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Reviewed by:
  • Ιδεολογία και γλώσσα
  • Dionysios Goutsos
Spiros A. Moschonas . Σπύρος Α. Μοσχονάς , Ιδεολογία και γλώσσα. Athens: Patakis. 2005. Pp. 338. €25.00.

It is rare that an author attempts to clear the ground around such a controversial "keyword" (in Raymond Williams' terms) as ideology—and, even moreso, in Greek. Spiros A. Moschonas undertakes this task with remarkable originality, grounding his discussion in an in-depth reading of an impressive range of works in a variety of disciplines, resulting in a book that broadens the reader's understanding of this important subject. His aims are twofold: first, to provide a sound definition of the term and, second, through this, to specify the role and function of linguistic ideologies. To this end, he first studies the political and philosophical underpinnings of the notion, with an emphasis on the important paradigms developed by Destutt de Tracy and by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. He then provides a list of the ten defining features of ideology, a list he expands in the third and final chapter to include a metalinguistic feature that he deploys to discuss ideologies on language, of language and in language. In his wide-ranging examination, the author skilfully employs a variety of approaches drawing on analytical philosophy, semiotics, formal semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics.

The book begins by tracing the genealogy of the term 'ideology' back to its original creators, the French idéologues of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the purported originator of the term, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) and his monumental four-volume Eléments d'Idéologie. Moschonas, drawing on the work of noted linguist Sylvaine Auroux, claims that de Tracy's founding principles, which give priority to the representation (or "idea") of existence over existence itself and to the speaking subject over the judgment expressed by (presumably) him, have not been neglected by later writers, but in fact they have constituted a common ground for thinking about the subject, while at the same time de Tracy's call for a science of ideology has been abandoned. The descriptive view of the idéologues is contrasted with Marx and Engels's critical examination of the term in their Critique of German Ideology. In this work, Marx and Engels introduced the famous distinction between base and superstructure, as well as the pejorative view of ideology as false consciousness, of which both are deemed by the author as logically simplifying or even naïve. Later Marxist theorists built on these basic views and tried to develop a metatheory of ideology that relied heavily on a strong version of linguistic relativism, a version which fully identified language with thought.

His discussion of these two paradigms leads Moschonas to propose that there is a fundamental distinction between an ideology (ιδεολογία) and its "underlying" conceptual system (ιδεαλογία, as the first Greek translations of the term idéologie would have it). The combination of the two fields is, according to the author, based on implication or entailment: an ideology implies a conceptual system but the reverse does not hold (there are many conceptual systems which are not ideological). Accordingly, indexes of an ideology can be traced in language but an ideology cannot be fully reconstructed through its linguistic [End Page 344] features alone. On the basis of this conclusion, in his second chapter Moschonas proposes an index of ideology, predicated on eight defining features, which the author presents in the form of statements ("theses" or "principles"). They are:

  1. 1. Ideologies are systems of ideas.

  2. 2. They have a social organization and communicative dimension.

  3. 3. They are only found in a domain of collective opposition.

  4. 4. They are historical phenomena.

  5. 5. They are stereotypical.

  6. 6. They are defeasible.

  7. 7. They employ normative rules, although they can be described by constitutive rules.

  8. 8. They are performative, something which in turn implies that each ideology partly corresponds to reality and partly does not.

The first "thesis" is the fundamental one, in the light of which the others should be viewed. Much of the chapter is devoted to explaining in more detail the systematic nature of ideology, and the author does this by elaborating on Roland Barthes' view of ideology/connotation as a second degree semiotic system...

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