refugees from Nazism, simply projects the 'extreme' ideological universe of Fascism on to the quite different structures of liberal capitalist regimes. Does all ideology work by the identity principle, ruthlessly expunging whatever is heterogeneous to it? What, for example, of the ideology of liberal humanism, which, in however specious and restricted a fashion, is able to make room for variousness, plurality, cultural relativity, concrete particularity? Adorno and his fellow workers deliver us something of a straw target of ideology, in the manner of those post-structuralist theorists for whom all ideology without exception would appear to turn upon metaphysical absolutes and transcendental foundations. The real ideological conditions of Western capitalist societies are surely a good deal more mixed and self-contradictory, blending 'metaphysical' and pluralistic discourses in various measures. An opposition to monotonous self-identity ('It takes all kinds to make a world'); a suspicion of absolute truth claims ('Everyone's entitled to their point of view'); a rejection of reductive stereotypes ('I take people as I find them'); a celebration of difference ('It'd be a strange world if we all thought the same'): these are part of the stock in trade of popular Western wisdom, and nothing is to be politically gained by caricaturing one's antagonist. Simply to counterpose difference to identity, plurality to unity, the marginal to the central, is to lapse back into binary opposition, as the more subtle deconstructors are perfectly aware. It is pure formalism to imagine that otherness, heterogeneity and marginality are unqualified political benefits regardless of their concrete social content. Adorno, as we have seen, is not out simply to replace identity with difference; but his suggestive critique of the tyranny of equivalence leads him too often to 'demonize' modern capitalism as a seamless, pacified, self-regulating system. This, no doubt, is what the system would like to be told; but it would probably be greeted with a certain scepticism in the corridors of Whitehall and Wall Street.

The later Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas follows Adorno in dismissing the concept of a Marxist science, and in refusing to assign any particular privilege to the consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat. But whereas Adorno is then left with little to pit against the system but art and negative dialectics, Habermas turns instead to the resources of communicative language. Ideology for him is a form of communication systematically distorted by power -- a discourse which has become a medium of domination, and which serves to legitimate relations of organized force. For hermeneutical philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer, misunderstandings and lapses of

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