Re: Responses to bewilderment & ambiguity

Robin Harwood (HARWOOD who-is-at UConnVM.UConn.Edu)
Sat, 13 Apr 96 10:20:21 EDT

Dewey wrote:
>Once these implications are taken-as-agreed-upon by some group, there can
>be hegemony of this group's ideas over others. Within any group 'holding
>the power' a taken-as-shared set of ideas is agreed upon or accepted as
>'right.'

What's interesting to me in this statement is the way in which it
necessitates relating ideas to larger issues regarding the distribution
of power within society. For example, democrats may have certain
"taken-as-shared sets of ideas", and republicans presumably have
other, rather different "taken-as-shared sets of ideas," and within
each group, there's a sense that their own view is "right". (We could
split this further into smaller and smaller subgroups representing
finer and finer gradations of "agreement" over certain particulars--
but for now I'm just thinking of the basic "platforms" which seem to
differentiate the two parties, and which most of the respective
party members seem to agree upon--sort of like "basic principles"?)
However, within the country as a whole, the power to set the moral agenda
shifts between democrats and republicans--and others perhaps not even
included in those two larger groups. So, actually, there are
hegemonies within hegemonies--there's a hegemony of ideas within the
democratic party, for instance, but then there is the larger hegemony
of ideas within the country as a whole. Don't know if I'm still
making sense here...
Robin