ABSTRACT

Althusser said that the greatest event of history to date was the encounter of the working class with Marx’s theory of capital. Althusser, of course, conceived of Marxism as a science, and not as an ideology. Nevertheless, this notion of an encounter, that is, of a mutual recognition between one, or several social formations and a discourse is perhaps the best characterization of ideology. The theory of rational expectations and financial markets; Pontifical Infallibility and the Catholic Church; inferiority of the Jews and the Nazi concentration camps: an ideology is a theory of the social formations that will make it real, and therefore true.