demonstrates how this capitulation to the primacy of the doctrine, far from implying the 'end of ideology', asserts the founding gesture of the ideological as such: the call to unconditional subordination and to 'irrational' sacrifice. What liberal criticism (mis)perceives as Fascism's weakness is the very resort of its strength: within the Fascist horizon, the very demand for rational argumentation that should provide grounds for our acceptance of authority is denounced in advance as an index of the liberal degeneration of the true spirit of ethical sacrifice -- as Haug puts it, in browsing through Mussolini's texts, one cannot avoid the uncanny feeling that Mussolini had read Althusser! The direct denunciation of the Fascist notion of the 'community-of-the-people [Volksgemeinschaft]' as a deceptive lure that conceals the reality of domination and exploitation fails to take note of the crucial fact that this Volksgemeinschaft was materialized in a series of rituals and practices (not only mass gatherings and parades but also large-scale campaigns to help the hungry, organized sports and cultural activities for the workers, etc.) which performatively produced the effect of Volksgemeinschaft. ¹⁸

3. In the next step of our reconstruction, this externalization is, as it were, 'reflected into itself': what takes place is the disintegration, self-limitation and self-dispersal of the notion of ideology. Ideology is no longer conceived as a homogeneous mechanism that guarantees social reproduction, as the 'cement' of society; it turns into a Wittgensteinian 'family' of vaguely connected and heterogeneous procedures whose reach is strictly localized. Along these lines, the critiques of the so-called Dominant Ideology Thesis (DIT) endeavour to demonstrate that an ideology either exerts an influence that is crucial, but constrained to some narrow social stratum, or its role in social reproduction is marginal. At the beginnings of capitalism, for example, the role of the Protestant ethic of hard work as an end-in-itself, and so on, was limited to the stratum of emerging capitalists, whereas workers and peasants, as well as the upper classes, continued to obey other, more traditional ethical attitudes, so that one can in no way attribute to the Protestant ethic the role of the 'cement' of the entire social edifice. Today, in late capitalism, when the expansion of the new mass media in principle, at least, enables ideology effectively to penetrate every pore of the social body, the weight of ideology as such is diminished: individuals do not act as they do primarily on account of their beliefs or ideological convictions -- that is to say, the system, for the most part, bypasses ideology in its reproduction and relies on economic coercion, legal and state regulations, and so on. ¹⁹

Here, however, things get blurred again, since the moment we take a closer look at these allegedly extra-ideological mechanisms that regulate

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