Hegemony and Autonomy

This article analyzes the concept of hegemony and examines its relationship to power and autonomy. Refuting the conventional belief that it is ideology that distinguishes hegemony, the article argues that it is autonomy that constitutes the distinguishing characteristic. Although hegemons tend to evolve into imperialists, hegemony involves leadership of an alliance, not domination by coercion. It is impossible to conceptualize hegemony without also including autonomy. In this conceptualization, the primary source of autonomy lies in a specific hegemonic system of domination that itself embodies the notion of autonomy for both the polity and its citizenry, a limiting construction that hinders the tendency toward imperialism. Such a system includes one type of autonomy that can be designated as autonomy within hegemony. In addition, the article discusses two other types of autonomy: counterhegemony and a largely power-based opposed hegemony. Thus, the article concludes, hegemony is a complex concept, with several types of manifestation, that can more usefully be understood in connection with autonomy and power than as a stand-alone concept.     

Harvard

Abstract

The following position paper was presented by a five-man delegation from the Harvard CCAS chapter to the embassy of the People's Republic of China in Paris on February 20, 1969. The group included Thomas Engelhardt, Cheryl Goodman, and Jon Livingston, all graduate students at Harvard, Neale Hunter, an Australian who spent 1965–67 teaching English in Shanghai, and Jonathan Mirsky, Director of Dartmouth's East Asia Center, who was unable to go to Paris but helped compose the statement.     

The Law and Politics of Marital Rape in England, 1945–1994

This article examines the ending of the marital rape exemption in England. It describes the unresponsiveness of the political and legal establishment on the issue from the war to the mid-1970s. The arguments and campaigns that feminists and others advanced against the rule from the 1970s onwards are analysed, together with the political and legal reaction to this campaign. Next, the Parliamentary and legal debates over the rule in the 1980s are discussed: a story of inertia, even hostility, towards such campaigning. Finally, the article considers the demise of the exemption in the 1990s. The article presents a nuanced account of this change, which was both vigorously contested and highly contingent. It also suggests that legal protection from ‘the rapist who pays the rent’, and the campaign to achieve this, deserve appropriate recognition within the story of feminist activism in the late twentieth century.