ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues against the view that conditions of existence are ideological, if this means that the rights of property are accepted as just by all members of a society. There has been a very general agreement that all class societies have to have either a dominant ideology or a dominant culture. In much of the recent literature, the notion that ideology functions as a condition of existence of the economy makes a frequent appearance. The most notable attempt to conceptualise the economy and its conditions of existence is that of Althusser, particularly in his early work. In sum, we have argued that the Althusserian tradition has drawn the relationship between economy and ideology very tightly, whatever variations exist between particular writers, and however much some of their accounts lack clarity.
