Cultural Hegemony

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of the society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class Weltanshauung becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class. In philosophy and sociology, the term cultural hegemony communicates denotations and connotations derived from the Ancient Greek word hegemony (leadership and rule), the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which the hegemon (leader state) rules sub-ordinate states, by the implied means of power, the threat of the threat of intervention, rather than by direct military force, that is, invasion, occupation, and annexation.