Hegemony

Hegemony: A Realist Analysis is a new and original approach to this important concept. It presents a theoretical history of the use of hegemony in a range of work starting with a discussion of Gramsci and Russian Marxism and going on to look at more recent applications. It examines the current debates and discusses the new direction to Marx made by Jacques Derrida, before outlining a critical realist/Marxist alternative. This book employs critical realist philosophy in an explanatory way to help clarify the concept of hegemony and its relation to societal processes. This work contributes to recent debates in social science and political philosophy, developing both the concept of hegemony itself, and the work of critical realism.

Karl Barth (1886-1968) was the most prolific theologian of the twentieth century. Avoiding simple paraphrasing, Dr Gorringe places the theology in its social and political context, from the First World War through to the Cold War by following Barth's intellectual development through the years that saw the rise of national socialism and the development of communism. Barth initiated a theological revolution in his two Commentaries on Romans, begun during the First World War. His attempt to deepen this during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic made him a focus of theological resistance to Hitler after the rise to power of the Nazi party. Expelled from Germany, he continued to defy fashionable opinion by refusing to condemn communism after the Second World War. Drawing on a German debate largely ignored by Anglo-Saxon theology Dr Gorringe shows that Barth responds to the events of his time not just in his occasional writings, but in his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics. In conclusion Dr Gorringe asks what this admittedly patriarchal author still has to contribute to contemporary theology, and in particular human liberation.

The United States is the most powerful political agency in the world, supported by the strongest economy, largest educated population, and the most lethal military machine. But it supports the ideals of liberalism and is using its power to try to create a liberal world order. No other state can presently resist this process. Nonetheless, the very libertarian nature of the emerging order--with powerful independent corporations and particularistic nationalisms and cultures--may be beyond the capacity of any single state to manage--even the United States.

This volume is a critical case study of the press coverage of the corruption trial of former Guam Governor Ricardo Bordallo, who maintained a strong indigenous rights stance, and committed suicide "for his people" rather than serve a three-year jail sentence. DeBenedittis focuses on the media's role in cultural imperialism, taking the position that news is necessarily hegemonic. Particular topics include how story structure and labeling can imply guilt or innocence, and how rumors play a unique role in mitigating the persuasive power of the press. Besides illuminating analysis of the media produced during the trial, DeBenedittis includes interviews conducted with key personnel at every media outlet in Guam, trial participants, Bordallo's press secretary, and several cultural critics.

Semmes extends Afrocentric social theory by formulating the problem of structured inequality for African Americans in terms of cultural hegemony. This innovative work challenges oppositional and segmented analyses that look at Black inequality in terms of either economic dislocation or racial oppression, and introduces the idea that what is at stake are the issues of progressive cultural adaptation, cultural reconstruction, and institutional development. What emerges is a new way of seeing and understanding the intellectual tradition and body of knowledge called Black, African-American, or Africana studies.

This book provides a critical sociology of religion in Latin America. It discusses the notion of religion as part of social, cultural, and political processes in capitalist societies, drawing on the classics of sociological thought (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Gramsci). Thus, churches are analyzed as organized institutions of religious mediation intimately linked to the production of social, cultural, and political hegemony in Latin America. The Catholic Church, the dominant church in the region, is analyzed in terms of its transformations from conquest and colonization through the changing winds of Vatican II to the revolutionary experiences of the popular church in the seventies and eighties.

This work brings together a collection of original essays on the contemporary study of international political economy (IPE). It provides contrasting and challenging interpretations of the study of IPE and the global political economy in general. It also exposes the reader to major issues and problems in international political economy such as European unification, U.S.-Japanese trade tensions, Africa's role in the world economy, international debt, and international financial reform.

The contributors to this volume question the boundaries and limitations that are imposed on the study of cities by urban sociology. They pose issues from a long-term and large-scale perspective and present them in a relational framework. The book's first part deals with places outside of western Europe and with times that preceded the establishment of the European-based capitalist world-economy. The articles in part two discuss the different aspects of the concept of hegemony and the establishment of domination as these apply to cities in the world-system. In part three the focus shifts back to extra-European zones where the patterns of transformation around cities under the aegis of capitalist world-economy are examined.