Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology
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Few concepts have been so intensively discussed or so widely sponsored as that of "ideology." Whether read as the expression of social classes or attributed a material independence and efficacy, whether devalued as false and non-scientific or asserted as the necessary element of social practice, "ideology" has become an ineluctable conceptual reference across a range of works dealing with subjects as varied as science and politics, gender and cultural production.
In this book, Göran Therborn makes a decisive contribution to the contemporary debate. Beginning with some critical reflections on Louis Althusser's influential writings in the late sixties, Therborn develops a theory of the formation of human subjects. He then goes on to consider the material matrix of ideologies and the problem of ideological change, the ideological constitution of classes and the characteristics of the discursive order that regulates it. Turning to questions of state power and political struggle, Therborn provides a remarkable account of ideological domination that displaces traditional categories, and a fascinating analysis of the process of political mobilization.
Brief yet wide ranging, probing yet succinct, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology is a work of theoretical exploration that establishes new bearings for the current discussion of ideology.
In this book, Göran Therborn makes a decisive contribution to the contemporary debate. Beginning with some critical reflections on Louis Althusser's influential writings in the late sixties, Therborn develops a theory of the formation of human subjects. He then goes on to consider the material matrix of ideologies and the problem of ideological change, the ideological constitution of classes and the characteristics of the discursive order that regulates it. Turning to questions of state power and political struggle, Therborn provides a remarkable account of ideological domination that displaces traditional categories, and a fascinating analysis of the process of political mobilization.
Brief yet wide ranging, probing yet succinct, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology is a work of theoretical exploration that establishes new bearings for the current discussion of ideology.
Göran Therborn is the Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is also the former co-Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala. He has worked in, and on, all the populated continents of the world. His works have been published in at least twenty-four languages. He is also a civic intellectual, with a lifetime commitment to universal freedom and equality, a supporter of anti-imperialist and egalitarian social movements, and writes on Marxist and Radical theory. Since his retirement from Cambridge in 2010 he lives at Ljungbyholm, in southeast Sweden.