hegemony

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hegemony Leadership or dominance of one state over others. The term originated in ancient Greece where the cities of Athens, Sparta and Thebes held hegemony over Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries bc. Italian Marxian theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) also employed the term hegemony to refer to the phenomenon of one social class monopolizing the creation and transmission of values.

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