The text by David Goddard presented here comes from a collective volume that was published in the early 1970s, edited by British historian Robin Blackburn (born 1940), titled "Ideology in Social Science: Reading in Critical Social Theory" (Fontana, 1972). It includes major theoretical names, more or less associated with the radical politics of the time: Ralph Miliband, Martin Shaw, E.J. Hobsbawm, Maurice Godelier, Gareth S. Jones, Martin Nicolaus, C.B. Macpherson, J.H. Westergaard, Lucio Coletti, Nikos Poulantzas, among others. In reality, two-thirds of the texts come from a single source, the New Left Review, of which Blackburn was the editor. Thematically, they are part of a critique of ideology based on the basic assumption shared by almost all the authors of the volume, that "ideology" is not just the realm of fanaticism and prejudice but something that permeates all social research, including that often called "value-neutral": "The very idea that social research can be conducted in any way other than through the prior development of concepts and theories must be considered ideological" (p. 9). Thus, from the perspective of various Humanities disciplines (sociology, history, economics, general epistemology), the essays explore the failures of "inductive empiricism," examine certain key problems in social analysis, and, through a selection of theoretical texts, support the usefulness and value of a Marxist-structuralist synthesis.

(Fotis Terzakis, from the introduction)