DRAFT – NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED
Beyond the ‘Global Unifier’?
Counter-Hegemony in Neo-Gramscian Analyses
Alison Ayers & Julian Saurin
Simon Fraser University and University of Sussex
ISA Annual Convention
Chicago, February – March 2007
The paper argues that counter-hegemony remains an inadequately theorised
concept in the neo-Gramscian turn of IR/IPE. Counter-hegemony as articulated
by Gramsci is closely related both to his understanding of the state (and the
organic state in particular) and to his critique of political praxis in periods of social
crisis and transformation.
The paper argues that the inadequate account of counter-hegemony in neo-
Gramscian IR/IPE has political-strategic roots and a political-sociological context.
A claim illustrated through analysis of the overwhelming concentration on the
politics of ruling classes within neo-Gramscian analysis, at the expense of a
historical sociology of the subaltern from which any movement warranting the
term counter-hegemonic would emerge.
Inadequacies in the conceptualisation of counter-hegemony moreover, have a
practical political consequence, which serves to restrict political analysis in the
seminar room and off-the-streets. It serves to over-state the role of the (caste)
intellectual and to correspondingly discount as a historical anachronism the role
of a vanguard party and of the organic intellectuals of mass movements. Thus
the neo-Gramscians are thus in danger of mimicking a ‘third-way’ politics for the
international realm rather than revitalising the revolutionary inter-nationalism of
their past master.
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