ABSTRACT
One of the problems with the thinking and theorising that have been done around the concept of ideology is that it has been conflated with the concept of culture. A key figure was the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who gave an influential definition of ideology. He argued that ideology is the way we live, an imaginary relation to real relationships. The terminus of the Thatcher and Reagan settlement and the business films of the 1980s was the global capitalist crash of 2007–2008. The financial sector, in Wall Street and the City of London, both liberated from any effective regulation in the 1980s, crashed and took a good chunk of the high street retail economy with it. Originally utopia as a concept refers to a good place which is a ‘no-place’, i.e. it does not actually exist.
