Language, Ideology and Social Consciousness

This work sets out to develop a distinctive, critical approach to the study of the development of social consciousness through empirical studies of sociopolitical conflict in the west of Scotland. It applies the works of psychologist L.S. Vygotsky and the philosophy of language of V.N. Voloshinov and M.M. Bakhtin. For these theorists, language is the medium of both ideology and of social consciousness itself, and so the analysis in the studis focuses closely on changes in processes of language-use and on the contextual roots of these changes. All of this has considerable implications for the critical evaluation of theories of ideology, and for their concrete application.