Consent-based regulation shifted to coercion as Britain entered a full hegemony crisis
Evidence
The years 1970–1974 witnessed the shift of social regulation from consent to coercion, the state’s knee-jerk recourse to “the law,” and the onset of a full crisis of hegemony. The state provided, not only the instruments of authoritarian governance, but “just that ‘sense of direction’ which the lay public feels society has lost” (315). This process was much enhanced by the construction of nightmares: the mapping of discrete areas into one, commodious, all-inclusive, protean but invisible “Enemy.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1064
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The ‘crisis of hegemony’ is concretized here: the state substituting coercion for consent and manufacturing a unified ‘Enemy’ out of disparate threats.
- DEEPTHINKING: The idea that social control operates by ‘mapping discrete areas into one protean but invisible Enemy’ — the construction of a unitary threat figure — is a dense, reusable analytical tool far beyond British 1970s politics.
Related
- Authoritarian states consolidate support by merging threats into one Enemy figure (similarity 0.87)
- Under hegemony, organized consent displaces direct coercion as the main instrument (similarity 0.80)
- Hegemony is a fragile, multi-front achievement won through consent, not domination (similarity 0.80)
- Hegemony works by winning consent backed by coercion, not by force alone. (similarity 0.78)