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. (shrink)

Amongst historians of economics it is generally assumed that while the term economics derives from the Greek term oikonomikos —the theory of household management—the ancient Greeks did not develop what we call economics. This paper traces the relation between the Greek term and the modern—a relation which is generally said not to exist. The paper is a critical theoretical attempt to begin to trace the underlying assumptions of modern economic theory as well as the more general question of the legacy (...) of ancient Greece on the modern world. (shrink)