Adam Tooze recently dissected Gramsci’s famous line: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Tooze’s central criticism is that the application of this idea to our times betrays a repetitive logic of regnum-interregnum-regnum and that, as a result, scholars operating in a Gramscian tradition—most notably, Giovanni Arrighi with his formulation of “cycles of world hegemony”—produce schemas that are “dangerously” simplistic and transhistorical.
The crux of Tooze’s argument is that
“America’s age of hegemony was not an answer to an interregnum. It truly was new. It was thus not the latest iteration of some familiar form of power. It did not replace the British empire. The British empire was reinventing itself too in response to the new challenges of the early 20th century. It was overtaken by the US and nested itself under the wings of that power. It was not something born. It was built. And if that is true for the early 20th century the question of how 21st century global power will be organized should be considered no less open.”
Close readers of Arrighi may find themselves puzzled, because such a claim meshes well with his understanding of world hegemony. In fact, Tooze’s disagreement with Arrighi seems to stem primarily from the dissection of the Gramsci line—which, across Arrighi’s ‘triology’ (The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Chaos and Governance (1999), and Adam Smith in Beijing (2009)), he never once quotes—and a misreading of Arrighi’s stylized depictions of world-hegemonic change.
In Tooze’s misreading, “Arrighi’s formulation reduces modern history to nothing more than a repeating timeless sequence” where one world hegemony replaces another in succession—Dutch in the 17th century, British in the 19th century, US in the 20thcentury—punctuated by periods of crisis. He notes:
“Models of this kind gesture to the confusion and terror of interregnum, all the while reducing that phase of disorder [between hegemonies] to something temporary, recurring and predictable. The model gestures to historical development – the upward step of phase after phase – but actually reduces radical change to repetition. After one hegemony what we look forward to, is simply another.”
I agree with his subsequent conclusion that such a “line of thinking is not just simplistic. In the current moment it is dangerously so.” And it is because of this shared sentiment that I write this commentary—not as a defense of Arrighi, per se, but rather as an articulation of how a corrected reading of his framework can provide a great deal of analytical clarity—not Pollyannish determinism—as our present crisis unfolds.
The Tooze-Arrighi Non-Debate
The origins of the Tooze-Arrighi non-debate lie in the concept of “word hegemony,” which Tooze does not address. Building on Gramsci, Arrighi defines world hegemony as something “more and different from ‘domination’ pure-and-simple.” It is rather “the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’” (p. 29). Whereas domination rests primarily on coercion, hegemony is “the additional power that accrues to a dominant group by virtue of its capacity to place all issues around which conflicts rage on a ‘universal’ plane.”
This definition matters because it necessitates that world hegemons make a credible claim to be leading the world system in a direction that is perceived as serving a general interest. A hegemonic state, in Arrighi’s formulation, promotes this general interest by temporarily resolving “all issues around which conflicts rage” in a way that earns the consent of would-be subordinates. This is the “supply side” of world hegemony: It is not a simple matter of supplanting a declining power through greater economic and military heft, but rather resolving system-level problems through both capacity and transformative vision.
On the “demand side” of world hegemony, Arrighi notes that the willingness of subordinate groups and states to accept a new hegemon had historically become especially widespread in periods of “systemic chaos.” Chaos, here, is not used to mean conflict and strife, but rather the mathematical meaning of the term—defining a situation in which is it almost impossible to predict the interaction of forces, and in which the system is open to complete transformation. In these moments of total and unpredictable lack of organization,
“the demand for ‘order’ – the old order, a new order, any order! – tends to become more and more general among rulers, or among subjects, or both… Historically, the states that have successfully seized this opportunity [to become world-hegemonic] did so by reconstituting the world system on new and enlarged foundations thereby restoring some measure of [order]” (p. 31–2).
This point is key. For Arrighi, the establishment of world hegemony has historically required a fundamental reconstitution of the system itself. It is only through dramatic transformation that a rising power has been able to resolve the system-level problems driving the chaos, provide order, and foster consent.
Arrighi and his co-author Beverly Silver refer to this as “system change,” or “a process of radical reorganization of the modern world system that changes substantively the nature of the system’s components, the way in which these components relate to one another, and the way in which the system operates and reproduces itself” (p. 21). They argued that it was through a series of these system changes—led by capable powers at key moments of interstate disorder—that allowed for the expansion of the capitalist system from its origins in the Italian city-states in the fifteenth century to its present global dimensions. In all instances, they understood that “hegemony has involved a fundamental reorganization of the system and a change in its properties” (p. 26). As they note:
“The formation and expansion of the modern world system is thus conceived as proceeding, not along a single track laid some four to five hundred years ago, but through several switches to new tracks laid by specific complexes of governmental and business agencies… these leading complexes… have all acted as ‘tracklaying vehicles’… In leading the system in a new direction, they also transformed it” (p. 22).
The laying of these new tracks has historically been a precondition of achieving world leadership in the Gramscian sense. The direction of these new tracks was not a predetermined trajectory, but rather the result of a series of leading powers having capacity and vision to reorganize the system at historical moments of chaos. The ability for a power to accomplish this task was never guaranteed—but nevertheless, three have done so in the past half-millennium: the Dutch in the 17th century, the British in the 19thcentury, and the US in the 20th century. (Note: Genoa, despite being the center of capitalist accumulation in the 15th century, was not a world-hegemonic power in Arrighi’s framework, in large part because it externalized its protection costs to the Spanish empire—a bifurcation of financial and military power that, Arrighi argued, can offer fruitful analogies to our own era, in which both Chinese economic and US military power have grown.)
Part of the confusion around Arrighi’s framework stems from the fact that, although this evolution of world capitalism was not preordained, several elements of it were patterned. By comparing historical world hegemonies, he is able to identify a series of these patterns: the growth in scale of the leading state, the alternation between extensive and intensive regimes, the sequential internalization of costs of accumulation, and the speeding up of social history, to name a few. But in all cases, these patterns are evolutionary. And like all evolutions, it is wrong to understand them as teleological or deterministic trajectories.
This was clarified in the table above, added by Arrighi in his postscript to the second edition of The Long Twentieth Century. As he notes, the theory’s “emphasis on the recurrence of financial expansions neither prevents us from recognizing systemic ruptures and paradigm shifts, nor is it meant to depict the history of capitalism as an eternal return to the same. On the contrary, it is meant to show that fundamental reorganizations of the system occur precisely when the ‘same’ (in the form of recurrent financial expansions) appears to return” (p. 375). In other words, to use Tooze’s language, periods of financialization have cleared the ground and provided the construction equipment for the “new” to be built.
Another cause of this common misreading of Arrighi is no doubt his association with Immanuel Wallerstein, who does not share this Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony—nor his articulation of hegemonic formation as system change. Wallerstein defined hegemony as synonymous with domination, understanding it as a “situation in which… one power is truly primus inter pares; that is, one power can largely impose its rules and its wishes… in the economic, political, military, diplomatic, and even cultural arenas.” For Wallerstein, as each hegemon’s technological and productive expertise diffuses to rising competitors (as a necessary component of its expansion), the hegemon’s edge is eroded, until a new state manages to achieve advantage in production, commerce, and finance—and then supplant the old amidst a predictable interregnum. This repetitive cycle is closer to Tooze’s caricature—but stands in stark contrast to Arrighi, who explicitly countered Wallerstein, noting that “world hegemonies have not ‘risen’ and ‘declined’ in a world system that expanded independently on the basis of an invariant structure.” Instead, fundamental transformation “led and governed by successive hegemonic states” was the name of the game (p. 31–2).
Tooze acknowledges that this fundamental transformation was precisely the case for the US in the mid-twentieth century. In shorthand: by reconstructing Europe and establishing international economic institutions, the US launched—on new and expanded foundations—a virtuous circle of profitability for capitalists, while also offering a reformist solution to the revolutionary challenges of the era. The new US-led system promised the “American Dream” of mass consumption to the working classes of core countries and, in the peripheries, made decolonization a reality and “catching up” development a possibility. At the same time, Roosevelt and Truman’s proposals to finance the world-wide provision of military protection of the capitalist system with the surpluses that had accumulated in the United States during the preceding 30 years of global systemic chaos meant that the US was able to offer the material and military foundations of its hegemony at an unbeatably low price.
Tooze is correct that the decisions by key actors in the creation of this regime were contested and contingent. There was no guarantee that the British system, which had erupted in world war and economic crisis, could be replaced by a new capitalist power. Indeed, Gramsci and his revolutionary contemporaries—to say nothing of elites in the halls of Western power—imagined (or feared) the end of capitalism entirely. This was certainly on the table in the early twentieth century. But instead, the United States resolved several of the system-level problems that had yielded chaos—war, formal colonialism, rising inequality—and a new world hegemony was “built.”
So what?
This clarification matters because Arrighi’s theory is useful for making sense of periods of “systemic chaos” (what Tooze reduces to Gramsci’s “interregnum”) and how to escape them. Patterns that emerge in the framework can provide a toolkit for analyzing the world around us in a moment of ‘global fog,’ when the old has died but the prospects for building the new are yet unclear.
This identification of patterns does not imply determinism. As Tooze correctly noted, it would be dangerously simplistic to assume that our present chaos was a temporary phenomenon and that a Chinese hegemony, organized following an extrapolation of the patterns shown in the table above, was imminent. But this is not what Arrighi’s theory offers to careful readers. Instead, it helps us understand the conditions of possibility for possible futures.
The framework allows us to recognize that periods of systemic chaos—in which we are no doubt amidst—have historically been the result of the contradictions of a declining hegemon’s leadership, burst asunder into crisis. Identifying these unresolved system-level problems can point to the “demand” conditions for a new hegemony—if one is to emerge.
For one, the social compacts undergirding US world hegemony (despite reaching geographically wider and socially deeper than those of its predecessors) necessarily excluded a large segment of the world’s population. The universalization of the American Dream was always a false promise, as it was not possible to accommodate “the combined demands of the Third World (for relatively little per person but for a lot of people) and the Western working class (for relatively few people but quite a lot per person)” without squeezing profits dry, as Wallerstein quipped. This failure erupted into a worldwide wave of protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the promise was abandoned in the neoliberal counterrevolution. This response has now erupted into dramatic waves of protest against inequality and immiseration around the world in recent decades.
For another, the attempt to achieve this false promise of universal mass consumption through the diffusion of the Western resource-intensive development model was predicated on treating non-renewable natural resources as if they were free goods – i.e., on the externalization of the costs of reproduction of nature. Such a model was ecologically unsustainable, and the consequences of this project rear their heads in the form of the climate crisis.
What’s more, the US regime—and, in fact, all three hegemonies that have organized Western dominance of the capitalist world-system—have been both (1) fundamentally grounded in militarism and (2) predicated on an imbalance of power between the West and “the Rest.” Yet in the wake of decolonization and development, countries across the global South have accumulated dramatic economic power—most notably, but not exclusively, China. In the face of this shifting balance of power, continuation of Western domination of the system will be possible only through reliance on even more coercive means, leaning on the preponderance of military power in the US and Europe. The mounting examples of ‘insubordination’ among rising powers in the global South, combined with the US’ militaristic response, is in no small part responsible for escalating interstate tensions in recent years.
Arrighi’s theory helps us identify these problems—which emerged from the contradictions of US leadership and are now driving systemic chaos. The framework also helps us understand that these are the “demand” conditions for a new hegemonic order—and that any power that wants to “supply” hegemony in the twenty-first century must place these “issues around which conflicts rage” on a “universal plane.” A new world hegemony, then, would have to resolve the problems left behind by US leadership—mounting inequality, ecological crisis, a changing balance of interstate power, rampant militarism. Whether a state—or a system of states—could transform the system in such a way that both solved these problems and still looked like something we could call “capitalism” is an open question. Indeed, the conditions for world hegemony may no longer exist—a prospect Arrighi discussed in his final book.
There is, of course, the possibility that officials in China have the vision and capacity to organize a “system change” that could end systemic chaos and establish world leadership (capitalist or otherwise). But it is no sure bet. It’s also possible—in fact, it is incredibly likely—that even if the Chinese state had the capacity and vision for system change, belligerent actors in the US (who still control the largest war-making apparatus the world has ever seen) would not peacefully adjust to the new status quo. From an ‘Arrighian’ perspective, then, the most likely outcome is not, contra Tooze, an optimistic vision of a new Chinese hegemony, but rather a prolonged period of conflict and systemic chaos—echoing that of the early twentieth century, but with far deadlier weapons and a ticking ecological timebomb.
But, to return to Gramsci, if Arrighi’s theory offers us “pessimism of the intellect,” it may also help shore up our “optimism of the will.” Close readers of Arrighi would not dispute Tooze’s contention that the future remains open and, if a “new” order is to emerge, it will have to be built—not born. By helping us identify the contours of the system change required to end the chaos, Arrighi’s framework may offer, if not a blueprint, then an initial sketch. But the act of building a new world that solves the problems of the old will be contingent and contested—and the responsibility for that task lies with us all.
Corey R. Payne (corey.payne@richmond.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. This response is indebted to Beverly Silver, with whom he has co-authored two essays on the subject: “Crises of World Hegemony and the Speeding Up of Social History” (2020) and “Domination Without Hegemony and the Limits of US World Power” (2022). He would also like to thank Sahan Karatasli for his useful feedback.
Image: Martinus Schouman via Wikimedia Commons. Image in public domain.