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Chapter 2
Stuart Hall and the marxist concept of
Ideology

Jorge Larrain

INTRODUCTION
That one cannot find agreement about the marxist concept of ideology is
hardly surprising or news anymore. The disagreements affect almost every
aspect of the concept: its content, its effectivity and its epistemological
status which is manifest in a range of questions. Is ideology subjective and
ideal (created by and existing in the minds of individuals) or objective and
material (existing in material apparatuses and its practices)? Is ideology a
determined and epiphenomenal superstructure or an autonomous discourse
with its own effectivity capable of constituting subjects? Is ideology
negative and critical (a distortion or inversion) or neutral (the articulated
discourse of a class, fraction or party)? Do ideological elements possess an
inherent class character or are they neutral and capable of being articulated
to various classes? These questions continue to haunt theoretical discussion
and have hardly received a unanimous answer. I do not think this lack of
theoretical agreement, confusing as it may be, should be considered so
intolerable as to prompt a desperate search for the marxist concept of
ideology. Even if one wanted to do that one would find it impossible,
simply because one has to accept the fact that there are several major
traditions within marxism which construct different concepts of ideology.
However, it is important critically to analyse and confront these different
approaches and their particular claims to explaining aspects of social
reality, not only with a view to showing which is most adequate but also to
explore whether they are complementary in any way.
1
In part this reflection has been motivated by reading Stuart Hall’s article
‘The toad in the garden: Thatcherism among the theorists’ (1988a), which
seems to claim the practical superiority of a particular conception of

Reprinted from Theory, Culture & Society (London, Newbury Park and New
Delhi: Sage), 8 (1991), 1–28.