Author Description

Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins is written in the shadow of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here, the meaning of power and ideology is finally thought with and against the shattered horizon of socialist and capitalist realism. Thinking anew the theory and practice of democratic politics, the essays put into question the meaning of ideology (as false consciousness) and the meaning of power (as seduction). On the question of ideology, political theorists, including Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, Claude Lefort, and Zygmunt Bauman, challenge the privileging of ideology-critique in orthodox Marxism. This critical reinterpretation of ideology is then accelerated by a radical (Baudrillardian) rereading of the meaning of power as seduction. The book concludes with political analyses of demon politics in the post-Cold War era.