Factors like community, culture and nation weaken the hegemony of neo-liberalism today. Discuss. (2022, 20 Marks)
Hegemony, in Antonio Gramsci‘s sense, is rule by consent: an order that has become common sense. From the 1980s to 2008 neo-liberalism enjoyed exactly that. Market freedom, open borders for capital and a shrinking state seemed the only rational course. Community, culture and nation are now eroding that consent, though far less of the structure.
Why the Old Solidarities Return
Neo-liberalism treats society as a market of choosing individuals. Its own theorists valued family and tradition, but its practice of flexible labour, mobile capital and commodified welfare dissolved the bonds that give life meaning. Humans remain social animals. Karl Polanyi‘s double movement (The Great Transformation, 1944) predicts the result: when the market is disembedded, society protects itself. Today that protection arrives through identity rather than class, as civic associations yield to religious, ethnic and national belonging.
Community
- Communitarians such as Michael Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit, 2020) argue that market meritocracy humiliated those it left behind and hollowed out the dignity of work.
- Communities defend livelihoods against market reform. India’s farmers’ movement forced the repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021.
- Governments must now buy social peace with cash-transfer welfare, the opposite of rolling back the state.
Culture
- Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Cultural Backlash, 2019) explain authoritarian-populist voting as a cultural backlash. Older, less educated and more religious citizens are reacting against rapid liberal value change, more than against economic loss.
- David Goodhart (The Road to Somewhere, 2017) contrasts rooted “Somewheres” with mobile “Anywheres”, the natural constituency of globalisation.
- Religious revival fills the space the market empties: evangelical politics in the US, political Hindutva in India, Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Nation
- Brexit (23 June 2016, 51.9% Leave) put “take back control” above membership of the world’s largest single market. Hostility to migrant labour ran beneath it.
- “America First” turned the author of the Washington Consensus against it, culminating in the April 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs.
- India: Atmanirbhar Bharat (May 2020), “vocal for local” and production-linked incentives revive the swadeshi logic of economic nationalism.
Why Hegemony Is Weakened, Not Overthrown
- The core persists. Central-bank independence, capital mobility and privatised utilities remain largely intact. Populists often cut taxes and deregulate; the US One Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 2025) extended tax cuts while trimming Medicaid.
- Nationalism without autarky. Atmanirbhar India concluded free trade talks with the EU on 27 January 2026.
- Identity as shield. Wendy Brown (In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 2019) argues that neo-liberal rationality, which defended markets and traditional morality against “the social”, itself nourished authoritarian nationalism. Culture wars can divert anger from inequality. Nancy Fraser‘s “progressive neoliberalism” (2017) shows the other side: emancipatory identity politics allied with finance until the alliance collapsed.
- Community can also be exclusionary: the xenophobia beneath Brexit protected neither workers nor welfare.
Conclusion
Community, culture and nation have broken neo-liberalism’s claim to common sense, and the doctrine no longer passes as “no alternative”. But they have not produced a counter-hegemony. More often they coexist with its core as a national-conservative neo-liberalism. Weakened hegemony will become real change only if these solidarities are turned into democratic regulation of markets, not ethnic closure.