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Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Table of Contents. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Cancel Save. I explore these distinct theories and trace their interconnections. At a key moment in Economy and Society , Max Weber ponders the future of revolutions in late modernity and points to a major historical shift: the emergence of a new state form that combines a rationalized bureaucratic apparatus with a vast technological infrastructure.
Weber speculates that:. Modern politics is like a macabre game of musical chairs: different cliques of elites circulate through positions of authority, but, throughout it all, the fundamental social order persists more or less unchanged. First, I argue that the concepts of hegemony, ideology, and governmentality are aspects of a common project. Along the way, I show how these distinct theories of power call forth unique reinterpretations of Machiavelli, the early modern theorist of power par excellence.
Many other commentators have pointed to the importance of Machiavelli for the 20 th century Left. Conversely, I try to accentuate those moments where interpretations diverge. In the conclusion, I attempt to sum up where we are at with regard to power nominalism as a theoretical enterprise. I suggest that despite the vital innovations this project has made possible, it also gives rise to unsolved — and perhaps unsolvable — dilemmas. Yet, we need to revisit these debates today because hegemony, ideology, and governmentality are concepts that continue to shape the frameworks within which we think, write, teach, and act.
What enabled regimes in Western Europe to retain power without any consistent resort to mass coercion? On the other hand, how to explain the sudden rise of fascism, a passionate mass movement of the Right? Many thinkers both on the Left and on the budding fascist Right would seek to answer these questions by supplementing Marx with a rereading of Hegel. Instead, he highlights the role that different intersubjective self-understandings play in the maintenance of public order.
Like Hegel, Gramsci views society as an organic whole or totality, in the sense that we cannot fully understand one aspect religion, politics, etc. However, Gramsci prefers to stress the other side of this equation: dominant cultural forms cannot be separated from their relationship to coercive political power. Hegemony, then, refers to this shifting blend of coercion and consent that allows a dominant class to stabilize its rule. Gramsci emphasizes that hegemonies are constituted through a material matrix of social practices that are sustained by a wide-ranging apparatus that includes schools, churches, public institutions and cultural traditions.
At church worshipers learn of the unchangeable fallenness of human nature. Citizens eventually acquire habits of thought that predispose them to view existing inequalities as natural and legitimate. Indeed, the young Hegel had already said as much. For one thing, the bourgeoisie had come to realize that extending suffrage did not pose a threat to their hold on power. Quite the contrary: by integrating the population into the political system, mass suffrage offered new methods of legitimation, allowing the state to co-opt resistance by channeling dissident impulses into moderate parties of loyal opposition.
He was an early advocate of liberalization in Germany, for example, but his primary justification was that this would bring the domestic legitimacy required to maintain an assertive foreign policy. Beyond the sphere of formal politics, the night watchman state of the 19 th century had become intertwined, through networks of patronage and regulation, with a whole group of ostensibly private institutions in civil society, giving it new methods of control over the habitus of everyday life.
In an evocative passage of The Prison Notebooks that contrasts the fate of Russia with the stillborn revolutions of the West, Gramsci remarks that:.
In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. The key difference lies in the social structure that underpins state power. The consequence of this variegated social structure is that the French state is actually far more resilient than it appears at first glance.
Philosophy, then, must minister to the revolution, exposing the terrain on which it is to take place. The Prince shows that the veneer of unassailable state is power misleading. However, even sympathetic readers like Laclau and Mouffe recognize that Gramsci does not quite carry his project of tracing the ways that hegemonic power operates in contingent historical circumstances a key aspect of what I call power nominalism to its logical conclusion.
For example, at times he seems to assume that identity formation is functional for the capitalist system or, conversely, for revolution , a move that introduces a kind of subterranean teleology into his work. Another consequence of this latent functionalism is that Gramsci appears to conceive of just a few key nodes of ideological transmission schools, churches, etc.
In the next section, I show how Louis Althusser attempts to respond to these very dilemmas. How is it that we take punctual, individual selves for granted as an irreducible feature of reality and the foundation of politics?
I argue that Althusser attempts to address these questions by radicalizing the nominalist conception of power, bringing it down to a microscopic level and showing how it fashions subjects from the ground up.
While hegemony as Gramsci usually describes it is a kind of class power that individuals live with but can choose to openly confront, Althusser suggests that ideology makes us what we are. He therefore raises perhaps inadvertently the old question posed by Weber: what kind of social change remains possible when power becomes truly pervasive? Althusser, by contrast, produced his major works in the s, at which point the horrors of Stalinism were plain for all to see.
In this context, older questions about the uncanny resilience of capitalism merged with new ones concerning the resurgence of despotism following a successful revolution.
According to this line of thought, deceitful priests and tyrants circulated myths about religion and authority in order to buttress their rule, and this reign of imagination would be broken when the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The aftermath of and the restoration, however, suggested to many that the instrumental account was unable to explain the enduring power of the traditional political myths.
In response to this problem, both Feuerbach and the young Marx drew on Hegel to develop an alternative account of ideology as alienation. According to this more complex view, ideology stems not from a few corrupt elites, but rather from the entire network of social conditions through which individuals are separated from their real human essence or potential as free beings, causing them to project idealized representations of existence into the realms of religion, morality, etc.
However, Althusser argues, these assumptions remain situated within the intellectual world of bourgeois humanism and its essentialist notions of human agency and individual rationality. As such, earlier accounts of ideology, including those penned by the young Marx, remain ideological to the extent that they are wrapped up with the political commitments of bourgeois society in ways that are not fully transparent.
To undertake this reconstruction, Althusser supplements Marx with Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the process of negotiating this question, the addressee is interpellated: he becomes a potential suspect, informant, or perhaps just a case of mistaken identity. There are two key points to consider here. Our real ideology is revealed in the very turning around to face the officer, not our individual conceptions about legitimate authority.
Far from being arcane theoretical arguments, these questions are decisive for any conception of political change. To put it more simply, while Gramsci typically reads The Prince as a statement about politics , Althusser also reads it as a text that says important things about the ontological composition of the world. No class membership predisposes him to assume his historical task. No social tie binds him to this people whom he must unify into a nation. On this reading, the prince inhabits a world that is contingent to its very core.
For Gramsci, philosophy directly prepares the ground for revolution, but for Althusser its ability to fill this role is called into question. This stance also implies that only the retrospective legitimation that comes from a successful revolutionary Event can certify any action as truly revolutionary. All present acts of resistance must remain ambiguous: do they open a new path, or remain complicit in the reigning power relations?
For Althusser, it is impossible to know for certain. Revolution therefore remains an open question, but, perhaps no more than a question. Adequately theorizing state power and the mechanisms of social change remains a problem to be addressed by his successors, among whom Michael Foucault is perhaps the most important.
At first glance, it might appear that Michel Foucault is something of an outlier in this discussion. After all, his work abandons the concept of ideology and, according to some commentators, in books like The Order of Things Foucault attempts to break with Marxist frameworks altogether. Nevertheless, I argue that these three thinkers share a common theoretical project: Foucault in fact seeks to complete the nominalist model of power, tracing its political implications as consistently as possible.
His work, especially the later writings on governmentality, thus reveals the significance — and the limitations — of the entire enterprise. The functionalist model assumes that any deployment of power is best characterized by the operation it preforms for some larger social whole, just as the significance of an organ is characterized by the task it preforms for the body e.
It was Louis Althusser who used the concept of ideology and ideological state apparatus in his works. According to Althusser, there are two apparatuses.
They are the ideological state apparatus and the repressive state apparatus. He used the term repressive state apparatus to refer to social bodies such as the government and the police. On the other hand, ideological state apparatus refers to social institutions such as religion, media, education, etc. This highlights that the ideology is much more intangible.
According to Marxism , in the capitalist system, the ideology plays a crucial role. It is these systems of beliefs and ideas that mystify the people so that they become incapable of seeing the social realities. It creates a false consciousness among the working classes. This allows the ruling classes to control the modes of production to their advantage. Ideology: Ideology is a system of ideas forming the basis of an economic or political theory.
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