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xv PREFACE Today, the predominant motif in investigations into questions concerning the nature and possibilities of contemporary world order ideology has been that of ‘empire’. A small industry of speculations on the imperial nature of our times has appeared since late 2001. The texts under consideration here are not in limited supply. For instance, David Harvey’s The New Imperialism and Michael Mann’s Incoherent Empire, Alain Joxe’sThe Empire of Disorder, Emmanuel Todd’s After the Empire, Derek Gregory’s The Colonial Presen, Michael Ignatieff’s Empire Lite: Nation-building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and Niall Ferguson’s Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire. As a prefatory note, the concept of ideology is often associated with the work of Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and Karl Marx (1818–1883). In general, Marxists approach cultural forms as emerging from specific historical situations that serve particular socioeconomic interests and that carry out important social functions. For Marx and Engels, the cultural ideas of an epoch serve the interests of the ruling class by providing ideologies that legitimate class domination. “Ideology” is therefore a critical term used in Marxist analysis that describes how the dominant ideas of a ruling class promote the interests of that class and help mask oppression and injustices. Marx and Engels argued that during the feudal period, piety, honor, valor, and military chivalry were the ruling ideas of the reigning aristocratic classes. During the capitalist era, values of individualism, profit, competition, and the market became the dominant ideology of the new bourgeois class, which was then consolidating its class power. Because ideologies appear natural and common-sensical, they often are usually invisible and elude criticism. Marx and Engels began their critique of ideology by attempting to show how ruling ideas reproduce dominant societal interests and relations and serve to naturalize, idealize, and legitimate the existing society, its institutions, and its values. In a competitive and atomistic capitalist society, it appears natural to assert that human beings are primarily self-interested and competitive, just as in a communist society; it seems natural to assert that people are cooperative by nature. In fact, human beings and societies are extremely complex and contradictory. Ideology smoothes over contradictions, conflicts, and negative features, idealizing human or social traits like individuality and competition, which are then elevated into governing concepts and values. However, the concept of ideology has been debated for some two hundred years within and without the disciplines of philosophy, politics and sociology. If there are such things as contested concepts, and if there were a prize for the most contested concept, the concept of ideology would very xvi nearly rank first. Nobody can even decide how to pronounce it! Given the existence of these traditional debates and problems concerning the ideological content of ideology itself, one might think it best to throw one’s hands up in despair, and discard the notion all together. Not nowadays! There is much at stake, especially in Africa-a continent being reconquered by ubiquitous forces hidden behind an ideology called World Order. This World Order ideology in this context is understood as a codified justification for social practices, codified in concrete as well as highly abstract systems of rule. In this book, I wish to argue that it is possible to point to some modes of analyzing ideology that at least provide a framework for coping with the issues that the concept of ideology raises in contemporary Africa. Along these lines, I shall present four theses, and give at least a cursory analysis of them. Briefly, first, the concept of ideology has to be separated from the content of science ; second, it is empty of content because what makes belief systems ideological is their incorporation within systems of domination ; third, to understand this incorporation we must analyze the mode in which patterns of signification are incorporated within the medium of day-to-day practices ; finally, we should be critical of the “dominant ideology thesis” elaborated in different versions by such authors as Parsons, Althusser and Habermas. My first thesis is that the notion of ideology has to be disconnected from the philosophy of science, with which in the past it has almost inevitably been bound up. The term ideology was coined as a positive term, meaning something like an all-embracing and encyclopedic form of knowledge, capable of cutting through the resistance of prejudice to produce a form of certain knowledge upon which social technology could in turn be founded. As it...

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