Hegemonic Analysis: Theories and Applications

Catalog description

An important strain within contemporary political science has been the attempt to explain how power is exercised through the manipulation or exploitation of consciousness, habits, and cultural predispositions. One of the key concepts in the study of these issues is that of "hegemony" --the establishment of particular beliefs as commonsensical presumptions of political life. In this course that notion will be systematically explored. Of particular interest will be how authors who conduct hegemonic analysis cope with the problem of analyzing the effect of what the objects of their analysis, by definition, do not and, in some sense, cannot, think about. Illustrations of hegemonic phenomena and attempts to analyze them will be drawn from a variety of fields, such as political theory, historiography, comparative politics, American politics, rational choice theory,agent based modeling, and epistemology.