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The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, by Michele Barrett. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991. $37.50; paper, $12.95. Pp. viii. 194.
In the preface to this book, Michele Barrett announces that her original intention was to evaluate various interpretations of the concept of ideology "in Marxisant [sic] and broader circles" for the purpose of adapting it to social divisions other than class. In the end this gave way, for her, to only a "lukewarm" acceptance of the concept of ideology for social analysis. She arrives at this conclusion after a foray through the works of Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, Althusser, Lacan, and finally Foucault (but not Mannheim!), all of which demonstrate "the more general weakness of Marxism, in particular its universalism." A better theory of subjectivity, she suggests, might be offered by "the psychoanalytic project" (vii), an idea to which she occasionally alludes, but does not, in fact, develop. Thus, this book remains a review of the literature, with no original thesis of its own.
Barrett begins with Marx himself, with six different definitions of ideology, three from The German Ideology, one from The Critique of Political Economy, and two from contemporary interpreters, Stuart Hall and John Mepham, commenting on The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Capital respectively. These are shown to be in some contradiction, which troubles Barrett for Marx but not for Foucault, in whom she finds contradiction to be...