As Gilbert and Williams argue, however, Gramsci’s ideas can be understood as more nuanced than being about pure domination and lend themselves well to a detailed analysis of power relations, especially at times of instability and crisis. Gilbert and Williams argue that while many have seen this consent as having to be active (and critiqued Gramsci for this), they do not. Nonetheless, the macro political analysis contained in Hegemony Now is incredibly valuable and adds much to the debates around the potential demise of neoliberalism. In the process of clarifying and updating the often misunderstood (and occasionally maligned) concept of hegemony, Gilbert and Williams also provide us with a valuable analysis of the ‘long 1990s’: an account of its constitution, a diagnosis of its crisis and a map for its overcoming. When I heard Jeremy Gilbert talking about this book on the Politics Theory Other podcast it sounded really exciting.

This is his description of an ‘interregnum’, the gap between powers, or crisis of authority, that occurs when belief in the status quo has been shaken and doesn’t quite hold in the way it did.They also successfully expand the term platform to include other forms of infrastructure: the global financial system, the energy system, production systems, global governance institutions, education, media and nation level state bureaucracies. They claim that consent to the neoliberal project was secured by persuading populations to accept private empowerment as consumers as a substitute for the weakening of social democracy.

Gilbert and Williams argue, however, that Gramsci’s concepts, especially if updated to accommodate the complexity of the contemporary world, are crucial for analysing power relations in the current conjuncture. It is a book that wants to much: Updating recent post-marxist and post-structuralist theory, recounting the history of the UK-left, the Labour party and some US campaigns, analysing real-existing neoliberalism and delivering an organisational strategy for the left.Their approach is to develop Gramsci’s concepts to include more complexity, through additions from other critical thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters.