That is, the belief that the capitalist economic system is the product of thrift and abstention; of land enclosure and improvement; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange; and the cash nexus as solution to a coincidence of wants. But as history teaches, the Industrial Revolution was not the outcome of peaceful and voluntary cooperation and exchange but violent and coercive state-backed aggression. One need not be a dogmatic Marxist to observe and understand this, it is historical fact.
Peirce’s theory of signs provides the basic analytical framework for understanding ideology as a structure of meaning. In his philosophy, all thought takes place through signs. A sign is something that stands to somebody for something in some respect. Each sign involves a triadic relation: the sign itself, the object to which it refers, and the interpretant, which is the understanding produced in the mind of the interpreter. Meaning arises not from isolated ideas but from the continuous interpretation of signs within a community.
Political systems succeed, in this framework, when they institutionalize recognition. Individuals accept the legitimacy of the order because their dignity is affirmed within it. Liberal democracy therefore appears anthropologically complete: the central psychological demand of human beings has been satisfied, and history in the dialectical sense has reached its resting place.
Sound of Gunfire 