Hegemony
Hegemony ( /hɨˈɡɛməni/, /ˈhɛdʒɨmoʊni/, /hɨˈdʒɛməni/; Greek: ἡγεμονία hēgemonía, “leadership”, “rule”) is an indirect form of government of imperial dominance in which the hegemon (leader state) rules geopolitically sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power, the threat of the threat, rather than by direct military force. In Ancient Greece (8th c. BC – AD 6th c.), hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states. In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country upon others; from which derived hegemonism, the Great Power politics meant to establish European hegemony upon continental Asia and Africa. In the 20th-century, Antonio Gramsci developed the philosophy and the sociology of geopolitical hegemony into the theory of cultural hegemony, whereby one social class can manipulate the system of values and mores of a society, in order to create and establish a ruling-class Weltanschauung, a worldview that justifies the status quo of bourgeois domination of the other social classes of the society.
Read more about Hegemony.
Famous quotes containing the word hegemony:
“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)