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NATURALISM AND IDEOLOGY: TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE Gregory Cameron

ABSTRACT Lefort’s ‘Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’ constitutes an important attempt to reinvigorate the notion of ideology through a critique of the Marxist use of the term while retaining the basic features of Marx’s own understanding. In particular, Lefort attempts to understand the transformations through which ideology goes in non-bourgeois social forms. He achieves this primarily through a critique of the naturalism inherent in Marx’s understanding of society and ideology. In this article, I argue that Lefort’s understanding of ideology and his critique of Marx belong squarely within the phenomenological tradition, despite the fact that Lefort does not make this explicit. More importantly, I argue that there is a strong continuity between Lefort’s understanding of ideology and Husserl of the ‘Vienna Lecture’. The article ends with a short application of these thoughts to ideology in the age of globalization. KEYWORDS globalization • Edmund Husserl • ideology • Claude Lefort • phenomenology

In his ‘Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’, Claude Lefort argues that part of the limitation of Marx and Marxist accounts of ideology is that they ‘conceive ideology only with regard to “bourgeois ideology”’. For Lefort, the task of a reconsideration of the notion of ideology is to recognize in it forms other than the bourgeois and to ‘grasp the principle of its transformation’ (Lefort, 1986: 183–4). The insight that informs this rearticulation is the recognition of the underlying naturalism of Marx’s Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 7–18 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068772

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understanding of ideology. For Lefort, ideology belongs to modern society in all its variations, and as such it needs to be thought with reference to that which differentiates these social forms. What emerges in the process is an anti-naturalist account of ideology and, I will argue, a phenomenological critique of modern political discursive forms. Before considering the understanding of ideology developed by Lefort, the problem of the European origins of ideology inherent in the claim that ideology belongs to modern social forms and the resultant characterizations of non-modern societies must be confronted. The charge of Eurocentrism is inevitable. The anti-Eurocentric argues that everything that has traditionally been claimed to be inherently European – philosophy, science, politics, religion, etc. – can in fact be discovered universally. The anti-Eurocentric renders universalism a fact to be accepted as such, rather than something to be discovered through the process of rational investigation. The challenge that is presupposed by Lefort’s essay is that of delineating that which distinguishes European culture from other cultural forms. In order to argue that there is a European origin to ideology one has to have an understanding of the difference between Europe and non-European cultures. While Lefort does not engage the anti-Eurocentric explicitly, he does offer an argument for what differentiates modern Europe from other cultural forms. For Lefort, the decisive issue is that in non-modern societies the principle of legitimation lies outside society itself. A transcendent principle, a god for example, legitimates the given social form. It is for this reason, he argues, that non-modern societies are inherently conservative, whereas modern societies are historical. The naturalization of the notion of history, the equation of history with change, constitutes one of the greatest confusions of modern social theory. An historical society is not reducible to a society that changes. An historical society is one which institutes consciously and deliberately the conditions for its own transformation and reflects on this process of transformation. History is both a matter of institution and of representation. As we shall see, the misrecognition of this fact is in part a function of ideology, just as the anti-Eurocentric universalization of history is itself ideological through and through. There is, however, a limitation to Lefort’s argument. As mentioned, it is modern society that constitutes, for Lefort, the condition of possibility for ideology. Ideology comes into being with the necessity of society accounting for its own legitimation and no longer appealing to the principle of a beyond. This characterization of the conditions for ideology cannot be reduced to a modern phenomenon; it is, rather, distinctively European. While it is true that the principle of legitimacy in ancient Athens or Rome lay in an appeal to tradition and to the gods, the philosophers, sophists and legal theorists sought, to varying degrees, to question this form of legitimation. For many ancient thinkers the site of legitimacy could not be sought in an appeal to an outside. Moreover, it would be difficult to claim that neither

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Greece nor Rome recognized themselves as historical societies. To be sure, the concept of history differed, sometimes radically, from that encountered in modern historiography, but there can be little doubt that ancient thinkers understood that there was a necessity for institutional transformation in the bringing about of ideal conditions. The reference to Greece and Rome suggests that what we are dealing with in the attempt to consider that which differentiates the modern world is already that which differentiates Europe from non-European cultural forms. This reference to that which differentiates Europe is not merely an intellectual Eurocentric exercise, is not merely the result of a desire to save Europe from the universalization of culture; rather, it is a necessary preliminary condition for understanding the transformations in the nature of ideology as a result of the process of globalization. But how is this thing ‘Europe’ to be understood? And how is it to be understood without at the same time falling into the trap of privileging this particular cultural form? Paradoxically, the beginnings of this understanding have already been laid down in Edmund Husserl’s 1934 ‘Vienna Lecture’, also known as ‘Phenomenology and the Crisis of European Humanity’. I say ‘paradoxically’ because anyone familiar with the ‘Vienna Lecture’ will know that Husserl’s essay is riddled with Eurocentric pronouncements and presuppositions, because his essay begins by privileging Europe in an anachronistic and completely unacceptable way. The paradox of Husserl’s lecture, however, also reaches into responses to the lecture. The ‘Vienna Lecture’ has been condemned both for its universalism and for its particularism. At the time it was written, Husserl’s thought in general was being condemned by the Nazis for its commitment to the universality of reason at the expense of the particularity of ‘blood and soil’; today, by contrast, Husserl is most frequently criticized for his Eurocentrism. In the case of the ‘Vienna Lecture’, however, there can be little doubt that the form of the essay emerges out of the polemical context in which it was written. The lecture constitutes Husserl’s attempt to come to grips with and overcome the inherent particularism of the European social and political situation. The lecture is Husserl’s response to Nazism, fascism and communism, to what he refers to as the ‘nature remedies’ of the European crisis. It will be impossible to go through Husserl’s argument in detail, nor shall there be an opportunity to consider the philosophical problems inherent in the lecture. Much of the lecture fails to fulfill the criteria established by his earlier phenomenology: there are a great many presuppositions; the concept of history used by Husserl is not thoroughly justified; the developmental understanding of the relation between cultures constitutes an unwarranted concession to naturalism; the privileging of Europe is at no point justified, if it ever could be from within the phenomenological epoche, etc. It does, however, seem to me that many of these problems could be dealt with by attention to the polemical character of the work and the recognition that the

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work unfolds in the characteristic zigzag fashion in and out of the natural attitude with the phenomenological reduction both anticipated and presupposed. But be this as it may, what is of interest in the following discussion is Husserl’s description of the essence of Europe and not his philosophical method. Husserl’s lecture attempts to generate and work within two distinct claims. On the one hand, he seeks to lay bare what he calls the teleological sense of European humanity, and on the other hand, he attempts to discern what in this sense constitutes the European crisis. The argument is presented in such a manner that it is often extremely difficult to discern how the distinction is being articulated. The crisis and the teleological sense intertwine. There is an important sense in which the crisis belongs to the essence, at least in the historical sense, and this historical sense is itself immanent to the essence. This latter point, though presented in terms unfamiliar to the earlier Husserl, can already be discerned in the characterization of experience as both motivated and anticipatory and in the understanding of science as a communal activity, as presented in Ideas I. Nonetheless, what is decisive in Husserl’s argument concerning the essence is that this essence is not necessarily recognized as such and is as a consequence already from the origin contaminated by the possibility of its other. The reason for this contamination cannot be discerned in something external to the origin; the contamination is inherent. But what does Husserl mean by the essence of Europe? The essence of Europe, its teleological sense, emerges out of ancient Greece as the discovery of infinite tasks through the development of the theoretical attitude. The theoretical attitude itself emerges, as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle recognized, through the development of the sense of wonder. This sense of wonder allows the philosopher to set aside the world of everyday experience and activity and look upon the world as a disinterested spectator. In the move to a theoretical attitude, what the philosopher discovers is the distinction between the world of everyday life, a world determined by tradition and practical activity, and the world as it really is. The ‘world as it really is’ is the ideal world of theoretical insight, an ideal moreover which emerges through the constant striving of the philosopher and which is passed on to other philosophers in its ideality and universality. The passing on of theoretical insight gives to the striving for universal or ideal truths a communal character that manifests itself, at least in part, in the perpetual reactivation and critique of these handed down idealities. The essence of Europe then is not simply the discovery of the theoretical attitude, a point that is often claimed by those who look to ancient Greece as the origin of European culture; rather, it is the discovery of infinite tasks. But the discovery of such tasks is not the equivalent of the recognition of such tasks. Indeed, it is the failure to recognize this infinity that constitutes the origin of European culture and the consequent crisis. From

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the origin, Husserl argues, the theoretical attitude has been hounded by naturalism and objectivism. Naturalism and objectivism are precisely what prevents the recognition of the ideality of the infinite tasks as the essential domain of the theoretical attitude. Naturalism and objectivism constitute the crisis of the essence of European culture because they develop through an attempt to eliminate the spiritual and the subjective, the ideality of the theoretical attitude. As such, objectivism also prevents the recognition of infinite tasks, it takes its discoveries as facts as opposed to idealities, it looks upon its discoveries as true once and for all and not as spiritual accomplishments whose truth must be continuously reawakened. Objectivism understands its accomplishments to be achieved within a temporal finitude. It fails to recognize that the truth does not lie in accomplishment, but in the development and practice of the theoretical attitude which opens the subject to the infinite. Thus Husserl writes: Psychic humanity has never been complete and never will be, and can never repeat itself. The spiritual telos of European humanity . . . lies in the infinite, is an infinite idea toward which, in concealment, the whole spiritual becoming aims, so to speak. As soon as it becomes consciously recognized in the development as telos, it necessarily also becomes practical as a goal of the will; and thereby a new higher stage of development is introduced which is under the guidance of norms, normative ideas. (Husserl, 1983: 275)

Again, this characterization reveals that for the most part the fact of infinite tasks lies in concealment. Individual thinkers may not be aware of this aspect of their activity, they may be blinded by objectivism and believe that they are responding once and for all – a response which, were it possible, would destroy the theoretical attitude – or that the responses that have been given are themselves natural and inevitable. One of the most important aspects of Husserl’s argument is that the discovery of the theoretical attitude does not merely affect the development of science and philosophy. More important in many respects is the fact that both the attitude and its discovery come to affect culture as a whole. European culture, in other words, in its development emerges out of the discovery of the theoretical attitude, an attitude which perpetually holds open the possibility of questioning and criticizing that which constitutes it at any given moment. But it was not until the modern age that this possibility came to be actualized in the social and cultural sphere. Nonetheless, in becoming actual, the acculturation of the theoretical attitude also enhanced the naturalism that had always been associated with it. The theoretical attitude associated with the natural sciences, sciences that set themselves finite tasks, came to manifest itself in the spiritual or cultural sphere. It is here that we begin to see how there could emerge in Europe in particular a social and political thought which strives for the instantiation of a finite ideal and the subsequent elimination of the theoretical attitude, the attitude

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of perpetual analysis and critique, the attitude that understands that the universal is not to be instituted here and now, but is rather an infinite ideal. Husserl’s ‘Vienna Lecture’ emerges in the context of a reflection on the crisis which was manifest in the social world by the coming to power of the various fascist and communist parties in Europe. The greatest danger from Husserl’s perspective was the objectivism which eliminated the sense of European culture as the pursuit of infinite ideas. For Husserl, the crisis emerges out of the instantiation of finite ideals and finite tasks, objectives to be instituted. This process necessarily meant the elimination of the perpetual reconsideration of truth and the perpetual overcoming of tradition in the interests of truth. It meant, in other words, the elimination of rationality in the interests of an anti-rationalism and an opposition to the life of spirit. What Husserl did not (perhaps could not, given the cultural forms taking shape at the time he was writing) consider was the possibility, which has since become self-evident, of the naturalization of infinite tasks. It is this moment in the process of naturalization that constitutes the present moment in European culture. Rather than a commitment to a finite naturalism there has emerged a commitment to the infinite endeavour without ideal. Ideals have become finite and practical. They no longer constitute infinite tasks, but they do exist within the framework of a perpetual striving, a perpetual endeavour, without ultimate meaning. Moreover, this endeavour has become naturalized; its perpetuation is taken for granted and represented as if it constitutes the natural state of human activity. The naturalization of infinite tasks without ideal – manifest most obviously in such institutions as liberal democracy and capitalism, but also in technological development and in legal institutions – required, in order to become naturalized, a process of acclimatization and assimilation which has been anything but easy. Nonetheless, the process cannot be understood as being simply positive. The naturalization of the infinite bears within itself the perpetual threat of a misrecognition of the task as being completed by finite objectives and ideals, and perhaps more ominously by the instituted movement itself being taken as natural and therefore not a task to be pursued, not an activity in the world. We see the latter in the perpetual failure of democracy and capitalism to deliver the goods they are assumed to bring about naturally as a consequence of their own movement. The preceding characterization and supplementation of Husserl’s argument in the ‘Vienna Lecture’ provides a means by which to engage in a critical philosophical manner with both the modern world and with European culture in general, but it does not yet give us an explicit notion of ideology. It seems to me that Lefort’s argument in the ‘Outline’ picks up precisely this omission from Husserl’s argument, and gives us a phenomenologically inspired notion of ideology. Moreover, what sets Lefort’s argument apart is its explicit attention to the notion of naturalism as being the locus of ideological discourse.

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Before we can proceed it will be worthwhile to say a word about why Husserl’s argument requires a concept of ideology. The naturalism that Husserl condemns, as we have seen, pre-exists the modern world, but it has been in the modern world that naturalism or objectivism has gained dominance. This dominance requires explanation and justification. The social and cultural effects of objectivism must be understood as not merely a result of thought about the world. They have to be understood also as being manifest in discourse in general. It is through discourse that the naturalism that haunts science comes to manifest itself in the social and cultural life world. It is in this context that we need the potential to generate an analysis and critique of discourse and not just modes of thought. The general claims concerning naturalism are not sufficient; discursively, anti-naturalism is never a fait accompli. Rather, it is a perpetual process of uncovering that which is in the process of being naturalized and the effects and function of this naturalization. Anti-naturalism in the social and cultural world is not equivalent to the development of a method as it is, at least in part, in the scientific sphere. Rather, in the social and cultural sphere ideology takes up the task of naturalization in the interests of a particular social order. The means for this task may even be derived from the anti-naturalism of the philosopher (this can be seen in the stress on the body in much recent social theory). The naturalization of a philosophical argument can be placed in the service of an objectivist political agenda. A perpetual vigilance with respect to discourse and its inevitable naturalization is required in order to prevent the naturalization of even the most critical discourse. Thus, as Husserl says, it is not to the individual truths that the philosopher must be devoted but to the ‘full sense of philosophy, the totality of its horizons of infinity’. The individual truths perpetually run the risk of preventing access to the full sense of philosophy by becoming absolutized, so, he continues, ‘No line of knowledge, no single truth may be absolutized and isolated’ (Husserl, 1983: 291). The isolation and absolutization of any given truth gives the truth the character of a fact. The meaning and effects of this truth are no longer reawakened with respect to the infinite task of critical political discourse and they come to cover over precisely what they were said to reveal. As Lefort points out, the critique of ideology should turn discourse into a ‘place of labour whose effect is to keep open the questioning that lies at its source, in spite of the arguments that are asserted and affirmed’ (Lefort, 1986: 202). Both the critique of ideology and of naturalism are infinite tasks, and they are infinite tasks not because they oppose truths to naturalistic truths, but because antinaturalism is not a dogma but an attitude or, as Lefort puts it, ‘an activity’ (Lefort, 1986: 202). Lefort picks up Husserl’s argument by focusing in greater detail on the social, political and cultural effects of naturalism within the context of modern society and more importantly reveals the historical transformation of this naturalism. There is, however, nothing entirely obvious about this

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reading. Besides a brief mention of Merleau-Ponty (Lefort, 1986: 232), Lefort makes no reference to phenomenology or to phenomenologically inspired thinkers. The phenomenological orientation of the work can only be determined through the reading. While the question concerning the absence of explicit reference to phenomenology is definitely worth further research, it is nonetheless evident that it is from a phenomenologically inspired position that Lefort takes up his reinvigoration of the notion of ideology. He achieves this primarily through a critical engagement with Karl Marx and, more importantly, with subsequent Marxists. His argument as such has two distinct foci. On the one hand, there is a reading of Marx which reveals the limits of his thought and its shortcomings; on the other hand, Lefort reads the history of ideology once these shortcomings have been revealed in an attempt to reinvigorate the notion of ideology and its critical potential and to save it from the dogmatic and ahistorical approach adopted by Marxists. The primary critical focus of Lefort’s reading of Marx is precisely Marx’s naturalism. But why should Marx or Marxists be concerned with the charges of naturalism? Isn’t there a sense in which Marx’s materialism is precisely a naturalism, a means by which to overcome the idealism dominant at the time he was writing, and doesn’t a critique of naturalism require, as Husserl suggested, a renewed idealism? These are extremely difficult questions, questions which get to the heart of the phenomenological critique of naturalism, and yet Lefort does not shy away from the issues raised here. His response to these questions in fact constitutes the basis from which one can begin to get a sense of a phenomenologically inspired critique of political discourse. The notion of ideology with which Lefort is concerned and which he is concerned to reinvigorate emerges out of Marx’s critique of idealism. Idealism is not simply a philosophical movement; it is, rather, the selfunderstanding of the bourgeoisie. The concept of ideology emerges, then, not out of an abstract theorizing, but out of an analysis of an existing discourse which determines and seeks to legitimate particular social relations, a particular manifestation of social division. Thus the concept of ideology and the concepts of knowledge and reality against which it is set are articulated against the background of Marx’s analysis of bourgeois society and not simply applied to those conditions. In simply taking over Marx’s notion of ideology, ideological conditions in non-bourgeois societies are concealed. Lefort’s understanding of ideology thus emerges out of Marx’s critique of bourgeois ideology. Where Lefort does not follow Marx is in the latter’s understanding that ideology is merely a reflection of social division, of real social relations. Ideology, for Marx, emerges out of a projection of real social conditions into the imaginary. The imaginary dimension is not itself determinate of social relations; what is essential is a return to the real. It is in social division that the dynamics of history are to be located. But Lefort indicates that this argument negates an equally primordial social division – the division between ‘social agents and representation’: ‘Marx refuses to recognize that

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social division is also, in a primordial way, the division between the process of socialization and the discourse that describes it’ (Lefort, 1986: 194). This critique of Marx leads to what could be called Lefort’s sociological reduction. What Lefort seeks to do is to conceptualize the mechanisms which ‘secure the representation of an imaginary essence of society . . . without succumbing to the naturalist fiction’. Marx’s naturalism can be located on a number of different levels. On the most basic level is his turn to the positive sciences in his attempt to articulate the origins, nature and history of social division. But more significant is the belief that social division can be inscribed within nature, in labour, but also in the division of the sexes. It is in such attempts to naturalize society that Marx is led to eliminate the significance of the symbolic dimension and to determine the nature of the social by reference to the real. It is Lefort’s indication that the imaginary dimension is equally primordial to the real that it is said to represent that constitutes the basis of his critique of naturalism. Against Marx’s account of the origins of society Lefort writes: We must appreciate that it is social space that is instituted with the division, and it is instituted only insofar as it appears to itself. Its differentiation through relations of kinship or class, through the relation between state and civil society, is inseparable from the deployment of a discourse at a distance from the supposed real, a discourse which enunciates the order of the world. Hence it would be impossible to take up a position which would enable one to grasp the totality of social relations and the interplay of their articulations. Similarly, it would be impossible to grasp the totality of historical development . . . since we would be then concealing from ourselves our own insertion in the domain of discourse which is already implicated in the division, and this oversight would lead us to regard our representation as real in itself. (Lefort, 1986: 194)

What this paragraph reveals is that Marx’s conception of the real presupposes what needs to be established. Any recourse to a natural division fails to articulate its own relation to the representation, takes its representation as if it were itself natural and not a result of a more primordial division between representation and reality. But the division between representation and reality cannot itself be determined through recourse to reality. Rather, it is the division that is primordial; representation and reality, as it were, predetermine each other in the articulation of social space. Despite appearances, this articulation of the emergence of social space corresponds almost to the letter to Husserl’s characterization of the phenomenological reduction. Naturalism assumes that it is only possible to generate a self-enclosed representation of reality through elimination of the subject. The subjective element needs to be set aside and the world represented as it is in itself. But this articulation fails to take account of the fact that worldrepresentation and the calling into question of previous representations are

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themselves not natural, but cultural or spiritual accomplishments. Lefort will argue that the distinction central to the Marxist analysis between reality and knowledge is only possible within the cultural context of modern society and, more importantly, within the context of historical society in which the transformation of social relations reveals the gap between representation and reality. Husserl writes: ‘Our surrounding world is a spiritual structure in us and in our historical life’ (Husserl, 1970a: 272). This does not mean that our conception of the surrounding world is false or that it can be simply ignored; rather, what it means is that this conception must be considered merely as a fact among other facts which it is the role of the phenomenologist to examine. The reduction, in other words, does not render the world nonexistent but instead brackets the question of this existence in order to consider that which appears as it appears. It is only in this appearance that what exists can come to be determined as existent. But again it needs to be understood that appearance is both active and passive and it is both from the perspective of the object and the subject. Representation cannot be the re-presenting of a reality that pre-exists it precisely because the two poles here presuppose each other. There is no thing prior to its representation, just as there can be no representation prior to the appearance of the thing. This point is not simply a criticism of the naturalist standpoint; rather, it reveals or makes explicit what the naturalist takes for granted. For the naturalist, the representation is reality; the representation is the thing, in a onesided concession to its own naturalism which denies the thing itself a role in its representation just as it denies the role of the one who represents. Bringing into question the nature of the surrounding world presupposes as its condition of possibility a disjunction between previous representations and ‘reality’. Reality itself appears only in this moment of disjunction, a disjunction which is not itself representable but which is instantly covered over by the generation of new representations. There is a powerful sense in which the appearance of the real is the epoche. The radical moment of suspension that draws us back to the interminable re-representation. The above quotation, then, reveals not only Lefort’s critique of Marx, but also Lefort’s concept of ideology. The naturalization of social relations and the division of labour led Marx to overlook the fact that social relations only take on significance insofar as they appear. They become social relations through being articulated. What needs to be set aside in thinking the social is the notion that access to the real beyond social division would be possible simply by adopting the correct theoretical stance. The division is already inscribed in the articulation, just as the division between subject and object is inscribed in knowledge in general. It is only insofar as there is a distance between articulation and a presumed real that the description is possible. Nonetheless, this distance is not a radical separation; the representation and reality are implicated in each other in a profound and irreducible way, as two sides of the same coin.

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Lefort’s argument then relinquishes the desire to oppose a real to ideology, and at the same time makes this attempt one of the signs of the presence of ideology. It is the placing of ourselves in the ‘illusory position of claiming to have an overview of Being’ (Lefort, 1986: 196) that constitutes the basic notion of ideology. Ideology seeks to re-immerse the social in that which transcends the social – in nature, in science, or in the universality of principles – and in doing so eliminates that which bears witness to the historicity of the social. Thus, while there is a correspondence between ideology and its critique, ideology seeks to eliminate that which would render the representation of the social subject to the conditions of the appearance of the social to itself whereas critique, whether intentionally or not, seeks a disarticulation of the social from its representation. In an apt description, Lefort suggests that the goal of ideology is to recreate the conditions of a society without history at the heart of historical society. The goal is to give to the present social order the appearance of an eternal and natural essence. In the absence of the historical dimension discourse comes to reconfirm a certain conception of the social, be it positive or negative. Lefort’s phenomenological account of ideology not only complements Husserl’s account of the crisis of European culture but also gives us a way in which to understand the transformations of ideology that are presently underway. According to Lefort, ideology today, ‘the invisible ideology’, proliferates discourse in such a manner that the appearance of ideology becomes difficult to discern. As a consequence of the liberalization of discourse, a condition emerges in which it appears as if everything can be said; there is no longer any discourse that is not in principle open to criticism. This fact alone, however, does not prevent various discursive regimes from gaining dominance, and on a global scale this dominance is more or less self-evident. A naturalism at the heart of contemporary discourse is, as a consequence, almost inevitable. The modern European naturalization of the infinite endeavour without ideal comes, through the effects of telecommunication, to dominate global discourse on the process of globalization. This naturalization constitutes not simply a naturalization of discourse but a profound Westernization in which the possibilities of that which lies beyond this thought are rendered ineffectual. Moreover, the process of naturalization that lies behind this Westernization is so profound that it comes to shut off the possibilities for an anti-naturalist critique and renders complicit even, or perhaps especially, the critique of this process.

Gregory Cameron is a part-time faculty member in Communication Studies and Cultural Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He received his PhD from York University’s Social and Political Thought Program where he specialized in the history of political thought. [email: [email protected]]

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References Husserl, Edmund (1970a) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (trans. David Carr). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1970b) ‘The Vienna Lecture’, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (trans. David Carr). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book (trans. F. Kersten). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lefort, Claude (1986) ‘Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (trans. John B. Thompson). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.