Hegemony

In modern discourse, hegemony most often refers to the cultural, economic, and political domination of a subject population (subaltern) by a group (a hegemon) that wields the power to shape the society's values, mores, and structures of thought. In addition to overt policing of established cultural norms, the reinforcement of hegemonic ideology also finds expression in subtler forms in everyday life, internalized in the minds of the population as common sense or appropriate moral judgments, socioeconomic ambitions, interpersonal relations, religious practices, physical presentations of self, and even mental constructs of reality. These subtler channels of hegemony continue to shape a society long after the originators of the hegemonic values fade into history. In other words, the long-term consequences of a group's hegemonic influence on a subaltern population rest largely on the degree to which that population internalizes as “natural” or “normal” the cultural elements supplied to it by the dominant society. Understanding the functioning and influence of hegemony in a modern republic requires examination of all of that [Page 1057]society's widely held notions—even its most fundamental concepts regarding the nature of reality and the distinction between right and wrong.

In ancient Greece, hegemony referred to the economic and cultural domination by one citystate of another, less powerful city-state. Since the 19th century, hegemony has usually referred to the nature of European and American political and economic domination over colonial conquests in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific.

In recent years, a third notion of hegemony has arisen, which now stands as the most common usage in academic and political discourse. In this most recent version, hegemony refers to cultural domination beyond the realms of politics and economics. The hegemon—a class of sociocultural elites rather than a state—dominates the culture not of a related foreign state nor of a conquered distant colony, but primarily other classes of people within its own society. This modern hegemony is in many ways the most profound and subtly nefarious, for it seeks not to dominate from afar but rather literally to shape the reality of those so dominated. It can be extremely difficult to identify specific hegemonic influences within a society, as would-be critics within the society are themselves formed as individuals by the foundational ideological and social constructs previously established by past hegemonic elites.