Cunningham - Ideology, History and Political Affect

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.
12678
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Ideology, history, and political affect
Daniel Cunningham
Department of Philosophy, Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, USA
Correspondence
Daniel Cunningham, Department of Philosophy, Villanova University, Villanova, 4226 Pine St., Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Recent social and political theory has shown renewed interest in ideology,1 a term widely deemed unfashionable not
long ago.2 This trend surely has multiple sociohistorical causes, but it seems especially connected to the rise of a newly
aggressive neo-fascist far right, whose beginnings we can trace to the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath.
The question of ideology reasserts itself in the context of a pressing need to oppose a global political movement that
unapologetically thrives upon ideological mystification.3 The aim of this article is to contribute to that ongoing effort
by filling in what I believe are two major gaps in this theoretical literature, two undertheorized areas that, I will argue,
are in fact closely related. These two undertheorized areas are (1) medium- and long-term historical transformations
in the very mode of operation of ideologies and (2) the relation between ideology and political affects.4 A greater focus
on the latter, I contend, holds the key to theorizing the former, which is needed if we are to grasp recent and ongoing
changes in deployments of ideology.
Whatever its causes, the undertheorization of the affects within Marxism generally, and within historical materi-
alist conceptions of ideology more specifically, has only become more glaring in recent history. The reasons for the
recent popular appeal of the far right largely involve the chickens-coming-home-to-roost of the neoliberal revolution
of the 1970s and 1980s, which devastated labor movements, both through direct political attack and by reducing the
bargaining power of workers in the developed world through outsourcing and automation. Liberal and conservative
parties meanwhile joined forces in eliminating and/or privatizing social programs, while the far right used cultural
factors—especially patriarchalism, racism, and religiosity—to capture the devotion of segments of the working classes
whose political identities were no longer so strongly tied, as they had previously been via the institutional vehicle of
the labor unions, to their economic interests. This reconfiguration, the product of a conscious political strategy, clearly
owes much to the ideological manipulation of mass affects. Who among us, here in the United States, has not marveled
at the fierce rigidity of the bond attaching socially conservative, rural, evangelical Christians to a New York City casino
boss and philanderer (at best) with no apparent regard for morality or religion? The power of this new generation of
authoritarian leaders—Trump, Orban, Duterte, and Bolsonaro; the list is long and growing—depends in part on the love
their followers feel for them (and love, as the saying goes, is blind).
To understand such attachments, we must attend to and theorize the interplay between ideology and the affects
in constituting political subjectivity, and we must do so in a way that does not hypostatize present circumstances but
views them as connected to broader developments. That is what I mean by a truly historical-materialist theory of ide-
ology, the desideratum of this effort: while recent discussions have contributed much to clarifying such issues as the
relationships among ideology, self-interest, and identity and the ideological functions of new technologies and com-
munications media, little theoretical work has foregrounded the historicity of ideology, the causes and patterns of
its change over time. Attending to this diachronic dimension is fundamental to a historical-materialist theorization of
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any phenomenon, and it is especially imperative in the case of ideology as we can see the latter’s forms of strategic
deployment changing rapidly before our eyes; in order to track the course of such changes without become dazzled
and disoriented by them, we must find theoretical tools with which to situate present movements amid longer-term
developments. Mass political affects, I will argue, are in substantial measure the element of such changes, and so a fruit-
ful way forward is to articulate a political theory that centers the historically dynamic relationship between ideology
and the affects.
I can here only begin this task. I proceed in three steps: in Section 1, I engage critically with one of the texts still
foundational to an influential strain of ideology theory, Louis Althusser’s 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses,” focusing on its oft-overlooked discussion of historical methodology and identifying its limitations for
grounding a truly historical theory of ideology. In Section 2, I argue for an understanding of the relationship between
ideology and subjectivity in terms of “cultivation,” contrasting the latter’s gradualism, variability, and open-endedness
with the abruptness of the “interpellation” famously featured in Althusser’s account. The theme of ideological cultiva-
tion opens quickly onto that of the affects, for, as I discuss, the ideological cultivation of political subjectivity occurs
substantially through strategies of affective appeal and manipulation. In Section 3, then, I propose that we would be
aided in studying the historical dynamics of such strategies by focusing on how they utilize various objects of affective
attachment: while much recent discussion of political affect has explored how various individual emotions influence
political phenomena, a historical materialist account should center the affective dimension of the connection between
subjects and the material world by means of which they produce and reproduce their means of subsistence. To that
end, I close by elaborating, at a very general level, a schema of objects of affective attachment that might help to guide
further theorization and study.
“Ideology” is inherently tricky to define, and its definition is part of its problematic. Terry Eagleton (2003, p. 13)
influentially defined it as “those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation
to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.” That definition suffices for my purposes here, but I must also
note that the basic tension within the concept, manifest in its history and in current theoretical debates, is between
its pejorative and neutral senses. Sometimes, that is, “ideology” or “ideological” functions normatively, as an indict-
ment of a calculated falseness: “That’s just ideology!” “What ideological hogwash!” Sometimes, however, it merely
means one’s politically informed worldview: In mainstream news reporting, for example, one often hears (in the United
States) about “Democratic” versus “Republican” ideology, or of someone’s motivations being “ideological” as distinct
from patriotic, financial, strategic, etc., none of which implies that any particular ideology is correct or incorrect.5
When I mean to use the term in its pejorative sense, I will say so. Most generally, this discussion concerns ideol-
ogy as something that influences subjects in service of a certain interest, which may or may not align with their
own.
1 “IDEOLOGY HAS NO HISTORY”
“To think everything historically, that is Marxism.”

—Pierre Vilar (1973)
Jan Rehmann, in his excellent intellectual history of the concept and theory of ideology (2013), distinguishes two
traditions with which recent Marxian theorists of ideology have aligned themselves. The first, which he calls “ideology-
critique,” derives mainly from Lukacs and the Frankfurt School, while the second, “ideology-theory,” follows upon the
work of Louis Althusser. Both traditions, in my view, theorize ideology in ways that do not sufficiently allow for his-
torical variation and development, but I will focus in this section on Althusser’s theory of ideology, whose ahistoricism
I find more glaring and damaging. This theory still exerts considerable influence on contemporary discussion. Very
recently, for example, Matthew Lampert (2021) has argued for an Althusserian approach contra ideology-critique on
the grounds that the former is more properly materialist.6 Ponce de Leon and Rockhill (2020) also look to Althusser for
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a “materialist conception of ideology” due to the focus on institutions, practices, and rituals implied by his concept of
“ideological state apparatuses” or “ISAs,” though they conclude that “he unwittingly opened the path to post-Marxist
reflections on subjectivity that would abandon the materialist analysis of ISAs, as well as the totalizing critique of
capitalism, in favor of a theoretical—and often theoreticist—preoccupation with subjectivation” (p. 9). I agree that
Althusser’s turn toward institutions, practices, and rituals was valuable to Marxist thinking about ideology, but I will
try to show in this section that his theorization of ideology suffers irredeemably from a thin and undialectical concept
of “history” that places it in conflict both with the philosophical principles of historical materialism and with the very
practice of studying history.7
Althusser himself famously, or notoriously, declared that “ideology has no history” (Althusser, 2014). But what did
he really mean by that? This thesis appears in the 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” which
Althusser culled from a book-length manuscript (only to be published after his death) and which provided the basis for
much subsequent “ideology-theory.”8 He elaborates: “the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure
and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that
structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense
in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies”
(Althusser, 2014). Ideology, Althusser ventures to say, “is eternal” in the same way that the Freudian “unconscious is
eternal, i.e. that it has no history.” He suggests that this analogy of ideology and the unconscious authorizes him to
propose “a theory of ideology in general, in the sense that Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in general”
(Althusser, 2014).
But these passages do not exhaust the status of “history” in Althusser’s theory of ideology. When he proclaims that
“ideology has no history,” propaedeutic to his “theory of ideology in general,” he has already specified that “there can
be no question of a theory of ideologies in general, since ideologies (defined in the double respect [of] regional and class)
have a history, whose determination in the last instance is clearly situated outside ideologies alone, although it involves
them” (Althusser, 2014). This passage makes a few notable points. First, there is a difference between “ideology in
general” and “ideologies,” which in turn differ among themselves along regional and class (and indeed other) lines.
Second, it is possible to devise a theory only of ideology in general, while specific ideologies instead have histories.
Third, as the latter point implies, history and theory are fundamentally opposed. Althusser seems to assume that having
a history makes a phenomenon inaccessible to theory, or more precisely that changing over time makes a phenomenon
ungraspable by conceptualization.
Althusser expresses this hostility between history and theory more directly elsewhere in the “Ideology” essay. In
that essay’s discussion of the Marxist theory of the state (the broader topic of On the Reproduction of Capitalism),
Althusser meanders into some remarks on methodology. He sets up an opposition between what he calls “descrip-
tive theory” and theory as such. The former—while already a “theory,” not merely an assortment of facts—requires
direct and initial observation of a new phenomenon: the example in question is Marx’s and Engels’ theoretical remarks
on the modern state. “And yet,” writes Althusser, “the descriptive theory of the state represents a phase in the con-
stitution of the theory which itself demands the ‘supersession’ of this phase. . . . [T]he accumulation of facts within the
definition of the state may multiply examples, but it does not really advance the definition of the state, i.e. the scientific
theory of the state. Every descriptive theory thus runs the risk of ‘blocking’ the development of the theory, and yet that
development is essential” (Althusser, 2014). Again, he assumes—does not really argue for—a basic hostility between
the empirical and specific, which he aligns with “history,” and the theoretical and general, meanwhile granting a clear
privilege to the latter that ascribes to the theoretician ultimate authority in deciding which facts, observations, and
experiences count and which do not.
In what way is this methodological priority of theory over fact materialist? What justifies the assumption that the
two are inherently incompatible? In any case, it shows that the declaration that “ideology has no history” reflects a
deep, inbuilt feature of Althusser’s methodology that perhaps should not be called an “anti-historicism” (to clarify what
exactly Althusser opposes in what he calls “historicism” would require a close look at the well-known section on that
topic in Reading Capital (Althusser, 2015), which would be out of place here) but that operates with a quite thin notion
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of what it means for something to “have a history” or to exist historically: “historical” for him means merely empirical,
pre-theoretical, of secondary authority.
A properly historical materialist approach must understand its concepts and theoretical constructions themselves
to have a history and to exist historically, which means always to remain subject to reevaluation as demanded by chang-
ing realities. Concepts and theories must aim at universal validity—explanatory value in all relevant cases—which they
achieve with varying degrees of success, but that aim does not justify a suspicion toward fact or empirical observa-
tion. “History,” moreover, does not denote only the chaotic manifold of becoming, the messiness of the empirical; it
includes conceptuality and abstraction as material forces active in history—what else is money? or the political idea
of “the people”? Or, in fact, ideology as such?9 Vilar (p. 84), who speaks from intimate acquaintance with the concrete
work of studying and writing history, merits quoting at length on this point:
It is not easy to name what makes the new emerge out of the old. To physicists this is unimportant, and
biologists may be reduced to philosophizing about it: their subject-matters do not alter with the rhythm
of human lives. But the historian’s domain is that of change itself, change at the level of structures as
well as on the level of particular “cases.” To the historian, the temptation to search for stabilities is an
ideological temptation, founded upon the anguish of change. There is no way out of it: save for a few
fragments on the point of vanishing, men in society no longer live in pre-history—a term whose very
invention shows that the concept of history has itself a history, one less simple than Althusser believes.
Six thousand years at the most comprise “historical times.” A few centuries form our familiar horizons,
and two or three of them exhaust our economy and our science. The “long duration” is not so very long.
However limited his textual sources, Vilar indicts something pervasive in Althusser’s work, beyond but including
the “Ideology” essays: a retreat from the inescapability and unpredictability of historical change into the false com-
fort of conceptual permanence. This pivot itself, in Vilar’s terms, is precisely “ideological” in the most pejorative sense.
“‘Real’ Marxist history,” Vilar insists, “must—and no science can do otherwise—move ceaselessly from patient and
ample research to a theory capable of the utmost rigour, but also from theory to ‘cases’, in order to avoid the risk of
remaining useless knowledge” (Vilar, 1973).
Althusser himself, in his 1970 essay, implicitly acknowledges this distinction between history as the merely empir-
ical and history as a dialectical intertwining of fact and concept. We have already seen him speaking in two different
ways of what it means to “have a history” (as he claims ideology does not). On the one hand, it means to have under-
gone change over time, as implied in the specification that “ideologies” have histories while “ideology” as such does
not: the former change; the latter does not. But, on the other hand, as we have also seen, he refers to “what we can
call history,” the concept of history of the Communist Manifesto, “history as the history of class struggles, i.e. the history
of class societies” (2014 2014, p. 255). The sense of the historical as changing over time, as the diachronic, aligns with
what Althusser regards as the merely empirical—disorganized matter subordinate to the authority of theory. But the
sense of “history as the history of class struggles” represents a theory of history, something at odds with what appears
elsewhere as a fundamental antagonism between “history” and “theory.” It is, moreover, a theory that precisely under-
stands itself as emerging from a specific history and as a material force in history—as part of the theoretical armature
of the political movement of the working class. But, of course, this theory of history and this dialectical sense of what
it means to exist historically are not Althusser’s; they are Marx’s and Engels’, and they obtrude uncomfortably within
Althusser’s text.
The consequences of this thin understanding of history appear in the most famous section of Althusser’s theory
of ideology, his account of “ideological interpellation,” which represents his attempt to theorize the relation between
ideology and subjectivity. Althusser writes that “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects
among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that
very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the
most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (2014 2014, p. 264). The account foregrounds
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the relationship among three terms: the concrete individual person, the person as subject, and ideology, which effects
the transition from the former to the latter. That transition, however, does not occur in time: “in reality these things
happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects
are one and the same thing” (2014 2014, p. 264). As he puts it subsequently, “ideology has always-already interpellated
individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology
as subjects. . . individuals are always-already subjects” (2014 2014, p. 265). Althusser thus eliminates any diachronicity
from the interaction between ideology and subjectivity: the policeman’s hail is only a metaphor, but it is a metaphor
chosen for the suddenness, the lack of process, it suggests.
Althusser means for this arrangement to apply transhistorically, to belong not to the empirical history of “ideologies”
but to the authoritative theory of “ideology”: he repeats, at the beginning of this section, “ideology has no history.” But
how can one accept this application? For one thing, “the individual” is itself a category with a history: the individual
person has not always been, as it is for the modern juridical order, the main locus of subjectivity. Althusser suggests
that he even recognizes this, as when he compares the modern, individual juridical subject with “the soul in Plato. . .
God, etc.” (2014 2014, p. 262), but he nonetheless poses this individual–subject–ideology triad as eternal when clearly
it rests upon a modern, liberal notion of the legally and morally responsible, individual juridical subject. One cannot
help recognizing the Kantian subject, which is free insofar as it obeys the law its rationality gives to itself, in such lines
as “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject,
i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection” (2014 2014, p. 269). The account of ideological interpellation might
have represented a portrayal of the process of the ideological production of individual subjectivity specific to the mod-
ern, capitalist, liberal order. It might even have proposed that a task for “proletarian ideology”—which Althusser, in
his follow-up “Note on the ISAs,” calls “a very special kind of ideology” because it is “steeped in historical experiences
illuminated by scientific principles of analysis” (2014 2014, p. 228)—is to undo such processes of individuation, to
raise the subjects produced as individual subjects into class-conscious subjects, aware of themselves as members of a
group subject capable of acting in history. But such transformations would be difficult to explain while believing that
ideology’s work upon subjects has “always-already” occurred.
My aim here has not been to rehash old complaints about Althusser’s antihistoricism but rather to clarify the limi-
tations of one still-influential theoretical starting point for the sake of establishing a new one. Althusser’s classic texts
on ideology valuably reoriented theoretical discussions of the topic toward institutions and the practices and rituals
embedded within them. In this sense, they were an important intervention on behalf of materialism. But the framework
Althusser proposes is not truly historical materialist because it is not truly historical: It contains illuminating insights
about how ideology and subjectivity interact within capitalist modernity, but it cannot embrace the full range of that
interaction’s forms across history or explain their courses of change and development.
2 FROM IDEOLOGICAL INTERPELLATION TO IDEOLOGICAL CULTIVATION
Since, as I have argued, Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of subjectivity cannot embrace and explain
historical change, we need a way of specifying the point of contact between ideology and subjectivity that can. A more
supple term than “interpellation” would be ideological cultivation: An ideology strives—using its institutions, rituals,
and agents—to cultivate subjects with beliefs, values, habits, fears, and desires convenient for the class or class con-
stellation whose struggle generates that ideology. This means that it cannot simply dictate to political subjects what
they must think and feel and value, cannot simply supply a script they must follow,10 but must work on them, must
shape them over time. The term “cultivation,” in contrast to “interpellation,” implies open-endedness: Ideology’s work
on political subjects is continuous and temporally bound, and it can be undone or modified in surprising ways.11 It was
perhaps for these reasons that the concept of cultivation—Bildung—was so central to Marx’s and Engels’ early theo-
rization of ideology in the texts compiled as The German Ideology,12 a byproduct of their attempt to wrest a genuinely
materialist philosophy of history from the left Hegelianism of the day.
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Such a conception better equips the theorization of ideology for historical application because it can capture the
relations between ideology and political subjectivity not only in a modern capitalist society but also in other circum-
stances, helping to illuminate a fuller picture of the past in terms that nonetheless make it relatable to the present.
The diverse manifestations of the relation between ideology and political subjectivity that such a picture would reveal
fall along a spectrum or scale of cultivability: different historical circumstances yield different dynamics within that
relation. We can think of the two extremes of this spectrum as on one side determination—the total thrall of subjec-
tivity to ideological manipulation—and on the other autonomy—the total self-actualization of subjectivity, wherein it
clearly sees the truth of its own essence, freely pursues its own interests and the satisfaction of desires that come
from within itself alone, somewhat like Robinson Crusoe, that classic figure, whom Marx ridiculed (Marx, 1976), of the
“rational actor.” Both extremes, as in any theoretical formulation, are abstractions, though I would argue, as have oth-
ers, that the past half century of neoliberalism has brought political subjectivity much closer to determination than to
autonomy and that in fact its ideology often deploys the lie of our autonomy to fortify our determination.13
To be ideologically cultivated is also to be inducted into a culture, to become cultured in a certain manner, to have the
features of one’s character calibrated for certain rules and expectations. And just as there are countercultures, there
are counter-cultivations: those involved in political education, in whatever institutional context, are operators of this
play of cultivation and counter-cultivation, and as such they are also superintendents of political cultures and counter-
cultures, whether they recognize it or not. E.P. Thompson’s historical work was uniquely attuned to the plays of such
cultivation and counter-cultivation within real instances of class struggle, and this awareness features prominently in
his polemic against Althusser:
[W]e find that, with “experience” and “culture” we are at a junction-point. . . . For people do not expe-
rience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedures. . . They also experience their
own experience as feeling, and they handle their feelings within their culture, as norms, familial and kin-
ship obligations and reciprocities, as values or (through more elaborated forms) within art or religious
beliefs. . . . Values are neither “thought” nor “hailed”; they are lived, and they arise within the same nexus
of material life and material relations as do our ideas. (1978 1978, pp. 171—175)
As Thompson’s historical investigations had taught him, the play of ideological cultivation and counter-cultivation
that yields the cultural dimension of political struggle, that animates political cultures and shapes political subjectivi-
ties, occurs largely in the realm of the affects. To better understand these dynamics, then, we must turn more directly
to theorizing the historical dimension of the ideological manipulation of political affects.
3 IDEOLOGICAL CULTIVATION AND OBJECTS OF AFFECTIVE ATTACHMENT
“Like social life as a whole, of which it is simply the temporal unfolding, history runs on affects.”
—Frédéric Lordon (2014)
Recent theoretical discussions of ideology have been too narrowly focused on its contemporary manifestations to
generate a theory adequate to a broader historical explanation; their “data,” in other words, come from too restricted a
field. The difficulty of expanding that field is serious: History presents a vast array of different forms of consciousness,
and attempting to capture all of them in a theory risks not only scholarly overreach but also prejudice, Eurocentrism,
and the reinforcement of historic exclusions. So let us not focus on consciousness per se. An early and partially pre-
served meaning of “ideology,” of course, was people’s ideas about the world, and idea usually suggests consciousness.
But, as theorists across many discourses increasingly recognize, the means through which such ideas are installed,
changed, canceled, etc., substantially involve the affects. By “affects” I mean, very broadly, the desires, repulsions,
emotions, and moods that inform rational decisions and motivate actions—and that, recursively, can also be
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informed and motivated by previous decisions and actions—but are not reducible to them. Such affects also
involve the body and its needs but are not reducible to the physical, for they also involve thoughts, beliefs, and
memories.14
The properly historical materialist way of theoretically accounting for ideology’s manipulation of the affects is not
to further elaborate the different ways of feeling about politics (there are many attempts, from the ancient Greeks to
the present, to schematize the affects as well as many explorations of such isolated political-affective phenomena as
patriotism, shame, hope and fear, love and hate) but to focus on subjects’ attachments and their objects. Our subjectiv-
ities and the identities that define them—which limit them and set them apart from others—are constituted through
our attachments to people, ideas, values, and institutions—the list could be elaborated almost endlessly, for there is an
affective dimension to basically all instances of subject-formation. But attachments aren’t necessarily positive or lov-
ing: we are also passionately attached to what we hate (to again philosophize via cliché, the opposite of love isn’t hate
but indifference15 ). Those who love our new authoritarians do so in part through the hate they help them to feel; those
who love a sports team also “love to hate” its rival—love and hate oscillate and pass into each other, a drama that can
be irresistibly intoxicating. And such intoxication is highly useful to the purposes of ideological cultivation. Ideology—
whether operated by politicians, bosses, pundits, teachers, etc.—cultivates political subjects largely by directing their
flows of attachment toward certain objects and away from others.
Such an approach can more sensibly connect political affects to material necessities of human life than can a theory
of ideology focused on ideas, facilitating the embrace of a wider historical field. For the objects of affective attachment
are what real events—wars and revolutions, economic transformations, ecological changes—can give and take away.
The explanation of such historical change requires the concept of a constant against which it occurs. The transition from
feudalism to capitalism, for example, makes sense as such, at both the most general and the most precise conceptual
level, only as a change in modes of production. Supplying such a constant does not imply that it represents a transhis-
torical universal; it rather helps to distinguish the period of history—and ultimately not just human history but the
history of the universe, or the history of matter—to which the term is relevant. As the young Marx and Engels wrote,
“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin
to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence” (Marx & Engels,
1978): The concept of a mode of production is relevant to the section of the universe’s history during which a creature
which does such a thing exists—and not beyond. As Vilar (1973) put it, “The historian (the Marxist historian above all)
will distrust [the concept of ahistorical structure]. For him, everything changes. And nothing is totally independent of
a global structure itself in course of modification. Yet if he admits the notions of ‘long times’ and ‘stable communities,’
why should the resistant networks of the most ancient structures—like the family, or myth—not be integrated in the
same categories?” Accordingly, a theory of ideology useful for capturing and explaining historical change would benefit
from identifying the most universally relevant categories of objects of politico-affective attachment: constants against
which change takes place, derived from the most constant of material needs experienced by the kind of creature that
engages in political activity.
What are these most general objects of politico-affective attachment? In this section, I will propose a schema of
them, which also suggests a certain portrayal of political subjectivity as such, as I will conclude by briefly discussing.
But first, allow me a caveat: I do mean specifically political subjectivity. The question this schema purports to answer is
“what are the most general categories of object to which political subjects attach, which therefore are available to ide-
ological manipulation,” not “what are the most general categories of object to which subjects attach.” This distinction is
important because, first, individuals form many affective attachments which aren’t necessarily “political,” even if they
are potentially so—the bond between a parent and child, the hatred of a personal enemy, admiration for an artist or ath-
lete, etc. Political affect concerns objects relevant to collective life and its sustenance; affect as such is much broader.
To that point, this distinction is important, secondly, because a historical-materialist approach must take political sub-
jectivity to transcend individual subjectivity—to operate, that is, at multiple levels, including individual, society, class,
racial or ethnic group, generation, etc. Arguing this point at length lies beyond the scope of this discussion, but suffice
it to say that a theory of subjectivity attuned to historical change must treat the subject not, as in liberal discourse, as
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a subject of laws, rights, and duties, but as a force with the power to act in history—as a material force. That force is
surely not the exclusive possession of the individual.
3.1 Institutional objects of attachment: Community, power, and economy
Institutions certainly do matter for the ideological cultivation of political subjects. But I understand “institution” here
very broadly—much more broadly than does Althusser and not in the top-down sense his theory implies: political sub-
jects both make and are made by institutions. Institutions are what sustain human practices over time, beginning with
their practices of material production and reproduction and including religious, social, sexual, educational, artistic, and
any other kind of sustained human activity.
The first subcategory of institutional objects of attachment (though I do not mean to imply any hierarchy among
these subcategories; they could be listed in any order) is community. There might be instances in human history for
which we could say that there was no community, but if so, then in such instances there was also no politics. The exis-
tence of a political community, even if it does not recognize itself as such, is among the first principles of human political
existence, as suggested by the fact that the very etymology of the word “politics” refers to the kind of community
in which systematic political thought first appeared.16 More specific objects of attachment within this subcategory
include the family, the neighborhood, the city, the nation, the tribe, the college, the church, the church denomina-
tion, the corporation, the branch of the military, and the platoon, along with all the symbols that represent them.
Ethnic, gender, and class groupings can also function as objects of community attachment. As these lists imply, affec-
tive attachment to instances of community is closely connected to identity—to how subjects articulate themselves to
themselves and others. It is also closely connected to belonging, undoubtedly a powerful affective need and perhaps a
universal one, since belonging to a group doesn’t only make us feel loved but is necessary for survival and flourishing.
And even if it isn’t essential to the constitution of all subjects, it certainly is essential to the constitution of political sub-
jects. Even total exclusion from a community implies a negative attachment to it, if only to the fact of exclusion itself.
Conversely, meanwhile, community attachment is the domain of the “us-them” principle, one of the tools most visibly
useful to ideologues throughout history.
The second subcategory of institutional objects of attachment is power. Political theory, since Bodin in the 16th
century, has often discussed “sovereignty,” but that term is too specific here. Institutional objects of attachment can
include sovereigns, such as kings, emperors, and presidents, but they can also include the institutions, practices, and
rituals through which power is exercised. Political power refers, most basically, to relations of force within or among
political communities. Political subjects form and are formed by attachments, both positive and negative, to entities
involved in class domination and gender and racial subordination, but such attachments to power also arise in family
life, workplaces, and educational, religious, cultural institutions, etc., which may or may not be oppressive. Explicitly
political arrangements such as parties or royal courts also require such attachments in order to function. Both acqui-
escence to a prevailing order and revolutionary opposition to it involve attachments to power, though in different
ways.
And the last institutional object of attachment by which ideologies cultivate political subjects, as far as I can cur-
rently theorize, is economy. I must distinguish here between “the economy,” an objective set of relations by which
a society conducts its “metabolism with nature” (Marx, 1976)17 —by which it produces and reproduces its material
conditions of existence—and “economy” as a set of objects of attachment. Subjects are attached to their jobs and the
instruments of their work (the “tools of the trade”), their workplaces, their amount of wealth, and their tax commit-
ments. An area of economic attachment that has been thoroughly explored within Marxism, beginning with Marx’s
own discussion of commodity fetishism (1976), is the sphere of consumption: Spectacularly in late capitalism but in
various ways and to various extents throughout human history, subjects are attached to what they buy and use, an
affective dynamic exceeding mere use-value. And ultimately, even sexuality, childbirth, and parenting involve economic
objects of attachment: they are, after all, our most fundamental means of reproduction.
CUNNINGHAM 9
Note that ideology does not create any of these phenomena as such—they can exist without it—it rather uses them
in its cultivation of political subjects. But ideologies and ideologues also shape their material manifestations—as, for
example, in a modern nation-state where economics is the purview of official policy, the ideological makeup of the gov-
erning class or classes influences the objective economy and how subjects attach to economic phenomena; or as, in an
early modern absolutist kingdom, the king and his ministers would use religious partisanship—an object of community
attachment—to solidify subjects’ allegiance to the Crown.
And note, finally, that these three domains often overlap in practice and that they can serve as objects of affective
attachment both directly (by immediately provoking feeling) and indirectly (by provoking feeling through the mediation
of discourse, representation, symbolization). To take just one example, a modern individual’s attachment to a political
party involves community—both directly, because the party gives them a feeling of belonging, and indirectly, because it
materializes their desire for the political community to be organized in a certain way. Such an attachment also involves
power—both directly, because one occupies a certain place in its hierarchy, and indirectly, because, again, it materializes
one’s desire for sovereignty to operate in a certain way within the political community. But it may or may not involve
economy in an equally direct way: it does if the subject is motivated to join this particular party because they see its
agenda as conducive to their personal financial advantage, which they desire to further, but people also join political
parties because of ideals and values, irrespective of personal gain. In that case, their attachment to the party involves
economy only in the indirect sense that it, once again, materializes their desire for the political community’s economy
to be organized in a certain way.
3.2 Temporal objects of attachment: Pastness and futurity
The three subcategories of institutional objects of attachment I have proposed follow from the material requirements
of human political existence: Some version of community, power, and economy has—at least so far in human history,
and it is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise—always been necessary to sustain collective human existence.
The universality of the second category, which I call temporal objects of attachment, can similarly be derived from the
material needs of subjects to produce and reproduce their means of existence, since doing so requires laboring upon
nature, which in turn requires some orientation in time: knowing when to plant and harvest, when the fish will bite, or
when the herds migrate implies some “domestication” of time, some division of its flow into “before” and “after,” even
before that division finds conceptual representation.18 Istvan Meszaros (1970) writes, “Politics could be defined as
the mediation (and, with its institutions, as a means of this mediation) between the present and future states of soci-
ety. Its categories, accordingly, exhibit the character appropriate to this mediating function, and references to the
future are therefore an integral part of its categories.” I would add, recalling the “tradition of all the dead genera-
tions” Marx noticed haunting 19th-century French politics, that this mediation between present and future inevitably
depends upon resources from the past, even at the apex of utopianism where political thinking tries to rid itself of such
dependence.
Beyond such theoretical deductions, however, the products of human political culture lend overwhelming empirical
support to the claim that objects signifying pastness and futurity are indispensable to the interplays of ideology and
political affect. The symbolic dimension of culture is replete with such objects, ultimately connected to but transcend-
ing the necessity of distinguishing past and future for the sake of collective survival. The first writings of civilizations
as varied as the ancient Hebrews and Babylonians and Egyptians, the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Aztecs and Inca,
and the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians present creation stories and apocalypses and coming messiahs, golden ages
and promised lands—vivid appeals to collective imaginaries that distinguish not just yesterday and tomorrow but the
past and future of the political community, channeling desires in ways that reinforce the coherence and continuity of
the group. And the affective need to attach to such objects, such emblems of pastness and futurity, is also evident in
modern political ideologies, whose operators make a constant appeal to “the good old days,” before some “other” came
along and ruined everything, as well as to the hopeful future which they will deliver if one votes for them.
10 CUNNINGHAM
One might wonder why I have not included, on equal terms with past and future, the other element of the standard
temporal triad—the present. It’s because the present is not an object, or a site where objects appear, as are the future
and the past. It is precisely because the present is not an object, separate from subjectivity—precisely because it is, as
so disturbed Saint Augustine, always slipping away—that we lunge out at and latch onto figurations of pastness and
futurity. They help us to orient ourselves in the evanescent present, to make something of a present which, whenever
we attend to it, we find to be nothing. Our need to do so is one of the vulnerabilities from which our affects derive and
thus one of the levers by which ideology can maneuver us.
***
I propose that combining this general schema of objects of affective attachment with the notion that ideologies
operate largely by affectively cultivating political subjects can give us a valuable rubric for studying the many diverse
manifestations of ideology throughout history. This theoretical device can embrace modern political ideologies, busi-
ness ideologies, religions and systems of magic as ideologies, the official ideologies of kingdoms and empires, etc., while
allowing for the specification of differences among them, enabling historical comparison, and identifying causes of
transformation and development.
4 CONCLUSION: AMPLIFYING THE “MATERIALITY OF THE IDEOLOGICAL”
Rehmann (2013) elaborates on a “paradigm shift” that occurred in the early 20th century—exemplified by, but not lim-
ited to, the theoretical interventions of Lenin and Stalin—from a “critical” to a “neutral” understanding of the concept of
ideology. “Ideology,” that is, lost its normative or pejorative sense and came to signify simply “ideas.” It belonged neatly
within the “superstructure” category of that old binary the other partner of which was the “base.” No longer were
there ideology, on the one hand, and truth or “science,” on the other hand, as Marx and Engels had in some instances
suggested, but only different ideologies corresponding to different class positions, one of which was however correct
because, in the words of Lenin, it was “the ideology of the labouring class,” based on “the facts of. . . history and reality”
(quoted in Rehmann, 2013). This displacement allowed the Bolsheviks to insist that they had the correct ideology, to
be vindicated by future “history and reality,” while simultaneously acknowledging that ideology as such involves lying,
in their case and theirs alone in service of a legitimate higher cause.
Whether justified by political necessities or not, this “neutral” concept of ideology, and the binary of ideal and
material to which it corresponded, for Rehmann culminated in an evacuation of “the materiality of the ideological”
(Rehmann, 2013), a materiality, pace Althusser,19 fully legible in Marx and Engels. Later 20th-century theorizations of
ideology, from Althusser’s focus on the institutions of ideological subjectivation to Bourdieu’s elaboration of “habitus”
to the analysis of “objective thought forms” by W.F. Haug (1987) and the Projekt Ideologietheorie, of which Rehmann
is a product, sought to restore and to amplify this “materiality of the ideological,” to account for both the complexity
of late capitalist society and the multilayered and profound ways in which its ideological formations influence subjec-
tivity, far beyond ideas and consciousness. I contend that focusing theoretical attention on the historically variable
relations between ideology and political affect is the next step in this amplification, which I mean in its etymological
sense of “making fuller” or of “filling out.” The affects lie in notoriously slippery conceptual territory, another reason
for their undertheorization within historical materialism, but failing to account for them leaves our understanding of
subjectivity hollow and unable fully to capture what we can plainly perceive ourselves to be.
ENDNOTES
1
See, for example, just within the past decade, Bianchin (2021), Celikates (2018), Haslanger (2017), Lampert (2021), Ng
(2015, 2019, 2021) Ponce de Leon and Rockhill (2020), Rehmann (2013), Reynolds (2023), and Stanley (2015).
2
In 2004, social psychologist David Weltman wrote of an “ideology of anti-ideology” in British politics, which he saw epito-
mized in the “Third Way” of Tony Blair, who “evokes inclusiveness and the promise of balanced dialogue between what were
formerly antagonists” (p. 84). Blair’s US counterpart, George W. Bush, simultaneously enjoyed enormous popular support as
CUNNINGHAM 11
he, with the help of Blair’s UK and much of continental Europe, prosecuted his disastrous military interventions in the Mid-
dle East. Given the professed, though highly selective, libertarianism of the new far right, it seems prescient that Weltman
continued, “the very act of criticizing partisan divisiveness involved setting up a new political division, and in this sense the
Third Way can be seen as a particular species of politics of non-politics. In recommending a politics without adversaries, it is
at the same time defining politics. . . as the adversary” (pp. 84–85).
3
Kirun Sankaran’s (2020) article “What’s New in the New Ideology Critique?” attempted to invalidate much of this recent dis-
course by arguing that the concept of “ideology” employed by “the new ideology critics” (especially Haslanger and Celikates)
can be fully replaced by the game-theory concept of “convention,” “an equilibrium solution to a social coordination problem” (p.
1446), like driving on the left or right side of the road. While I have my own criticisms of Sankaran’s targets and agree with
some of his, this reduction of “ideology” to “convention” radically neutralizes the concept and trivializes the discussion. Aside
from operating with a narrow and uninformed understanding of what “the Marxian concept of ideology” is (“a collective epis-
temic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements” (p. 1441)), aside from unfairly representing his
targets (he criticizes Haslanger, especially, for assuming that ideology-critique will change the world by changing people’s
ideas, a notion that she herself directly criticizes (Haslanger, 2017), and aside from showing remarkable ignorance of the
history of ideology theories beyond the past decade, Sankaran’s argument glibly sidesteps the fact that ideologies, even as
conventions, exist for a social purpose and in a context of power relations. Ideologies exist to further particular agents’ inter-
ests, such as capital accumulation and power acquisition, and to suborn to those ends other agents who might not pursue
them on their own. The successful implantation and maintenance of a “convention” depends upon relations of force, among
other factors. Even the convention of driving on the right or left side of the road, intended to signify total value-neutrality,
presupposes a state with police powers and ideologically maintained authority. Sankaran’s impatient and ill-humored dis-
cussion, designed to discourage rather than to advance new thought, merely illustrates one dimension of how ideologies
operate in society and thereby obscures the question of why they exist.
4
Ponce de Leon and Rockhill (2020) helpfully discuss the affects, as an element of their “compositional theory of ideology,” via
Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism in Capital, Vol. 1: “Commodity fetishism is not . . . purely subjective or a simple illusion,
nor does it only exist in the realm of ideas. On the contrary, it is a constitutive aspect of the collective sensorium that has been
socially constructed under capitalism. And this sensorium is as affective and libidinal as it is value-laden and often uncon-
scious. Indeed, this is one of the most important features of Marx’s elucidation of commodity fetishism . . . . For in addition
to constituting a shared sensorium that is ideational, practical, and perceptual, ideology functions as a social system of col-
lective values, unconscious feelings, and uncontrollable cravings. The commodified universe of capitalism arouses desires,
produces needs, drives obsessions, concocts baseless anxieties, perpetuates fear, and creates mesmerizing spectacles of a
world of pleasure in order to mask a world of pain.”
5
See Rehmann (2013): “The identification of the concept of ideology with thought and perception in general was arguably
one of the main intellectual strategies in bourgeois academia to sanitise and superannuate the challenge of Marx and Engels’
ideology theory, namely by taking off the critical edge of the concept of ideology by over-generalizing it. A similar roll-back
occurred in ‘Marxism-Leninism’ as well.”
6
“[O]ne possible response to the many problems of ideology critique is to argue that we need to continue the ‘materialization’
of the project of critical theory. This, in essence, is the argument Althusser started to put forward in the mid-1970s. It is well
known that earlier in his career, Althusser and his circle had looked to Marx’s late works—and especially Capital—for the
true, scientific Marxism. But by the 1970s, Althusser rejects this approach; and by his 1978 essay Marx in his Limits, he now
sees Marx’s entire oeuvre as a protracted struggle to overcome idealism and establish a new materialist basis for critical
theory” (p. 170).
7
The 1970s produced two major critical responses to Althusser by esteemed historians, Pierre Vilar’s (1973) “Marxist His-
tory, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser” and E.P. Thompson’s (1978) The Poverty of Theory or An
Orrery of Errors. Both discuss concrete ways in which Althusser’s treatment of “history” is out of touch with the concept of
history that emerges from the historian’s practice of constructing it. Thompson’s essay is notorious among those friendly to
Althusser for its rhetorical posturing and straw-manning; I think Stuart Hall’s (1988) assessment is apt: “While I believe The
Poverty of Theory to have been an ill-judged, intemperate enterprise, conducted by way of brilliant but crude polemic and
caricature, where skillful argument and serious exemplification were the modes required, it clearly has a point.” That point,
as I elaborate below, is that the privileging of “theory” over empirical research effected by Althusser and his followers is
nonmaterialist, detrimental to the pursuit of historical research, and implicitly authoritarian. Vilar’s discussion, meanwhile,
confronts Althusser’s positions more honestly but is limited by the fact that, given its early date, its conclusions are based
almost exclusively on Reading Capital. See also the 1987 interview with Vilar (2022) recently published for the first time in
English in New Left Review. There Vilar reports, “I showed Althusser the manuscript [of ‘Marxist History’], to which he gave
his full approval. ‘This is the point of view of the historian,’ he wrote to me. ‘The historian is responding to the accusation
that he is “falling into historicism”; and he suspects me a little of “falling into theoreticism”; on the one side the philosopher,
on the other the practitioner of history; Marx is perhaps the only one who has attempted to be both; a useful discus-
sion indeed!’” Althusser also drafted a short reply to Vilar, now published in the volume History and Imperialism: Writings,
1963–1986.
12 CUNNINGHAM
8
Lampert (2021) points out that “Althusser indicates repeatedly in his 1978 essay [‘Marx in His Limits’] that the arguments
put forward in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses need to be ‘rectified’ or ‘extended.’ It is a project that Althusser
continued to develop over the 1970s and 1980s, and one that he never finished; however, he has taken the first steps across
the ‘absolute limit’ of materialism.” Be that as it may, Lampert’s attempt to continue Althusser’s project makes use of no
other text by Althusser than the two “Ideology” essays (mainly the famous first one). Althusser, of course, had plenty to say
about ideology in his classic early works, yet most discussions of his theory of ideology focus, as does Lampert and as do I
here, almost entirely on these later essays. Lampert justifies this choice, for his own purposes, in a way that applies as well
to mine: “Rehmann writes that Althusser ‘had already developed’ the ‘entire concept of ideology in general’ at work in the
ISAs essay in For Marx. Eagleton makes the same claim. The problem is that Althusser’s work in the 1960s is still continuous
with the idealist tradition of ideology, treating ideology as an unconscious ‘discourse’ which produces a ‘subject-effect.’ By
the end of the 1960s, however (and coinciding with the composition of the Ideology and Ideological State apparatuses essay),
Althusser critically rejects his own ‘theoreticist’ early work. Thus. . . the position put forward in the ISAs essay ought to be
read as a criticism of that early work, not as continuous with it. . . [L]ooking to this earlier work for help interpreting what
Althusser says about ideological apparatuses will seriously mislead the reader” (pp. 172–173).
9
Vilar (1973), discussing the value of non-Marxist economic research to Marxist theory, writes, “[W]hat we must strive to
think out historically (if we want to ‘understand the facts’ as Marx likes to say) is how a theory, because it is partial (the
theory of one level of one mode of production) yet claims universality, may serve simultaneously as a practical and as an
ideological tool, in the hands of one class, and for one period of time.”
10
See Hall (1988): “Ruling or dominant conceptions of the world do not directly prescribe the mental content of the illusions
that supposedly fill the heads of the dominated classes. But the circle of dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power
to map or classify the world for others; its classifications do acquire not only the constraining power of dominance over other
modes of thought but also the inertial authority of habit and instinct.”
11
See Dolar (1993): “There is a sudden and abrupt transition from individual—a pre-ideological entity, a sort of materia prima—
into ideological subject, the only kind of subject there is for Althusser.” Dolar actually defends this abruptness of transition:
“I think we should hold to the idea of sudden emergence and abrupt passage as a deeply materialist notion. . . . Althusser
has only pursued, with rare consequence, a basic structuralist insight: structure always springs up suddenly, from nothing,
without any transitional stages” (p. 77). Perhaps this is so in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it surely is not so in history. Dolar
and Zizek (1989) developed Althusser’s basic insights about ideology into a fuller and more explicitly Lacanian account of
subject-formation, but this insistence on the suddenness of genuine transitions, as well as the centrality of individual subjec-
tivity to psychanalytic theorization, renders doubtful the utility of such an account to articulating a truly historical theory of
ideology. On the limitations of Lacanian psychoanalysis for theorizing ideology, see also Hall (1988).
12
See Johnson (2022), who elaborates how The German Ideology was in fact constructed as a continuous text by posthumous
editors from a series of articles Marx and Engels intended for publication in an aborted journal.
13
See Lordon (2014): “One could even ask whether capitalist society is not the first to exhibit a comprehensive regime of desire
and affects. . . . The passionate temperament of employment, now richer than both the Marxian thesis of naked exploitation
and its continuation in the sociology of Fordist consumption implicitly assumed, ends neither with the desire for the money
that affords survival, nor with that for the consumption goods that solicit the compulsion to buy. . . the affects-desires that
capitalism was proposing to its enlistees fell short of taking away the sting of the idea that ‘real life is elsewhere.’ . . . But what
if it can now convince employees that their working life would more and more become simply their life, and that the former
would provide the latter with its best opportunities for joy?”
14
The study of political affects has drawn increased scholarly attention over the past two decades across a broad and diverse
array of disciplines. The volume The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior (Neuman et al., 2007)
presents research by many prominent scholars working at the intersection of political science and psychology and provides
a good introduction to that discourse. Martha Nussbaum (2001, 2004, 2010) has written extensively and compellingly about
the place of emotions in a liberal society, especially vis-à-vis the legal system. Within phenomenologically oriented Conti-
nental philosophy, Brian Massumi (2002, 2015) and John Protevi (2009) have developed influential political theories of the
affects. Within Marxian theory, Frédéric Lordon (2014, 2016, 2022) and Jason Read (2017) are doing exciting theoretical
work in the Althusserian-Spinozist tradition, and Idit Dobbs-Weinstein (2015) consistently emphasizes the centrality of the
affects to politics, especially where the latter touches religion. Finally, more peripheral to political affect as such but relevant
to the present discussion is The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory (Buchanan & Powell 2018), which combines
political theory with evolutionary biology in attempting to account for the long-term development of moral sentiments. This
is only a very cursory summary of several discourses which have similar objects but communicate little with each other.
15
I joke, but cliches and popular sayings, as Freud knew well, do often usefully encapsulate the contours of affective life that
theory has difficulty mapping.
16
See Aristotle (1984): The opening sentence of the Politics states, “Every state [polis] is a community of some kind, and every
community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good.”
17
See also Marx (1973) and Marx (1981). Marx’s concept of “metabolism” has sparked much recent discussion, most notably
in Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017). For a good
CUNNINGHAM 13
historical-semantic explanation of why Marxists only lately recognized the importance of this concept, see Ian Angus (2018).
See also John Bellamy Foster (2013).
18
See Norbert Elias (1992).
19
See Rehmann (2013): “Althusser restricted himself to picking out [from Marx and Engels’ writings] terms like ‘illusory’ and
drew the conclusion that ideology, here, was ‘pure illusion,’ which showed for him that the concept of ideology was ‘not
Marxist.’ But as soon as one takes Marx and Engels’s complex arrangement of gender, class, and state into consideration,
one can see that they had in fact undertaken a decisive shift toward ideology-theory that, instead of clinging to a naïve
concept of ‘false consciousness,’ conceived of the ideological as a material and institutional arrangement in society.” See
also Ponce de Leon and Rockhill (2020).
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How to cite this article: Cunningham, D. (2023). Ideology, history, and political affect. Constellations, 1–14.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12678
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Daniel Cunningham teaches ethics at Villanova University. He is working to develop an historical materialist
theory of political culture.

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DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.

Ideology, history, and political affect

Constellations. 2023;1–14. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1

1 “IDEOLOGY HAS NO HISTORY”

“To think everything historically, that is Marxism.”

2 FROM IDEOLOGICAL INTERPELLATION TO IDEOLOGICAL CULTIVATION

3 IDEOLOGICAL CULTIVATION AND OBJECTS OF AFFECTIVE ATTACHMENT

3.1 Institutional objects of attachment: Community, power, and economy

3.2 Temporal objects of attachment: Pastness and futurity

4 CONCLUSION: AMPLIFYING THE “MATERIALITY OF THE IDEOLOGICAL”

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