The Comparison of Joseph Nye’s Conception of Soft Power and Antonio Gramsci’s Conception of Hegemony

Abstract

The article is qualitative research documentary research. The aim of this research is to analyze and compare the conception of soft power proposed by Joseph Nye with the conception of hegemony proposed by Antonio Gramsci. Since both concepts concentrate on creating the acquiescence among people. For the soft power the consent is created for international coalition while hegemony is created to evolve syndicalist state to holistic state.

The result of this study show that the concept of soft power and hegemony has some shared principle but mostly are different. The shared principles are the utilization of consent for an advantage and the praxis of state actor to preserve the activity which increase soft power of non-state actor. However, the rest are different. While hegemony tried to assimilate traditional intellectual of other groups, soft power tried to intervenes to gain from the other groups while their traditional remain. And the step to create hegemony, it requires turning population to intellectual which considered as “juridical” and utilize the realm of politics to confirm their intellectual group, that means in the concept of hegemony only state actor has roles of promulgate consent. While soft power perceives that non-state actor is available to promulgate soft power. So, the result of this study is confirmed that soft power and
hegemony are different even these are power by consent.