Masking Hegemony - A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion and the Private Sphere (Paperback, New)

Masking Hegemony is a critical evaluation of the use of the public/private and religion/state binaries in liberal political thought from the Protestant Reformation to the present. The book demonstrates that liberalism's public/private and religion/state binaries, designed to separate "religion" from the "state," are about as sophisticated as talk about the "four humours" in the human body, and may in fact mask or make invisible the influence of dominant religious institutions on state policies. Following theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, each of which demonstrates that dominant ideologies and social norms can circulate indirectly and operate invisibly, Craig Martin argues that there is inevitably a circulation of power and authority from the so-called "private sphere" to the "public sphere" in a liberal democracy, but that the public/private and church/state language prevents us from bringing that circulation of power into relief.