出版社：American Sociological Association Section on Political Economy of the World System
摘要：As part of my research for a book manuscript on the crisis of global capitalism I recently finished writing (Robinson forthcoming), I decided to re-read the classic 1978 study conducted by the noted socialist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall and several of his colleagues, Policing the Crisis. The authors show in that book how the restructuring of capitalism as a response to the crisis of the 1970s – which was the last major crisis of world capitalism until the current one hit in 2008 – led in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to an "exceptional state," by which they meant a situation in which there was an ongoing breakdown of consensual mechanisms of social control and a growing authoritarianism. They wrote: This is an extremely important moment: the point where, the repertoire of hegemony through consent having been exhausted, the drift towards the routine use of the more repressive features of the state comes more and more prominently into play. Here the pendulum within the exercise of hegemony tilts, decisively, from that where consent overrides coercion, to that condition in which coercion becomes, as it were, the natural and routine form in which consent is secured. This shift in the internal balance of hegemony – consent to coercion – is a response, within the state, to increasing polarization of class forces (real and imagined). It is exactly how a 'crisis of hegemony' expresses itself….the slow development of a state of legitimate coercion, the birth of a 'law and order' society…the whole tenor of social and political life has been transformed by [this moment]. A distinctively new ideological climate has been precipitated (Hall et. al. 1978: 320-321).
