Here some thoughts in the umbra of the disintegrating post-WWII political world order.
Hegemony usually applies to the "leadership, predominance, preponderance" of a state, "esp. the leadership or predominant authority of one state of a confederacy or union over the others" (OED), hence a political concept. In the twentieth century, we read, quoted in the OED, "the hegemon of the western hemisphere is the United States." (Forum Jan.Mar. 1904 347 Cent. Dict. Suppl.) A political entity is composed of people, the polis being originally a togetherness of people under some kind of constitution that regulates how they live together and how the power of some over others is exercised according to law.
It seems to be a misuse of the word 'hegemony' to apply it to things or an idea. Freedom, for instance, is an idea, or even ideal, that a people can aspire to, and democracy as a form of government is regarded today as realizing an ideal of freedom in a state, but we don't say that the idea of democracy is hegemonic. Nevertheless it certainly predominates today in the West as an idea aligned with freedom or even as the idea of political freedom. Other ideas, such as justice or human rights, may predominate as guiding ideals in the modern world, but we don't say they are hegemonic.
Things themselves are not regarded as free, but may be used by us humans as means to realize our freedoms in living our lives. Life itself is a kind of movement as an exercise of our freedoms of movement. Freedom itself can only be grasped as a kind or kinds of movement. Our use of things from spear-heads through to super-computers running A.I. algorithms is understood as our human deployment of technology for our own ends and, as such, technology, it is said, cannot exercise any hegemony over us. It is our servant, invented by human ingenuity. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the cyberworld, digital algorithms automate control over movements of all kinds, including our own lives. The proponents of the ever-encroaching cyberworld proclaim that algorithmic control is all for the good, our own good, especially our convenience; all that is needed are some ethical guard-rails.
What is the case, however, when an idea becomes a thing, i.e. thingified, and hence moves in the world as thing, even with its own law of movement? This seems at first sight to be an idle, whimsical idea. After all, ideas are at home in the realm of ideas, but things are material, situated on the other side of the divide. How we humans value everything around us, including each other, is indeed ubiquitous. We cannot help but evaluate, estimate and thus appreciate or depreciate, like or dislike, desire or shun, enjoy or reject everything we encounter in the world. Our very social togetherness is borne by a constant mutual estimation of who each of us is, a kind of sociative movement I call interplay. Hence valuation, evaluation, estimation is practised in everyday life which can be conceived as guided by an ensemble of cultural values. In the modern age, at least in the West, the values of human rights have come to the fore as ideals to be lived up to and practised in any polity. Most states pay lip service, at least, to human rights as proclaimed in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.
There is also a value that has been realized globally in an especially thingy way. The paradigm for this value-thing is money, which serves to sociate people economically through what has come to be called the cash nexus. But what is money? What is its essence, its specific whatness? At first, one could say, that money is the thingly embodiment of exchange-value and as such serves to mediate market exchange. The forms of appearance or 'faces' or 'looks' of this exchange-value are money and goods of all kinds, including services. But not all thingified value is exchange-value; it has further forms of appearance, starting with capital and wages, and proceeding to profit, interest and ground-rent, each of these being the income-forms of thingified value.
Capital itself is thingified value circling through its own peculiar movement via a series of quasi-Protean transformations of form that aims to generate more thingified value in the form of revenue than was first advanced in the form of money-capital invested in wage-earning employees and means of production. The principle or law governing this movement of capital is that The Medium of thingified value itself must be augmented, i.e. must accumulate or valorize. The residue remaining from the realized revenue after deducting all the costs of the production and circulation processes, comprising those for means of production/circulation, wages/salaries, interest and ground-rent must be positive, i.e. profitable. Otherwise the movement has failed and the continued existence of the functioning, entrepreneurial capital in question becomes doubtful.
The law (or principle) of valorizing thingified value is able to assert itself today globally without humans knowing anything about The Medium of thingified value. That is the beauty of this law of movement. It is a law of movement sui generis that no physical science can ever 'discover'. Why not? Because thingified value itself is nothing physical, but rather a thingified idea of estimation and evaluation realized behind the backs of the players practically sociating in economic life in a so-called 'free market economy'. Thinking from within the ontological difference is required to see it, but currently positivist thinking, that has closed off the ontological difference, has the upper hand. This closure of the mind ensures so far that The Medium remains inconceivable, i.e. without a concept. Liberal political thinking is thus unable to understand its own essential shortcoming, for it remains on the surface, pleading and striving futilely for the fairness of interplay among free individuals. The Medium circulating, valorizing below remains out of sight, beyond the mind's grasp.
Today we are witnessing how the United States, as the state most unequivocally dedicated to capitalism, and therefore tacitly to the law of movement of the valorizing Medium, is unknowingly, but for that all the more ruthlessly and effectively, asserting this law worldwide. The hegemony of The Medium is being exercised via a surrogate, camouflaged under the political slogan of America First, and no one is the wiser, not even right-wing Republican politicians nor oppositional left-wing activists. Instead of seeing The Medium for what it is, the capitalist economy is proclaimed to be the realm of individual freedom in which the players are free to play the rough, competitive gainful game, with its several winners and many losers. Tough luck, buddy, if you're a loser. The so-called Free World is founded on an equivocal idea of freedom that it strives to uphold, come what may. Hence the vilification and repression in the U.S. from the right of anyone calling attention to the ravages of capitalism. Conservatives in other countries follow suit.
The political hegemony of the United States, largely exercised through the U.S. dollar, is seen by many, since it is highly visible, but the weird thingy hegemony of The Medium remains invisible, beyond comprehension. The West's political hegemon is unknowingly itself subjugated to the hegemony of the latter's movements, rendering the 'Free World' a meticulously manicured ideology.
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.
Capitalocene & The global law of movement.
Seminal: Critique
of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a
Form-Analytic Extension of Marx's Uncompleted System Kurasje, Copenhagen 1984, reprinted 2015.
