Uneven worlds of hegemony: Towards a discursive ontology of societal multiplicity
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00471178211010321 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211010321
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(1) 83 –103
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178211010321
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Uneven worlds of hegemony:
Towards a discursive ontology
of societal multiplicity
Viacheslav Morozov
University of Tartu
Abstract
The neo-Marxist literature on uneven and combined development has made significant progress
towards a comprehensive theory of the international. Its point of departure is societal multiplicity
as a fundamental condition of the international. This article identifies an important lacuna in the
ontology of multiplicity: there is no discussion of what constitutes a ‘society’, or the basic entity
capable of entering a relationship with other entities. Existing solutions, including those relying
on relational sociology, gravitate towards ontological individualism. Building on poststructuralist
neo-Gramscian theories, I propose to ground the conceptualisation of ‘society’ in the notion
of hegemony. This implies a discursive ontology, which attributes the inside/outside dynamic
to hegemonic formations rather than states or societies. Coupled with the understanding of
hegemony as a scalar phenomenon, this ontology can account for the primacy of the state in
modern times, while also enabling a research focus on other types of collectivities.
Keywords
hegemony, multiplicity, ontology, poststructuralism, scale, uneven and combined development
Introduction
The debate about the disciplinary foundations of International Relations (IR), which
remains as lively as ever, is heavily tilted towards third-image perspectives. Beginning
with E. H. Carr, it has been common to assume IR can contribute to the social sciences
by studying the international as an anarchical, fragmented domain.1 In his call upon IR
to break free from ‘the prison of political science’, Justin Rosenberg argues that instead
Corresponding author:
Viacheslav Morozov, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, Lossi 36, Tartu 51003,
Estonia.
Email: morozov@ut.ee
1010321IRE0010.1177/00471178211010321International RelationsMorozov
research-article2021
Article
84 International Relations 36(1)
of anarchy as a negative concept, IR must acknowledge societal multiplicity as the foun-
dational ontological premise.2 Multiplicity has a number of important consequences,
which by themselves warrant a separate disciplinary focus. This could provide IR with
its own ontological grounding, separate from the ontology of political power that under-
lies political science.
While acknowledging the importance of Rosenberg’s argument, this article is not
directly concerned with the question of the disciplinary standing of IR. Instead, I am
addressing an important blind spot at the centre of his ontology. Multiplicity is indeed the
most fundamental feature of the social (and, it could be argued, of being as such), yet a
mere postulation of this fact does not suffice to identify the basic unit of analysis in IR.
To develop a meaningful argument, Rosenberg has to bring it down to ‘societal’ multi-
plicity. However, as the discussion about the pitfalls of substantialism in sociology and
IR makes clear, assuming the existence of discrete societies as a self-evident fact is not a
theoretically sustainable option.3 The solutions proposed so far have relied on relational
sociology, which is heavily tilted towards network analysis and tends to fall back on
ontological individualism.
As an alternative, I propose to ground multiplicity in the neo-Gramscian concept of
hegemony, as elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.4 In the final analysis, it
is hegemony that produces a relatively stable, even if contested, social order out of the
endless flow of differences. It endows one intersubjectively shared image of reality with
the status of social truth, thus providing meaning to the otherwise chaotic world. It also
creates an outside, thus dividing the world into relatively coherent spaces, the generic
term for which is ‘hegemonic formations’. Not all units of interest to IR come under this
category, but all are hegemonically constituted: the very idea of a ‘unit’ (an actor, an iden-
tity etc.) is always grounded in a larger intersubjective system of meaning. In the modern
times, the most important among hegemonic formations is the territorial nation-state. This
is due to the fact that, as critical International Political Economy (IPE) demonstrates, the
national scale has nodal significance in the capitalist world, turning the nation-state into a
primary locus of various competing and complementary hegemonic practices. This hap-
pens despite the fact that the underlying dominant dynamic is global rather than national.
This article is organised as follows. The next section summarises the debate on multi-
plicity and argues that it has not so far produced a theoretically sustainable relational
ontology of ‘society’. I then demonstrate that Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation of
hegemony, originally offered as a remedy against economic reductionism, works equally
well in conceptualising basic social entities in a thoroughly relational way. I go on to cou-
ple this theoretical frame with the concept of scale, borrowed from IPE. Finally, I turn to
empirical examples, whose main purpose is to indicate how hegemony theory could work
in the analysis of pre-modern settings and non-state units. The conclusion summarises the
findings and highlights their implications for our understanding of the international.
Societal multiplicity: substantive or relational?
Rosenberg’s diagnosis of IR being locked in the prison of political science primarily
centres on what, following Headley Bull, is often called ‘the domestic analogy’: the
study of relations between states draws on premises derived from the observation of
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