ABSTRACT
The efficacy of managing knowledge to purpose becomes foregrounded in periods of hegemonic ascendancy when the world to be ruled is ruled with greatest efficacy as the world that is to be known. Hegemony’s understanding of the potential of ignorance, in other words, makes the production, management, and sanctioning of ignorance of paramount importance. The most recent manifestation of the baleful convergence has certain historical precedents in the particular history of the current war-obsessed hegemon hell-bent on invasion, extractive colonisation, and what it terms ‘full spectrum dominance’. While a fairly new field, then, at least in having belatedly acquired a name, agnotology, or the science of ignorance, has a long and tortured record of antecedents entwined with the history of hegemony and colonial empire.
