Our world is a world of complexity, of interwoven causal systems, dynamics, processes, and trajectories. It is this field of social complexity which constitutes the very fabric of power. To âpossessâ, âexertâ or âtakeâ power is in some sense to master social complexity, for a time. Control of complex social systems is inherently difficult, always partial and tending towards being incomplete. Indeed, many significant contemporary global problems are in a certain sense all problems of grappling with this complexity, from rolling economic disasters to the threat of anthropogenic global warming, from constitutional crises to rising political instability. Perhaps the most significant global event of the past decade, the global financial crisis which began in 2007â2008, has frequently been identified as being the result of fundamental over-complexity (Landau 2009). Beyond the financial system, the last thirty-five years have seen ever-increasing globalisation, the complexification of global supply chains, increasing global flows of capital and labour, and the intensification of more complex forms of identity and subjectivity (Murray 1989; Cerny 2008; Mirowski 2013). Each of these processes have served to have increase the abstraction, interconnectivity, multi-scalarity, and sheer complexity of political, economic, and social systems.
The form of politics that has predominated in this environment of growing complexity has been neoliberalism. Though it has taken many different forms throughout the world, neoliberalism has been the leading political force on a global basis since the 1990s, and in many nations, since the early 1980s (Harvey 2005; Plehwe and Walpen 2006). Many of the proponents and ideologues of neoliberalism claim that its suite of hallmark policy measures, such as financial deregulation, and the marketisation and privatisation of public services, are the only way that complex social systems can be managed at all (Mirowski 2013, 56, 326). In this they are inspired by the thinking of an early theorist of social complexity, the economist Friedrich von Hayek, whose work claimed to demonstrate the impossibility and undesirability of effective economic planning and intervention (Hayek 1962; Hayek 1964). The ideology of neoliberalism is therefore, in a sense, an ideology of complexity (Dean 2013). While global politics since 2016 is difficult to interpret with absolute authority, it would appear as if the present era is one of increasing challenge to neoliberalism. From Trumpâs 2016 election victory, to the brexit âleaveâ vote, from the rise of neosocialists such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn to ever-increasing increasing power of European right-authoritarianism, it seems that consent to neoliberalism is breaking down. However, rather than simplifying the political landscape and cutting it down to a human or even national scale, this process is instead only increasing the complexity and contingency of global political events. Our present moment has unveiled the real complexity of our social and political world, to the bafflement of various priesthoods of political science and political journalism, whose brittle interpretative frameworks struggle to explain this shifting political landscape.1 To properly understand this new world requires us to understand power in all its complex ramifications. Our present moment therefore raises a number of questions: how can we properly think this profusion of social and political complexity? What might such theorisations imply about the kinds of politics required to address complex global issues, or understand the relative decline of ruling neoliberalism?
How can we understand power in a world of ever-growing complexity? This book proposes that we can do so by rethinking the theory and practice of political hegemony through the resources of complexity theory. The basic claims of this book are as follows. Complexity is an ontologically real feature of the world, both physical and social. Certain kinds of systems are complex in nature, and we can find the tools to understand how such systems behave within the body of thought known as complexity theory. In turn, a social theory of complexity can help transform political theory. The conceptual innovations of complexity theory can be deployed to rethink a pre-existing political theoretical tradition, one which has always been used to analyse complex socio-political phenomena, the tradition of political hegemony theory. The task of this book is to establish the grounds for a new theory of complex hegemony, to re-build existing political theory, and in so doing help understand the increasingly complex dynamics of our contemporary world.
1 Why Complexity Matters
How can we understand this complex world, so as we might begin to change it? One potential solution lies within the body of thought which has developed to study complexity itself, complexity theory. Beginning in the natural sciences, and emerging out of a confluence of different precursor disciplines, (such as thermodynamics, cybernetics, and chaos theory), complexity theory today constitutes a massively interdisciplinary project to define, measure, and understand complex systems (Mitchell 2009).
It is necessary first of all to offer a rough definition of what complexity is. Complexity, in the formal sense, means more than the ordinary language use of the term, which would be roughly equivalent to âintricateâ or even âhard to understandâ. While complex systems are certainly intricate in form, and may indeed be hard to understand in practice, the sciences of complexity have a more specific idea of what complexity is. A full definition remains the work of the second chapter of this book, but for now we can define a complex system as one that is more than merely the sum of its parts. In other words, complex systems feature forms of order that emerge from the relations between their components. Emergence is therefore perhaps the most important concept in determining whether a system is properly complex, or merely complicated (Byrne 1998). Much follows from this basic insight: complex systems need to be studied holistically, the relations between parts are as important as the parts themselves, relations tend to be non-linear, and so forth. From such principles, we can begin to locate order within complexity. Complexity theory, in short, provides an array of formal concepts that can serve to give analysts of complex phenomenaâincluding complex political phenomenaâsome basic grasp of their dynamics, structure, and operation. Complexity is therefore ontologically real, a real way in which certain systems operate that exists independently of our representations of it. It is also a body of knowledge (complexity theory) which through conceptual and mathematical representation enables us to explain how complexity works.
Complexity theory has spread from its origins within the natural sciences and mathematics into the humanities and social sciences, often mediated by thinkers who pre-empted some of the crucial ideas of complexity, such as Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson (Connolly 2013, 29) as well as theorists whose thought was partially marked by early waves of complexity ideas, such as Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and FĂ©lix Guattari, amongst others. It has filtered into sociology (Sawyer 2005; DeLanda 2006; Elder-Vass 2010), international relations (Urry 2003; Walby 2003; B...