Ideology

I have mixed feelings about this book; I'd picked it up as it was recommended by China Miéville in "A Spectre, Haunting". The first two chapters ("What Is Ideology?" and "Ideological Strategies") were great – truly an introduction and overview, bringing to the foreground the many conflicing notions of ideology I'd encountered and linking them to political practice. I enjoyed the beginning of the third chapter "From the Enlightenment to the Second International" as helpful contextualization of the birth of the study of ideology, but then felt the book got lost in detailed intellectual history and rehashing of academic fights, so I began skipping and picked up again in the second-to-last chapter, "Discourse and Ideology", which turned out to just be a particular in-fight about semiotics with some other academics. The "Conclusion" was short and summarized the ideas of the first few chapter well. If you pick this up out of practical rather than academic interest, I'd recommend treating it as a primer and sticking to the first two or three chapters.