Contents

Introduction

Chapter One Twisted Preliminaries: The ‘Idéologistes’ and Napoleon

1.1. Ideology as a ‘natural science’ of ideas

1.2. A post-Jacobin state-ideology

1.3. Napoleon’s pejorative concept of ideology

Chapter Two Ideology-Critique and Ideology-Theory according to Marx and Engels

2.1. From ‘inverted consciousness’ to ‘idealistic superstructures’

2.1.1. The camera obscura and its critics

2.1.2. A ‘naive sensuous empiricism’?

2.1.3. Excursus to the young Marx’s critique of religion

2.1.4. Camera obscura as metaphor for ‘idealistic superstructure’

2.1.5. ‘Ruling ideas’ and ‘conceptive ideologists’

2.2. The critique of fetishism in the Critique of Political Economy

2.2.1. From the critique of religion to the critique of fetishism

2.2.2. From ideology-critique to the critique of ‘objective thought forms’

2.2.3. The wage-form and the ‘true Eden’ of human rights

2.2.4. Capital-fetishism, the ‘trinity formula’ and the ‘religion of everyday life’

2.2.5. The ‘silent compulsion’ of economic rule as ideology?

2.2.6. ‘Science’ between ideology and ideology-critique

2.3. Did Marx develop a ‘neutral’ concept of ideology?

2.4. Engels’s concept of ‘ideological powers’

Chapter Three The Concept of Ideology from the Second International to ‘Marxism-Leninism’

3.1. The repression of a critical concept of ideology

3.2. Lenin: bourgeois or socialist ideology?

3.3. Lenin’s ‘operative’ approach: self-determination and hegemony

3.4. Ideology in ‘Marxist-Leninist’ state-philosophy

3.5. ‘Ideological relationships’ in the philosophy of East Germany

Chapter Four The Concept of Ideology from Lukács to the Frankfurt School

4.1. György Lukács: ideology as reification

4.2. 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 theory

4.8. ‘Commodity-aesthetics’ as ideological promise of happiness

Chapter Five The Concept of Ideology in Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony

5.1. A significant shift in translation

5.2. Gramsci’s critical concept of ideology

5.3. The critique of common sense as ideology-critique

5.4. Gramsci’s concept of ‘organic ideology’

5.5. ‘Ideology’ as a category of transition toward a theory of hegemony

5.6. The critique of corporatism and Fordism

5.7. A new type of ideology-critique on the basis of a theory of hegemony

Chapter Six Louis Althusser: Ideological State-Apparatuses and Subjection

6.1. The relationship to Gramsci

6.2. The theory of ideological state-apparatuses (ISA)

6.3. A debate on ‘functionalism’

6.4. ‘Ideology in general’ and subject-constitution

6.5. The derivation of the ‘imaginary’ from Spinoza and Lacan

6.6. Lacan’s universalisation of subjection and alienation

6.7. Can subjects talk back at interpellations?

Chapter Seven From the Collapse of the Althusser School to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

7.1. Michel Pêcheux’s discourse-theoretical development of Althusser’s ideology-theory

7.2. The post-Marxist turn of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

7.3. Stuart Hall: bridging the theory of hegemony and discourse-analysis

7.4. Michel Foucault’s neo-Nietzschean trajectory from ideology to discourse to power

7.4.1. A peculiar Nietzschean-Heideggerian strand of ‘anti-humanism’

7.4.2. The dissolution of Althusser’s concept of ideology into ‘knowledge’

7.4.3. The substitution of ideology-critique by ‘fictionalism’

7.4.4. The introduction of a neo-Nietzschean concept of power

7.4.5. ‘Relational power’ or ‘phagocytic essence’?

7.4.6. Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and the ‘technologies’ of power – a re-interpretation

7.5. Poststructuralism and postmodernism

7.5.1. Questions of definition

7.5.2. Postmodernism’s essentialist definition of modernity

7.5.3. A component of neoliberal ideology?

7.5.4. Theoretical loss: the dematerialisation of social life

Chapter Eight Pierre Bourdieu: ‘Field’, ‘Habitus’ and ‘Symbolic Violence’

8.1. The development of the concept of field from the German Ideology

8.2. Field against apparatus?

8.3. Ideology, symbolic violence, habitus – disentangling a confused arrangement

8.4. Bourdieu’s contribution to the development of Althusser’s model of interpellation

8.5. A new determinism?

Chapter Nine 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 ideology

9.2. The ideological at the crossroads of class-domination, state and patriarchy

9.3. ‘Vergesellschaftung’ – vertical, horizontal, and proto-ideological

9.4. The dialectics of the ideological: compromise-formation, complementarity and antagonistic reclamation of the common

9.5. Fascistic modifications of the ideological

9.6. Policies of extermination and church-struggle in Nazi Germany

9.7. Further ideology-theoretical studies

Chapter Ten Friedrich Hayek and the Ideological Dispositif of Neoliberalism

10.1. The formation of neoliberal hegemony

10.2. Hayek’s frontal attack on ‘social justice’

10.3. Overcoming ‘economy’ by the game of ‘catallaxy’

10.4. Hayek’s construct of ‘negative’ justice

10.5. The religious structure of Hayek’s market-radicalism

10.6. A symptomatic contradiction between market-destiny and subject-mobilisation

10.7. State and liberty: neoliberal discourse is permeated by its opposite

10.8. The road to ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’

10.9. Is the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism exhausted?

Chapter Eleven The Unfulfilled Promises of the Late Foucault and Foucauldian ‘Governmentality-Studies’

11.1. Foucault’s mediation of the techniques of domination and of the self

11.2. The enigmatic content of the concept of governmentality

11.3. Eliminating the inner contradictions of neoliberal ideology

11.4. A problematic equation of subjectivation and subjection

11.5. Towards an ideology-theoretical re-interpretation of ‘governmentality-studies’

References

Person Index

Subject Index