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Contemporary Cultural Theory

disenchantment is yet another instance of the culturalist antithesis
between culture and civilisation, or, to use Weber’s own roughly
equivalent terms, Wertrationalität and Zweckrationalität (Weber,
1964, p. 115).
Weber’s theory of legitimation provides an especially impor-
tant instance of this general stress on the social effectivity of belief.
Despite the recognition in The German Ideology of the significance
of ruling ideas, both Marx and most immediately subsequent
Marxists tended to explain social order, insofar as it could be said
to exist at all, as a consequence either of the mode of production
or of the state. Weber, by contrast, stressed legitimate authority,
that is, a type of imperative control based on the acceptance by
subordinates of the right of superordinates to give orders. Weber
sketched out an ideal typology of three main kinds of legiti-
mation, but by far the most significant for modernity was the
rational/legal type, which rests ‘on a belief in the “legality” of
patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to
authority under such rules to issue commands’ (p. 328). In effect,
this is little more than a restatement of the ‘ruling ideas’ version
of Marx’s theory of ideology, but with the extremely important
qualification that such ideas are conceived not simply as ruling,
but as ruling effectively. Insofar as legitimate authority does exist,
it is uncontested. Moreover, there was for Weber no necessary
succession of different types of class rule, and hence of ruling
ideas, as there had been for Marx. In principle, at least, a legiti-
mate authority might last indefinitely.

Freud and the unconscious
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is best known for his development of
the psychoanalytic concept of the ‘unconscious’. The relevance
of this work for critical theory lay in the promise that it might
explain how individual subjectivity is articulated with social struc-
ture. Though not the first to believe in the existence of an
unconscious, Freud’s signal contribution was to link it to the notion
of psychic repression. The human psyche, he argued, was consti-
tuted by energy flows, or ‘instincts’ and ‘drives’ as he would come
to term them. Much of this desire is narcissistic and destructive

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