Spurred on by my friend Grey Anderson of Verso and inspired by a visit to Dalian, Beijing and Shanghai, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the problem of power in the 21st century and US hegemony.
Theorizing power on a world historical scale requires a deeper dive into the extant literature. It is good to start with Foucault & foray through Marx, Latour...but your glosses reveal a lack of having really contended with their intellectual projects (no pun intended).
Read Giovanni & Arrighi. Long 20th C, and Chaos & Governance in the Modern World System. Spend some time in Marxist geography lit.
...then your thinking/theorizing about power and hegemony might get really interesting.
Thanks, can't say I understood all of this, but it did make me think of the kind of economic dynamism for which the US is famous, and how we keep reinventing ourselves (and inventing new technologies and entirely new industries) at the moment when we're told that "America is in decline", "Our best days are over", etc. Think about the transition from the "malaise" 70's to the invention of the personal computer and software industries, and then the development of the internet (not an American invention).
Or one statistic that still boggles my mind: The US is now the world's largest producer of oil. A complete disaster for humanity and all the other species inhabiting our planet, but also a testament to what was once called "American ingenuity."
So I'm supposed to doubt the overwhelming scientific consensus because some rando on the internet says some other guy I never heard of says he has a theory that proves all climate models are bunk? And said rando can't explain said theory? Yeah, that's not gonna happen, dawg.
I am and will remain a huge fan, but I am afraid you are seriously mistaken here. An aspiration is not a project. As an engineer, when I hear the word 'project' I expect to see AT LEAST five points:
1) A reasonably well defined team of people in charge (it can be a single individual, of course)
2) A reasonably clear hierarchy - there is at least a last instance decision-maker
3) A reasonably clear resource pool and limits thereof
4) Clearly defined goals
5) Most important of all, a feedback loop that can correct the trajectory of the project if things, as they wont, do not go as planned. It is here that things can go horribly wrong, like they did in WW1 for the Entente soldiers (in Italy the clearly incompetent general Lamarmora was replaced only in November 1917)
Most examples you make (pursuing a girl, getting a job worthy of the social standing of your family, winning a military campaign, or a war) satisfy the conditions above, as do exceedingly complex projects like the Manhattan, Apollo, Airbus, MS Windows NT projects.
But the wretched-poor African country that fails to get rich or the US that succeeds in becoming the hegemon to the world are conceptually different, for the simple and good reason that states do not have the agency of an individual: in the past you have fiercely, and rightly, criticized the realist FP experts, like prof Mearsheimer, but you are here on their same page, ie you attribute to the US state the same agency and project capacity of an individual.
But let's be subtler and say that there is a continuous spectrum and that a single individual possesses agency and coherence of vision in the highest degree and the state in the lowest. Large corporations and organizations fall in between, arranged by their cohesion and focus.
I have greatly enjoyed your posts where you rightly exposed the ad hoc, contingent and random nature of the British (and Dutch) imperial projects, which btw were driven by the joint-stock companies which are an intermediate entity between individual and state. A very complex and multi-tiered picture, as reality is. I hope that the following posts will move in that direction.
But your insistence that the US hegemonic project is new and unique makes me fear for the worse. The contention that it is beyond and above the past historic cycles of growth/flourishing/decadence and fall of the previous empires.
A few counterexamples:
1 The sorry show of a clearly incpacitated Biden serves what purpose in the hegemony project? It is a pure negative for the US: at the best it shows that the Deep state really exists (and so the US democracy is shallow) at worst it remonds the rest of the world of the last days of the USSR, it frightens the allies and encourages the enemies
2 The piling up of hostile moves towards China, Russia, Iran and a score of other nations AT THE SAME TIME, soldifies a hostile block that could control the Heartland and really challenge the US hegemony
3 The abuse of sanctions for everything and agains everybody (including Europe!!!)
4 The brain-dead support for Israel, and the hijacking of Congress by the AIPAC
You have repeatedly pointed to the complete inadequacy of the US to lead in other fields, like the green transition, where china is streets ahead. The picture that we get in Europe is of a seized machine that threates to break down at every moment.
The fact that nobody, I assume you as well, can conceive of a non-catastrophic end to the US Dollar an Empire hegemony, does not mean the end will not come.
I am afraid that the US empire is like the old ones, and has not some super-human, AI-dirven project to trascend history. The precedent that comes to mind is the third century crisis, which the Roman empire overcame because the provincial elites decided that it was more advantageous to be ruled by Rome. In the fifth century, the decision was different, and it was curtain for the Western empire. Now, the fact is that here in Europe, the US empire is being increasingly perceived a liability, forcing us to buy overpriced gas, to get in an economic war with China and so on. A Trump presidency would turbocharge this situation. I have to hope the the US hegemony is indeed a project and there is indeed somebody in charge.
I suggest to you Mr. Tooze to look into Gabriel Rockhill, and under the big project taken immediately after WWII by US intelligence agencies as well as private foundations on shaping the minds of people and especially nipping in the bud certain ideas, such that existing hierarchies are forever maintained.
As for the huge project you are hinting at, tackling climate change, business as usual will not work. To marginally succeed, profits should not matter, and hierarchies should not natter, just effectiveness on the long term and efficiencies. For survival, societies themselves should adapt.
"tackling climate change, business as usual will not work."
I'm not a big fan of "business as usual" but I do have to admit that enormous growth in wind and solar that we're seeing today is all happening under our existing capitalist system.
I can understand the argument that profitability shouldn't matter when the survival of all life on Earth is at stake, but I also think we might have gotten lucky in that the renewables we need to replace fossil fuels are actually profitable, even head-to-head competing against fossil fuels without subsidies. There was no guarantee at the outset that would be true, but it does appear to be true.
The enormous growth in wind and especially solar is due to the investment and development policies of that particular non-capitalist/capitalist country, which made investments in such developments "viable" in the developed economies.
Also, we have passed 12 months since for every month we had more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the benchmark pre-industrial era, surpassing the low emission scenario, a bit ahead of time.
Sure, I'm happy to give China plenty of credit. I think we should also give credit to the inherent efficiencies of solar photovoltaics. It's a good technology, somebody was going to develop it and at some point the economics of "electricity without having to pay for fuel" was going to take over, as it has.
One of Germany’s core maladies is the total absence of project-power: no large scale project (or small scale one for that matter) can be decided and executed upon in a timely fashion.
Without a serious capacity for execution, nothing Germany wants to do amounts to anything or maybe the problem is that they don’t really want to do anything anyway.
It’s great (and always useful) to reframe in this way so thanks! To have to really grapple with the more granular texture of historical events is of course productive. I’m kind of unclear however how this methodological approach isn’t, to some degree, a reframing of “great man” history as “great project” history with all the attendant issues. So long as it remains a conversation between the framed “text” and (proposed) underlying structure and dynamic forces it’s all good. Maybe more on that as the series unfolds. I look forward to it.
Looking forward to this set of notes especially your thoughts on American hegemony after your trilogy starting with Deluge. Does your idea of American hegemony as experimental project power connect to John Darwin's histories of empires and world system, The Empire Project?
I had caught your appearances at AMNC24 on Youtube when this Chartbook arrived, and have since watched your LRB 2019 Winter Lecture, all of which very interesting either separately or together.
Although I can't claim anywhere near the extent of your historical vision, it seems to me that there are two hegemonies that the US needs to maintain: the domestic and the international. Your point in the LRB lecture weighing the contemporary crisis against that of the Vietnam era is well taken, and dovetails with a comment Bruce Cumings made in the introduction to his book _War and Television_. Leaving out much of his argument, Cumings offered a US liberal politics that spans an unbelievably wide gamut between say, George Wallace and Eugene McCarthy, to name some figures from my political generation. Cumings in short, views US liberal discourse as coextensive with what makes it onto the TV screen.
It seems the current foundation of US global hegemony is the dollar's international function, and the "small yard, big fence" policies of recent years seem both a response and threat to that project. This in contrast to a true multilateral project: the de-evolution of US global financial activity under conditions of true multilateralism into some kind of best-of-class Fintech, a gigantic global PayPal or Charles Schwab.
I have no idea whether the US, as a well-behaved banker to the world (isn't that the Swiss?) could generate the GDP necessary to keep Americans smiling, but this question exposes the link between the US domestic and international hegemonies, and I think it does so via continuance of the American Frontier. As William Appleman Williams characterized it, the frontier remains a "Utopia of escape" for Americans and American business. Hence Andrew Jackson's Indian Wars, thence AI and semiconductors. The utopia of escape offered by Deng Xiaoping has proven a mirage, hence open conflict builds at home (and abroad).
I believe expansion fits your definition of a project, and rather than continuing to speak beyond my pay-grade, I might offer this essay: sociologist Renee Anspach's "Everyday Methods for Assessing Organizational Effectiveness" (1991):
Anspach's study presents--in my reading--a project dialectic of "design and realization" to use Raymond Williams' words: that by which idealist policy can proceed through its synthesis by "folk methods [that] constitute a repertoire of organizational survival".
You show a picture of an urban landscape and asks: "What kind of power built this forest of giant buildings, these mountains of steel and concrete? " In the middle ages urban centers was dominated by churches and cathedrals i.e. religious power. Today our cities are dominated by what I term 'finance cathedrals' - yet your story does not touch upon the role of financial power in the recent transformation of our cities.
Best piece and thought project yet. Have never been a fan of Foucault, but here you are developing an evolution of traditional philosophy in the context of post-modernity. Look forward to the next note...
Because one can intellectualize the notion of projects doesn’t make it so in the underlying reality. Like the fact that history has conspiracies doesn't mean that history is a conspiracy theory. And just because one can call things “project” doesn't mean the world is projects or project driven. As Marx showed, the workings of capitalism are far beyond the intentions or control individual capitalists -- or even groups of them -- no matter what their intentions or how they conceptualize it (as we are reminded of daily). Even the admission of idiosyncrasy (like coincidence), undermines the notion of project as a meaningful construct, and exposes it as an academic exercise.
How you can say project is the underlying unity of power , knowledge etc.,? U know the elite are conscious and seek to maintain the system they inherit
I don't know why u think romance and marriage is something consequential. Nobody is interested in love story of others and the interest fades with age.
Theorizing power on a world historical scale requires a deeper dive into the extant literature. It is good to start with Foucault & foray through Marx, Latour...but your glosses reveal a lack of having really contended with their intellectual projects (no pun intended).
Read Giovanni & Arrighi. Long 20th C, and Chaos & Governance in the Modern World System. Spend some time in Marxist geography lit.
...then your thinking/theorizing about power and hegemony might get really interesting.
I say this as a fan (with a PhD in this field).
Caccaminuzzoli.
Gesundheit!
Thanks, can't say I understood all of this, but it did make me think of the kind of economic dynamism for which the US is famous, and how we keep reinventing ourselves (and inventing new technologies and entirely new industries) at the moment when we're told that "America is in decline", "Our best days are over", etc. Think about the transition from the "malaise" 70's to the invention of the personal computer and software industries, and then the development of the internet (not an American invention).
Or one statistic that still boggles my mind: The US is now the world's largest producer of oil. A complete disaster for humanity and all the other species inhabiting our planet, but also a testament to what was once called "American ingenuity."
Climate change models vilolate the 2nd law of thermodynamics there nothing to worry about.
I love this place, you never know what kind of crank-thinking you'll find here. Every day it's a new surprise.
So the winner of the nobel physics prize is wrong ie John Clauser.
So I take it you don't understand this theory yourself, or you'd be explaining it to us right now, correct?
That would be waste of time and effort, I am just putting some doubt into your mind that you might be wrong.
So I'm supposed to doubt the overwhelming scientific consensus because some rando on the internet says some other guy I never heard of says he has a theory that proves all climate models are bunk? And said rando can't explain said theory? Yeah, that's not gonna happen, dawg.
I am and will remain a huge fan, but I am afraid you are seriously mistaken here. An aspiration is not a project. As an engineer, when I hear the word 'project' I expect to see AT LEAST five points:
1) A reasonably well defined team of people in charge (it can be a single individual, of course)
2) A reasonably clear hierarchy - there is at least a last instance decision-maker
3) A reasonably clear resource pool and limits thereof
4) Clearly defined goals
5) Most important of all, a feedback loop that can correct the trajectory of the project if things, as they wont, do not go as planned. It is here that things can go horribly wrong, like they did in WW1 for the Entente soldiers (in Italy the clearly incompetent general Lamarmora was replaced only in November 1917)
Most examples you make (pursuing a girl, getting a job worthy of the social standing of your family, winning a military campaign, or a war) satisfy the conditions above, as do exceedingly complex projects like the Manhattan, Apollo, Airbus, MS Windows NT projects.
But the wretched-poor African country that fails to get rich or the US that succeeds in becoming the hegemon to the world are conceptually different, for the simple and good reason that states do not have the agency of an individual: in the past you have fiercely, and rightly, criticized the realist FP experts, like prof Mearsheimer, but you are here on their same page, ie you attribute to the US state the same agency and project capacity of an individual.
But let's be subtler and say that there is a continuous spectrum and that a single individual possesses agency and coherence of vision in the highest degree and the state in the lowest. Large corporations and organizations fall in between, arranged by their cohesion and focus.
I have greatly enjoyed your posts where you rightly exposed the ad hoc, contingent and random nature of the British (and Dutch) imperial projects, which btw were driven by the joint-stock companies which are an intermediate entity between individual and state. A very complex and multi-tiered picture, as reality is. I hope that the following posts will move in that direction.
But your insistence that the US hegemonic project is new and unique makes me fear for the worse. The contention that it is beyond and above the past historic cycles of growth/flourishing/decadence and fall of the previous empires.
A few counterexamples:
1 The sorry show of a clearly incpacitated Biden serves what purpose in the hegemony project? It is a pure negative for the US: at the best it shows that the Deep state really exists (and so the US democracy is shallow) at worst it remonds the rest of the world of the last days of the USSR, it frightens the allies and encourages the enemies
2 The piling up of hostile moves towards China, Russia, Iran and a score of other nations AT THE SAME TIME, soldifies a hostile block that could control the Heartland and really challenge the US hegemony
3 The abuse of sanctions for everything and agains everybody (including Europe!!!)
4 The brain-dead support for Israel, and the hijacking of Congress by the AIPAC
You have repeatedly pointed to the complete inadequacy of the US to lead in other fields, like the green transition, where china is streets ahead. The picture that we get in Europe is of a seized machine that threates to break down at every moment.
The fact that nobody, I assume you as well, can conceive of a non-catastrophic end to the US Dollar an Empire hegemony, does not mean the end will not come.
I am afraid that the US empire is like the old ones, and has not some super-human, AI-dirven project to trascend history. The precedent that comes to mind is the third century crisis, which the Roman empire overcame because the provincial elites decided that it was more advantageous to be ruled by Rome. In the fifth century, the decision was different, and it was curtain for the Western empire. Now, the fact is that here in Europe, the US empire is being increasingly perceived a liability, forcing us to buy overpriced gas, to get in an economic war with China and so on. A Trump presidency would turbocharge this situation. I have to hope the the US hegemony is indeed a project and there is indeed somebody in charge.
Adam, I am impressed by Chartbook 296 - I had not expected this theoretical approach.
That you got me thinking is a good thing and I want to thank you for it.
I suggest to you Mr. Tooze to look into Gabriel Rockhill, and under the big project taken immediately after WWII by US intelligence agencies as well as private foundations on shaping the minds of people and especially nipping in the bud certain ideas, such that existing hierarchies are forever maintained.
https://gabrielrockhill.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@criticaltheoryworkshop5299
As for the huge project you are hinting at, tackling climate change, business as usual will not work. To marginally succeed, profits should not matter, and hierarchies should not natter, just effectiveness on the long term and efficiencies. For survival, societies themselves should adapt.
"tackling climate change, business as usual will not work."
I'm not a big fan of "business as usual" but I do have to admit that enormous growth in wind and solar that we're seeing today is all happening under our existing capitalist system.
I can understand the argument that profitability shouldn't matter when the survival of all life on Earth is at stake, but I also think we might have gotten lucky in that the renewables we need to replace fossil fuels are actually profitable, even head-to-head competing against fossil fuels without subsidies. There was no guarantee at the outset that would be true, but it does appear to be true.
“…enormous growth in wind and solar that we're seeing today is all happening under our existing capitalist system.”
Happening under or despite? Or more precisely: under despite the masters of capitalism’s efforts to block?
The enormous growth in wind and especially solar is due to the investment and development policies of that particular non-capitalist/capitalist country, which made investments in such developments "viable" in the developed economies.
Also, we have passed 12 months since for every month we had more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the benchmark pre-industrial era, surpassing the low emission scenario, a bit ahead of time.
Sure, I'm happy to give China plenty of credit. I think we should also give credit to the inherent efficiencies of solar photovoltaics. It's a good technology, somebody was going to develop it and at some point the economics of "electricity without having to pay for fuel" was going to take over, as it has.
One of Germany’s core maladies is the total absence of project-power: no large scale project (or small scale one for that matter) can be decided and executed upon in a timely fashion.
Without a serious capacity for execution, nothing Germany wants to do amounts to anything or maybe the problem is that they don’t really want to do anything anyway.
It’s great (and always useful) to reframe in this way so thanks! To have to really grapple with the more granular texture of historical events is of course productive. I’m kind of unclear however how this methodological approach isn’t, to some degree, a reframing of “great man” history as “great project” history with all the attendant issues. So long as it remains a conversation between the framed “text” and (proposed) underlying structure and dynamic forces it’s all good. Maybe more on that as the series unfolds. I look forward to it.
Looking forward to this set of notes especially your thoughts on American hegemony after your trilogy starting with Deluge. Does your idea of American hegemony as experimental project power connect to John Darwin's histories of empires and world system, The Empire Project?
Professor Tooze-
I had caught your appearances at AMNC24 on Youtube when this Chartbook arrived, and have since watched your LRB 2019 Winter Lecture, all of which very interesting either separately or together.
Although I can't claim anywhere near the extent of your historical vision, it seems to me that there are two hegemonies that the US needs to maintain: the domestic and the international. Your point in the LRB lecture weighing the contemporary crisis against that of the Vietnam era is well taken, and dovetails with a comment Bruce Cumings made in the introduction to his book _War and Television_. Leaving out much of his argument, Cumings offered a US liberal politics that spans an unbelievably wide gamut between say, George Wallace and Eugene McCarthy, to name some figures from my political generation. Cumings in short, views US liberal discourse as coextensive with what makes it onto the TV screen.
It seems the current foundation of US global hegemony is the dollar's international function, and the "small yard, big fence" policies of recent years seem both a response and threat to that project. This in contrast to a true multilateral project: the de-evolution of US global financial activity under conditions of true multilateralism into some kind of best-of-class Fintech, a gigantic global PayPal or Charles Schwab.
I have no idea whether the US, as a well-behaved banker to the world (isn't that the Swiss?) could generate the GDP necessary to keep Americans smiling, but this question exposes the link between the US domestic and international hegemonies, and I think it does so via continuance of the American Frontier. As William Appleman Williams characterized it, the frontier remains a "Utopia of escape" for Americans and American business. Hence Andrew Jackson's Indian Wars, thence AI and semiconductors. The utopia of escape offered by Deng Xiaoping has proven a mirage, hence open conflict builds at home (and abroad).
I believe expansion fits your definition of a project, and rather than continuing to speak beyond my pay-grade, I might offer this essay: sociologist Renee Anspach's "Everyday Methods for Assessing Organizational Effectiveness" (1991):
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/800635>
Anspach's study presents--in my reading--a project dialectic of "design and realization" to use Raymond Williams' words: that by which idealist policy can proceed through its synthesis by "folk methods [that] constitute a repertoire of organizational survival".
Stopped reading at visa versa, but thank you 🤣
You show a picture of an urban landscape and asks: "What kind of power built this forest of giant buildings, these mountains of steel and concrete? " In the middle ages urban centers was dominated by churches and cathedrals i.e. religious power. Today our cities are dominated by what I term 'finance cathedrals' - yet your story does not touch upon the role of financial power in the recent transformation of our cities.
Best piece and thought project yet. Have never been a fan of Foucault, but here you are developing an evolution of traditional philosophy in the context of post-modernity. Look forward to the next note...
fascinating!
Excellent piece on power and hegemony, we look forward to further installments and attendant discussions.
Because one can intellectualize the notion of projects doesn’t make it so in the underlying reality. Like the fact that history has conspiracies doesn't mean that history is a conspiracy theory. And just because one can call things “project” doesn't mean the world is projects or project driven. As Marx showed, the workings of capitalism are far beyond the intentions or control individual capitalists -- or even groups of them -- no matter what their intentions or how they conceptualize it (as we are reminded of daily). Even the admission of idiosyncrasy (like coincidence), undermines the notion of project as a meaningful construct, and exposes it as an academic exercise.
How you can say project is the underlying unity of power , knowledge etc.,? U know the elite are conscious and seek to maintain the system they inherit
I don't know why u think romance and marriage is something consequential. Nobody is interested in love story of others and the interest fades with age.