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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4547075" data-attributes="member: 42582">Ferratus, I'm not quite sure who I'm arguing with here or what exactly the position is that you're coming from, but anyway, some responses.As I said, few historians today accept Marx's theory of history.This is not what the theory of ideology is, as found in the early Marx and developed by the Frankfurt school, Habermas etc. It's hard to give actual examples of contemporary (neo-)Marxist analysis of particular institutions or phenomena, as it violates the board's "no politics" rule, but it is not regarded by all as discredited. If you want to look at a recent book that I think usefully deploys more-or-less Marxist notions, try Scott Veitch's "Law and Irresponsibility".Whether or not this is true has little bearing on the explanatory utility of the Marxist theory of ideology, which is not a theory of the unconscious but rather a theory of certain social phenomena.Durkheim's notion of the collective consciousness is not any sort of account of a shared societal mind or species memory (and thus does not really resemble Jungian notions of such a thing). As with the Marxist theory of ideology, it is an account of certain social phenomena. To see the collective consciousness in action, perform the following experiement: walk into a restaurant, stand up on the counter and start taking off your trousers, and observe the near-uniform response of shock and horror from any onlookers (I perform a slightly tamer version of this experiment in class to explain Durkheim's basic idea to my students).Well, I think anyone who can't find quite a degree of illumination of his/her experiences from Weber's writings on bureaucracy, and on other rationalising processes of modernity, hasn't spent enough time trying to work with and understand white-collar organisations!Well, I'm not sure who you're counting as a Hegelian - I don't think that Durkheim is a Hegelian in any particularly interesting sense, for example (he makes no use of the dialectic), and Weber is a neo-Kantian heavily influenced by Neitzche (a great anti-Hegelian). But I think that Raymond Geuss's defence of the dialectic (as developed by authors like Adorno) found in his Outside Ethics is very interesting, and persuasive to some reasonable degree. And three of my favourite historians are EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and MI Finley - all Marxists, although none in any very interesting sense a Hegelian, at least to my eye.</blockquote>

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