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Title: Ideology: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 0-86091-538-7 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: 01 May, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Decent Introduction
Comment: This is a decent introduction to ideology, and how our understanding of it has changed since the formalization of its study in the Enlightenment.
Unfortunately, Eagleton's attitude towards the "postmodernist" or "post-structuralist" thinkers who are his so-rarely named enemies (except for the poor Michel Foucualt) frequently reduces their arguments to straw men, and then simplistically and reductively refutes them. He expresses no interest in exploring the possibilities of Foucault's work, or of engaging in any significant manner with Lyotard or Baudrillard. To say Baudrillard's politics are vacuous is in one sense true and in another sense misses the point.
Furthermore, some of his readings (for example, of Nietzsche) are similarly reductive and ignore everything that does not explicitly address the subject of ideology, much to the detriment of his argument.
The book's simple stylistic manner makes it easy and quick to read but perhaps impairs its philosophy.
Eagleton, as the back of my copy announces, is a "splendid polemicist," and this book reinforces that distinction, while leaving open the question of whether or not one wants to be considered a "polemicist."
Rating: 4
Summary: Illuminating on ideology & its intellectual history
Comment: The subtitle to this book reads 'an introduction', but I doubt that your typical undergraduate student would find this a useful introductory text. Rather being a bland, dispassionate catalogue of various views on ideology, Eagleton's book is a lively and even at time virulent debate with the long line of intellectuals who have sought to conceptualize ideology from the likes of Marx, Schopenhauer, Lukács, Althusser, etc.
At its core, the enterprise contained with the books stands as a defense of the Marxist critical tradition against post-modernism and relativism-meaning that he desires to preserve the notion of ideology as a critical device for emancipation from false beliefs and mental processes that reinforce social oppression. Thus, after its initial chapters covering the usage of the term 'ideology' in speech and the social manifestations of ideological strategies, the Marxist debates take the forefront of the discussion almost entirely. In the final pages, Eagleton attempts to rebuff post-modern and neo-Marxist erosions of the viability of the concept of ideology. If you never considered Marxism to be the school of thought with the most invested interest in preserving the notion of 'ideology', a reading of this book will suggest strongly to the contrary.
Eagleton has not only an incredible talent for not only conveying his argument in a lucid, witty and convincing manner, but also in presenting the position of diverse authors with whom he interacts. He thus proves himself not only to be an excellent mind and author but also a superb reader.
Rating: 3
Summary: The winter of reviewer's discontent
Comment: There are several sentences in my friend's asnalysis of the eminant mister Eagleton's critic (myself) which catch the eye somehow.
"Arguably, he's not Marxist enough in critiquing these positions"
This sentence alone tells us all we will ever need to know about the biases of the reviewer. Actually, it is nothing of the sort, and the eminent and dignified mister Eagleton was nothing short of baldly dogmatic in in every page of his book.
The next sentence is a reader-stopper, a sort of Gog and Magog of being completely incorrect:
"In using phrases like "abstract structures of ideology" the reviewer shows he has not really read the book attentively, as ideology is not necessarily "abstract" at all"
Actually, that's all ideology is by its very definition- an abstraction, an idea about how the universe works. The Mirriam Webster dictionary clearly defines the word "ideology" in direct and complete contradiction to my reviewer friend:
"Ideology: Function: noun 1 : visionary theorizing 2 a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c : the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program."
Not content with with opening his mouth and removing all doubt, our friend goes on to embarrass himself further:
"And, incidentally, by what definition of "ideology" is Marxism an ideology??"
I thought the multiple question marks were a nice emphasis of the intelligence of this statement. Well my illustrious friend, Marxism is an ideology in the same sense that it is a sociopolitical idea, a theory. Also, Marx made mention of it as a theory maybe fifteen or twenty thousand times in his writing, and that is what it is called by every marxian scholar alive and dead. Theories are ideas. Ideas are by their very nature abstractions. Even high school children in the UK know this.
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Title: The Idea of Culture (Blackwell Manifestos) by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 0631219668 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Archaeology of Knowledge ISBN: 0394711068 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1982 List Price(USD): $13.60 |
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Title: The Ideology of the Aesthetic by Terry Eagleton ISBN: 0631163026 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: 01 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $33.95 |
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Title: The Marx-Engels Reader by Karl Marx, New York :, Friedrich Selections. English. 1978 Engels, Robert C. Tucker ISBN: 039309040X Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 February, 1978 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Orientalism by Edward W. Said ISBN: 039474067X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1979 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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