values. Social integration and system integration can vary independently. Social classes do have different and conflicting ideologies but are, nevertheless, bound together by the network of objective social relations. (p. 168 )

This is a very serious work on a very important topic: it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of social order and social domination, two things which in human history have meant the same, alas. Since AHT have also been asked to review my own The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, it may be of interest to note the areas of convergence with The Dominant Ideology Thesis. The two books appeared in the same year, partly addressing the same problems, but were written from very different intellectual, political and national backgrounds, with no apparent knowledge of each other. Both argue that existing order/domination is not maintained, to any significant extent, by a belief among the ruled in the rulers' right to rule. Both stress the crucial importance of non-normative constraint, the different relations of different classes to the same ideology, and the lack of coherence and consistency of most ideologies. It may also be the case that each of the two works would have benefited from knowledge and use of the other. Many of my propositions and conceptual distinctions could have been fruitfully concretized and corroborated by the empirical readings that AHT collect and introduce into their discussion. Their exposition could probably have been clarified and sharpened by parts of the analytical instrumentarium developed in my book. In spite of their partial confluence, however, DIT and The Ideology of Power. . . remain fundamentally different. In at least one sense they are even opposites. For while the latter is, above all, a constructive effort to develop new tools for grasping the complex relations of ideology and power, DIT is mainly a work of destruction. Not only is it about something which the authors are out to destroy. It ends with a call for silence about ideology: 'Since the real task is always to understand the economic and political forces which shape people's lives, too much has been said about ideology in recent decades' (p. 191 ). This sentence seems to imply two claims: that AHT have said virtually all there is to say about ideology, at least for the immediate future; and that, for all practical purposes, ideology has nothing to do with how economic and political forces shape people's lives. Let us test the weight of these claims.

If enough has been said about ideology with the publication of DIT, it must follow that enough has been said about DIT. That is what AHT were hunting throughout their book, and most readers will have noticed, even after a first reading, that their numerous shots scored several 'hits'. But what animal is it, whose hide the proud hunters have

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