ABSTRACT

The automobile permeated Western societies in the twentieth century and enjoys hegemonic protection. Nevertheless, profound changes in mobility are looming, posing new challenges for mobility research. This article develops a four-dimensional understanding of hegemony, which encompasses the integral state, material and ideological dimensions and people’s everyday practices, in order to analyse the changes in mobility. The Gramscian approach is characterized by a profound conception of power relations and serves as an instrument for analysing social struggles and related actor constellations. This understanding not only enables a precise determination of the hegemonic safeguarding of the automobile, but also of the emerging fractures in the automotive consensus and the perspectives of counter-hegemonic strategies. Based on this Gramscian perspective, the article analyses the safeguarding and brittleness of car hegemony in Germany. It is concluded that although windows of opportunity have opened for a less car-centric mobility regime, these currently lack a fundamental politicisation of the car and involvement of labour required to innovate beyond narrow ecological modernisation, which would see only moderate modal shift and technological uptake of post-fossil drivetrains while otherwise leaving the hegemony of the car unchallenged.

摘要

汽车在20世纪渗透到西方社会，并享有霸权主义保护。尽管如此，移动性的深刻变化迫在眉睫，为移动性研究提出了新的挑战。本文发展了对霸权的四维理解，涵盖了完整的状态，物质和意识形态维度以及人们的日常实践，以分析流动性的变化。葛兰西式方法的特征在于对权力关系的深刻理解，是分析社会斗争和相关演员群体的一种工具。这种理解不仅可以精确确定汽车的霸权保障，而且还可以确定汽车共识中正在出现的破裂以及反霸权策略的观点。基于这种葛兰西式的观点，本文分析了德国汽车霸权的维护和脆弱性。得出的结论是，尽管为以汽车为中心的交通方式打开了机会之窗，但目前这些机会缺乏对汽车的基本政治化，以及缺乏超越狭窄的生态现代化进行创新所需的劳动力投入，这只会带来适度的模式转变和技术吸收化石动力传动系统的设计，同时保持了汽车霸主的地位。