Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals by Jonathan Smucker (review)

Jonathan Smucker's new book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals is a fascinating work on social movements. The title is a reference to Antonio Gramsci (and the concept of hegemony) and the subtitle gives a nod to Saul Alinsky (famed social activist and author of 1971's Rules for Radicals), though it is Gramsci's work, along with that of other social thinkers, that forms the theoretical basis for the work. His use of the roadmap metaphor in the subtitle tells us this will be a guide for those who seek progressive social change (the author eschews the term activists). The map offers a route to successful social movements and seeks to avoid the pitfalls encountered by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.

The central concept of "occupation" in OWS, according to the author, was not only a prescient vision but also a strategy—one which communicated an image of the poor and lowly 99 percent involved in a proletariat-style uprising against the wealthy and elite 1 percent. Smucker describes the organizational structure of this movement as consisting of the "core" (or Occupy Proper) and a loose host of assorted people with grievances as the broader social "base." Occupy Proper was the highly dedicated base that became inward-looking and unwelcoming of potential members, thus creating an insularity that failed to grow the movement. In addition, the decision to solely use "prefigurative politics" rather than integrate "strategic politics"—in other words, expecting the cause itself to sustain the movement rather than actively engaging the political structure—was another cause of the OWS's loss of support.

Smucker uses many interesting concepts that can be very useful to the study of social movements. For example, he introduces the concept of "life of the group," which refers to the collective driver of the movement that is activated through collective ritual activity. A "crisis of legitimacy" occurs in social campaigns and movements when groups lose their legitimacy due to the social acceptance of a political challengers' narratives. The concept of the "political identity paradox" represents the dilemma resulting from an insular core rejecting potential allies and new members. The "story of the righteous few" is the romanticizing of a group's marginalized status that creates an us vs. them mentality which eventually dooms an organization to failure. The concepts of "ethics of ultimate ends," doing what is determined to be the morally correct action, and "ethics of responsibility," doing what is determined after careful and rational deliberation to be the most effective action, are borrowed from Max Weber and are useful in this analysis. The concept of "hardcore" is an exaggeration of the group's primary features that, if left unchecked, lead to extreme courses of action. These concepts are successfully used to ground the experiences of OWS.

The strong theoretical underpinnings are a strength of the work. There are symbolic interactionist concepts such as backstage, fashion and floating signifiers; phenomenological concepts of lifeworld, narrative and framing; conflict/critical concepts such as the dominant ideology, challenger alignment, and of course, hegemony and its variants, hegemonic order, hegemonic contest and hegemonic alignment; and the functionalist concept of social unification. Regarding social theorists and sociologists, Gramsci gets the lion's share of attention, of course, but others get consideration as well (despite the subtitle, Alinsky is but a footnote). The work of Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Paulo Freire, and George Herbert Mead were expertly examined in the framework of social movements. Of sociology's foundational theorists—Karl Marx (represented in this work primarily through the work of Gramsci), Weber, and Emile Durkheim—only Durkheim's ideas were excluded in this examination. Extending the theoretical basis to include his ideas would augment much of the concepts presented. For example, Durkheim's focus on social cohesion and solidarity are important in understanding social movements. Durkheim's concept of collective consciousness, the element of moral cohesion that binds the movement, can be found in Smucker's...