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System change, not return to the same: A comment on Tooze’s ‘Hegemony Notes’ | Section on Marxist Sociology

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Adam Tooze recently dissected Gramsci’s famous line: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Tooze’s central criticism is that the application of this idea to our times betrays a repetitive logic of regnum-interregnum-regnum and that, as a result, scholars operating in a Gramscian tradition—most notably, Giovanni Arrighi with his formulation of “cycles of world hegemony”—produce schemas that are “dangerously” simplistic and transhistorical.  The crux of Tooze’s argument is that “America’s age of hegemony was not an answer to an interregnum. It truly was new. It was thus not the latest iteration of some familiar form of power. It did not replace the British empire. The British empire was reinventing itself too in response to the new challenges of the early 20th century. It was overtaken by the US and nested itself under the wings of that power. It was not something born.

Adam Tooze recently dissected Gramsci’s famous line: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Tooze’s central criticism is that the application of this idea to our times betrays a repetitive logic of regnum-interregnum-regnum and that, as a result, scholars operating in a Gramscian tradition—most notably, Giovanni Arrighi with his formulation of “cycles of world hegemony”—produce schemas that are “dangerously” simplistic and transhistorical.  The crux of Tooze’s argument is that

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