tradition of working-class radicalism, etc.). In Marxism, the capacity of the ISAs and other socializing institutions to determine class consciousness, especially corporate consciousness, has been greatly exaggerated.

It is not evident, in any case, that societies require the level of ideological support implied by Therborn. As Foucault argues, the individuation, construction and discipline of individuals can be secured by regulatory practices and institutions (panopticism) which do not require subjective consciousness on the part of individual persons.

The drift of our argument is that Therborn overstates the importance of ideology, an overstatement most prominent in his view of ideology constructing subjectivities. We would advocate a much more indeterminate approach: ideology has causally important effects only on some social phenomena at some times. For example, as we tried to show in The Dominant Ideology Thesis, ideology does not generally work to incorporate subordinate classes. Similarly, ideology may or may not have a role in the formation and maintenance of any economic practices. Or -- to take a position advanced by Therborn -- why should one assume that the role of ideology is to form subjectivities? Why, equally, should one not assume that subjectivities are only contingently formed by ideology and can, just as effectively, be created in other ways?

We believe that Therborn is not sufficiently indeterminate, and seems moreover to have allied very different Marxist and sociological forms of determinism. We do not, of course, wish to say that indeterminacy has no limits, a position of mindless empiricism, and in a review article of this length we cannot attempt to tackle the issue of what the limits are, although we have outlined a possible solution for Britain in The Dominant Ideology Thesis. Therborn has written an excellent essay which frees the study of ideology of many of its rigidities. However, in sum, we wish he would take space to say more on a number of issues, particularly on the relationship of the implicit functionalism of subjectivities to the contingent qualities of ideology, on the precise role of the economy, and on the mechanisms of the overdetermination of non-class ideologies by class.

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