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.
Read more about Cultural Hegemony: Background, Cultural Hegemony, Intellectuals and Cultural Hegemony, Gramsci’s Intellectual Influence
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or hegemony:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“The author’s hegemony must be broken. It is impossible to go too far in fanatical self-denial or fanatical self-renunciation: I am not I, but rather the street, the streetlights, this or that occurrence, nothing more. That’s what I call the style of stone.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)