Author: Habinek, Thomas N.
Title: Ideology for an empire in the prefaces to Cicero’s dialogues
Review/Collection: "Ramus", 23, 1-2
Year edition: 1994
Pages: 55-67
Keywords: Philosophie - Filosofia - Philosophy, Politique - Politica - Politics
Description: Ideology is a process as well as a product. To extract a set of political principles or mystificatory arguments from a text and call them ‘ideology’ is to overlook the fact that a text is ideological only insofar as it seeks to affect an audience. As J.B. Thompson has written, in a passage cited with approval by Terry Eagleton, ‘to study ideology…is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ The ideology of a text, such as a dialogue of Cicero, cannot therefore be understood except in strategic relationship to a particular context. And the question that allows us to explore that relationship and thereby to begin to reconstruct the ‘relations of domination’ underwritten by the text is cui bono: to whose advantage is this text constructed and situated as it is? [Author]
Works:
Author initials: Habinek 1994
Title: Ideology for an empire in the prefaces to Cicero’s dialogues
Review/Collection: "Ramus", 23, 1-2
Year edition: 1994
Pages: 55-67
Keywords: Philosophie - Filosofia - Philosophy, Politique - Politica - Politics
Description: Ideology is a process as well as a product. To extract a set of political principles or mystificatory arguments from a text and call them ‘ideology’ is to overlook the fact that a text is ideological only insofar as it seeks to affect an audience. As J.B. Thompson has written, in a passage cited with approval by Terry Eagleton, ‘to study ideology…is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ The ideology of a text, such as a dialogue of Cicero, cannot therefore be understood except in strategic relationship to a particular context. And the question that allows us to explore that relationship and thereby to begin to reconstruct the ‘relations of domination’ underwritten by the text is cui bono: to whose advantage is this text constructed and situated as it is? [Author]
Works:
Author initials: Habinek 1994
