because AHT have hardly understood the purpose of Althusseret al., and spend most of their time simply talking at a tangent. When Althusser wanted to argue that the Catholic Church was the central ISA in pre-capitalist Europe, he said: 'It is no accident that all ideological struggle, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century . . . was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious struggle; rather, this is a function precisely of the dominant position of the religious ideological state apparatus.' ⁷ Poulantzas had earlier made a related point: 'The dominance of this [dominant] ideology is shown by the fact that the dominated classes live their conditions of political existence through the forms of dominant political discourse: this means that often they live even their revolt against the domination of the system within the frame of reference of the dominant legitimacy.' ⁸

We cannot expect AHT to have looked for evidence for or against these notions. But in arguing against their own construct, they have come up with some rather telling illustrations of Althusser's and Poulantzas's arguments. Against the idea of Catholic incorporation of the peasantry, for example, they write:

In the Black Mass in the region of Labor in 1609 the Catholic Mass was celebrated in reverse by a priest who had his face to the ground while elevating a black Host. In Catalan witchcraft in the same period, Latin prayers were recited backwards while in the Midi Feast of Fools, Massbouffe and Mass-farce turned the Church's sacred ritual into a public burlesque. In the absence of a real revolutionary strategy, the peasantry had to content itself with a purely farcical portrayal of the idea that 'the first shall be last'. (pp. 78 -9)

When they come to mid-Victorian Britain, AHT invoke studies of the labour aristocracy to support their view that 'apparently bourgeois beliefs [of self-help, improvement, independence, respectability] had distinctive, corporate and class meanings for the proletariat' (p. 117 ).

In AHT's opinion, Althusser's essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' "is moving to the conventional statement of the dominant ideology thesis. . . . This position is summarized well in Althusser's own words: "To my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a very long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses' (p. 24 ; emphasis omitted). AHT make no attempt to disprove Althusser's statement. But they do make various points which indirectly pertain to it. Their discussion of the supportive relationship between Church and feudal aristocracy is of the kind we might expect from an Althusserian perspective. Again, in their summary of Willis's Learning to Labour (p. 150) they refer to the

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