Hegemony

Hegemony is a sociological concept developed by Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci in prison, after he was incarcerated by the Fascists, [Page 710]between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. It refers to the dominance of a social class or group over the others in a given society. The dominance is practiced without materially violent methods but through veiled dynamics, by making all the other social classes of groups perceive its own values and choices as natural norms, which are claimed to benefit everyone but actually, and invisibly, express the interests of the ruling class and its strategic will to control and dominate. In many respects, the concept of hegemony underpins many contemporary fears of consumer culture as an ideological tool for controlling the masses, ...