the concentration of power has been expressed almost exclusively through the
language of material distributions of power. This has been its main shortcoming.^7
In fact, theories about concentrations of power need also to bring out the complex
constitution of power, not just its distributional consequences. Ideas of legitimacy
and hegemony are two such ways of enriching our understanding of power.
The concept of hierarchy positions this argument relative to Waltz’s world. There
is a possible tension between anarchy and hegemony, given that any hierarchical
ordering principle might be thought incompatible with an anarchical society. This
prompts the question whether practices of legitimacy are sustainable, even in such
conditions of exceptional predominance as have recently emerged. Its starting point,
it must be clearly stated at the outset, is that no such hegemony presently exists.
Theoretically, however, these questions address some arresting themes that have
been central to the post-Waltzian debate.
Primacy and hegemony
Hegemony is arguably the ultimate litmus test for international legitimacy: it is the
very hard case. Practices of legitimacy take place within an international society, and
successful legitimation, so it would seem, has been most attainable when there has
existed some semblance of equilibrium.^8 Historically, international society has been
deeply distrustful of concentrations of power, so much so that its basic ethos has been
described as ‘anti-hegemonial’.^9 To the extent that legitimacy rests upon an acquired
consensus, this has been most readily achievable within a relatively even distribu-
tion of power that respects checks and balances – what early nineteenth-century
practitioners called a ‘just equilibrium’. To regard hegemony as a possibly legitimate
status may then appear paradoxical or self-contradictory. How, in short, is the
legitimacy that arises within equilibrium to be replicated in conditions that, by
definition, are its antithesis? Can the ‘anarchical society’^10 tolerate any legitimate
hegemony? This unease is compounded by the perception of hegemony as an expres-
sion of hierarchy, and hence as potentially inconsistent with anarchy. Hegemony, so
it might seem, erodes legitimacy and anarchy as traditionally conceived within
international society. This chapter challenges both of these conclusions.
Unfortunately, what we have witnessed is an unhelpful conflation of the concepts
of hegemony, on the one hand, and primacy on the other. Too often, the United
States is described as the current hegemon, when nothing is intended beyond its
enjoyment of degrees of material primacy.^11 This is explicit in Posen’s remark that
those ‘who recommended a policy of “primacy” – essentially hegemony... have
carried the day’.^12 Likewise, the conflation is apparent in the suggestion that ‘US
hegemony is the result of objective material conditions’, while ‘the perpetuation of
USprimacy is a matter of policy’.^13 Any understanding of the wider theoretical
significance of US predominance needs first to disentangle the two concepts of
primacy and hegemony.
These, in turn, relate to more fundamental accounts of power, the material and
the social. The materialist viewpoint regards primacy as a substantive power that is
272 How hierarchical can international society be?