In this volume of essays by leading socio-legal scholars, the dual concepts of consciousness and ideology are examined and used to expose law’s presence and power in social life. Rejecting the association between ideology and concealment, each essay explores the ways in which ideology and consciousness artfully produce truth, creating both power and the grounds of its resistance. The rich empirical studies included in this volume are crucial to our understanding of law, consciousness and ideology.

This book addresses a central theme in social and political theory: what is the motivation behind the theory of ideology, and can such a theory be defended?

In this book Christopher Pines demonstrates that Karl Marx conceived of ideology as false consciousness. He shows how the different meanings of false consciousness found in the writings of Marx and Engels reflect the influence of the views of the Baconian-French Enlightenment and of Hegelian Feuerbachian philosophies. Pines argues that, for Marx, the diverse senses of false consciousness all generally denote a social consciousness that takes certain false things to be true regarding matters of significance to class-divided societies.

Consciousness and the Neoliberal Subject outlines a theory of ideological function and a range of ideological positions according to which individuals rationalise and accept socio-economic conditions in advanced consumer capitalist societies. Through a critical examination of the social and psychoanalytic theories of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, the author extends the understanding of ideology to consider not only the unconscious attachment to social relations, but also the importance of conscious rationalisation in sustaining ideologies. In this way, the book defines different ideologies today in terms of the manner in which they conditionally internalise a dominant neoliberal rationality, and considers the possibility that entrenched social norms may be challenged directly, through conscious engagement. It will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in ideology, neoliberalism, psychoanalytic thought and critical theory.

How to explain the hegemonic stability of neoliberal capitalism even in the midst of its crises? The emergence of ideology theories marked a re-foundation of Marxist research into the functioning of alienation and subjection. Going beyond traditional concepts of ‘manipulation’ and ‘false consciousness’, they turned to the material existence of hegemonic apparatuses and focused on the mostly unconscious effects of ideological practices, rituals and discourses. Jan Rehmann reconstructs the different strands of ideology theories ranging from Marx to Adorno/Horkheimer, from Lenin to Gramsci, from Althusser to Stuart Hall, from Bourdieu to W.F. Haug, from Foucault to Butler. He compares them in a way that a genuine dialogue becomes possible and applies the different methods to the ‘market totalitarianism’ of today’s high-tech-capitalism.

Originally published in 1999, this book sets out to develop a distinctive, critical approach to the study of social consciousness through empirical studies of sociopolitical conflict in the west of Scotland. It accords an analytical priority to language-use and provides a critical review of a number of contemporary studies and approaches as part of an emerging presentation of an original and distinctive method. The book makes a significant contribution to the recovery for social science of the achievements of a set of Marxist psychologists and philosophers of language - most notably L.S. Vygotsky and V.N. Voloshinov - whose potential relevance for political sociology has barely been recognised. It tests and demonstrates the relevance of the approach it seeks to develop in relation to empirical studies - most notably the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders 'work-in' of 1971-72 and the Scottish Office-led urban policy 'Partnership' in Ferguslie Park, Paisley in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ultimately, the analytical focus on language becomes a key component of a larger mode of social investigation which begins from an analysis of changing patterns of language-use - one which 'turns' to language without embracing the 'linguistic turn'.