ABSTRACT
The Dominant Ideology Thesis was simultaneously anti-Parsonian and opposed to the idea of cultural sociology as the analysis of a separate and quasi-autonomous realm, namely the cultural sphere. When people regard postmodernism as the fragmentation and diversification of modern cultures by the forces of consumerism and the global markets, then postmodernism means that it is impossible to have a dominant ideology in an advanced capitalist system. The function of ideology was to produce an integrated dominant class rather than to produce a subordinated working class. Romanticism helped to elaborate the ideology of individualism that facilitated and buttressed the new social and the economic structures. The main burden of this chapter on ideology in feudalism was negative, that is to refute the idea of a golden age of religious practice from which there was a process of secularization with the development of a capitalist industrial society.
