Building Consent: Hegemony, ‘Conceptions of the World’ and the Role of Evangelicals in Global Politics
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Owen Worth,Kyle Murray |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01003.x |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Building Consent: Hegemony, ‘Conceptions of
the World’ and the Role of Evangelicals in
Global Politics
Kyle Murray
Tennessee State University
Owen Worth
University of Limerick
Since Robert Cox’s early interventions in the 1980s, the work of Gramsci has been openly applied to the arena of
international politics, often superimposed on to the wider concepts of‘world order’ and‘transnational class’ formation.
While this has produced a great deal of commendable scholarly work,it has equally produced a growing number of
critics who have voiced concerns over the viability and feasibility of applying Gramsci’s key concepts to the realm of
the international. Rather than revisiting these charges,we argue that one of the main problems associated with the
‘neo-Gramscian’inter pretations of international relations (IR) is that they have tended to develop an ontology of their
own and havenot pur sued a re-readingof Gramsci’s actual work to explore a fresh opening towards applying Gramsci
to the international. We argue that by re-exploring Gramsci’s understanding of ‘conceptions of the world’ and by
re-examining Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, a greater scope can be achieved for understanding power relations
within global politics.We demonstrate the potential for this by tentatively looking at the role of increasingly popular
global evangelical religious groups in the fashioning of hegemonic consent across diverse parts of civil society, arguing
that it is such bottom-up studies of societal consent that are required in order for Gramscian theory and research to
move beyond their current ontological applications.
Keywords: hegemony; international relations; religion; Gramsci
The influx of ‘neo-Gramscian’material within the area of inter national studies, particularly
in the disciplines of international relations (IR), has been such that it has almost acquired
the status of a paradigm in recent years.While debates continue over the validity of the
application of Gramsci (Femia, 2005;Ger main and Kenny, 1998),over the manner in which
it is applied (Ayers,2008; W. I. Robinson,2005; Wor th, 2008) and on its compatibility with
Marxist rigour (Bieler et al., 2006; Morton, 2006), the ‘neo-Gramscian’ approach is one that
has been utilised in order to demonstrate how power and consent are maintained in
international politics. Central to this has been the legacy of Robert Cox and his work on
‘world order’ and on the role of hegemony in international politics. From here, Gramsci’s
central concept of hegemony is transferred to an international level through a combination
of production,‘transnational social forces’ and the inspiration of leading states (Cox, 1987;
1996). It has been this utilisation of hegemony at an international level that has often raised
as many problems as it has potential avenues for development. Rather than building upon
the complexities illustrated in readings of hegemony from other academic fields (Morley
and Chen, 1996;Mouffe, 1979),or indeed looking at some of the more authentic accounts
that have appeared in political theory (Ives, 2005; Thomas, 2010), the general trend has
been to understand hegemony as an elaborate extension of the state/class leadership,
building upon previous more conservative usages of the term (W. I. Robinson, 2005).
This article aims to look at an area that has often been neglected in such studies and that
is the area of religion, in which Gramsci placed significant interest when understanding
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01003.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 731–747
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
consent. Religion and the formation of the Catholic Church in Italy became especially
important when he looked at how a hegemonic relationship was forged between repre-
sentatives of church and society at different levels.In keeping with recent accounts that have
called for a reassessment (or a clarification) of how hegemony can be used in a manner that
can open up new avenues of study (Saurin, 2008, p. 35;Worth, 2009), we analyse how the
global ‘Prosperity Gospel’ movement has helped to harmonise the processes of free market
capitalism and globalisation through mobilising popular consent within subaltern classes.
One way of understanding how this consent is mobilised is to look at Gramsci’s notion of
‘conceptions of the world’, which enables us to understand how different narratives can be
harmonised across different levels of international society.This allows us to understand the
dynamics of hegemony in a manner that moves beyond state-centric accounts and looks
at empirical socio-cultural forms of agency that are often underplayed within studies
of hegemony in IR (Pasha, 2008; Worth, 2011). By looking at a number of examples
of evangelical Christianity within sub-Saharan Africa, we can understand how levels of
consent can be forged at all levels so that they are compatible with the wider forces of
neo-liberal hegemony.
Gramsci and ‘Conceptions of the World’ as the Terrain of Hegemony
Hegemony in IR has often been understood as a mechanism that has been traditionally
used to imply ‘dominance’ or ‘leadership’ by one specific state. While accounts in main-
stream IR have stressed the strength of such leadership through a study of specific historical
eras (Keohane, 1984; Kindleberger, 1981), the accounts used by neo-Gramscians have
argued that hegemony is forged through class alliances,or through ideologies that have been
inspired within the elites of leading states (Cox,1983;Van der Pijl, 1998).This has provided
a fresh understanding of the articulation of hegemony at the international level, but still
suffers from the downplaying of complexities that were involved in Gramsci’s own elabo-
ration of the term. It also leads to top-down assumptions and generalisations concerning the
nature and positioning of civil society – in terms of the rather un-dialectical manner in
which neo-liberal social forces are asserted to have gained supremacy over agencies which
merely reinforce its overriding production.
Cox’s portrayal of US-inspired hegemonic leadership portrays world order as ‘nebuleuse’,
whereby states, productive forces and ideas interact to strengthen and consolidate (Cox,
2002).What is missing, however, is the capacity of seeing how hegemony is articulated at
all levels of international society.This can be done through a better understanding of the
complexities implicit within Gramsci’s own concept of hegemony and fully utilising
Gramsci’s framework for locating and analysing these subtleties. Broadly understood by
Gramsci, hegemony is the synthesis of class relations around a specific form of production.
However, the workings and expressions of hegemony contain a far more complex set of
relationships which are formed through a set of contrasting means.
As a functional process, hegemony is a both a structural and superstr uctural project of
consensual totality which can fuse contradictory ‘conceptions of the world’ held by the
popular masses and mobilise them at the level of consciousness so as to allow the ruling
classes to fashion and exert a specific brand of intellectual and moral leadership while
controlling and perpetuating economic production. While hegemony is the overarching
732 KYLE MURRAY AND OWEN WORTH
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(4)
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