Ideology After Poststructuralism

Ideology is a hotly disputed term in social and political theory. It continues to generate intellectual dispute more than 200 years after its birth in the fervour of the French Revolution. Most recently, post-structuralists such as Foucault and Deleuze launched a strident critique claiming that 'there is no such thing as ideology', creating a theoretical environment which polarises critical opinion either for or against ideology. Ideology after Poststructuralism aims to end this culture of antagonism by bringing together leading scholars in the field to establish a dialogue between post-structuralism and ideology critique. For the post-structuralists there is a need to generate a sensitive account of ideology so as to bolster their claim that they have a significant contribution to make to social and political criticism. For the ideology theorists there is a need to engage with the post-structuralist critique of ideology without taking the assumptions that post-structuralists have so thoroughly criticised. The essays in this book show how the intellectual posturing of recent decades has closed off debate to the detriment of both post-structuralism and ideology critique.

Sinisa Malesevic is lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology, NUI, Galway. He is author of Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State (Frank Cass, 2002), editor of Culture in Central and Eastern Europe: Institutional and Value Changes (IMO, 1997) and co-editor of Ideology after Poststructuralism (Pluto 2002).Iain MacKenzie is a Lecturer in Politics at The Queen’s University of Belfast. He is author of articles on Deleuze and Guattari and co-author of Contemporary Social and Political Theory: An Introduction (OUP, 1999).