Page 78 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 69

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

of reification. Human reality is necessarily detotalised under cap-
italism, he argued, both by commodity fetishism and by other
reified forms of consciousness, the most important of which is,
in fact, science (pp. 6–7).
For the young Lukács, reified thought could be overcome only
by the proletariat’s coming to consciousness of itself as the iden-
tical subject and object of history (p. 20). In the early 1920s Lukács
clearly viewed the prospects for such development as fairly
imminent: the ‘imputed’ class consciousness (p. 51) embodied in
Marxism was to be actualised in the empirical consciousness of
a working class led by the revolutionary party. But as Lukács
recoiled from both Nazism and Stalinism, this revolutionary
optimism gave way to an increasing reliance on the realist novel
as the principal totalising instance in our culture (Lukács, 1963).
While Anderson is mistaken seeing western Marxism as born from
a moment of failure (quite the contrary—it was born from a
moment of high revolutionary optimism)—it would eventually
be characterised by ‘a common and latent pessimism’ (Anderson,
1976, pp. 92, 88). Hence the preoccupation with how culture as
ideology functions to legitimate the capitalist system, and so too
the growing scepticism as to the possibilities for successful
working-class opposition.

Antonio Gramsci
Such pessimism is typically Weberian, but paradoxically it was
Gramsci, perhaps the western Marxist thinker least influenced by
Weber, who produced by far the most theoretically persuasive,
and indeed influential, Marxist theory of legitimation. As is well
known, Gramsci substituted, for the more orthodox base/super-
structure model, a civil society/political society model, which
derived from both Hegel and Marx, but which had commanded
relatively little attention among Marxists. Political society here
denoted the coercive elements within the wider social totality,
civil society the non-coercive. Where most Marxists had prev-
iously stressed politico-economic coercion, and where Weber had
stressed legitimation, Gramsci chose to point towards both, and
towards their inextricable interconnection in the maintenance of

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