The Dominant Ideology Thesis should be read with a se sense of humour. The vociferous and voracious animal, which Abercrombie, Hill and Turner claim to have hunted out of every lair from medieval France to contemporary Britain, is little more than a blown-up balloon, against which little more than a pin or a good pencil is required. (But it is a balloon which deserves to be punctured.) Beneath the extravagant claims, DIT contains some sound sociological sense. Its authors are quite correct in emphasizing the usually fractured and contradictory character of dominant ideologies and the resilient ideological autonomy of subordinate classes. They are right to underline the crucial function of 'non-normative aspects of system integration' -- a stress already developed by David Lockwood a score or so years ago. Their book does, however, involve a celebration of obscurantism which, if it were to become influential, would have very serious implications. For in their declamatory references to 'the dull compulsion of economic relations' and their closing statement that 'too much has been said about ideology in recent decades', they are paying obscurantist homage to what might be called a 'black-box' conception of human subjectivity. Black-box theories do have certain legitimate functions in science: they are economic, and they make it possible to advance by circumventing terrains of ignorance that are difficult to penetrate. But to turn such a makeshift solution into a principle, some 115 years after it was first proposed, seems to merit the harsh designation of a celebration of obscurantism. What of the people who are 'dully compelled' to become and to remain wage-labourers, or salaried sociology lecturers? What do they know, what do they feel, what do they hope for, what do they fear, what do they consider 'fun', what do they think is possible or impossible? Or do they not have any beliefs at all? Abercrombie, Hill and Turner have a perfect right to regard such questions as boring or trivial. But social science and historiography would themselves become dull and boring if they restrained other people from trying to answer them.

AHT remain imprisoned in one of the traditional conceptions of ideology: that of normative beliefs of right and wrong. Modern analyses of ideology and discourse have to break out of -- are breaking out of -- that straitjacket. I might be allowed to refer to my own book as one little example. Instead of barricading itself against the notion of subjectivity, as AHT propose, historical materialism has to confront it and account for its vicissitudes. Unless we transcend what Marx and Weber knew about the 'dull compulsion' of the market, we cannot comprehend the new social movements (the student, the women's, the

-177-