Hegemony
Hegemony is an indirect form of government, and of imperial dominance in which the
hegemon rules geopolitically subordinate states by the implied means of power, the threat of force, rather than by direct military force. In Ancient Greece,
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.