Hegemonic world orders, distributional (in)justice and global social change

Abstract Focusing on the relationship between distributional justice and hegemonic world orders, this article turns attention to a fundamental contradiction in historical capitalism between profitability and legitimacy that manifests itself in successive creative destructions of hegemonic orders. Through a comparative–historical analysis of world hegemonies, I show that increasing distributional injustices during periods of ‘legitimacy crisis’ compel new hegemonic powers to pragmatically address some of these injustices as a part of their hegemony-building strategies. Despite growing efforts by world hegemonic powers to address such distributional injustices, social and global inequalities in the capitalist world-economy tend to increase over time. As social and global inequalities increase, new hegemonic powers are compelled to make greater promises and to undertake much greater efforts to address distributional injustices in order to gain intellectual and moral leadership in an emergent new world order. Yet, none of these efforts become successful in the long run because even the partial successes of redistribution policies pave the way for ‘profitability crises’ and undermined world hegemonies. This dynamic poses several challenges to achieving global distributional justice in an emergent new capitalist world order.