Philosophy Glossary

Agape (ἀγάπη) — Love of goodwill and self-giving, not dependent on the worth or merit of the one loved. The word is infrequent in classical Greek literature but becomes central in the Septuagint and the New Testament, where it names God’s love for human beings, human love for God, and love of neighbour. The Gospels sum up the law in the two commandments of love of God and neighbour (Matthew 22:37–40), Paul devotes the hymn of 1 Corinthians 13 to agape, and the First Epistle of John identifies it with the nature of God (1 John 4:8). In Latin the term was rendered as caritas or dilectio. Augustine, in The City of God and elsewhere, made caritas the principle of the moral life, and Thomas Aquinas treated it as a theological virtue in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 23–27). Kierkegaard, in Works of Love (1847), analyses love of neighbour as a Christian duty. The most influential study of the contrast is that of the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna, 1930–1936; English translation by Philip S. Watson, 1953): for him, eros is ascending, acquisitive love motivated by the value of its object, whereas agape is descending, spontaneous and unmotivated love, and the history of the Christian idea of love is that of its mixture and conflict with eros. The thesis has been widely criticized: thinkers such as Martin D’Arcy, in The Mind and Heart of Love (1945), argued that the two complement each other, a position taken up by Benedict XVI in the encyclical Deus caritas est (2005). See also eros, philia; Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Kierkegaard. ...

Agnosticism (from Greek a-, “without,” and gnôsis, “knowledge”) — The position that the existence of God, or of the divine and transcendent in general, cannot be known, and that judgment should therefore be suspended. The term was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist and defender of Darwin, in 1869, in the context of the Metaphysical Society of London. Huxley created it as a label for his own position, in contrast to the “gnostics” of Church history, who claimed to possess knowledge of the transcendent; Huxley himself explained the episode in the essay “Agnosticism” (1889), although accounts differ on the exact circumstances of its first utterance. For Huxley, agnosticism is not a creed but a principle of method: not to affirm as certain what cannot be supported by evidence. It differs from atheism, which denies God’s existence, and from theism, which affirms it; strictly, agnosticism concerns knowledge, while theism and atheism concern belief, so these categories cross-cut one another. Antecedents of the attitude appear in Protagoras, for whom it was not possible to know whether the gods exist or not (fragment DK 80 B4), in the ancient Skeptics (see skepticism), in Hume, and above all in Kant, who limits theoretical knowledge to possible experience. Herbert Spencer (First Principles, 1862) speaks of the “Unknowable” as the limit of knowledge. Bertrand Russell discusses the relation between the two positions in the essay “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?” (1947). It should not be confused with gnosis, in opposition to which Huxley formed the word. See Protagoras, Hume, Kant, and Russell. ...

Akrasia (ἀκρασία) — Weakness of will: the condition of acting against what one oneself judges to be the best thing to do. The Greek word is formed from the privative prefix a- (“without”) and kratos (“power,” “mastery”), and literally means “lack of self-mastery.” The problem is central to ancient ethics. In the Protagoras (352b–358d), Socrates denies that akrasia exists: whoever knows what is best does not act otherwise, so that apparently being “overcome by pleasure” is in fact ignorance, a miscalculation of pleasures and pains. Aristotle takes up the question in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, starting from common opinions (endoxa) and the observed phenomena, and he accepts that people do act against what they know. He distinguishes the akratic (akratēs), who acts against his own deliberate choice because of passion, from the self-controlled person (enkratēs) and from the intemperate person (akolastos), who acts on a vicious choice. He also separates two forms of akrasia: weakness (astheneia) and impetuosity (propeteia). To explain the phenomenon, he argues that the akratic possesses knowledge in one sense but does not exercise it at the moment of action, being gripped by desire. In modern philosophy the debate was reopened by R. M. Hare in Freedom and Reason (1963) and by Donald Davidson in his essay “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” (1970). See also phronesis, ethics and free will; the central thinkers are Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. ...

Anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις) — Recollection, reminiscence. From the Greek anamimnēskein (“to remind,” “to call back to mind”). In Plato’s philosophy, anamnesis is the thesis that learning is recollecting: the immortal soul contemplated the Forms before being joined to the body, and knowledge consists in reviving what it already possessed. The doctrine appears in the Meno as a reply to the paradox of inquiry (80d–e), according to which one can search neither for what one knows nor for what one does not know. Socrates illustrates it (82b–85b) by leading an uneducated slave boy, by questions alone, to the solution of a geometrical problem, that of doubling the area of a square. In the Phaedo (72e–77a), anamnesis serves as an argument for the soul’s pre-existence and immortality: equal sensible things remind us of Equality itself, which the soul must have known beforehand; in the Phaedrus (249b–c), the human soul is capable of knowing because it has seen true realities. Aristotle rejects Platonic innatism: in the Posterior Analytics (II.19), knowledge arises from perception, memory and experience, out of a capacity (dynamis) the soul already has. The notion reappears in the Christian tradition, in a liturgical sense, as the memorial of the Last Supper. In modernity, the debate over innate ideas, in Descartes and Leibniz, takes up the question in other terms. See also eidos, alma, episteme and dialectic; the central thinker is Plato, with Socrates as a character. ...

Anti-realism (from Greek anti-, “against”, and Latin realis) — A generic name for positions denying that a given domain (the external world, theoretical entities, values, mathematical objects) exists or has properties independently of our minds, practices or language. Like realism, it is always defined relative to a domain, and there is no single anti-realism. Its classic forms include nominalism about universals and the idealism of George Berkeley, for whom to be is to be perceived (esse est percipi). In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism treats theories as tools for prediction, and Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism (The Scientific Image, 1980) holds that science aims at empirical adequacy, not at truth about the unobservable. In ethics, non-cognitivism and error theory deny that there are objective moral facts. Michael Dummett, beginning with “Truth” (1959) and “Realism” (a 1963 lecture), recast the dispute in semantic terms: the realist accepts that every statement of a domain is determinately true or false, even if we cannot know which; the anti-realist ties truth to the possibility of verification or justification, which leads to revising classical logic in favor of intuitionistic logic. Hilary Putnam, with his “internal realism,” is often placed in an intermediate position. Anti-realism is criticized for allegedly struggling to explain the success of science, an objection known as the “no-miracles argument.” ...

Atheism (from Greek átheos, from a-, “without,” and theós, “god”) — The position that denies the existence of God or gods, or simply does not admit them. In antiquity átheos was above all an accusation: Socrates was charged with not recognizing the gods of the city (Plato, Apology), and Anaxagoras and Diagoras of Melos were prosecuted or persecuted on religious grounds. Positive (or strong) atheism, which asserts that God does not exist, is distinguished from negative (or weak) atheism, which merely lacks belief in God without asserting his nonexistence; the latter differs from agnosticism, which concerns knowledge rather than belief. Explicit, systematic atheism becomes possible in modernity: Baron d’Holbach sets out an atheist materialism in the System of Nature (1770), and Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), interprets God as a projection of the human essence. Marx makes the critique of religion the premise of social critique, Nietzsche announces in The Gay Science (1882, § 125) the “death of God” as a cultural event whose nihilistic consequences were still to come, and Freud, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), treats religion as an illusion born of helplessness. In existentialism, Sartre holds that without God existence precedes essence (see essence and existence). Theists respond with arguments for God’s existence and point to the moral and metaphysical foundations of belief; analytic philosophers such as J. L. Mackie (The Miracle of Theism, 1982) discuss arguments for atheism, notably the problem of evil. See Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, theism, and nihilism. ...

Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) — An existential structure of Dasein in Martin Heidegger: the human being’s relation to its own death as its ownmost possibility, which individualizes it. In Being and Time (1927), the analysis occupies Division II, chapter 1 (§§46–53). Heidegger distinguishes dying (Sterben), lived by Dasein, from perishing (Verenden), proper to living things, and from demise (Ableben), the biological end considered from outside (§49). Death is not a future event among others but an ever-imminent possibility, which §§50–52 characterize as ownmost, non-relational, not to be outstripped, certain, and indefinite as to when. No one can die in another’s place (§47). In everyday life Dasein covers it over in the “they” (das Man): “one dies” is a death that belongs to no one (§51), and anguish discloses what this concealment evades. Authentic being-toward-death is neither brooding on the end nor wishing for it, but anticipation (Vorlaufen, §53): taking finitude on as a possibility, which opens up the potentiality-for-being-oneself and “anticipatory resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit, §§60 and 62), and grounds Dasein’s temporality in Division II. Criticisms: Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), denies that death gives life meaning or individualizes, seeing it instead as a fact that undoes projects; Emmanuel Levinas, in God, Death, and Time (lectures of 1975–1976), shifts priority from one’s own death to the death of the other. It has also been objected that Heidegger’s analysis of an “ownmost” death fits poorly with concrete experiences of mourning. See existentialism, being, and the article Heidegger: being and time, Dasein, and the question of being. ...

Causality (from Latin causa, which renders the Greek aitía) — The relation by which one event, thing or state (the cause) produces, explains or determines another (the effect). The philosophical problem is what this relation is and what justifies our belief in it. In Aristotle (Physics II.3; Metaphysics V.2), “cause” has a broad, explanatory sense and is said in four ways: material (what something is made of), formal (its essence or definition), efficient (the source of change) and final (that for the sake of which something happens). Modern science concentrated on efficient causation. For David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–1740; An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1748), observation reveals only succession and constant conjunction between events, never a “necessary connection”; the idea of necessity arises from the mind’s habit of expecting the effect after the cause. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in the Second Analogy of Experience, replies that causality is a category of the understanding, a condition for ordering events in time, and not a mere empirical generalization. In the twentieth century Bertrand Russell, in “On the Notion of Cause” (1912), proposed that physics can do without the concept, while David Lewis (1973) analyzed causation through counterfactual conditionals and possible worlds. Neighboring issues include the distinction between cause and reason, mental causation, and the relation to determinism and empiricism. ...

Commodity fetishism (Fetischcharakter der Ware) — Karl Marx’s concept according to which, in commodity production, the social relations among producers appear as relations among things endowed with properties of their own. It is set out in Capital, Volume I, chapter 1, section 4 (“The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”). Marx observes that the commodity seems trivial, yet proves full of “metaphysical subtleties”: the social character of each person’s labor appears as an objective property of the products, and value as a natural quality of things. Producers relate socially only through exchange, so price movements seem an independent law that governs the producers themselves. The analogy is with religion, in which products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures; the word “fetish” came from eighteenth-century religious ethnology (Charles de Brosses, 1760). For Marx, fetishism is not a mere perceptual error: it arises from the social form of labor in an economy of private, independent producers and would disappear only under a different form of organization. Developments: Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), elaborated it as reification (Verdinglichung); see Georg Lukács. Guy Debord took up the theme in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Criticisms: structuralist readings such as Louis Althusser’s (Reading Capital, 1965) reject centering Marxism on alienation and Hegelian categories; economists of other schools dispute the labor theory of value it presupposes, as in Böhm-Bawerk’s critique (see surplus value). See also alienation, ideology, and the article Marx: historical materialism, surplus value, and commodity fetishism. ...

Conatus — A Latin term meaning effort, striving, or endeavor; in Spinoza, the effort by which each thing perseveres in its being, identified with its very essence. In the Ethics (1677, posthumous), Part III, proposition 6, Spinoza states that each thing, as far as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being; in proposition 7, that this striving is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. The concept has antecedents in seventeenth-century physics: Descartes uses it in a mechanical context (Principles of Philosophy, 1644), and Hobbes speaks of conatus as minimal motion in De Corpore (1655), later applying it to human passions in Leviathan. Spinoza generalizes it and makes it the principle of his psychology and ethics: when referred to mind and body together, conatus is called appetite; appetite accompanied by consciousness of itself is desire (cupiditas, III, prop. 9, scholium). The fundamental affects are defined in relation to it: joy is the passage to a greater perfection, or power of acting, and sadness the passage to a lesser one. In Part IV, virtue is identified with power of acting itself, and seeking what is useful to oneself under the guidance of reason is the foundation of Spinoza’s ethics. The concept was taken up by Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 1968) and is often compared with Nietzsche’s will to power; in a 1881 letter to Overbeck, Nietzsche said he was astonished to find a precursor in Spinoza. See Spinoza, Hobbes, Deleuze, Nietzsche, and monism. ...

Deism (from Latin deus) — The position that natural reason suffices to know the existence of God, creator of the world, without recourse to revelation, miracles, or the authority of churches. In its typical form, the deist admits a creator and a moral order but rejects divine intervention in history through particular revelations, hence the frequent but simplifying image of a God who creates the world and lets it run by its laws. Many deists, however, admitted a general providence and the immortality of the soul, so the thesis of God’s total absence from the world does not describe all of them. Its founding text is usually taken to be Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate (1624), which proposes five “common notions” belonging to every true religion. In England it took shape from the late seventeenth to the first half of the eighteenth century with John Toland (Christianity Not Mysterious, 1696), Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730); Locke, though not a deist, prepared the ground by defending the reasonableness of Christianity. In France, deism was the position of Voltaire, who wrote in a verse epistle (Épître à l’auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs, 1769) that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and of Rousseau, whose “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” (in Emile, 1762) is an exposition of natural religion. Hume critically examined the argument from design, the basis of much deist argument, in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Deism is distinguished from theism, which admits revelation and divine action in the world, from pantheism, and from atheism. See Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Enlightenment. ...

Enlightenment (Aufklärung; French Lumières) — The eighteenth-century European intellectual movement that advocated the critical use of reason as the guide to knowledge, morality, and political life. In German, Aufklärung names the act of “clearing up”; in French the movement is that of the Lumières (“lights”). Its protagonists include Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert (Encyclopédie, 1751-1772), Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, and, in Germany, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Kant, building on Newton’s science and Locke’s epistemology. Its typical banners are religious toleration, criticism of superstition and traditional authority, natural rights, and progress. The most famous philosophical definition is Kant’s, in An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784, in the Berlinische Monatsschrift): humanity’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity, understood as the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. Its motto is Sapere aude!, a phrase from Horace (Epistles, I, 2, 40) that Kant renders as “Have courage to use your own understanding.” Moses Mendelssohn answered the same question in the same journal in 1784. The movement was criticized from Romanticism onward and by Herder, and in the twentieth century by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947 edition), which investigates how enlightened reason can turn into domination. Foucault, in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984), takes up Kant’s text as a critical “attitude.” See Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, Adorno, Horkheimer, reason, and autonomy. ...

Eros (ἔρως) — Love as desire, the longing for something one lacks. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Eros appears among the primordial powers; in philosophy, its foundational text is Plato’s Symposium. There, after Aristophanes’ speech about split beings seeking their lost half (189c–193d), Socrates reports the teaching of the priestess Diotima (201d–212c): Eros is not a beautiful and perfect god but a daimon, an intermediary between mortals and immortals, the child of Poros (resource) and Penia (poverty) (203b–c). As desire for the beautiful and the good, he seeks to possess them forever and therefore drives toward generation and immortality. Diotima describes a ladder of love: from beauty in one body to beauty in all bodies, then to souls, laws and the sciences, up to the contemplation of Beauty itself, single, unchanging and eternal (210a–212a). In the Phaedrus (244a–257b), love is a form of divine madness that revives in the soul the memory of the Forms. In later thought, Platonism and Neoplatonism, in Plotinus, retain the image of love as ascent. Theologians such as Anders Nygren, in Agape and Eros, took eros as the type of acquisitive, ascending love, in contrast with Christian agape. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), called Eros the life drive, which tends toward union and preservation. See also beauty, daimon and philia; Plato, Plotinus and Freud. ...

Ethos (ἦθος) — Character, a habitual way of being; originally the dwelling or accustomed place of a living creature, and hence its customs. Greek distinguishes ēthos (with eta, “character”) from ethos (with epsilon, ἔθος, “habit,” “custom”), and Aristotle exploits this closeness in the Nicomachean Ethics (II.1, 1103a): ethical virtue (ēthikē) takes its name from habit (ethos), since it is acquired by the repetition of acts. From this comes “ethics” and, through Latin, “morals” (mores). The word appears in a saying of Heraclitus (fr. B119 Diels-Kranz) usually translated as “character is for man his daimōn,” and Heidegger, in the Letter on Humanism (1946), reads it as the abode in which a human being dwells. In the Rhetoric (I.2, 1356a), Aristotle presents ethos as one of three means of persuasion, alongside pathos (the emotion aroused in the audience) and logos (the argument): it is the credibility the speaker builds through the speech itself, through the practical wisdom, virtue and goodwill he displays. In contemporary usage ethos also names the set of values, customs and attitudes that characterizes a group or a culture (the scientific, professional or civic “ethos”). See also ethics, pathos, logos, arete and daimon; the central thinker is Aristotle. ...

Fallacy (from Latin fallacia, “deceit,” from fallere, “to deceive”) — A mistake in reasoning that makes an argument invalid or persuasive without good reasons, although it seems correct. Its systematic study goes back to Aristotle, whose Sophistical Refutations (De Sophisticis Elenchis) catalogs thirteen kinds of apparent reasoning, six dependent on language (such as equivocation and amphiboly) and seven independent of it. In the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689, IV.17), John Locke introduced the names ad verecundiam and ad ignorantiam and established ad hominem, which was already in use before him. In Fallacies (1970), C. L. Hamblin criticized the traditional treatment as superficial. A fallacy is not the same as a sophism, generally understood as a fallacy used with intent to deceive. Fallacies are divided into formal and informal. ...

Falsificationism — Karl Popper’s thesis that the mark of empirical science is falsifiability: a theory is scientific if it can, in principle, be refuted by experience. The term derives from Latin falsus (“wrong”) and facere (“to make”). The position was set out in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung, 1934, dated 1935 on the title page; English version 1959), especially in §§4–6, and popularized in Conjectures and Refutations (1963). Popper starts from the problem of induction, formulated by Hume (see deduction and induction): no number of confirming observations proves a universal law, yet a single contrary observation can logically refute it. This asymmetry grounds his criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. Theories such as Einstein’s, which risk testable predictions (like the deflection of light observed in 1919), contrast, in Popper’s view, with historical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Adler’s psychology, which can accommodate any outcome. Scientific progress would be a cycle of bold conjectures and attempts at refutation; theories that survive severe tests are not proved but “corroborated” (ch. X). Central criticisms: the Duhem–Quine thesis, on which hypotheses are not tested in isolation, so refutation can always be redirected to auxiliary hypotheses (Duhem, 1906; Quine, 1951); Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), observes that scientists do not abandon paradigms at every anomaly; Imre Lakatos proposed a “sophisticated falsificationism” of research programmes (1970); Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method (1975), denies that any universal method exists. See empiricism, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and the article Philosophy of science: Popper, Kuhn, falsification, and paradigms. ...

Four causes (αἰτία, aitía) — Aristotle’s doctrine that to know something is to know it through its causes, and that the answers to the question “why?” are of four kinds. The Greek word aitía means “cause,” but also “responsibility” and “explanation,” and interpreters often note that its sense is wider than “cause” in modern usage. The doctrine is set out in the Physics (II.3, 194b16–195a3) and the Metaphysics (V.2, 1013a24–b3), and the requirement of knowing through causes appears in the Posterior Analytics. The four are: the material cause (hylē), that out of which something is made, such as the bronze of a statue; the formal cause (eidos, the essence or definition), what the thing is, such as the statue’s form; the efficient cause (that from which the beginning of motion or change comes), such as the sculptor; and the final cause (telos, “that for the sake of which”), such as health, which is the end of walking. A single thing may have several causes, and one cause may produce opposite effects. In the Physics (II.7, 198a), Aristotle observes that in natural beings the formal, efficient and final causes often coincide. The theory underpins his physics and biology, in which nature acts for the sake of an end, and it is tied to hylomorphism. The Scholastics, such as Thomas Aquinas, inherited it; in modern science, with Francis Bacon and others, the word “cause” tended to be restricted to efficient cause, and Hume’s critique targeted it. See also telos, eidos, ousia, dynamis and energeia and physis; Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Hume. ...

General Will (volonté générale) — A central concept in Rousseau’s political philosophy: the will of the body politic insofar as it aims at the common good, distinct from the sum of particular wills. It appears in The Social Contract (1762), where the act of association has each person place his person and power under the supreme direction of the general will (Book I, ch. 6). Rousseau distinguishes it from the “will of all” (Book II, ch. 3): the latter is merely the sum of private interests, whereas the former considers only the common interest. From it follows Rousseau’s conception of sovereignty: since sovereignty is the exercise of the general will, it is inalienable (it cannot be transferred to representatives) and indivisible (Book II, chs. 1 and 2); and law, to be legitimate, must express that will. Hence the famous thesis, in Book I, ch. 7, that whoever refuses to obey the general will “will be forced to be free,” a formula Rousseau understands as the identity of freedom and obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself, and which touches Kant’s notion of autonomy. The expression circulated before Rousseau, for instance in the article “Natural Right” that Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie. The critical tradition, from Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958) and J. L. Talmon (The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952), sees in the general will a risk of subordinating the individual to the collective; sympathetic interpreters reply that it is a principle of formal legitimacy, not a substantive power. See Rousseau, social contract, and state of nature. ...

Gestell (also written Ge-stell; usually “Enframing”) — Martin Heidegger’s term for the essence of modern technology: the mode of revealing that claims nature and human beings as a standing reserve of resources. In ordinary German, Gestell means “frame,” “rack,” or “stand”; Heidegger rebuilds it from stellen (“to set,” “to place”) with the collective prefix Ge- (as in Gebirge, “mountain range”), to name the gathering of the ways of “setting upon” characteristic of the technological age. The word appears in the 1949 Bremen lectures (“Das Ge-Stell,” in Einblick in das was ist, published 1994) and in “The Question Concerning Technology” (lecture of 1953, published in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1954). For him the essence of technology is nothing technological: it is a destining of revealing in which everything shows up as Bestand, a “standing reserve” to be ordered and exploited, like the Rhine turned into an energy supplier by the hydroelectric plant, in contrast to the old wooden bridge. Human beings are claimed by it as well, and risk understanding themselves merely as resources. Heidegger sees here the supreme danger, which blocks other forms of truth, but cites Hölderlin (“where danger is, grows the saving power also”) to point toward a possible turn (Kehre), for which art would be one path. Translations differ: “Enframing” (William Lovitt, 1977) is the most common English rendering, but other versions exist. Critics such as Andrew Feenberg and Don Ihde contest the unitary and essentialist character he attributes to technology, while Jacques Ellul offers a parallel, independent analysis. See Dasein and the article Philosophy of technology: Heidegger, Ellul, and Mumford; see also Andrew Feenberg, Don Ihde, and Jacques Ellul. ...

Hegemony (ἡγεμονία, hēgemonía) — In Antonio Gramsci, a form of domination based on intellectual and moral leadership and consent, not merely coercion, exercised by a class over society. The Greek word means “leadership” or “command” (from hēgemōn, “guide,” “leader”) and denoted, in antiquity, the supremacy of one city over others. In Russian social democracy the concept was used to describe the proletariat’s leadership in the revolution; Gramsci developed it in the Prison Notebooks (written between 1929 and 1935), after using it in “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926). His thesis is that in Western societies with a dense “civil society” (schools, churches, press, associations), a class’s power depends on winning the consent of the governed, not just on controlling the coercive apparatus. Gramsci distinguishes domination (coercion) from leadership; in Notebook 6, §88, he formulates the state as political society plus civil society, that is, hegemony armored with coercion. “Organic” intellectuals have the role of organizing consent (Notebook 12, §1). Hence the strategy of a “war of position” within civil society and the building of a counter-hegemony. The concept was taken up by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), in a post-Marxist key, and by Robert Cox in international relations. Criticisms: Perry Anderson, in “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” (1976–1977), pointed to oscillations in the term’s usage; Louis Althusser, with his ideological state apparatuses, proposed a structuralist alternative. See also ideology and the article Western Marxism: Lukács, Gramsci, and Althusser. ...