The Ambiguity of Ideology

This article responds to Rose Gann's 'The Limits of Textbook Ideology' in a previous issue of Politics. It acknowledges that she has performed a service in drawing our attention to the problematic character of the concept, particularly within the ordered world of the academic textbook. However this ambiguity in the concept is not limited to the academic textbook but exists across the whole range of the human and social sciences and is much deeper and more perplexing than her own discussion indicates.