Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins is written in the shadow of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here, the meaning of power and ideology is finally thought with and against the shattered horizon of socialist and capitalist realism. Thinking anew the theory and practice of democratic politics, the essays put into question the meaning of ideology (as false consciousness) and the meaning of power (as seduction). On the question of ideology, political theorists, including Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, Claude Lefort and Zygmunt Bauman, challenge the privileging of ideology-critique in orthodox Marxism. This critical reinterpretation of ideology is then accelerated by a radical (Baudrillardian) rereading of the meaning of power as seduction. The book concludes with political analyses of demon politics in the post-Cold War era.

Table of Contents

Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins	Arthur Kroker
What is to be Done? Art and Politics after the FALL...	Mark Lewis
Four Theses on Ideology	Anthony Giddens
The Impossibility of Society	Ernesto Laclau
La Langue Introuvable	Michel Pêcheux and Françoise Gadet
Some Conditions for Revolutionizing Late Capitalist Society	Jürgen Habermas
On the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies	Claude Lefort
Concepts of Ideology in Marx	György Márkus
Ideology and the Weltanshauung of the Intellectuals	Zygmunt Bauman
Cynical Power: The Fetishism of the Sign	Arthur Kroker and Charles Levin
When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy	Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard's Seduction	Brian Singer
Sign and Commodity: Aspects of the Cultural Dynamic of Advanced Capitalism	Andrew Wernick
Baudrillard, Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis	Charles Levin
Hobbes and/or North: Rhetoric of American National Security	Frederick M. Dolan
The Dark Night of the Liberal Spirit and the Dawn of the Savage	Michael A. Weinstein
Ressentiment and Postmodern Politics	Michael Dorland
Promotional Culture	Andrew Wernick
We Objects Object	Eileen Manion
The End(s) of Woman	Nino Ricci