individualist, achievement-orientated, hierarchical and non-manual values of the school -- values which seem to involve 'bourgeois hegemony' over and in the school system, the central ISA in Althusser's view of mature capitalism. Of course, AHT introduce Willis in order to show the school's failure to indoctrinate the adolescent working class. But the evidence could equally be used, not to prove Althusser's 'conventional statement', but at least to make it rather plausible. Suppose, for example, that the school had embodied the ideology of this working-class youth: 'a refusal to submit to authority; the value of solidaristic collectivism and the rejection of the various elements of the individualist ethos; a glorification of manual labour; and an awareness that labour has only a commodity status in the modern economy, coupled with [rejection] of this fact'. Is it not rather plausible that bourgeois state power would then have been in jeopardy?

AHT's 'stress definition' of DIT -- in which it is equated with emphasis on ideology -- is the loosest of the three but apparently the most important to the authors. Whereas the identifiable definition identifies the target, and the construct provides an easy route of attack, as well as a catchy title for the enterprise, the 'stress definition' commands and connects the other two across all logical hiatuses, supplying the energy and meaning for the whole polemic. It is precisely with the 'stress definition', however, that the argument of DIT breaks down. For AHT do not really seem to have appreciated that they have a much more restricted definition of ideology than the people they attack. Towards the end of the book AHT claim: 'In our argument we have so far equated "ideology" with beliefs' (p. 188 ). That is not quite true. In reality, they equate ideology with normative beliefs, without making clear to themselves that there might be other beliefs -- about what exists and what does not, about who one is, about what is possible and what is not, and so on. Quite correctly AHT assert that I there is an important distinction between the acceptance of social arrangements because they appear just, and acceptance simply because they are there, or because they appear as a coercive external fact'. 'We do not understand this kind of pragmatic acceptance', they continue, 'as entailing the possession of any set of beliefs, attitudes or false consciousness. Instead pragmatic acceptance is the result of the coercive quality of everyday life and of the routines that sustain it' (p. 166 ; emphasis added).

Now, AHT's conception of ideology is not shared by the theorists

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