This episode is a “deep dive” into the very deep waters of ideology and ideological commitments. A couple of important notes for listeners: first, this episode was recorded the day before William Clare-Roberts’ excellent essay “Ideology and Emancipation: Voluntary Servitude, False Consciousness, and the Career of Critical Social Theory” was published. (We promise to do our level best to get him on the podcast for a Part 2 of this “Ideology” series!)  Second,  we are VERY excited to announce our new partnership with Edinburgh University Press, which is not only sponsoring this episode, but a number of other HBS episodes this season!  EUP has generously offered our listeners a discount on their current catalog, so be sure to enter the discount code “HBS” when you buy books on their website!

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

•  We’re Here (HBO series, 2020-present)
• A look at 20 years of tuition costs at U.S. universities
• Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
• Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The German Ideology (1932)
• Charles Mills, “Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism” (2017)
• In re: “the Dude’s” claim (from The Big Lebowski) that “it’s all opinion,”  check out our Season 7, Episode 92 on the topic of  “Lazy Relativism”
• Plato’s theory of “recollection” in Pheado
• For a “deep dive” into Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, check out our Season 6, Episode 90 
• Slavoj Žižek on Lacan
• “logrolling”
• “Chemtrails” conspiracy theory
• Amy E. Wendling, The Ruling Ideas: Bourgeois Political Concepts (2012)
• Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971)
• “Mary, Queen of Poland”
• What do we mean by “Enlightenment, Inc”?  Listen to our Season 10, Episode 137 on “Originality” to find out!
• Carl Schmidt, The Concept of the Political (1932)
• Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1968)
• Frankfurt School
• “Private language”
• Normativity
• Michel Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, Lectures at the Collège de France 1980-1981 (1981)
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in  Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
• Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How To Read Donald Duck: Ideology in the Disney Comic (2020)
• Henry Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and The End of Innocence (1999)
• Marshall McLuhan on fish and water
• Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964)
• Theodor Adorno, “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column” (1975)
• A brief, weird history of brainwashing
• Sara Li, “What is a Cult and Why Do People Join Them?” (Teen Vogue, 2023)
• Our Season 2, Episode 21: “Conspiracy Theories”