Producing Hegemony: State/Society Relations and the Politics of Productivity in the United States

Abstract

This paper argues for a historical reinterpretation of the social bases of American global hegemony in this century. The first part builds a case for three related propositions: 1) prevailing theoretical traditions in international political economy embody inadequate conceptions of states, state powers, and state/society relations and are, as a consequence, largely unable to interpret the historically concrete processes by which the socio-political basis of American global power was constructed in the twentieth century; 2) recent scholarship in historical political economy suggests potentially fruitful alternatives to prevailing understandings of state powers and the core relations of American global hegemony in this century; and 3) in light of the first two propositions a historical reinterpretation of the socio-political core of American hegemony is warranted. As a step in this direction, the second part of the paper suggests one such alternative interpretation. It is argued that the extraordinary global powers of the United States were made possible by a reconstruction of state/society relations peculiar to the U.S., simultaneously creating the social infrastructure of mass production and consumption while maintaining the formal separation between the spheres of politics and economics, public and private, which is characteristic of liberal capitalist social formations. The distinctive neoliberal quality of American hegemony may be best understood as the historical outcome of the political struggles entailed in this process of socio-political restructuring.