Theories of Ideology

Jan Rehmann, Dr. phil. habil, teaches philosophy and social theories at Union Theological Seminary in New York and the Free University in Berlin. He is co-editor of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HKWM) and author of books on ideology, Neo-Nietzscheanism, Max Weber, the churches in Nazi Germany, and poverty.

"[...] Rehmann’s comprehensive historical account of ideology provides the most insightful and exquisite illumination of the term ideology today." – Thomas Klikauer, University of Western Sydney, Australia, in: Capital & Class 39/3, 550-554"[...] this book provides a good overview of the historical development of various major accounts of ideology" – Michael Morris, in: Marx & Philosophy"This book's treatment is the best introduction we have to the complicated notion of ideology. It provides the most sophisticated yet subtle analyses of how hegemony operates in our time. Jan Rehmann has given us a marvelous gift." – Cornel West, Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary"Part of a larger movement of boldly reconceptualizing Marxism in and for the 21st century, Rehmann offers a philosophically self-conscious rethinking of ideology. Based on critical surveys of other important theories (especially those emerging from Gramsci and Althusser) he explores how and why ideology shapes society, how society shapes the conscious and unconscious parts of ideologies, and how this applies to current phenomena such as neoliberalism, the capitalist crisis since 2007, and the tea party movement." – Richard D. Wolff, University of Massachusetts"My own intellectual and political conviction is that we need the concept of ideology all the more urgently today, when its use has been stigmatized by contemporary philosophy. Rehmann's book provides a detailed and indispensable account of its history, the various modern versions of the concept and the debates which have swirled around it: just what we need to make a new beginning!" – Fredric Jameson, Duke University

• Introduction1. Twisted preliminaries: the ‘Idéologistes’ and Napoleon1.1. Ideology as a ‘natural science’ of ideas1.2. A post-Jacobin state-ideology1.3. Napoleon’s pejorative concept of ideology 2. Ideology-Critique and Ideology-Theory according to Marx and Engels2.1. From ‘inverted consciousness’ to ‘idealistic superstructures’2.2. The critique of fetishism in the Critique of Political Economy2.3. Did Marx develop a ‘neutral’ concept of ideology? 2.4. Engels’s concept of ‘ideological powers’3. The Concept of Ideology from the Second International to ‘Marxism-Leninism’ 3.1. The repression of a critical concept of ideology3.2. Lenin: bourgeois or socialist ideology?3.3. Lenin’s ‘operative’ approach: self-determination and hegemony 3.4. Ideology in ‘Marxist-Leninist’ state-philosophy3.5. ‘Ideological relationships’ in the philosophy of East Germany4. The Concept of Ideology from Lukács to the Frankfurt School4.1. György Lukács: Ideology as reification4.2. Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of the ‘culture-industry’4.3. Abandoning the concept of ideology?4.4 The ‘gears of an irresistible praxis’4.5. Ideology as ‘instrumental reason’ and ‘identitarian thought’ 4.6. From Marcuse to Habermas – and back to Max Weber? 4.7. Taking the sting out of critical theory4.8. ‘Commodity-aesthetics’ as ideological promise of happiness5. The Concept of Ideology in Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony5.1. A significant shift in translation5.2. Gramsci’s critical concept of ideology5.3. The critique of common sense as ideology-critique5.4. Gramsci’s concept of ‘organic ideology’5.5. ‘Ideology’ as a category of transition toward a theory of hegemony5.6. The critique of corporatism and Fordism5.7. A new type of ideology-critique on the basis of a theory of hegemony6. Louis Althusser: Ideological State-Apparatuses and Subjection6.1. The relationship to Gramsci6.2. The theory of ideological state-apparatuses (ISA)6.3. A debate on ‘functionalism’6.4. ‘Ideology in general’ and subject-constitution6.5. The derivation of the ‘imaginary’ from Spinoza and Lacan6.6. Lacan's universalisation of subjection and alienation6.7. Can subjects talk back at interpellations?7. From the Collapse of the Althusser School to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism7.1. Michel Pêcheux's discourse-theoretical development of Althusser's ideology-theory7.2. The post-Marxist turn of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe7.3. Stuart Hall: Bridging the theory of hegemony and discourse-analysis7.4. Michel Foucault's neo-Nietzschean trajectory from ideology to discourse to power7.5. Poststructuralism and postmodernism8. Pierre Bourdieu: ‘Field’, ‘Habitus’ and ‘Symbolic Violence’8.1. The development of the concept of field from the German Ideology8.2. Field against apparatus?8.3. Ideology, symbolic violence, Habitus – disentangling a confused arrangement8.4. Bourdieu's contribution to the development of Althusser's model of interpellation8.5. A new determinism?9. Ideology-Critique with the Hinterland of a Theory of the Ideological: the ‘Projekt Ideologietheorie’ (PIT) 9.1. The resumption of Marx and Engels's critical concept of ideology9.2. The ideological at the crossroads of class-domination, state and patriarchy9.3. ‘Vergesellschaftung’ – vertical, horizontal, and proto-ideological9.4. The dialectics of the ideological: compromise-formation, complementarity and antagonistic reclamation of the common9.5. Fascistic modifications of the ideological9.6. Policies of extermination and church-struggle in Nazi Germany9.7. Further ideology-theoretical studies10. Friedrich Hayek and the Ideological Dispositif of Neoliberalism 10.1. The formation of neoliberal hegemony10.2. Hayek’s frontal attack on ‘social justice’10.3. Overcoming ‘economy’ by the game of ‘catallaxy’10.4. Hayek's construct of ‘negative’ justice10.5. The religious structure of Hayek's market-radicalism10.6. A symptomatic contradiction between market-destiny and subject-mobilisation 10.7 State and liberty: neoliberal discourse is permeated by its opposite10.8. The road to ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’10.9. Is the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism exhausted?11. The Unfulfilled Promises of the late Foucault and Foucauldian ‘Governmentality-Studies’11.1. Foucault’s mediation of the techniques of domination and of the self11.2. The enigmatic content of the concept of governmentality11.3. Eliminating the inner contradictions of neoliberal ideology11.4. A problematic equation of subjectivation and subjection11.5. Towards an ideology-theoretical reinterpretation of ‘governmentality-studies’Bibliography Index