primacy of the economy, it would be difficult to imagine any other feature so characteristic of Marxist accounts of ideology. Marxists have often attacked the sociology of knowledge for adopting a conception of ideology as covering all kinds of knowledge, thus depriving the concept of what they see as its vital critical edge. To return to our original comparison, Lukács ⁴ felt that Mannheim's work obscured the crucial differences between true and false consciousness, while Adorno ⁵ suggested that Mannheim called everything into question but criticized nothing.

We turn now to one of the central elements of Therborn's theory: the function of ideology. Therborn identifies four (and only four) dimensions of human subjectivity, and then argues that ideology's function is to construct those subjectivities: 'My thesis is that these four dimensions make up the fundamental forms of human subjectivity, and that the universe of ideologies is exhaustively structured by the four main types of interpellation that constitute these four forms of subjectivity' (p. 23 ). We see several difficulties arising out of Therborn's theoretical position. In the first place, he comes close to arguing that the forms of human subjectivity determine the forms of ideology, which would commit him to a problematic of the subject as the ground of all ideology. A second difficulty with this and other theories of interpellation is their assumption that the subject is an individual agent, the person, when on the contrary the constitution of 'persons' in late capitalism often requires the formation of collective agents such as business corporations, professional associations, trade unions and trade associations. It is perfectly possible to describe social epochs (classical Rome or late capitalism) in which legal, social or religious definitions of 'the person' do not coincide with effective economic agents. Therborn's argument may work for 'natural persons', but it needs to be shown how it applies in the case of 'juristic persons'. One can further ask whether the formation of corporate structures has to be by interpellation. In the third place, ideology does not invariably constitute persons; it can also de-constitute them. For example, the laws of coverture precluded women from personhood on entry into marriage. It is more pertinent to claim that ideologies function to differentiate persons from not-persons (for example, children, married women, slaves and aliens). These remarks raise the traditional philosophical problem of whether subjects require bodies and, indeed, what 'bodies' are. The variations on this union of subject/body are

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