ABSTRACT
This chapter initiates a secondary interest in the book in exploring the position of the sociologist as critic in a neoliberal age. Comparing the success with which Peter Wagner and Axel Honneth adapt sociology to the tasks of critique in a neoliberal age, the chapter finally opts for a third approach that is suggested by Agnes Heller. Neoliberal ideologies intend to rob us of any alternatives to the hegemonic conviction that public institutions function best by reinventing themselves via the norms, logics and imperatives of the market. It seems, then, that ideology critique must re-enact the disputation of purposes that has been suppressed by neoliberalism’s ideological blockages. Later in this chapter, I will suggest that the neoliberal university might be reclaimed as just such a battleground.
