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Gramsci Reconsidered: Hegemony in Global Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

SONJA BUCKEL  and
ANDREAS FISCHER-LESCANO
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Abstract

This article focuses on Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is a particular way of living and thinking, a Weltanschauung (world-view), on which the preferences, taste, morality, ethics, and philosophical principles of the majority are based. Social struggles are transformed into legal ones in the course of processes in which juridical intellectuals are organizing hegemony under the special conditions of the legal system. We try to use this concept to contrast it with the prevailing readings of hegemony in international relations and in international law. ‘Hegemonic law’, we argue, is not the law of any superpower, but an asymmetric consensus which relies on a climate of world-society-wide recognition. The concrete form of hegemonic law under particular social conditions depends on the ‘historical bloc’, in which it is coupled with other social praxes. In the post-Westphalian system the historical bloc is fragmented into transnational and colliding legal regimes and law-generating processes in civil society.

Keywords

fragmentation of world lawglobal civil societyglobal social movementshegemonyideology

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ARTICLES
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Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 437 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2009

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References

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81 Ibid., Q13 §11, 1548.

82 Ibid., Q6 §84, 777.

83 Ibid., Q13 §7, 1544.

84 Ibid., Q6 §98, 792.

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89 In the free-law tradition: E. Ehrlich, Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts (1913), 390.

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93 Gramsci, supra note 16, Q7§21, 877. In relation to the ideological system of law, Hans Kelsen puts it very similarly when he writes:

[I]n fact only those legal norms can be supposed valid whose concepts are effective . . . The contents of the two systems [law and nature (Kelsen) – law and power relations (Gramsci)] neither coincide entirely, nor diverge entirely. The tension must not exceed a maximum limit – for then the assumption of an intrinsically legal system of ‘law’ would lose all meaning – nor fall below a minimum one – for then any chance of using the system of law as a serviceable interpretive or evaluative schema for man's actual behaviour . . . would be taken away. (H. Kelsen, Allgemeine Staatslehre (1925), 18) That the law in the objective sense, i.e. the legal order, is the will of the State does not mean that the State ‘produces’ the law, but that the State is the bearer of this order, the content of which is ‘produced’ by a social process. (H. Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (1932), 98)

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95 We use a broad concept of transnational law, which includes moments of supranational, international, and private jurisprudence, but transcends the classic jus inter gentes and its limited set of subjects, fora, and fonts; see F. Hanschmann, ‘Theorie transnationaler Rechtsprozesse’, in S. Buckel, R. Christensen, and A. Fischer-Lescano (eds.), Neue Theorien des Rechts (2009), 375.

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103 Ibid., at 281.

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105 ‘The modern Prince, the myth of the Prince, cannot be a real person, an actual individual; he can only be an organism, a complex social element in which a collective will already begins to become concrete, which is recognized and has in part asserted itself in action’ (Gramsci, supra note 16, Q13 §1, 1537).

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118 Gramsci, supra note 16, Q13 §11, 1549.