Abstract
I take the concept of hegemony, as developed by Gramsci, to be a useful — if somewhat blurred1 — notion, which seeks to explain a palpable fact: that, despite the glaring inequities evident in many societies, the rulers and elites of these societies do not necessarily have to resort to regular and extensive repression in order to maintain themselves. Coercion alone is not the secret of their success. Though we owe the development and deployment of the concept to Gramsci, it is one which — in different guises — crops up in diverse theoretical contexts. Long before Gramsci (or Marx), David Hume observed that ‘nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers’.2 And, while Gramsci introduced ‘hegemony’ to the Marxist conceptual family (where it sits alongside its rather more disreputable cousin ‘false consciousness’), there are more distant ‘bourgeois’ relatives, such as ‘consensus’, the ‘common culture’ and (Weberian) legitimacy.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis ( London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980 ), pp. 11–15.
David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963 ), p. 29.
As I have argued elsewhere, James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), is a persuasive work and a valuable corrective to glib assumptions about subaltern false consciousness
which Mexicanists should take seriously: Alan Knight, ‘Weapons and Arches in the Revolutionary Landscape’, in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 24–54. However, I think Scott goes rather too far in jettisoning more subtle variations on this theme, such as Gramsci’s (see Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 90–1). I discuss this further in n. 63 below
On the historical pervasiveness of inequality, note the–impressionistic but cogent–comments of Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (Vol. 2) The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 466–7.
On the benefits of ‘deliberate eclectic[ism]’ (what might be called picking theoretical horses for empirical courses), see Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 4ff.
On ‘implosion’, see Matei Dogan and John Higley, ‘Elites, Crises and Regimes in Comparative Analysis’, in Elites, Crises and the Origins of Regimes, edited by Matei Dogan and John Higley (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 10–11.
Charles Tilly, European Revolutions,1492–1992 ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 ), p. 10.
Stalinism was ferociously repressive, but it also had a solid base of support and did not rule by terror alone: Sheila FitzPatrick, Everyday Stalinism ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 ), p. 224.
Perhaps the clearest case of revolution-by-terror (and little else?) would be the Khmer Rouge; although recent revisionist work on Mao seems to point (excessively?) in the same direction: Jung Chang and John Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Cape, 2005).
The ‘others’ being chiefly ‘bourgeois’ (or, more cautiously, ‘non-Communist’) revolutions like the French (1789) and the Bolivian (1952). I have developed these comparisons elsewhere: Alan Knight, ‘Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France’, in Past and Present, 134 (February 1992), pp. 159–99
Alan Knight, ‘The Domestic Dynamics of the Mexican and Bolivian Revolutions’, in Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, edited by Merilee Grindle and Pilar Domingo (London: ILAS, 2003 ), pp. 54–90.
Of course, a particularly unpopular, incompetent or abusive administration may provide the proximate cause of a major political upheaval: here we enter a familiar terrain of ‘triggers’, ‘catalysts’ or ‘last-straws-that-break-camels’-backs’ (see, for example, E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, in Revolution in History, edited by Roy Porter and Mikulâs Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 15–16. But such distinctions involve a hierarchy of causation and proximate causes require powerful ulterior causes if they are to ‘work’. After all, bad administrations are common, major political upheavals quite rare.
I do not dispute the many ‘desirable consequences’ of representative democracy (see Robert A. Dahl, On Democacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 45ff., which includes a useful ten-point list). However, bringing about substantial systemic change is not usually one of them. Democracy often works by preventing worse outcomes (such as wars, famines, civil rights abuses, corruption with impunity). It is a commonplace that no socialist transformation has occurred as a result of the ballot box. When Allende threatened to contradict this commonplace, he was ousted and killed.
Albert Speer, who coordinated the German war economy, considered it ‘one of the oddities of the war’ that Hitler ‘demanded far less from his people than Churchill or Roosevelt did’, the explanation being ‘the [Nazi] regime’s anxiety not to risk any shift in popular mood’: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 214. It should be said that Speer’s views are open to question; and his inclusion of Roosevelt and the US in this comparison is particularly questionable.
On the phenomenon of ‘naive monarchism’, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 96–103 (though Scott is, of course, sceptical about it). Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–21 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) offers a (colonial) Mexican version
The phenomenon is not, however, limited to old regime monarchies: for example, a similar ‘dissociative process’ appears to have insulated Hitler from criticism: Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History ( London: Pan Books, 2001 ), p. 266
Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich ( Harmondsworh: Penguin, 1974 ), pp. 41–2.
Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), p. 10.
There are parallels here with Braudel’s famous tripartite scheme of historical change: modes of production, we might say (though Braudel did not), are products of the longue durée; revolutions and regime changes are, more precisely, part of ‘social history, the history of groups’; while lesser political flux–coups, revolts, changes in government–forms part of l’histoire événementielle, ‘a history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations’: Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l’Histoire (Paris: Flamarrion, 1969), pp. 11–12 (extracted from La Méditerranée et le monde mediterranéen à l’époque de Philippe II).
Again, the problem of scale arises: how much political change is required to turn a political revolt or coup into a revolution and how much social change is demanded of a ‘social’ revolution? It is not difficult to come up with reasonable–sounding formulations: see, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 264 (‘rapid, fundamental and violent domestic change’)
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 4–5 (‘rapid basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures’). But these definitions merely pad out the problem (how fundamental is fundamental, how rapid is rapid, how basic is basic?). Ultimately, since attempts at rigorous quantification are likely to fail, we have to rely on good judgement and informed intuition.
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization ( New York: The Free Press, 1964 ), p. 156.
Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 154, 208; Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 161, 285.
John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987 ), p. 373.
Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 311, 327.
On the political beliefs and practice of Zapatismo, see John Womack Jr, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 20, 62, 87, 107–8, 172–3, 195, 204–5, 224ff.
Alan Knight, ‘Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation’, in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 135–62, makes a distinction between Mexican patriotism–a basic shared allegiance to the ‘imagined political community’ of the patria–and nationalism, which denotes a more aggressive, ambitious and integrative commitment to nation-building (by means of schools, mass organizations, and the media). It follows that the former is more ‘bottom-up’ and even ‘organic’, the latter more ‘top-down’ and instrumental. The terminology may be disputed, but the distinction, I think, remains useful. Accordingly, Zapata and his ilk were patriots rather than nationalists. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, gives nineteenth-century examples of this divide (though uses different terminology).
The phrase–a ‘forged fatherland’, i.e., a ‘nation constructed’–derives from the classic work of Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria–pro-nacionalismo (Mexico: Porrúa, 1916).
There have never been greater events… better prepared yet less foreseen’: M. W. Patterson, trans., De Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Regime ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1962 ), p. 3.
Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 3, quoting Karl Bünz.
There were more radical currents swirling around upstream of the Revolution, notably those which carried forward the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led by the Flores Magôn brothers (hence its alternative label, Magonismo). As its name suggests, the PLM began with an impeccably liberal ideology and programme; but it was soon radicalized by persecution and exile and became a loosely anarchosyndicalist movement, committed to armed insurrection. Its insurrections failed, however, and its appeal remained narrow. Even among the newly organized working class, Magonista influence was quite limited and eclipsed by popular liberalism: see Rodney Anderson, Outcasts in Their Own Land. Mexican Industrial Workers 1906–1911 ( Dekalb: University of Illinois Press, 1976 ).
On the nineteenth-century origins and appeal of patriotic liberalism, see Mallon, Peasant and Nation; and Guy P. C. Thomson with David G. LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Wilmington: Del., SR Books, 1999 ).
The phrase, which derives from Lesley Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos, first published 1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), has come to denote the mass of local and regional research, from which we derive the image of a much more complex, heterogeneous and fragmented Revolution than was previously assumed.
Frans J. Schryer, The Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-century Mexico (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980 ).
A reversal of Scott’s well-known title/concept (see n. 59), which is propounded in Alan Knight, ‘Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994), p. 100.
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985 ). This threefold typology–crudely, the enthusiasts, the neutrals and the opponents–could, of course, be made more complex.
A somewhat similar–but fourfold–typology of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is provided by Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 305, which discerns ‘those who believed; those who enjoyed or profited from or were happy to identify with the new order through opportunistic association; those who displayed an apathetic outward compliance, but inwardly sustained an unspoken conscientious objection; and finally those whose intolerance for [sic] the regime… manifested itself in forms of dissent, opposition or resistance’. Overy’s second category (‘those who enjoyed’) is, in my version, split between the pro-regime enthusiasts and the middle-ground neutrals; for me, the former are not simply ‘those who believed’, but also those who–out of self-interest and ‘opportunistic association’–forged close, supportive ties to the regime, irrespective of normative convictions. Of course, the three regimes were different, and ‘belief’ was probably a stronger force in Overy’s two cases than in mine.
This major socio-political shift, spanning the 1940s and’50s, has been only sporadically investigated. The older studies of Mexican politics, written during the regime’s heyday, focused on elites, formal institutions and ‘the centre’, hence they did not penetrate deep enough to grasp it. Occasional local and regional studies have illustrated the regime’s absorption of–and absorption by–provincial elites, businessmen and caciques (bosses). The trend is captured in several of the analyses in Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, eds, Caciquismo: Machine Politics in Twentieth-century Mexico ( London: ISA, 2006 ).
Pablo Gonzâlez Casanova, Democracy in Mexico ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1970 )
Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971 ).
Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes in Five Nations ( Boston: Little Brown, 1965 ).
The ‘limited good’ was a concept developed by anthropologists working in Mexico, who argued that the poor saw life as a zero-sum game, which in turn encouraged subaltern suspicion and anomie rather than solidarity and cooperation: see George Foster, ‘Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 47 (1965), pp. 293–315. While this was no doubt a considerable reification, it did capture some elements of Mexican ‘subaltern’ life which are relevant to the present discussion; furthermore, if we take the ‘limited good’ as a socio-political outcome, rather than some psychological given, we can see how the regime of the PRI often worked to promote division, rivalry and competition, thus making subaltern solidarity and contestation much more difficult.
Robert E. Scott, Mexican Government in Transition ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964 ).
Sylvia Maxfield, Governing Capital: International Finance and Mexican Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) is a cogent analysis of the elite alignments which underpinned financial, fiscal and political stability during the heyday of the PRI, c. 1950–80.
Compare Vincent T. Gawronski, ‘The Revolution is Dead. Viva la revoluciôn!: The place of the Mexican Revolution in the Era of Globalization’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 366–7, which argues that, for decades, ‘support for the [PRI] system’ rested on ‘ideological foundations and culture’; but that, ‘as globalization bears down heavily on Mexico, the traditional ideological and cultural sources of legitimacy are withering’.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Alan Knight
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Knight, A. (2007). Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution. In: Chalcraft, J., Noorani, Y. (eds) Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592162_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592162_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28547-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59216-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)