The theory of ideology

The work of Marx and Engels provides a series of brilliant insights into the socio historic genesis of ideas and their role in history. In contemporary Marxism, the concept of ideology refers not merely to abstract systems of thought, institutionally recognized as such but to something much broader. A Marxist account of practical ideologies would necessarily involve their location within an analysis of production relations, not in the sense that the latter mechanistically determine the former, but in the sense of their inseparability. In the last decade, much of the advances made in the understanding of ideology has centred on the question of language. Gramsci was the first to expound systematically the concept of hegemony and identify its political significance. The understanding of the ideological matrix within which the subject is produced in bourgeois society involves examining the forms of self-representation through the rituals and practices and myths.