The Dominant Ideology of Modernity

Abstract

Although the poststructuralist critique of ideology has had a significant impact, a more devastating criticism has come from within sociology itself. The epistemologically external critique mounted by the anti-essentialist camp is thus reinforced by the internal, modernist and empirically grounded arguments of historical and political sociology, together nailing the coffin shut on both Marxist and functionalist concepts and theories of ideology. In a series of studies published between the late 1970s and early 1990s, Abercrombie, et al. (1978, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1990) made a decisive impact on the sociological understanding of ideology. In these works they provided a coherent theoretical, and a meticulous empirical, mostly historical, debunking of the so-called dominant ideology thesis (DIT). By challenging the two leading paradigms of their day, namely structuralist Marxism and structural functionalism, they attempted to demonstrate the analytical limitations of the dominant ideology concept in both of its uses: when linked to class structure as in Marxism, and in the notion of common culture apropos of the Parsonian functionalist tradition. Their argument was essentially that there is no, and never has been, such a thing as ‘dominant ideology’, in the sense of intra- and inter-group value unity, and that both functionalism and Marxism overstate the importance of shared values as generators of social action.KeywordsSchool TextbookDominant IdeologyIranian CaseIranian NationNationalist DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.