Beyond the Old Marshal: "Patriotic Nonsense," the Vernacular Cosmopolitan, And Faulkner's Fiction of the Early 1940S (Theory and Practice) (William Faulkner‪)‬

Nobody has yet come up with a single adequate definition of ideology" (1), writes Terry Eagleton, who ought to know. Tellingly, though, he also observes that He further points out that most people have a rigid, exclusively rationalist definition of ideology as "a schematic, inflexible way of seeing the world, as against some more modest, piecemeal, pragmatic wisdom"--as the way, for example, that a "person-in-the-[American]-street" might have viewed politics in the old Soviet Union in relation to his own country's (3-4). Instead, Eagleton posits a theory of ideology that "must figure as an organizing social force which actively constitutes human subjects at the roots of their lived experience and seeks to equip them with forms of value and belief relevant to their specific social tasks and to the general reproduction of the social order" (222-23). Not rigid in the least, any ideology faces "conflicting interests among which it must ceaselessly negotiate" as it "strives in the teeth of political resistance to reconstitute that order at an imaginary level" (222). In other words, successful ideology in practice is not so much a policeman in mirror shades as a savvy recruiter with a good line.