'proletarian ideology' in the late 1920s in order to designate not the 'distortion' of proletarian consciousness under the pressure of bourgeois ideology but the very 'subjective' driving force of proletarian revolutionary activity, this shift in the notion of ideology was strictly correlative to the reinterpretation of Marxism itself as an impartial 'objective science' as a science that does not in itself involve the proletarian subjective position: Marxism first, from a neutral distance of metalanguage, ascertains the objective tendency of history towards Communism; then it elaborates the 'proletarian ideology' in order to induce the working class to fulfil its historical mission. A further example of such a shift is the already mentioned passage of Western Marxism from Critique of Political Economy to Critique of Instrumental Reason: from Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and the early Frankfurt School, where ideological distortion is derived from the 'commodity form', to the notion of Instrumental Reason which is no longer grounded in a concrete social reality but is, rather, conceived as a kind of anthropological, even quasi-transcendental, primordial constant that enables us to explain the social reality of domination and exploitation. This passage is embedded in the transition from the post-World War I universe, in which hope in the revolutionary outcome of the crisis of capitalism was still alive, into the double trauma of the late 1930s and 1940s: the 'regression' of capitalist societies into Fascism and the 'totalitarian' turn of the Communist movement. ⁷

However, such an approach, although it is adequate at its own level, can easily ensnare us in historicist relativism that suspends the inherent cognitive value of the term 'ideology' and makes it into a mere expression of social circumstances. For that reason, it seems preferable to begin with a different, synchronous approach. Apropos of religion (which, for Marx, was ideology par excellence), Hegel distinguished three moments: doctrine, belief, and ritual; one is thus tempted to dispose the multitude of notions associated with the term 'ideology' around these three axes: ideology as a complex of ideas (theories, convictions, beliefs, argumentative procedures); ideology in its externality, that is, the materiality of ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses; and finally, the most elusive domain, the 'spontaneous' ideology at work at the heart of social 'reality' itself (it is highly questionable if the term 'ideology' is at all appropriate to designate this domain -- here it is exemplary that, apropos of commodity fetishism, Marx never used the term 'ideology' ⁸ ). Let us recall the case of liberalism: liberalism is a doctrine (developed from Locke to Hayek) materialized in rituals and apparatuses (free press, elections, market, etc.) and active in the 'spontaneous' (self-) experience of subjects as 'free individuals'. The order of contributions in this Reader follows this line that, grosso modo,

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