Although Marx’s concept of ideology has been a subject of considerable discussion, much of the debate has proved to be rather disappointing. There has been no systematic attempt to examine why Marx needed the concept of ideology, why it was an important concept for him and how it related to his views on truth and objectivity. This book, first published in 1982, considers these and other neglected questions. It explains why Marx continued to use the term ideology throughout his life to mean both idealism and apologia and traces the complex ways in which, according to Marx, such talented writers as Hegel became apologists. In conclusion the book outlines the lessons Marx learnt from his investigations into the nature and mechanism of ideology and discusses his theories of objectivity and truth.

This work explores the question of defining ideology from a Marxist perspective. Advancing beyond the schemas of discussion presented in current Marxist literature, the author offers an account of how the concept of ideology should be defined and what role it plays within historical materialism. Through a close reading of Karl Marx’s relevant writings, this volume demonstrates that while there is no coherent, single account of ideology in Marx’s work, his materialist framework can be reconstructed in a defensible and ‘non-deterministic’ way. The definition of ideology presented is then articulated through a close reading of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Efforts are also made to demonstrate that Gramsci’s interpretation of historical materialism is indeed consistent and compatible with Marx’s. A systematic articulation of a theory of ideology that combines the works of Marx and Gramsci, as well as adding elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory and William James’s psychology, this volume will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in political economy and Marxist thought.

Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism offers a theoretical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s new materialist understanding of justice, legality, and rights through the vantage point of his widely invoked but generally misunderstood critique of liberalism. The book begins by reconstructing Marx’s conception of justice and rights through close textual interpretation and extrapolation. The central thesis of the book is, firstly, that Marx regards justice as an essential feature of any society, including the emancipated society of the future; and secondly, that standards of justice and right undergo transformation throughout history. The book then tracks the enduring legacy of Marx’s critique of liberal justice by examining how leading contemporary political theorists such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Nancy Fraser have responded to Marx’s critique of liberalism in the face of global financial capitalism and the hollowing out of democratically-enacted law. The Marx that emerges from this book is therefore a thoroughly modern thinker whose insights shed valuable light on some of the most pressing challenges confronting liberal democracies today.

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.

Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death. With Marx’s Dream, Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed alternative view, distinguishing rigorously between Marx and Marxism. Rockmore breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in three key ways. First, he shows that the concern with the relation of theory to practice—reflected in Marx’s famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world, while the point is to change it—arose as early as Socrates, and has been central to philosophy in its best moments. Second, he seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. And, crucially, Rockmore relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, without the special pleading to which Marxist accounts too often resort. Marx’s failures as a thinker, Rockmore shows, lie less in his diagnosis of industrial capitalism’s problems than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound. ? Only a philosopher of Rockmore’s stature could tackle a project this substantial, and the results are remarkable: a fresh Marx, unencumbered by doctrine and full of insights that remain salient today.

This book deals with substantive issues that have the potential to enhance our understanding regarding how Marxist theory can be quite useful in interpreting Black specificities and the race paradigm. So far, Marxist theory has been excluded because it is supposedly class and economy reductionist, but the essence of this theory-dialectic-not only proves that it is a meaningful way of seeing racism for what it truly is, but also a way of filtering through the plethora of interpretations of what constitutes race. The timeliness of the approach should help revive discussion on ethnophilosophy as an ideology. So much academic consideration has led scholars to seriously underestimate ideology's extraordinary efficiency in blending into lived experience to the point where much of its most telling effects have become undetectable. This work suggests that critical theory must reorient itself and offers an important discussion on the dominant discourse of poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, Marxism, African socialism, NZgritude, and Afrocentricity. The book's approach sheds a radical light on the claim for Black specificities and racism. It shows that racial and ethnological discourses are ideological and political mystifications, masking exploitation. Under such circumstances, racial and racist ideologies become cards to be played by the perpetrators or the victims, as the case studies of Haiti and South Africa illustrate. As can be seen, then, the intelligibility of racism and its various forms can only stem from an analysis of the social structures upon which they rest. Just to show how inextricably linked ideology, race, racism, political expansion, and economic domination are, the book looks at Africa and its Diaspora, revealing how Africans remain the scapegoat for racial 'othering' in the global economy's ideological praxis. In so doing, the book is also able to include African intellectuals' perspectives that have often been omitted from the dialogue on critical theory, race, racism, and Black specificities.