Social control exercised and effected by means of the ideological manipulation of aspects of the common culture of a society—religion and politics, culture and economy, etc.—to explain and justify the
status quo to the political advantage of the dominant (ruling) class dates from the
Age of Enlightenment, in the 18th century. Such a method of social control conceptually derived from the
Noble Lie, proposed by
Plato, which was required for the social stability of a
republic composed of three social classes. In Book 3 (414e–15c) of
The Republic, Plato presents the
Noble Lie (
gennaion pseudos, γενναῖον ψεῦδος) in a fictional tale, wherein Socrates establishes and justifies the origin of the
socially stratified society: By the nineteenth century, Karl Marx described such ruling-class cultural hegemony with the term
dominant ideology, which described the societal
status quo (religious and political, economic and cultural) that characterised the capitalism of the nineteenth century. As such,
Marxist philosophic theory proposes two
conceptual models, the Intentional and the Spontaneous, to characterise the social function(s) of the dominant ideology: ;(i) Intentional Ideology is deliberately constructed by
bourgeois and
petit-bourgeois intellectuals, which then is propagated by the
mass communications media (print, radio, television, cinema, Internet). Hence, because the bourgeoisie own the communications media, as a social class, they can select, determine, and publish the economic, social, and cultural concepts that constitute the established
status quo, which are the
ideology (formal doctrines) that serves their interests as the
ruling class of the society. Moreover, because the working class own no mass communications media, they are overwhelmed by the bourgeoisie′s
cultural hegemony, and, because they have no intellectuals of their own, they adopt the imposed bourgeois
worldview (
Weltanschauung), which thus constitutes a
false consciousness about their own economic
exploitation by the strata of the upper classes; with that false awareness the working class lose their social and political, economic and cultural independence as a social class. ;(ii) Spontaneous Ideology spontaneously originates in every social class of a society, as an expression of the existing material structure of the given society. Based upon their experiences of societal life, the men and women of each social class (upper, middle, lower) construct their intellectual understanding of the society, and, because their societal experiences are primarily of capitalist social relations, the shared (dominant) ideology tends to reflect the
norms of a capitalist society. Hence, the content of the reportage of a
newspaper is determined, not by the socio-economic and political prejudices of the
publisher, but by the societal
status quo, the fixed social
narrative that is believed by the publisher and by the readers of the newspaper. In organising as
trade unions, the working class experience and express a different type of social relation within a capitalist society, because such an ideological perspective challenges the intellectual and social legitimacy of capitalism, by questioning the validity of how society is organised, and thus how it functions. The successful establishment of a working-class ideology (worldview) represents a collective approach to perceiving and resolving the socio-economic, political, and cultural problems of working-class people. Therefore, by means of such an embryonic
class consciousness, a new material structure, within a capitalist society, becomes the base of a new ideology that expresses the interests of workers—and contradicts the
status quo of the bourgeois cultural hegemony proposed and established by the dominant ideology of the capitalist ruling class. ==Criticism==