Cultural Hegemony

Cultural hegemony is the concept, developed by Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, describing the way dominant groups maintain power not primarily through coercion but through the normalization of their worldview as common sense. The ruling class, in Gramsci's account, rules by making its particular interests appear to be universal interests — so thoroughly that the dominated classes come to consent to their own domination.

Hegemony is maintained through cultural transmission — schools, media, religious institutions, and popular culture all propagate frameworks of understanding that make the existing distribution of power appear natural, inevitable, or meritocratic. The key move is that hegemonic culture does not present itself as partisan; it presents itself as simply "how things are."

The concept is double-edged in debates about cultural relativism: relativists invoke cultural autonomy to resist Western hegemonic criticism; critics of relativism note that the same logic shields internal hegemony from criticism by the dominated within the culture. The dissident within any given culture is precisely the figure that philosophical relativism has no resources to support — which exposes relativism's ideological function as a shield for power rather than a protection of genuine cultural diversity.

See also Ideology, Power and Knowledge, Gramsci, and Cultural relativism.