Perry Anderson - The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony

Historically, of course, the origins of the term hegemony are Greek, from a verb meaning to guide or to lead, going back to Homer. As an abstract noun, hgemonia first appears in Herodotus, to designate leadership of an alliance of city-states for a common military end, a position of honour accorded Sparta in resistance to the Persian invasion of Greece. It was tied to the idea of a league, whose members were in principle equal, raising one of their number to direct them all for a given purpose. From the outset it coexisted with another term indicating rule in a more general sensearkh. What were the relations between the two? In a famous passage of his History of Greece, discussing the evolution of the Delian League headed by fifth-century Athens, the eminent liberal historian Grotean associate of John Stuart Millargued that hgemonia was leadership freely based on attachment or consent, whereas arkh implied the superior authority and coercive dignity of empire, extracting by contrast mere acquiescence. Thucydides had carefully distinguished between the two, and criticised the passage of Athens from the first to the second as the fatal cause of the Peloponnesian War.

So stark an opposition was, however, foreign to contemporaries. In Herodotus and Xenophon, hgemonia and arkh are used all but interchangeably. Was Thucydides more punctilious? The paragraph on which Grote relied opens with the first term and ends with the second, tracing a development without counterposing them.

That there was a conceptual continuity, rather than any clear-cut contrast, between the ideas of hegemony and empire in classical Greece was rooted in the meanings of both. Written at the end of the Weimar Republic, the first scholarly study of the former, by Hans Schaefer, showed that hegemony was indeed leadership freely conceded by members of a league, but it was a specific commission, not a general authority. Granted was command on the battlefield.spectrum of power, arkh was constitutively ambiguous at the other, translatable according to context (or leaning of the translator) as neutral rule or dominative empire. In the rhetoric of the fifth century, associations of the first with consent and the second with coercion were tactically available, but the sliding surface between them precluded any stable demarcation.

In the fourth century, this changed. After defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Athenian oratory, no longer able to extol empire as before, revalued the virtues of hegemony, now suitably moralised as an ideal of the weakened. Isocrates, calling on Greeks to unite once more against Persia under the leadership of Athens, claimed hegemony for his city by exalting its cultural meritsthe benefits it had historically conferred on others, above all its blessings in philosophy, eloquence and education. His panegyric is the most systematic vindication of hegemony as a freely acknowledged preeminence to be found in the literature. But even it could not dispense with the telltale counterpoint of its other: Greeks should also be deeply grateful for the very great empire that Athens had enjoyed.

Looking back, Aristotle would write of Athens and Sparta that each of the two states that were hegemonic in Greece took their form of government as a standard and imposed it on other cities, in one case democracies and in the other oligarchies, paying no regard to the interest of the cities, but only to their own advantage, until it became a fixed habit with the people of the various cities not even to desire equality, but either to seek to rule or to endure subjection. Concluding that it is in the role of Hegemon that the real secret of the League to Corinth is to be found, he may have said more than he intended.