possessed, rather than as something that is social and bestowed by others. In its most
recent formulation, ‘hegemony is about raw, hard power... US hegemony is the
result of objective material conditions’.^14 There is on this view no distinction to be
made between hegemony and primacy, as both describe material distributions. At
the very least, hegemony is simply a referent for such material power. According to
John Mearsheimer, ‘a hegemon is a state that is so powerful that it dominates all
other states in the system’.^15
Such material accounts of primacy stand in sharp contrast to those that emphasize
the essentially social, or recognized, status of hegemony. Even if this rests on material
power, that alone is not sufficient. ‘The brute material condition of having one state
holding a preponderance of military resources may produce great influence and
strength for that state’, observes Hurd, ‘but without a successful strategy of legiti-
mation the social relation of hegemony or “Great Power” status is not created’.^16
Simpson goes further: ‘hegemony is a juridical category dependent on the “recog-
nition” of “rights and duties” and the consent of other states in the system’.^17 It is
this understanding of hegemony as socially bestowed, not unilaterally possessed, that
is critical, and the concept of hegemony is best limited to this usage alone. Only on
the basis of this distinction can we begin to appreciate that a whole range of recent
international problems resides exactly in the widening divergence between US
primacy and US hegemony, since this ‘disjuncture between the power structure and
the social order is becoming rather stark’.^18
Accordingly, we must take seriously those two contrasting readings of power.
One regards primacy as an attribute of the leading state, and denotes what it
‘has’; the other treats hegemony, and the power of which it is constituted,
as something acknowledged by others, and with reference to how it is socially
regarded. Otherwise expressed, in the latter view, ‘hegemony is a state or condition
of the system itself, and not a property belonging to the hegemon’.^19 In order to anchor
this distinction, the chapter makes appeal to the underlying logic of English School
theory, and invites the conclusion that hegemony be regarded as one possible
institution of international society.^20
It is highly revealing that disagreements about which material distribution of
power is more conducive to stability have been largely replicated in the literatures
on international legitimacy and hegemony. Over the past half-century, there have
developed two disparate clusters of theory that address stability from the seemingly
distinct routes of legitimacy and hegemony. These express similarly contested
judgements about which distributions best foster stability. At first glance, they appear
downright contradictory. The first emphasizes a relatively even dispersalof power as
a precondition of (consensual) legitimacy, and hence of stability. The other,
especially in its variants of HST, is committed instead to the benefits of a concentration
of power in a single hegemon.
Tellingly, however, neither is exclusively a theory of international distribution.
Thus far, too much of the ongoing debate about the post-Cold War structure of
power has been about its distributional pattern, and the likely durability of United
States primacy. Its conflation of primacy and hegemony leads to other significant
How hierarchical can international society be? 273