CULTURAL HEGEMONY:
In Marxist philosophy, the term 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 worldview 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, 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 carries denotations and connotations derived from the Ancient Greek word hegemony (leadership and rule). Hegemony is the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which the hegemon (leader state) rules subordinate states by the implied means of power (the threat of intervention) rather than by direct military force—that is, invasion, occupation, or annexation.
In philosophy and sociology, the term cultural hegemony carries denotations and connotations derived from the Ancient Greek word hegemony (leadership and rule). Hegemony is the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which the hegemon (leader state) rules subordinate states by the implied means of power (the threat of intervention) rather than by direct military force—that is, invasion, occupation, or annexation.
INTELLECTUAL & CULTURAL HEGEMONY:
In perceiving and combating cultural hegemony, the working class and the peasantry depend upon the intellectuals produced by their society, to which ends Antonio Gramsci distinguished between bourgeois-class intellectuals and working-class intellectuals, the proponents and the opponents of the imposed, normative culture, and thus of the societal status quo:
Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals [administrators, scholars and scientists, theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.] experience through an esprit de corps their uninterrupted historical continuity, and their special qualifications, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group. This self-assessment is not without consequences in the ideological and political fields, consequences of wide-ranging import. The whole of idealist philosophy can easily be connected with this position, assumed by the social complex of intellectuals, and can be defined as the expression of that social utopia by which the intellectuals think of themselves as “independent” [and] autonomous, [and] endowed with a character of their own, etc.
— Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971), pp. 7–8.
The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the Man of Letters, the philosopher, and the artist. Therefore, journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers, artists, also regard themselves as the “true” intellectuals. In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labor, even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual. . . .
The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor [and] organizer, as “permanent persuader”, not just simple orator.
— Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971), pp. 9–10.