Ideology and the self

MARK WARREN Department of Government, Georgetown University

Theories of ideology are critical when they distinguish beliefs about the social and political world according to their impact on the individuals who hold them. Critical theories are especially concerned with beliefs that reconcile individuals to power relations that are not in their inter- est, that is, beliefs that transform power into domination. Distinguish- ing these kinds of beliefs from others is both necessary and problem- atic. The necessity is primarily normative: any political theory that values the capacities of individuals to determine their futures - as do democratic and democratic socialist theories - needs to distinguish forms of consciousness according to their effects on political self- determination. Yet the distinction is problematic because it is noto- riously difficult to draw without portraying individuals as passive recip- ients of socially determined ideas, and without privileging related dis- tinctions between true and false consciousness that are difficult to justi- fy and easy to abuse.

In this article I examine one facet of this problem by looking at the rela- tion between ideology and the self. I choose this axis of inquiry because of its strategic centrality. The Achilles' heel of critical theories of ideol- ogy has been to show how ideologies penetrate the self while at the same time retaining for normative reasons a conception of the self with capacities for reasoned political discourse and autonomous choice. I I frame the issue through two methodologically limiting cases. The first, the structuralist holism of Althusser, shows the "deep" relations be- tween ideology and domination - an insight further developed by post- structuralists - but does so at the cost of a politically significant con- cept of the individual. The second, an emerging school of rational choice Marxism, attends to what is missing in structuralist/post-struc- turalist approaches by focussing on the agency of individuals. But while rational choice approaches have the virtue of framing individuals' stra-

Theory andSociety 19: 599-634, 1990. �9 1990 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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tegic situations as both active and problematic, their analyses are stunted by axiomatic conceptions of the self and limited conceptions of rationality. These approaches retain individual agency at the cost of suppressing analyses of ideological dimensions of power.

These two cases frame the more general problem within theories of ideology of reconciling normative significance and theoretical adequa- cy. My aim in this article is to offer some suggestions for breaching the hiatus. I draw loosely and critically from rational choice heuristics to clarify some of the demands of the individual level of analysis, especially about how ideologies function for individuals. Looking at the issue in this way, I shall argue, suggests that ideologies are parasitic on situations in which there are trade-offs between self identity and politically significant capacities for self-determination. Ideologies can be produced and reproduced by individuals as they deal with these trade-offs. I shall suggest that analyzing these situations allows us to distinguish forms of consciousness according to their effects in en- abling or subverting capacities for reasoned political discourse and autonomous choice. This approach provides one way of explaining the "deep" nature of ideologies in framing individual actions, while also retaining the distinctions necessary to critical theories of ideology.

What should a critical theory of ideology do?

What we consider an adequate approach to ideology depends, of course, on how we conceive the problematic. Because critical ap- proaches to ideology assume the value of self-determination, they problematize the fact that individuals often have beliefs about the social and political world that form internal blockages to self-deter- mination. Such beliefs have often been identified as false forms of con- sciousness, in contrast to true forms of consciousness that are presum- ably necessary for political self-determination.

The problems with this way of elaborating problematic relations be- tween beliefs and self-determination are well known. The key criticism, which I accept here, is that such distinctions can legitimate political claims to epistemological privilege, allowing truth to be determined by political power. 2 As I shall argue, for both theoretical and political reasons, the normative functions served by the distinction between true and false consciousness cannot, and ought not, refer to the proposi- tional contents of consciousness (that is, its truth or falseness), but

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rather to capacities for self-direction attributable to consciousness. I refer to such capacities as rational autonomy, the ability to reflect on and direct one's desires in such a way that one can develop a life-plan. Although one's desires are inevitably constructed by social and cultural forces, the capacity to reflect on these forces is also socially and cul- turally constructed, not only as a set of cognitive competencies, but also by situations that enable or frustrate the balance between desires and self-reflection necessary for constructing a unified self. Autonomy, as every student of child psychology knows, is a social achievement. That is, I do not mean "autonomy" to refer to an absence of social for- mations of individual capacities for choice, but rather to distinguish between social processes that develop these capacities and those that do not. I intend "rational" to refer to the cognitive qualities of processes that underwrite autonomy. The cognitive dimensions of autonomy become politically relevant when they consist in reasons that can be justified and altered through discourse. That is, if beliefs are held in ways that make them immune to justification and alteration through argument, then they are not held rationally, even though they might be true. As I use it here, then, the notion of rational autonomy refers to a competency to participate in discourse in ways that political reasons can be adjusted and political decisions can be intersubjectively justi- fied. The concept of ideology, I shall suggest, retains its normative sig- nificance if it identifies forms of consciousness that systematically undermine rational autonomy in this sense. Thus, forms of conscious- ness are ideological if (a) they produce a systematic distortion of cogni- tive capacities for discourse - the politically relevant dimension of rational autonomy, and (b) this distortion also functions to support the interests of a dominant against a subordinate class, caste, or group.

In this article I concentrate on (a) and presuppose (b). 3 It is worth emphasizing that both levels of specification are necessary, because the concept of ideology identifies a relationship between individual capaci- ties and political effects. For example, puerile leftists may lack rational autonomy and yet identify with counter-hegemonic movements that align with their interests. Although they may be victimized by their lack of capacities for self-determination, they are not victimized by the po- litical effects of their deficiency, and thus their beliefs are not ideologi- cal in the negative sense I am considering here.

The usefulness of these normative specifications of ideology depends in part on parallel explanatory criteria. It is common in Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of ideology to focus on the roles ideologies play

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in sustaining the hegemony and interests of a dominant class. Most such approaches define forms of consciousness as ideological in terms of their effects in sustaining social relations of power that serve inter- ests of a dominant class, where these interests are partial. Such defini- tions refer to the social functions of forms of consciousness, and thus to normative specifications (b) above. These approaches often assume, erroneously, that the origin and structure of an ideology are explained by its function in reproducing the relations of power of which it is a part. Functional and structural analyses are necessary but not suffi- cient, because they ignore the ways that ideologies are produced or reproduced by individual practices. Because individual practices are not problematized by these approaches, it is difficult for them to focus on the individual capacities that ideologies undermine. 4 By default, they portray ideologies as imposed on cognitively passive individuals by hegemonic classes or cultural structures. This is, of course, an over- extension of functional and structural explanations. It is also implaus- ible: individuals are never passive in their interpretations, ideological or otherwise. 5 Schooling, propaganda, media control, and other institu- tional aspects of hegemonic culture may provide the terms of discourse that frame and limit cognition, but individuals must nonetheless repro- duce these terms, selecting and articulating them in ways that permit a cognitively viable - that is, meaningful - life-world. Indeed, it is quite possible that an ideology or some of its elements may not be imposed by a dominant class at all, but rather that power relations structure existential predicaments that individuals rationalize and lend meaning to, in this way producing ideologies that function to support dominant- class interests without being dominant-class products. 6

There are also epistemological difficulties with the view that ideologies can be imposed on cognitively passive individuals, since it requires something like a positivist theory of meaning. This is roughly the view that meanings are equivalent to semantic units, which are in turn uniquely specified by their references to factual states of affairs. Critical theories of ideology ought to reject this view of meaning because it fails to show how meanings are generated by the situated practices of indi- viduals. To be sure, meanings are symbolically and linguistically struc- tured, but they are also determined by other life-world contingencies: experiences of internal needs and external limits and possibilities, semi-articulate shared norms and customs, features inherent in neces- sarily limited social perspectives, and so on. A theory of ideology, if it is to problematize individual capacities, ought to be consistent with post- Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, that is, the view that meaning

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depends upon situated usages. On this view, ideologies could never be imposed on individuals as meanings, because of the nature of meaning itself. Rather, ideologies must be seen as conceptual structures that - if they are to have an impact - must become meaningful for individuals by being reproduced by t h e m . 7

The cost of neglecting the individual practices and circumstances that reproduce ideologies is an inability to distinguish forms of conscious- ness that dislocate capacities for rational autonomy from those that underwrite them. I point out below that we already categorize certain mechanisms of ideologies according to the cognitive mistakes they embody, and hence according to their effects on individual's cognitive capacities. So there exists a prima facie case for this level of investiga- tion. A critical theory of ideology must build on what we already recog- nize here, showing how cognitive competencies are dislocated as a result of practices that occur under constraints not of the individual's choosing.

The lim#ing cases: Althusser and rational choice Marxism

The reasons for these requirements will be somewhat more clear if we look at two limiting cases in neo-Marxism: the structuralist holism of Althusser, and the axiomatic individualism of rational choice Marxism. In a well-known essay on ideology, Althusser writes that "the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only constitutive of ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects."8 Althusser's now famous suggestion is that ideological structures work "deeply" on individuals, determining the way they understand themselves as subjects by articu- lating their lived experience. His insight is that ideologies can tie indi- viduals' self identities to existing power relations, so much so that de- fining subjectivity is the primary means through which ideologies gain their effects. Certainly no critical theory of ideology is adequate unless it can account for what I refer to as an '~Mthusserian effect," the pro- duction of self identities that are integrated into relations of power.

Yet at the limit, the Althusserian insight requires that we view the world as lacking the possibility of autonomous agents. Most of us find we cannot. This is not because we cannot imagine such a possibility, but rather because we would find such a world to be so morally and politi- cally objectionable that - if this were the only alternative - we would

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prefer to remain with our subject-centered fictions. In a world without autonomous agents we would no longer have grounds for thinldng that our political ideals - moral agency, freedom, responsibility, and collec- tive deliberation and choice - have any basis whatsoever in the nature of the social world. In such a world n o political theory that seeks to guide political action would have a meaningful role.

Althusser's formulations highlight a more general problem within theories of ideology: a seeming trade-off between explanatory adequa- cy and normative relevance. 9 Althusser is right to reject metaphysics of subjectivity: positing that subjective capacities exist because we value them only obscures our abilities to understand their real conditions of existence. Where he is wrong is in failing to distinguish between the effects of different kinds of social determinations as they relate to sub- jectivity. Subjective capacities are never sui generis; the competencies we associate with subjectivity are intersubjectively developed and sus- tained. A theory of ideology should not polarize subjectivity and social determination, but rather distinguish between determinations accord- ing to their effects on the development of subjective competencies. The problems attaching to the Althusserian insight arise whenever ideology is defined without reference to the irreducible imperatives of the life- world; that is, whenever we confuse the functions of ideas in sustaining the individual's sense of self, value, and practices with their functions in sustaining relations of power. 1~

The emerging literature of rational choice Marxism represents the polar opposite of Althusser's approach in that it posits rational indi- vidual agency and admits only those structural and functional explana- tions that can be reduced to unintended consequences of the choices of rational individuals. 11 Rational choice Marxism is the limiting case that complements Althusser: if Althusser reduces individuals to social structures, rational choice Marxism demands that social structures be explained, without residue, as effects of the maximizing decisions of individuals operating under constraints. This would seem to be ex- tremely poor ground upon which to build a theory of ideology. As I have argued elsewhere, the kind of methodological individualism prac- ticed by rational choice Marxism fails to produce a critical social sci- ence let alone a critical theory of ideology because it is indifferent to the ways that power relations can form subjectivity. 12 Nonetheless, there are two aspects of this literature I find important. First, because of its methodological demand that any theory reconcile itself with regulative assumptions about rationality, this literature draws attention

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to the cognitive judgments that reproduce ideologies. 13 Second, be- cause of its related methodological demand that theories show how individuals' judgments maximize their values, it castes the relation be- tween judgments and interests as a problematic. I consider these issues in later sections of this article. I argue toward the end, however, that, as the approach is extended to account for ideological phenomena, it reveals maximizing mechanisms that undermine capacities for judg- ment, drawing into question rational choice assumptions about agency. Thus my interest in rational choice theory is in saving its territory of investigation while rejecting its axioms and techniques.

Distinguishing ideologies according to cognitive effects

These two limiting cases mark off a problematic that is recognized, albeit implicitly, in our common understandings of the effects of ideol- ogies on cognitive judgments. Typically, ideologies are thought to sup- port prevailing relations of power by means of justification (legitima- tion), dissimulation (masking or mystification), or reification (naturali- zation). TM Taken together, these distinctions create a prima facie case for relating the cognitive dimensions of ideology to their Althusserian consequences. What follows is a summary of these cognitive effects.

Ideologies just/fy domination if power relations are transparent - that is, if they are cognitively accessible to individuals - and if they are per- ceived as right or legitimate. Organic conservative ideologies, most institutionalized religions, and most gender ideologies embody this kind of mechanism. In terms of cognitive functions, we might say that justifying mechanisms separate cognitions of power relations from reflexive cognitions of interests. The cognitive distortion in this case is reflexive, signified by a failure to identify interests in autonomy.

Second, ideologies may assert the desirability of a political situation but dissimulate or mask its conditions of realization. Dissimulating ideolo- gies make promises but block cognitive access to power relations that undermine these promises. This can occur in a number of ways.

An ideology may dissimulate by equating a single social relation with a promise, and then abstracting this from the totality of social relations necessary to its realization. When, for example, liberal ideology identi- fies the contractual relation between employer and employee as one of free exchange between equal individuals, it draws attention away from

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relations of dependence that are part of the context of exchange. When these relations are suppressed, then the ideal - here, the individual as a partner in a free, cooperative exchange - seems unproblematic: it is manifested and realized in the exchange. Dissimulations are not lies or falsehoods; the notion of "false consciousness" is especially inapprop- riate here. Rather, they obscure because they highlight some kinds of social contingencies and suppress others. They highlight one kind of social relation (for example, the contractual equality between employer and employee) and suppress others (for example, systematic disadvan- tages in bargaining owing to market conditions, or the cultural manipu- lation of employees' needs and wants in ways that drive them into the exchange). 15

Dissimulations can also work through language. For example, when President Reagan's officers acted outside of their constitutional author- ity in the Iran-Contra affair, the President claimed that "mistakes were made" The passive grammatical construction cognitively severs the President's actions (and inactions) from their legitimation. This in turn cognitively impairs, if only subtly, the individual's capacity to respond in a way that measures promise against performance in public life. Similarly, grammatical associations can identify facts taken from dif- ferent historical totalities in ways that cognitively mask causal pro- cesses. 16 For example, referring to the Contras as "freedom fighters" associates the Contras with partisans of the American revolution through a linguistic equation of symbols from historical totalities that have litfle relation to one another.

Dissimulations may also operate by equating intellectual and affective factors in ways that individuals attach affective significance to public objects, consumer objects, or other externalities unrelated to their needs and goals. For example, advertisements that symbolically equate consumer products with personal prestige and social recognition can cause individuals to misidentify appropriate means of realizing their interests.

Third, ideologies may naturalize or reify what are in fact historically specific conditions of existing arrangements. The products of human actions are mistaken for natural limits of existence, removing these phenomena from the realm of possible political action. Thus existing political arrangements may be accounted for in terms of pre-political universal axioms or laws, objectively discernable through science or reason. From this one may deduce the inevitability of existing arrange-

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ments, thus making their desirability irrelevant. For example, an ideol- ogy may convey the idea that a representative democracy with limited mechanisms for popular influence is not ideal, but it is the best possible given the (behaviorally observable) inability of citizens to deal with complicated political issues. Likewise, liberal market arrangements may produce skewed distributions of goods, but these arrangements seem to be the only ones possible given that humans are (by the axioms of neo-classical economics) motivated by a self-interested rationality. A different sort of example involves reversals of historical causes. The correlation between class and race in the United States can only be construed in racist terms (that is, holding that class status is a result of differing racial capabilities) by forgetting that racial attributes have been reasons for economic discfiminationJ 7 Reifications involve cogni- tions of power relations but they are understood as being outside of the sphere of normative discussion and change.

Why do people think ideologically?

In each of these cases, cognition is severed from context: from the internal context of interests and desires, from an intersubjective context of justification, or from the external context of time, causality, and his- tory. Each case exemplifies missing conditions of rational autonomy in ways that may underwrite domination. If we assume with democratic political theories that individuals have a basic interest in capacities rele- vant to their self-determination, we need to ask why individuals think ideologically if doing so subverts this interest. As I have suggested, the answer that relies on social determinism, that individuals think ideo- logically because they are subjected to hegemonic cultures, propagan- da, persuasion, and the like, is insufficient. It is important to treat the question, "Why do people think ideologically?" as having to do not only with social influences and available interpretive resources, but also with (1) the relation between interests and cognitive judgments, and, (2) the relation between perspectives inherent in individuals' situa- tions and cognitive judgmentsJ 8 As an example of the first relationship, we might find that individuals are faced with choices that do not permit interests in self-esteem and self-determination to be served at the same time. If self-esteem requires that one make sense of a situation in which opportunities for self-determination are lacking (say, as a low-level employee in a corporation), then one may prefer self-esteem to recog- nizing the power relations to which one is subject (say, by identifying oneself as a part of the "corporate family" rather than an instrument of

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someone else's profit). In the second case, ideologies can feed on cogni- tive mistakes that correspond to the perspectival limits inherent in one's situation - a point Lukfics made in arguing that workers' ex- periences of fragmented and "timeless" factory labor induce reifed modes of consciousness. 19

Clearly, these two possibilities can work together and reinforce one another. Here, however, I am especially interested in the first possibili- ty, because this is where we find an Althusserian effect - that is, a rela- tion between ideology and the constitution of the self. Ideologies, I shall suggest, serve fundamental interests in personality formation, but they do so in a way that there is a trade-off between self identity and rational autonomy, leading to an ideologically constituted subjectivity.

I wish to elaborate this possibility by engaging rational choice heuris- tics, because here we find methodological markers for problematics missing in functional and structural approaches. Rational choice theory assumes axiomatically that individual behavior can be explained as an outcome of maximizing values. This assumption raises the question of why, if it is generally in the interests of individuals to be rational - that is, to think in ways that cause actions that maximize values - people would think in ways that are apparently irrational.

Rational choice theories mark out irrationality as an issue by explain- ing behavior as the combined result of a theory of motivation and a theory of judgment. 2~ In its standard form, the theory of motivation includes three kinds of assumptions. First, individuals attempt to maxi- mize their personal gain; they are "selfish" in the sense that they act without regard to the interests of others. Second, motivations are lim- ited to material values, or at least to such motivations as can be as- signed values that can be quantitatively compared. Social rewards such as recognition are secondary, and one can ultimately trace them to "first order" material utilities. ~1 Finally, individuals are assumed to prefer short-term to long-term rewards.

The theory of judgment holds that, because values are scarce and therefore costly, individuals will assign costs and benefits to various strategies in ways that maximize satisfactions and minimize costs. Recent work has tended to look more closely at assumptions about judgment to explain why individuals often settle for sub-optimal rewards. Theories of judgment now assume that the information needed for maximizing is costly to acquire in time and cognitive effort.

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This "bounds" rationality, so that individuals may pursue simplified or habitual strategies of judgment that provide satisfactory, but sub- optimal, levels of reward, but that also reduce the costs of judgment. It is here that questions about the heuristics of cognition have become important.

In its standard form rational choice theory is clearly inappropriate to explaining why individuals think ideologically. Ideologies violate its most basic axioms. With respect to motivation, individuals often act against their interests, seeming to prefer imaginary or vicarious satis- factions over those that can be concretely experienced and achieved, as with ascetic Christians who seek salvation. With respect to judgment, individuals often deceive themselves about what their interests are, as with a battered wife who refuses to leave her husband. Or individuals may subscribe to beliefs about their situation for which there is little evidence, such as the belief of a poor white male that their poverty is caused by favorable treatment of minorities and women. Or they may be akrasiatic actors - individuals who calculate their optimal strategy, and then knowingly act contrary to it, as with a worker who knows that their loyalty to their employer deprives them of income and advance- ment elsewhere. 22

From an Althusserian perspective cases such as these are not surpris- ing: there is no reason to expect, apart from ideological "interpella- tions" of subjectivity, a unified rational agent capable of doing the sorts of things rational choice theory expects of individuals. If we are left to choose between structural determination and axiomatically posited individuals, Althusser's position looks to have more explanatory power. This is not, however, the choice with which we are ultimately left. In the case of ideologies, we need to see that the axioms of standard rational choice theory mark out problematics that are inherently plausible - up to the point, of course, that the problematics are confused with axioms, as they are in standard rational choice theory. With regard to questions of motivation, ideologies must, in fact, maximize something for indi- viduals. The problem is to get away from limited conceptions of moti- vation to see what this "something" might be. With regard to questions of judgment, ideologies must make sense to individuals somehow; the problem is to break with the equation between coherence and instru- mental rationality that is embedded in standard rational choice theory. What I am suggesting is that a critical theory of ideology needs to attend to the problematic marked out by rational choice axioms, even if the axioms themselves are incompatible with critical theory.

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Three problems in the use of rational models

But not every way of framing this problematic is useful. I can imagine three kinds of objections or false starts. First, some will deny that ideol- ogies constitute a proper domain for models of rationality at all. If there are prima facie reasons to hold that ideological thinking is irra- tional, then one must search for its causes rather than its reasons. Thus, one might argue that victims of neurosis are motivated by non-cogni- tive processes such as unconscious conflicts, and therefore we should use a psychological model of explanation rather than a rational model. Similarly, when one is motivated by ideology, their cognitive processes are taken over by social forces interacting with psychological desires. Then an appropriate kind of explanation would refer to the causes of beliefs, rather than their reasons. 23

Yet this kind of distinction, while valuable in limiting cases (organic pathologies, addictions, and the like) fails to explain cases where reasons remain effective, but in ways that detach them from context, producing irrational actions. A neurotic may have reasons for acting as he does, but the reasons are repressed, and can only be made cognitive- ly available through therapy. Ideology, I shall suggest, involves similar, although not parallel, detachments of rationality from context.

A second objection might be to agree that rational models can deal with ideological beliefs, but to deny that they have irrational conse- quences for the individuals that hold them. Proponents of standard rational choice theory, for example, tend to see apparently irrational beliefs and behaviors as merely apparent, it only being a matter of fig- uring out h o w they are rational. It is one thing, of course, to see how apparently irrational actions may have rational consequences. It is quite another to say that any action based on cognitively formulated prefer- ences is rational. Much rational choice theory comes very close to the latter case. This involves using a vacuous conception of rationality because it defines the notion empirically, in terms of whatever people do. 24 This is a philosophical mistake. Alternatively, it confuses a model of action with how people really are. This is a methodological mistake. What rational choice theory in fact does is create models with a normative presupposition in favor of instrumental rationality. The model serves as a normatively significant ideal type, not as a map of empirical behavior - a point that Max Weber understood much better than today's rational choice theorists, z5 The problem of ideology calls for a regulative model of rationality with this kind of normative func-

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tion, although limiting the model to instrumental rationality is clearly not sufficient, because this model fails to identify the non-instrumental interests in rational autonomy that ideologies violate.

A third problem is closely related: the instrumental conception of rationality employed by rational theory is not sufficient to probe the ways in which reasons operate at the cognitive level. Thus, for example, if one imposes a rational choice model on a person who is motivated by canons of justice rather than personal gain, one can argue that to be motivated in this way is "irrational" But this judgment misses what is going on. Decisions guided by considerations of justice may require more rationalization, more cognitive processing, than an action that maximizes personal gain - especially when there is a clear conflict between two courses of action. Likewise with ideologies: it made sense in some way for the worker who voted for Reagan in 1984 to give an account of his vote by saying that he "liked Reagan's image of Ameri- ca," even though he knew that the Reagan administration cut OSHA enforcement, failed to prosecute violations of collective bargaining, favored a tight monetary policy, and generally pursued policies that reduced worker welfare. No ideology is devoid of internal coherence: effective ideologies always have some kind of inner logic, some kind of narrative structure that "makes sense," and carries a motivational force of its own - an issue I discuss below. The proper approach is not to leave the domain of rationality if a given instance fails to correspond to instrumental axioms, but rather to replace the axiom with a hermeneu- tical reconstruction of the reasons according to their sense for the agent. 26 These reasons can then be judged "ideological" or not by look- ing at their impact on capacities for rational autonomy and their effects on power relations. 27

Ideology as a maximizing process

The fruitful way of making use of rational choice heuristics, it seems to me, is to grant the regulative proposition that individuals are engaged in some form of preference maximizing when they hold to or create ideo- logical beliefs, but without prejudging the kind of rationality that maxi- mizing entails. Consider this proposition in light of the following remarks by Alvin Gouldner:

The ideologue's t ruth is not just a knowledge about some par t of the world but simultaneously t ransforms the ideologue's relation to it, and does so in a

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way that is liberating in relation to some other, older conception of the world. It has become a center around which the ideologue's identity becomes re- arranged. It is thus more than empirical bits of information that are decisive in their effects on the ideologue; there has been a larger and more subtle con- ceptual shift that rearranges the total architecture of his perspective on the world, and hence of his place in it . . . . The ideology is thus in some measure self-transforming.

But now that the whole self has been reorganized in terms that hinge on the ideology, the latter cannot be lightly opened up for examination; it cannot be kept perpetually open to continual, critical reexamination or challenge .. . . To the extent that ideology becomes the grounding of identity, a person's being becomes contingent on the maintenance of that ideology and thus sets limits on the capacity to change that ideology rationally. In other words, insofar as it is self-constituting, ideological discourse generates an identity that, like an interest, is taken or takes itself as given, and thereby also constitutes a limit on rationality. 2s

What is significant here is Gouldner's formulation of the ideological organization of the self as an interest: ideological beliefs are maintained just to the extent that they produce a self identity. But in serving this interest, ideologies also produce a stunted, non-reflexive rationality.

Gouldner does not provide further analysis, but his comments suggest an opening to rational choice heuristics. The obvious way of applying rational choice models to a case such as this is to expand what counts as a utility. In Gouldner's example, the ideologue "chooses" to value a self organized through ideological commitments over satisfactions - material or social - that might be gained through a greater openness to existential contingencies. The ideologue prefers the security of ideo- logical identifications to the precariousness of other means of gaining identity, even though these other means might, in fact, be more con- ducive to rational autonomy. In this example, self identity operates as a utility with an overriding motivational force.

Standard rational choice theory has always resisted expanding the notion of utility in this way - not only to reflexive motivations such as self identity, but also to social utilities such as desires for community, prestrategic commitments t o others, 29 or commitments t o j u s t i c e . 3~

From the perspective of standard rational choice the problem is a loss of explanatory power: if everything is potentially a preference, we could only know what any particular preference ranking would look like by waiting for it to happen. But the objection is misplaced in two respects. First, if people are motivated by a wider variety of phenomena than standard rational choice theory allows, the supposed loss of explana-

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tory power occurs only relative to a faulty presumption. In this case, the burden is on standard rational choice to show that the theory does not

in fact preclude the possibility of explanation by methodological fiat. Second, the fears of standard rational choice theory are exaggerated by the fact that it has no theory of preference formation: admitting a greater range of phenomena as motivations can appear arbitrary only when preferences are differentiated only by the rankings individual happen to impose on them.

With respect to the second issue, preferences have key hierarchical characteristics that are not reducible to individual choices about rank-

ings. Gouldner 's comments suggest that one such hierarchy is related to ideological identities: interests in self identity are pr ior to maximizing external utilities - presumably once a basic minimum of material well- being is achieved. As Am61ie Rorty, Har ry Frankfurt , Jon Elster, Amar tya Sen and others have argued, not all preferences relate to the self in the same way. Some are "second-order preferences" or "meta-

preferences" that have to do with the kind of person one wants to be- come, and that integrate first-order preferences into a life-plan, narra- tive, or some other kind of unified whole. 3~ In this case, what motivates

are not desires for material satisfactions but rather for goods that sus- tain self identity, which in turn allows one to anticipate the future and gain the kind of f reedom of the will of which humans are capable. As

Am61ie Ror ty puts it,

Standard theories of rational agency trade on important ambiguities in the notions of preference and satisfaction. Because they take satisfactions and preferences at face value, they do not give explanations of an agent's desires; their accounts of motivation are too simplistic. An agent's felt preferences l are what he believes and senses himself to want: standardly, these are desires for felt satisfaction1. Such felt satisfactions 1 are defined by their correspond- ing desires. But since there are also preferences that are not phenomenologi- cally experienced, and since a person can be mistaken about his prefer- ences i, preference becomes a theoretical term that encompasses a wide range of motives, only some of which are phenomenologically experienced as such, and only some of whose satisfactions are phenomenologically experienced. Habits, moods, emotions, religious or moral commitments, aesthetic reac- tions like disgust or admiration and other sorts of character traits are, in the larger sense, motivational. They form a person's preference 2 system, and often explain a person's preference3 rankings .... These preferences2 can operate without the agent having to act from an occurrent desire in ways that preserve the voluntary character of action. 32

Persons are, in part, motivated by images, tastes, and commitments that, together, provide a continuity of personality. This continuity

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allows individuals to examine reflexively their first-order preferences in such a way that they can gain a capacity for choice or autonomy. 33 Moreover, these competencies have an intersubjective dimension: they make it possible for individuals to rely on one another, because they are an intrinsic aspect of capacities to promise, ward off immediate desires, act with consistency, and remain the "same" person over time. The expectations of others locate self identities in a fabric of social relations that both enable and in many ways enforce self identities.

Preferences that are oriented toward personality formation are not, then, simply one set of preferenees among many: they are intersubjec- tively constituted conditions of being a person with a continuous iden- tity over time, manifested to others through a consistency between behavior and communicated intentions. It is through self identity that humans can avoid being the objects of whims, immediate desires, and the like, thus preserving "the voluntary character of action" - that is, autonomy. The capacity to control oneself and one's future is a need and a value in its o w n r i g h t . 34 Certainly Freud understood this: on his account, many neuroses result from attempts to form a stable personal- ity under adverse circumstances. Illusions, compulsive behaviors, and the like are valued (although, importantly, not by a "rational agent," but by some configuration of desires) precisely because they are part of a self identity that allows one to continue with everyday life, to avoid becoming the object of strong internal desires, to preserve the sem- blance of autonomy - although at a high psychological cost. Many actions that appear irrational in terms of first-order preferences can be seen as elements of strategies for maintaining subjectivity or agency. The capacity for self-interested action depends on an interest in the self - or "care of the self," to use Foucault's term. Thus maximizing external satisfactions depends on having a self that can do the maximizing, and it is "rational" to follow strategies that will solidify such a serf. As Amtlie Rorty puts it, "For someone to be capable of agency in the strong sense, to hold himself responsible for avoiding self-deception and akrasia, requires that he - or at any rate some relatively central set of his habits - reflexively underwrite his integrative process."35

Ideologies, I argue in later sections of this article, are parasitic on maxi- mizing strategies oriented toward continuity and care of the self. But they also reinforce personality structures that are self-defeating be- cause they undermine key elements of rational autonomy: self identity is gained at the expense of a capacity for choice with respect to first- order preferences. 36

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Rational autonomy and value

This approach to ideology clearly requires an account of value and rational agency more substantial than the one offered by rational choice theory, notwithstanding the contributions of its heuristics in focusing on maximizing processes. Specifically, it requires: (a) an account of value broad enough to include personality formation and self identity as values. (b) A distinction between personality formations that provide rational autonomy and those that are self-defeating. (c) A link between the cognitively disenabling features of ideologies and self- defeating personality formations that would account for the Althus- serian effect without theoretically barring rational autonomy. I consider the first two demands in this section, and the third in subsequent sections.

Rational choice remains hampered by the legacy of neo-classical eco- nomics to the extent that it conceives of values as external objects of internal desires that once achieved through relevant actions, produce internal satisfactions. No doubt many of our motivations and their cor- responding values can be characterized in these terms. However, as an account of value general enough for a theory of ideology it is inade- quate. It fails to identify values that cannot be attached to external objects of satisfaction, values such as those involved in establishing a self identity. The rational choice conception of value, no matter how permissive or extensive one makes it, ultimately tells us little about such satisfactions because its instrumental paradigm of action presupposes a unified self oriented toward achieving worldly utilities, a self whose fundamental constitution remains unaffected by the satisfactions it achieves.

Motivations never operate quite as rational choice theory supposes because there is a close relation between achieving wordly satisfactions and sustaining a continuity of the self. A unified self depends on a life that is a well-integrated existential whole. Value is, in some sense, as- signed to elements of this whole insofar as they contribute to an ex- perience of wholeness and continuity, in this way becoming the focus of interests and preferences, which in turn motivate actions. For this reason it is unlikely that the value of even the most basic need can be separated from its function in sustaining the continuity and whole- ness of one's life. Eating, for example, is rarely just a satisfaction of hunger. It also marks the day into segments, provides occasions for social exchanges and rituals, allows for aesthetic expression in cooking,

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relieves boredom, and so on. The value one places on eating will be related to its role in integrating these related activities into a life plan, in terms of which the self will identify its unity and continuity.

The accounts of value that take such characteristics of value into account are phenomenological in nature. Some, like Hegel's and Marx's, focus on experiences of recognition that occur through inter- actions. Here processes of self-development through labor become the locus of value; the world of objects is valuable primarily because of its contributions to processes through which individuals produce self- recognition. Indeed, in Marx's view, an obsession with possessing objects as such is a pathological reversal of value, caused by a degrada- tion of self-recognition in alienated l a b o r . 37 Joseph Gabel, drawing from phenomenological psychology to locate a parallel degradation of value in ideology, refers to value as something attaching to the "dynamic and organized character of reality "'38 Value attaches to things according to their roles in organized duration, and organization is the result of interacting with the changing contingencies that are thrown into the life-world. The metaphor Gabel uses is melody: a melody has an identity with which its value is associated. But it lacks material dura- bility, "thingness." Rather, it is a contingent, relational, and temporal kind of identity. Its organization may be highly structured, unique, and immaculate, but its durability is a product of temporally-bound perfor- mances. 39

Gabel's metaphor for value captures something that is true for even more durable aspects of the world: the experience of value attaches to those things that sustain the continuity, integrity, and wholeness of the life-world in terms of which self identities are demarcated and solidi- fied. There is nothing that is easily comparable about any single ele- ment, because it is the way they work together that provides the ex- perience of value. Because the possession of any single object, or the achievement of any single satisfaction is by itself relatively lacking in value (imagine eating reduced to the satisfaction of hunger), experi- ences of value are precarious, depending on continuous interactions with the contingent and temporal qualities of existence, that is, with associated complexes of satisfactions and attachments. Value is a result of reproducing the existential totality of one's life in and through the contingencies of one's existence. One can, of course, act instrumentally with respect to some of the conditions of value, as when one eats as a way of invoking associated values. But because values themselves

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depend on precarious experiential totalities, they can never be gained directly, as if they were objects, n~

These considerations provide insights into the kind of personality structure that could maximize value - insights blocked by the rational choice account of value - which in turn will tell us something about personality structures that will endow ideological identities with value. A personality that is open to the kind of value the world has to offer will also be open to temporality and contingency. To put the point somewhat impressionistically, a personality structure that is centered and controlled without being rigid will be open to the potentials for value inherent in everyday life. Conversely, individuals unable to live with the precariousness of value, who withdraw from experiential reali- ty and maintain their identities outside of temporal duration and unsustained by practices, will have a low capacity for value. The former personality structure is a condition of maximizing precarious values; it exhibits autonomy because the capacity for value, and hence for choices relevant to value, is high. The latter detaches experiential sources of value from personality formation and self identity; it exhibits a lack of autonomy because it is internally closed to the kinds of values the world has to offer.

Consider, for example, a woman whose anti-feminist political views follow from Christian fundamentalism. 4~ Such a person will interpret traditional roles as valuable because they are biblically sanctioned, and see feminism as a threat to biblical identities. Traditional gender roles may include hardships, but the hardships themselves have value be- cause they are anticipated by biblical narrative, in this way becoming essential dements of self identity. This kind of identity requires con- crete, temporal social relations such as church and family, but their value is scripted, externalized from these relations, and insulated from precariousness as an element of an otherworldly narrative. Because the values of the biblical identity are detached from context, they are achieved at the cost of closing off temporal sources of value, sources that may be denied by the very power relations secured by biblical narrative. At the same time, the ideological effect of reifying and justi- fying traditional gender roles follows from the high cost to self identity that would result from dislocating elements of the biblical narrative. More generally, personality formations that produce ideological effects will externalize and atemporalize values. The value of evangelizing, for example, depends on biblical commands. The value of the social inter-

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actions that flow from the command stems from the ways they become instances of an otherworldly narrative. This is why a conversation with an evangelizer may seem something less than a conversation; why a non-evangelical participant may feel devalued as the object of someone else's narrative.

From the perspective of politics, we can see that these kinds of per- sonality formations are likely to withdraw from the uncertainties of political life, or to engage political events as if they were instances of atemporal narratives. Insofar as the political world is a realm of uncer- tainty and open possibility, it does not admit of non-precarious self identities. Ideologies exploit this difference between politics and non- precariousness by promising non-precarious identities. But in doing so they reinforce cognitive withdrawal, undermining cognitive conditions of autonomy and short-circuiting public justification, that is, processes of interaction that rely on discourse as an alternative to power. 42

Ideologies feed on desires for non-precariousness, but in so doing they undermine cognitive competencies. From the point of view of cogni- tion, reality becomes spatial, timeless, ahistorical, and fixed rather than temporal, changing, and interactive. Personalities that come to depend on such cognitive structures become rigid; they define themselves through the internal consistency of a set of identities, suppressing new and inconsistent information, ideas, and experiences. As Gabel puts it, "the privileged system is established as an exclusive value without pre- cariousness; the non-privileged residue is downgraded to a value without consistency "'43 Individuals who attempt to maximize non-pre- carious values do so at the expense of severing cognitive relations from existential contingencies. What makes such solutions to problems of self identity irrational, then, is that maximizing non-precarious values undermines capacities for worldly values. They are 'ideological" if, as a consequence of solving problems of personality formation, relations of domination are cognitively justified, reified, or dissimulated.

The Althusserian effect as a product of maximizat ion

These considerations, although incomplete and overly schematic, begin to answer the question of what ideology maximizes. To see how, let us take one more example, this time William Connolly's account of a con- servative "ideology of sacrifice," which he finds among many white,

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married, blue-collar workers in the United States. A typical member of this group

is a principle breadwinner in a family with young children and ... has a reasonable degree of job security. The breadwinner does not see himself as working simply to maximize his family's short range consumption opportuni- ties. He voluntarily sacrifices now so that his children can escape the circum- stances in which he finds himself. He chooses to accept the work routines, authoritarian controls and overtime he dislikes in order to improve the mo- bility of his children. His claim to the respect of his wife and children grows out of this willingness to sacrifice, and the respect they give him lends dignity to his life activity. 44

This orientation toward work and family, Connolly continues, "helps to condition the worker's interpretive reaction to welfare recipients, intel- lectuals, student dissidents, feminists, deviants, and criminals. For the conduct and rhetoric of each of these types threatens to invalidate the ideology of sacrifice? '45 If, for example,

radicals claim that common crimes are implicitly acts of rebellion against an order that breeds criminals, they inadvertently condemn the worker for bowing passively to that order. Or: they mock his exercise of self-restraint by relieving the criminal of responsibility for stealing .. . . If feminists claim that women are imprisoned in the home, the worker's sacrifice is reinterpreted as a restraint on her freedom and dignity.... The worker is caught in a bind .. . . The ideology of sacrifice generates political orientations that help to generate the worker's plight while the plight generates pressures to perpetu- ate the ideology.... The worker is thus under a double pressure, first, to accept the ideology and, secondly, to resist the suggestion that its role in securing his identity outstrips its truth value. 46

Connolly's example and analysis suggest how ideologies exploit the conflicts between power relations that generate constraints on satisfac- tions, and needs for cost-effective and seemingly non-precarious "tem- plates" for self identity. Ideologies provide satisfactions for metaprefer- ences, linking personality to seemingly non-precarious values, but with the effect of tmdermining competencies related to political judgment. Consider from this perspective Althusser's account of how ideologies constitute individuals. Ideologies, he writes, work through

1. the interpellation of "individuals" as subjects; 2. their subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself; 4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that, on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right. 47

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Ideologies tell individuals who they are, where they fit in, how they relate to authority ("the Subject"), and what kind of power and dignity they possess. But they do so through abstract group identifies that falsi- fy the temporal and interactive dimensions of everyday life. Ideologies can function hegemonically precisely because they "defocus" con- tingent and varied situations; they provide identities that override dif- ferences, or magnify some differences enough to override commonali- ties. 48 For example, Connolly's worker may identify himself - to the exclusion of the more varied and difficult texture of social relations - as 'Tkmerican," "white," "moral" "head of household" and so on. Identi- fies such as these have the advantage of dissociation from the pre- cariousness of the worker's own conditions of life as well as the predic- aments of others (non-white, female, welfare recipient, etc.), against whom the worker's identity is defined. These identities provide con- tinuity and certainty in the face of reality in a way that makes it possible to "go on" with daily life. And they produce an Althusserian effect by integrating subjectivity and power relations.

For the same reasons, however, the strong interpretation of the Althus- serian thesis - that ideologies actually constitute subjects - is implaus- ible. After all, everyday thought, speech, and interaction are much richer, and more varied and concrete, than ideological thinking, which is public, common, simple, and abstract. Indeed, it is inconceivable that these more concrete modes of thought could be completely contained and overridden by ideological ones, with their relatively abstract char- acter.

What is plausible, however, is a weaker version of Althusser's thesis, one that would show how an Althusserian effect might occur through active assimilations of ideological identifies to the concrete and varied situations individuals face in everyday life. As Connolly's example sug- gests, ideologies may be parasitic on rules individuals make for them- selves in order to maintain a strategic balance between desires and realistic possibilities for satisfactions, a balance essential for the con- tinuity of personality. Often, as George Ainslie argues, these rules re- late to problems of balancing short-term and long-term interests, given the constraints of a particular reality:

[T}he availability of environmental reward is not the limiting factor in the operation of the person's internal reinforcing mechanism. The limiting factor is the availability of discipline, that is, of means of restricting self-reward according to a pattern that makes the best use of the underlying drives. External objects are valued not because they can peremptorily bestow or

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withhold reward, but rather insofar as they serve as useful boundaries between a person's long-term interest in maximal aggregate reward and his short-term interest in immediate reward. 49

From an individual perspective, the problem of suppressing immediate desires often makes use of relatively explicit rules governing behavior - or cognitive "bright lines," in Ainslie's terms - in order to maintain a longer-term strategy. 5~ One might, for example, hold to a doctrine of abstinence from alcohol when one drink a day would optimize satisfac- tion because it is easier to draw the line here than elsewhere, where the boundaries would be less clear, and thus less enforceable from a cogni- tive point of view.

When we apply these suggestions to the problem of ideology, we come up with the possibility that individuals may produce cognitive "bright lines" (or take over norms that serve this cognitive function) in ways that simultaneously serve an internal strategy of maintaining self iden- tity and have the effect of justifying, reifying, or dissimulating power. In such cases, dominant classes may be responsible for the ideologies that serve their interests only indirectly, by creating existential dilemmas of personality-formation that can only be resolved nonprecariously. 51

This is no doubt one way, as strncturalist Marxists put it, that ideology is inscribed in everyday life. Thus although it is true, as Jon Elster argues, that "there is no reason to suppose that beliefs shaped by a social position tend to serve the interests of the persons in that posi- tion, ''52 it is certainly possible that interpretations serving immediate interests of personality-formation can produce "subjects" whose sense of agency is integrated with the regime of power that initially created the dilemma for self identity.

Cognitive interests in narrative structure

For ideologies to be integrated into personality formation, however, it is not enough that they serve strategic functions with respect to internal desires and external satisfactions. Personality formation requires more; it requires coherence of meaning with respect to the self. As suggested in the example of anti-feminist biblical narrative above, one's personal biography must somehow "make sense," This condition explains an- other feature of ideologies: they must have an inner coherence in spite of their insufficiency to rational autonomy. To the extent that continuity

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of the self is a value, consistency within the intellectual system that one uses to define one's personality will also be a value. 53 This is part of what Weber meant by "value rationality," and why he claimed that while it is true that people are motivated by "interests" rather than "ideas," interests are both material and ideal in nature. 54 In addition, the internal coherence of ideologies is no doubt reinforced by a purely cognitive factor: people do not live well with cognitive dissonance. The internal coherence of ideologies no doubt helps to sustain non-dis- sonant modes of cognition. They may involve some self-deception, but nonetheless help to maintain a functioning cognitive apparatus, espe- cially as it relates to a biography of the self.

That ideologies could have these cognitive functions with respect to the self is in part rooted in how we assign meaning to duration. We do so partly by situating ourselves within a narrative of the self: we want to know how our past will unfold into a future. Most people harbor a good deal of anxiety about their historicity, certainly more if their lives are difficult. Our fascination with novels and movies continually repeats this historicity; we imagine what we would do and what we would experience if we were the characters. Stories with happy endings resolve some of this anxiety, especially if the personalities are like us. Adventure stories provide a new serf, a self that might have been, taking us away from the mundane qualities of everyday life. Good stories develop characters, and this is no different with novels or movies from how it is with our own personal biography.

At the same time, we are never fully transparent to ourselves. We assign meaning to our lives partly by borrowing stories that are already a part of our culture. We know that novels and movies are "just stories" and distance ourselves from them. Other stories - ideologies among them - become "ours" so completely that they define who we are without our full awareness. Every set of social expectations and coercions creates a role with a certain coherence in terms of a story about the society of which that role is a part. We often see that these are, in fact, borrowed stories when we become disillusioned with them; we find the story, along with its associated demands, coercions, and rewards, so con- straining that we see that the lives we actually lead do not fit neatly with the roles through which we have defined our self identity. Only during such times of disorientation, even crisis, do we see the extent to which our identities depend on the narratives others impose on us.

To some extent, these stories are imposed by social expectations, co-

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ercions, and rewards that are biographically earlier than any possible conception of the self. At the same time, taking over the stories society offers us is cognitively "easy." Assuming one has a choice, it is always easier - from the point of view of cognitive effort - to judge by means of categories that are available. We have "Tory minds," as Amrlie Rorty puts it. 55 The same holds true for situations of uncertainty: we will tend to think about new situations in old ways, simply because it costs effort not to do so, especially where the benefits of changing one's mind are unclear. 56

The narrative dimensions of ideologies no doubt feed on both the imperatives of biographical narrative and "low cost" cognition. Ideol- ogies are culturally available stories about who is a member of a com- munity and who is not; about what social relations are like and how they are justified; about what is permissible political behavior and what is not; about where one fits into the social hierarchy; about what one can expect from society; about how to judge everyday experiences such as contracting for labor; about moral reasons for success and failure, and so on. From this perspective, narrative structures seem essential to ideologies: from the more arcane "original positions" of contractarian liberalism, to more common stories that explain social position accord- ing to moral fitness, assign causes of unemployment and crime, and locate conspiracies of other nations, peoples, races, or social groups. The imperatives of narration are especially important in the case of public events that have immediate consequences for everyday life, such as military recruitment, paying taxes, unemployment, and crime. Ronald Reagan's success as a communicator rested in part on his abil- ity to translate every public issue into a narrative. Through narrative, ideologies provide connections between imperatives of personality for- marion and public fife, in this way linking resources of self identity to particular regimes of power.

But again, what is distinctive of ideologies, as opposed to other kinds of narratives, is that they present trade-offs between the possibilities of meaning that attach to coherence and cognitive conditions of rational autonomy. Even a coherent narration can be quite detached from the world, from interaction, and from reflexivity, and for this reason can be insufficient to rational autonomy. Rational autonomy depends on some degree of fit between the contingencies of everyday life and linguistic/ symbolic formulations, a fit that cannot be guaranteed in advance of interactions with the social and natural world, and that must therefore be subject to continual adjustments. With respect to the natural world,

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we would not ordinarily rely on results that have not, in some way, been put to the test of experimentation and engineering. In the social world, corrections and checks occur through reflexive processes of dialogue. Ideological formulations bypass this reflexivity, a possibility that is increased to the extent that power relations exclude public spaces con- stituted by dialogue. Few organizations today are participatory democ- racies, and most decision-making - when it is not simply authoritarian - involves individuals only as recipients of one-way communication through the media. In addition, where there are psychopathologies of everyday life, cognitive processes are prone to withdrawal, allowing ideological narratives to become even more powerful and bypassing the temporal and intersubjective contingencies of politics altogether. Under these conditions, individual maximizing will produce Althus- serian effects.

Against rational choice theory: Irrational maximizing

Yet these considerations also underline the key weakness of rational choice axioms. If the cognitive mechanisms of ideologies work in any- thing like the way I have suggested, it does not make sense to talk of rational and irrational decisions by an agent. The unity of the subject is, in the case of ideology, a problematic. There is no rational self that, with possibilities spread out before it, cognitively chooses to think one way rather than another. On the contrary, what is distinctive about ideological thinking is that its narratives interact with personality for- mation, but in ways that assimilate self identity to relations of power. The unity of the self is secured at the expense of rational autonomy.

Such a conclusion is reminiscent of Freud: maximizing processes seem to exist, but not agents that rationally maximize. 57 Freud's problem was how to restore the ego's capacity for gaining real satisfactions in repres- sive situations against the fantasy satisfactions of the id and the rigid authoritarianism of the superego. The capacity for rational agency was, for Freud, one possible result of internal conflicts. Rational maximizing can occur only where there is a strong ego capable of integrating the self. In many cases, however, there can be maximizing behaviors ori- ented toward a strategic balance of internal desires and external con- straints that do not produce rational outcomes. In the case of neurosis, for example, compulsive behaviors may be functionally necessary for some people to "carry on" - given their biography and the nature of their reality. But the neurotic balance at best stabilizes everyday misery

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and produces only imaginary satisfactions. Here we find maximizing processes that result in a form of personality that is unable to relate behavior to worldly values. 58 Maximizing processes can short-circuit maximizing decisions, a conclusion excluded by definition from the rational choice view of rationality as instrumental maximizing of v a l u e s . 59 That maximizing and rational agency are the same thing is a prejudice rooted in rational choice theory's confused ontology of the self.

True consciousness versus rational autonomy revisited

I have been presupposing distinctions between forms of consciousness that underwrite rational autonomy and those that subvert it. I intend this distinction to cover the normative presumption in critical theories of ideology, namely that not all forms of consciousness about the public world are equally good for individuals. I have yet to show that I have formulated this normative presumption in a way that it does not give rise to pernicious political consequences.

Within traditional Marxism, this normative presumption is covered by the distinction between true and false consciousness. As I have already noted, the distinction is open to the common and well-founded objec- tion that it assumes an epistemologically privileged observer - a leader, party, theoretician, regime, or movement - that can know individuals' interests better than the individuals themselves. Authoritarian implica- tions follow when a regime or vanguard claims to represent individuals' interests against their own self-understandings. Utilitarian fathers of rational choice theory going back to James Mill have argued that because epistemological arrogance is closely related to political repres- sion, it is better to take individual preferences at face value and dis- pense with the distinction between true and false consciousness alto- gether. The normative cost of this position is, however, an indifference to the ideological dimension of power.

Post-structuralists object to the distinction between true and false con- sciousness on different grounds: they argue that it must inevitably appeal to metaphysical foundations that could not possibly be known, owing to the fact that all knowledge is, in the end, interpretation. This being the case, metaphysical identities such as those identifying the interests of the self can only be achieved by power. But post-structural- ists fail to see that the fact that all knowledge claims are interpretation

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makes them equally ungrounded only with respect to their proposi- tional correspondence to metaphysical or positively accessible facts. They miss crucial distinctions between the "local" functions of inter- pretations according to how they secure the autonomy of i n d i v i d u a l s . 6~

Differing interpretations have differing impacts on individuals' capaci- ties for autonomy. Whereas rational choice theorists are insensitive to domination, post-structuralists totalize domination by failing to show how any form of consciousness could contribute to political self-deter- mination.

The problem is that the issue of true and false consciousness is badly formulated. The normative problem to which the distinction speaks is not about the truth and falsity of beliefs but rather about the impact of beliefs on enabling or disenabling competencies associated with ration- ality. 61 This could escape notice within standard Marxism in part because the problem of rationality was narrowed to questions of prop- ositional truth by the quasi-positivism of Second and Third Interna- tional Marxism. The rationality of a form of consciousness is deter- mined, on this view, by a correspondence between logically interrelated concepts and observable facts. But whatever the many difficulties of positivism as an account of truth, it is certainly not an account of ra- tionality. It is not necessary for someone to be correct about the nature of the world and their interests to act rationally. What counts is that, under the circumstances, they have good reasons for thinking, speak- ing, and acting as they do. If in the course of these processes indi- viduals revise their notions about what the world looks like and come to know more about themselves, we do not say that they have moved from "false consciousness" to "true consciousness" but rather that they are following through on their capacities for rational autonomy. It seems to me that something about this process is what we really ought to, and intuitively do, capture with the notion of false consciousness - specifically, when this process fails.

I have referred to the capacity for sustaining such a process as "rational autonomy," where "rational" refers to processes of reflexive examina- tion and justification of beliefs about the world such that the practices they affect sustain an integration of personality and a capacity to achieve worldly values. '~utonomy" refers to the resulting capacities for self-determination. As I have mentioned, I am supposing autonomy to be a capacity that, in the case of politics, is enabled through social interaction and dialogue, and is collectively exercised. I also suppose that the concept of ideology retains its normative significance to the

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extent that it identifies forms of consciousness that stunt the develop- ment of capacities for autonomy by providing identities that sever value and practice. Thus, ideas are ideological if: (1) their contributions to problems of life-world integration produce a systematic distortion of cognitive capacities for judgment by disenabling capacities for reflexive examination of beliefs, and (2) this distortion also serves the interests of a dominant class. Note that this specification is functional rather than structural or propositional, but unlike standard functional defini- tions it is specified in two dimensions: the functions of ideas for the constitution of the self, and their functions for sustaining relations of power. Although some ideas may be particularly susceptible to ideo- logical usage, no idea is, in itself, ideological: propositionally correct statements can have ideological consequences depending on their indi- vidual and social functions. 62

The concept of rational autonomy is a limiting ideal rather than an identification of what a non-ideologically constituted subjectivity is like. For example, it is not necessary that every decision by someone who possesses rational autonomy be made rationally, or even that all decisions be made for considered reasons. Instead I am thinking of something like Habermas's criterion of rationality viewed as one dimension of subjectivity. One possesses rational autonomy if, when one is presented with alternative views in a context within which a re- sponse is appropriate, one has the capacity to argue about them in ways that are guided by the normative possibility conditions of discourse, conditions that also identify the positive normative potentials of poli- tics. These possibility conditions include propositional truth (pragmati- cally conceived), correctness in terms of the standards of intelligibility and coherence embedded in language, legitimacy in cases of collective choice about the social world, and expressive sincerity with respect to demands of internal nature. 63 On this account, one does not have to have ideas that are true to be rational; one can be wrong about the propositions one believes and offers. "Mistakes" exhibit a lack of autonomy only if they are systematically integrated into one's self iden- tity in such a way that revision would fundamentally destabilize one's personality structure. In such cases, the mistakes are retained owing to their function for maintaining self identity, which in turn produces an inability to respond to situations that require, for appropriate, value- sustaining practices, a reflexive examination of one's beliefs. When specified together with consequences for power-relations, beliefs that are integrated into the self in ways that defeat revision are the mark of ideology. Because revision is a key condition of cognitive orientation

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toward a temporal and contingent world, individuals whose cognitive capacities are systematically undermined will produce an irrational political community. Lacking capacities for revision, such communities will lack the capacity to resolve political issues by means of discourse and will prematurely turn to power. Conversely, the mark of rational autonomy is the possibility of revision, the openness to solving prob- lems through discourse. Existentially, this suggests a personality open to temporal and contingent values. Politically, it specifies a personality with the capacity to resolve issues through discourse. Publicity/dis- course is, for this reason, a key indicator of a non-ideological politics.

Because there is no way to specify the truth or falsity of beliefs in advance of dialogical processes, no authoritarian political implications follow from this way of distinguishing rational from irrational agency. This does not mean that the concept is politically trivial. It remains possible to characterize the political conditions of the kind of discur- sive process through which rational agency is developed and manifested. Habermas provides one way of specifying these conditions: relations of power inappropriate to the potentials of discourse must be suspended if discourse is to perform its political functions. A rational discourse community is defined by the kinds of power it excludes, leaving claims to be enforced only by argumentation, or by other agreed procedures when argument fa i ls . 64 In the limiting case, the epistemological prob- lem of knowing what is or is not "false" requires a proliferation of public spheres in which claims to knowledge are revised and validated through processes of argumentation. 65 In other words, the political implications of this approach are in the direction of strong democracy, which is precisely the normative orientation that problematizes ideol- ogy to begin with.

Implications for social science

The question of whether a conception of ideology that depends on a theory of rational autonomy can provide empirically useful distinctions for social science is a somewhat more difficult issue. Clearly, the con- cept has limited explanatory value if it provides only ex post facto dis- tinctions. It does, however, suggest distinctions between different kinds of processes of self-development as they relate to different kinds of social and political structures. The point would be to distinguish social relations that produce rational autonomy with its associated dialogical competencies from those that destroy it. Although it is not my aim to

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elaborate a theory that would produce such distinctions, it is worth noting that certain of the applied human disciplines already assume their necessity and viability. Educational theory, for example, deals with interactions between learning situations and the development of cognitive skills. In certain schools of thought, the difference between successful and unsuccessful education turns on a student's capacity for a u t o n o m o u s thinking. 66 Similarly, developmental psychology focuses the development of autonomous cognitive capacities of judgment. 67 Finally, in psychotherapy, there is increasing attention to the indicators within therapeutic processes that mark increases in patient's abilities to deal with the sources of their unhappiness. 68 In each case, these distinc- tions refer not to propositional contents of consciousness, but to in- dicators of developing capacities of rational autonomy.

Social and political theory has been slow to make use of similar modes of analysis with respect to political processes, but there is no reason why such analyses would not be possible. If so, then a critical theory of ideology defined in terms of rational autonomy would be not only politically significant, but also an asset to critical social science.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Jiirgen Habermas, "Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment," New German Critique, 26 (Spring-Summer, 1982), 13-30; John Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, 3-6; The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Aspects of Sociology, trans. John Vertiel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), chap. 12.

2. Althusser provides a distinction between true and false consciousness by distin- guishing between science and ideology, but it has a rather ad hoe quality given his absolute holism. For an account, see Norman Geras, "Althusser's Marxism" in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader (London, New Left Books, 1977), esp. 254- 256. Post-structuralists, however, complete the logic of Althusser's approach and give up on the notion of false consciousness altogether. See, e.g., Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, "Post-Marxism Without Apologies," New Left Review, 166 (November-December, 1987). Cf. Michel Foucault's objections to the concept of ideology on three grounds: (a) the concepts of true and false consciousness associ- ated with it; (b) its presuppositions that there is a subjectivity distorted (as opposed to constituted) by ideological befiefs, and (c) the reduction of ideas of material con- ditions. "Truth and Power," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 60. I assume that any reconstructed concept of ideology must meet objections such as these.

3. My approach parallels Habermas's model of suppressed generalizable interests, although I arrive at it by a somewhat different route. See Jiirgen Habermas, Legiti- mation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 111-117. I

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am also indebted to Alvin Gouldner's view that ideology consists in stunted reflexi- vity. See The Dialectic ofldeology and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

4. On the place of functional analysis in critical social theory, see Mark Warren, "The Marx-Darwin Question: Implications for the Critical Aspects of Marx's Social Theory," International Sociology, 2 (September 1987), 251-269.

5. Cf. Shawn Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1988), 6-17, 53-57; Carol Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 12-13.

6. Cf. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 157. 7. I disagree with Jon Elster's claim in Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), 462, that ideologies must be specified "structurally" - by which Elster means as semantic entities, rather than functionally. To hold that structures - linguistic, symbolic, or otherwise - convey ideological meanings, one must have a pre-Wittgensteinian view of the relation between symbolic structures and meaning.

8. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State Apparatus," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 160. Cf. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: New Left Books, 1978), 63-69.

9. This tradeoff is evident even in the most complete methodological agenda of which I am aware, John Thompson's Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley, Univer- sity of California Press, 1984). Thompson combines the social analyses of neo- Marxism and Weberian sociology with structural and hermeneutical analysis of dis- course. See esp. 133-139. Thompson proposes three steps in the analysis of an ideology. The first of these is a "social" analysis moving from the macro to the micro: one ought to show what functions an ideology serves in maintaining or changing social structures (such as class relations), in legitimating or undermining institutions (such as a corporate body, or political institution), and formulating situated political actions. The second step would consist in a (structural) discursive analysis, which would look at the narrative structure of an ideology, its argumenta- tive structure, and its syntactical structure. Each of these structural features of ideologies have an impact on the way ideologies convey meaning and structure cog- nition. Finally, a hermeneutical step would provide an interpretation of the mean- ing of an ideology, from which one presumably can infer actions. Hermeneutical questions are, of course, posed from the perspective of the subject, and in this sense produce the issues with which I am concerned here. But the approach does not re- spond adequately to the Althusserian challenge insofar as it presupposes, rather than explains, the constitution of intentional subjects.

10. I do not mean to suggest that these questions are entirely unexplored. Gramsci's conception of hegemony, for example, includes the important insight that ideol- ogies must articulate the experiences and practices of individuals if they are to have an impact. But Gramsci's concept is not a complete theory so much as a methodo- logical marker for a problematic. What I present here is consistent with Gramsci's conception of hegemony, but does not rely on it. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Qnintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), esp. 323-373, 403-419. There is also an important body of neo-Freudian literature that focuses specifically on the motiva- tional bases of ideologies. See, e.g., Theodor Adorno, "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda" in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by

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Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); Otto Fenichel, "Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism," in The Col- lected Papers of Otto Fenichel, Second Series (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1954); Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964), chap. 3. My topic overlaps with and to some extent presupposes this litera- ture. My initial focus, however, is slightly different: I am especially interested in the cognitive dimensions of ideology because of the importance of cognitive capacities for political processes that invoke reasons. It is here that the neo-Freudian approach tends to be weak.

11. The foremost proponent of this approach has been Jon Elster, especially in Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). In more recent work Elster is more critical of rational choice axioms. See, e.g., his introduction to The Multiple Self, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For other examples of rational choice Marxism see Analytical Marxism, ed. John Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Adam Przeworski, "Marxism and Rational Choice," Politics and Society, 14 (1985), 379-409, and D. F. B. Tucker, Marxism and Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).

12. Mark Warren, "Marx and Methodological Individualism," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (December, 1988): 447-476. To the extent that ideology has received attention in this school, it is seen as having to do with the effects of environmental factors on preferences and preference ordering.

13. See, e.g., Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx, chap. 8. i4. See, e.g., John Thompson, Studies in the Theory ofldeology, 131. Cf. G6ran Ther-

born, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1980), 94; Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification, trans. Margaret Thompson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 92-109.

15. For an extended consideration of this example, see Mark Warren, "Liberal Consti- tutionalism as Ideology: Marx and Habermas," Political Theory, 17 (November 1989), 511-534.

16. Cf. Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness, 92-109. On the impact of writing styles on cognitive abilities to deal with social, relational, and historical processes, see Richard Ohmann, "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language," College English 41 (December, 1979): 390-397.

17. Joseph Gabel refers to such cases as spatialized cognition: persons lack sensitivity to the temporal and dialectical interactions of self and world. False Consciousness, 105-112.

18. These two questions correspond roughly to Jon Elster's distinctions in Sour Grapes, 141-157, between ideologies induced by psychological interests, and those induced by one's social position or situation.

19. Georg Luk~ics, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971 ). The reifying mechanisms inherent in limited perspectives involve generaliz- ing from limited situations to universal claims, identifying a part of a totality with the whole, and identifying parts taken from different totalities.

20. This is why Jon Elster, in reconstructing Marx's theory of ideology from a rational choice perspective, divides his problems into questions of motivation, and ques- tions of cognition. Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 465-468.

21. Cf. Jon Elster, "Introduction," The Multiple Self, 12-13.

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22. Amrlie Oksenberg Rorty, "Self-deception, Akrasia and irrationality," in The Mul- tiple Self, ed. John Elster.

23. See, e.g., Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 474-476. 24. Amartya Sen, "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Eco-

nomic Theory" in Sen, Choice, Welfare, and Measurement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), esp. 88-89.

25. Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans, and ed. Edward Shils and Henry Finch, (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 89-94.

26. Cf. Shawn Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology and Politics. 27. A fourth problem in the use of rational models is worth mentioning. Some who

think in rational choice terms may be inclined to look at how, if ideologies are not rational for individuals, they are rational for society. One might argue that society requires means of solving the "free rider" problem, and ideologies can do just this. See, e.g., Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 48. Individual maximizing requires some degree of social solidarity: commitments, for example, to the sanctity of private property, contracts, and the like. But to extend rational choice theory in this way is either to misuse it or to break with it altogether. Solving free rider problems may be one effect of ideol- ogies, but to interpret this effect according to the axioms of rational choice theory is to reify society into an instrumentally rational actor. It is certainly quite valuable to look at the functions that moral rules and the like have on social organization (as Durkheim does, for example). But to do so in terms of the individualistic metaphor of instrumental rationality requires that one posit in society a kind of agency that it does not have. Groups can possess rationality, but this is a capacity they gain from common understandings and dialogical interactions, requiring a model of rationali- ty that rational choice theory does not possess. For an account of the dependence of instrumental rationality on communicative action, see J/irgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), part III. Cf. Jon Elster's list of possibilities for conceptualizing "broad" collective rationality in Sour Grapes, 33-42.

28. Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, 47. 29. Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Part III. 30. Tom Tyler, "Justice and Political Leadership," in Richard Lau and David Sears,

Political Cognition (Hillsdale, N. J. Erlbaum, 1986), 262. 31. Jon Elster, "Introduction" to The Multiple Self, 13; cf. Elster's critique of utilitarian-

ism on the question of preference ranking in Sour Grapes, 133-140. Cf. John Christian, "Constructing the Inner Citadel: Recent Work on the Concept of Autonomy," Ethics, 99 (October, 1988), 119; Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18-20; Harry Frankfurt "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," in The Inner Citadel, ed. John Christman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Amartya Sen, "Rational Fools."

32. Am61ie Rorty, "Self-Deception, A krasia and Irrationality," 122. 33. Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person." 34. Cf. Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy 78-81. 35. Am6lie Rorty, "Self-Deception, A krasia and Irrationality," 131. 36. It is worth pointing out that ideological self-defeat does not follow the pattern of

addiction, a common example among analytic philosophers who study autonomy. An addict's second-order preferences are not strong enough to overcome self- defeating desires. In the case of ideologies, however, self-defeat is a result of indi-

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viduals detaching second-order preferences from first-order demands and their life-world contingencies.

37. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Pub- lishers, 1959), 101-103.

38. Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness, 72. 39. Cf. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York:

Washington Square Press, 1953), 712-734. 40. Cf. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes, 101-108. 41. See Rebecca Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 1987), chap. 2. 42. My formulations are loosely indebted to Hannah Arendt, The Human Conditton

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), chap. 31. 43. Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness, 77. 44. William Connolly, Appearance and Reality in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1981), 67. 45. Connolly, Appearance and Reality, 67. 46. Connolly, Appearance and Reahty, 68. 47. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State Apparatus," 168. 48. See Alvin Gouldner's excellent considerations of the relation between discourse

generally and ideology, which he considers as a case of an "elaborated speech variant," The Dialectic of ldeology and Technology, 56-64.

49. George Ainslie, "Beyond Microeconomics," 155-156. 50. George Ainslie, "Beyond Microeconomics," 145-149. 51. Nietzsche portrays such a situation in his On the Genealogy of Morals, where he

argues that the situation of oppression caused "slaves" to attempt to regain a vicarious sense of power through Christian justifications and reifications of their situation. See my Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), chap. 1. Similarly Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 746-747, notes that the working classes are especially prone to the self-discipline of austere morals through their identification with rigid Protestant sects. Smith explains the power of discipline, however, in terms of its effects on balancing conflicting interests: given the harshness of a worker's life, following short-term temptations would lead to long-term ruin. Strict prohibitions against self-indulgence provides rules that individuals value because of their enabling effect for longer-term strategies for survival.

52. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes, 143. 53. Cf. Jon Elster, "Introduction" to The Multiple Self, 28. 54. Max Weber, From Max Weber, trans, and ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills,

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 280. 55. See, e.g., Am61ie Rorty, "Self-Deception, Akrasia, and Irrationality," 123-124;

126-127. 56. Joseph Gabel makes an equivalent point when he points out that "dialectical"

thought - thought open to temporality and interaction - is relatively costly com- pared to "spatial" kinds of thinking that reify values and relations, False Conscious- ness 85. See also Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic Histoty, 48; Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), chap. 5; Jon Elster, Sour Grapes, 141-148, and Making Sense of Marx, chap. 8.

57. Cf. Jon Elster, "Introduction," The Multiple Self, 20-23. Elster points out that Freud's functional model of the self is, among other things, an "economic" model, where various parts of the self compete for different ways of maximizing satisfac-

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tions. Elster suggests that we interpret the notions of id, ego, and superego as ff they were "agents," each acting strategically within the self. Here, however, the meta- phor of agency is stretched so thinly that it breaks.

58. This suggests a problem that goes deeper than AmElie Rorty's and Jon Elster's dis- tinctions between first and second order (or meta) preferences. In their terms, actions that appear irrational from the perspective of first-order preferences will often turn out to be rational in terms of metapreferences. Rorty writes, for example, that "the capacities what are exercised in self-deception and akrasia are common, and perhaps necessary for sane rational action .... There is a strong hidden rationale behind the persistent strategies that are commonly called irrational." The existence of neurosis and other pathologies suggests, however, that even when one looks at the functions of metapreferences in maintaining agency, some of these strategies still appear irrational in the sense that they stabilize a character of a pathological sort with respect to rational action. Rorty's wording hides the fact that finding a "rationale" for apparently irrational actions and seeing these as "rational" are two different things. The "rationale" one finds in the case of neurosis is that, under the circumstances, the action stabilizes a personality, and results from internal maxi- mizing processes. This kind of maximizing can, however, undermine the capacity for rational agency.

59. Elster's account of irrationality in ideology in Sour Grapes, 111-124, as, in part, a loss of autonomy in preference formation is not quite right. He opposes "character planning" - strategies for maintaining autonomy - to situations where preferences are manipulated. On the account I offer here, ideologies are parasitic on character- planning and thus operate indirectly on preference formation.

60. Foucault himself began to make such distinctions in his last work. See, e.g., "What is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader.

61. Cf. Brian Fay, Crttical Social Science: Liberation and its Limits (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 72-75.

62. See note 7 above. 63. Jiirgen Haberrnas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?," in Communication and the

Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). 64. This does not mean that all power is suspended in such a community. For example,

if consensus does not emerge, a community might quite rationally solve an issue through majority rule or other decision procedures, assuming this does not impinge on the structural conditions of discourse about future issues. The point is that asymmetries of power in specific cases do not produce systematic asymmetries.

65. See Jiirgen Habermas, Strukturwandelder Offentlichkeit (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1962).

66. See, e.g., R. F. Dearden, ",Autonomy and Education" in Education and the Develop- ment of Reason, ed. R.F. Dearden et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

67. Shawn Rosenberg, Reason, Ideology, and Polities. 68. See, e.g., M.H. Klein, P. Matieu-Coughiin, and D. J. Klesler, "The Experiencing

Scales," in W. P. Pinsof and L. S. Greenberg, editors, The Psychotherapeutic Pro- cess, A Research Handbook (New York: Gilford, 1985); Eugene Gendlin, "A Phil- osophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism," in David Levin, editor, Psycho- pathologies of the Modern Self(New York: New York University Press, 1987); Don Kuiker, "Moments of Affective Insight: Their Phenomenology and Relations to Selected Individual Differences," Imagination, Cognition and Personality 6 (1986- 87): 341-364; Edmund Sherman, Working with Older Persons (The Hague: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1984).