Thursday, January 22, 2026

The Tensions of Ideology: Marx and Machiavelli, Althusser and Gramsci

From a presentation I gave at Space Gallery 

As I said before on this blog, ideology is perhaps better grasped as an intersecting field of problems and questions than a concept or theory. It is a way of thinking together the relation between the question of knowledge, the social order, and political power. Of course, these different aspects are unequally and unevenly applied in different thinkers, a point that I tried to sketch out earlier with Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx.