ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how two central institutions, the state and the market, contribute to social identities. It discusses Louis Althusser's theory of state and ideology and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, who have contributed significantly to describing and theorising contemporary capitalism's novel ways of producing subjectivity. The chapter enlightens with Boltanski and Chiapello's work on the spirit of capitalism. They investigate the interplay between three phenomena: capitalism, the spirit of capitalism and the critique of capitalism. The chapter outlines the Althusser's attempt to solve both tasks: first Althusser's contribution to the development of a theory of the state and then his contribution to the understanding of how ideology functions. He develops the concept of interpellation to describe this double inscription of the imaginary and the symbolic. Althusser's emphasises how capitalism requires agency in order to be reproduced. The constitutive nature of interpellation causes the ideological call to appear as trivialities, truths, personal preferences, or choices.
