Introduction

Abstract

This book seeks to revitalize the ideology critique, which appears nowadays as an outdated discipline, mainly because it cannot give a satisfactory account of a kind of ‘God’s eye’ discourse, which a critic of ideology — in an apparently inescapable way — has to assume to formulate his or her critique. This work, however, by revisiting Habermas’s theory of communicative action viewed through the lens of the theory of ideology formulated by Slavoj Žižek attempts to present an ‘alternative route’ to insist on the pertinence of an ideology critique for political analysis. For the sake of the argument, this book also includes the case study of the consensus reached by Chilean political elites on the post-Pinochet political economy model (1990–2006). In this way, the case study is used to obtain new theoretical insights in order to return critically to the problem of the possibility and necessity of a universal truth as a way of rehabilitating an ideology critique for political analysis, identified as the main concern of this book.