Abstract
This chapter first sets out a general theory of complex hegemony. It develops key insights from Gramsci along lines suggested by complexity theory, with particular attention to the key complexity ideas of emergence and social structure, metastability and political transformation, and the politics of self-organisation. The author reads elements of Gramscian hegemony theory through the lens of ideas from complexity theory and vice versa, developing a generalised and abstracted theory of hegemony using the resources of complexity theory. The central question it answers from a theoretical standpoint is how hegemony-as-emergent property can be engineered, and from a more political point of view how it is that intensely complex, large-scaled societies can seemingly still be ruled by relatively small groups of elites? To do so it synthetically combines key hegemony and complexity concepts, before deriving some general principles, using simple socio-political examples as illustrations.
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Sawyer lists a series of properties for systems which are likely to display wild disjunction: non-aggregativity, non-decomposability, non-localisation, and highly complex rules of interaction. Social systems generally meet all of these requirements, (Sawyer 2005, 96–7).
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Though the majority of British people since the 1960s have been recorded in social attitude surveys as desiring a reduction in immigration, the issue has grown significantly in importance in the years since 2000, remaining consistently in the top three most important issues picked by survey sample groups since 2003, (Binder 2014).
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Williams, A. (2020). Theorising Complex Hegemony. In: Political Hegemony and Social Complexity. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19795-7_8
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