Hegemony in Latin America

Abstract

The conceptual development of “hegemony” has a major impact on Latin Americanist political thought beginning in the 1960s. The concept is deployed in a wide range of contexts including: the role of intellectuals in society; transition from dictatorship to democracy; the triumph of the “Washington consensus”; and the return of populism in its neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forms. Hegemony theory is seen as enabling social theory to account for the complexity of social organization in modern societies and to understand the tenuous unity of the social without losing sight of heterogeneity and contingency.