Ideology After Poststructuralism

Book excerpt: Ideology was proposed by Count de Tracy in 1796 as "a unified science of ideas" and has lived on as a theoretical concept among many social and political theorists, but has spurred the opprobrium of poststructuralist theorists. Malesevi'c (political science and sociology, NUI, UK) and MacKenzie (politics, Queen's U. of Belfast, Northern Ireland) present eight contributions from equal numbers of poststructural and ideology theorists. Efforts are made to critique ideology theory from a poststruc tural standpoint without a blanket rejection of the theory. Other chapters attempt to integrate some poststructural criticisms in order to maintain ideology theory as a relevant analytical concept. Distributed by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR