The Politics of Truth

This book is at once a textbook survey and critique of the theory of ideology, and the site of Michele Barrett's settling of accounts with Marxism. With the honesty we have come to expect of her, she announces that she has now nailed her colours 'to the mast of a more general postMarxism'. Foucault, despite some jitters about his competence, has been entrusted with the helm, and Laclau and Mouffe are prominent among the crew. That the theory of ideology would prove the acid test of Barrett's commitments had already been signalled in her self-critical Introduction to the 1988 edition of Women's Oppression Today where she remarks on the reliance of her argument on an unthought-through concept of 'gender ideology'. At that time, however, she was reluctant to dump an idea which still seemed a potentially fruitful tool to investigate the relationship of the psychic to the social. On further scrutiny, it has been rejected as inherently unhelpful. This is in part because of the equivocation between its neutral use to refer to 'historical consciousness', and its critical or epistemological definition as involving a necessary element of illusion or distortion of the truth. But it is mainly because of its 'class belongingness': the mystification to which we are directed in its critical use is one which serves class interests and is explicable by reference to them. The theory of ideology thus rests an on explanatory model which is no longer if it ever was appropriate. For today, argues Barrett, it is only the dogmatist who thinks that social inequalities and political differences can be 'subsumed under or reduced to the question of class'. In principle, this leaves open the possibility that 'ideology', conceived as 'mystification' accountable to multiple sources and serving complex interests (patriarchy, racism, nationalism), might still be salvaged. But given how closely Barrett associates the economic and class reductionism of Marxist theory with its realist epistemology, and her generally favourable commentary on Foucault, Derrida and others who have ditched that paradigm of knowledge, what in effect is being argued is that once you have broken with a class perspective there is very little mileage in the idea of a systematically sustained false consciousness about social reality at all. On the other hand, despite her criticism of'anti-humanism', Barrett has by no means shifted to any pos

Critical theory · Epistemology · Equivocation · Feminism · Human sexuality · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Scrutiny · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Cultural Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology

• Realism, humanism and alternative hedonism

  Open Access•Kate Soper, Jamie Morgan•Journal of Critical Realism•2026

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