SOURCE: “Dialectic Without Detail,” in Times Literary Supplement, June 28, 1991, pp. 6-7.

In the following review, Griffiths offers unfavorable assessment of Ideology.

Though generally admiring William Empson's work, Terry Eagleton regretted that “it lacks … almost any concept of ideology”. This is not strictly true: a formulation such as “language is essentially a social product, and much concerned with social relations, but we tend to hide this in our forms of speech so as to appear to utter impersonal truths” (The Structure of Complex Words) states clearly one classic account of ideological function. But you see what Professor-Elect Eagleton means: Empson makes his point unsystematically, as a general observation about human behaviour rather than as something determined by particular sociopolitical circumstance. When Empson says of the early eighteenth century in England, “There was the feeling that the unity of society had become somehow fishy”, he sounds more jokey than a...