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80 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
Marx and Engels had written, The ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch
the ruling ideas i.e. the class which is the ruling material force is at the same time
its ruling intellectual force’ (p. 64). The passage is, in fact, more subtle and
qualified than that classic and unforgettable opening suggests. But, in the simple
form in which it appeared, it could no longer—for reasons partly sketched out
earlier—be sustained. Some theorists took this to mean that any relationship
between ruling-class and dominant ideas had therefore to be abandoned. My own
view is that this threw the baby out with the bath water, in two senses. It was
based on the unsupported, but apparently persuasive idea that, since ‘ideas’ could
not be given a necessary ‘class belongingness’, therefore there could be no
relation of any kind between the processes through which ideologies were
generated in society and the constitution of a dominant alliance or power bloc
based on a specific configuration of classes and other social forces. But clearly it
was not necessary to go so far in breaking the theory of ideology free of a
necessitarian logic. A more satisfactory approach was to take the point of ‘no
necessary class belongingness’: and then to ask under what circumstances and
through what mechanisms certain class articulations of ideology might be
actively secured. It is clear, for example, that even though there is no necessary
belongingness of the term ‘freedom’ to the bourgeoisie, historically, a certain
class articulation of the term has indeed been effectively secured, over long
historical periods: that which articulated ‘freedom’ with the liberty of the
individual, with the ‘free’ market and liberal political values, but which
disarticulated it from its possible condensations in a discourse predicated on the
‘freedom’ of the worker to withdraw his labour or the ‘freedom’ of the ‘freedom-
fighter’. These historical traces are neither necessary nor determined in a final
fashion. But such articulations have been historically secured. And they do have
effects. The equivalences having been sustained, they are constantly reproduced
in other discourses, in social practices and institutions, in ‘free societies’. These
traditional couplings, or ‘traces’ as Gramsci called them, exert a powerful
traditional force over the ways in which subsequent discourses, employing the
same elements, can be developed. They give such terms, not an absolutely
determined class character, but a tendential class articulation. The question as to
how the articulation of ideological discourses to particular class formations can
be conceptualized, without falling back into a simple class reductionism, is a
matter on which important work has since been done (the work of Laclau
referred to earlier here is, once again, seminal).
Second, to lose the ruling-class/ruling-ideas proposition altogether is, of
course, also to run the risk of losing altogether the notion of ‘dominance’. But
dominance is central if the propositions of pluralism are to be put in question.
And, as we have shown, the critical paradigm has done a great deal of work in
showing how a non-reductionist conception of dominance can be worked out in
the context of a theory of ideology. However, important modifications to our
way of conceiving dominance had to be effected before the idea was rescuable.
That notion of dominance which meant the direct imposition of one framework,