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John Cash's Identity, Ideology and Conflict is, overall, a worthwhile book. Indeed, it can be thought of as two worthwhile books. It is, on the one hand, an analytical intervention into the study of ideology. In this first book, occupying most of Part 1, Cash reviews and analyzes the theories of a disparate galaxy of predecessors—Anthony Giddens, Erich Fromm, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, to name a few—and assembles from them a subtle and, he claims, more inclusive model of ideology, one “which is at once concerned with the interplay of both social and psychic processes” (25). While some theorists have stressed the economic determinants of ideology, and others its cultural (or simply personal) aspects, Cash sets out a “third approach,” which “appropriates the virtues of both the sociological and psychological approaches whilst overcoming their limitations.” (12). This third approach recognizes that ideology is inevitably freighted with “psychological characteristics.” “[T]he subject cathects the ideological construction to which he or she has been subjected”; this makes him or her an “active party” (71) in ideology's interpellations, not merely their object of address.
On the other hand, Identity, Ideology and Conflict is also an in formed account of Unionist politics in Northern Ireland from 1962 to the present. In this second book, occupying Part 2, the author reviews and comments on positions taken at different junctures in Northern Ireland's struggles by an array of Protestant leaders— includingTerence O'Neill and Ian Paisley—and suggests that they can be accounted for by the more dynamic and nuanced model of ideology he has been developing. As Cash says early on, his study “can be described as an attempt to develop social and political theory with an empirical intent” (8). The material on Unionist politics, then, stands as an elaborated example of Cash's “third approach.”
As I read through Identity, Ideology and Conflict, though, I found it hard to make the t