Hall, “After Neoliberalism”:

The current neoliberal settlement has also entailed the re-working of the common-sense assumptions of the earlier, social democratic settlement. Every social settlement, in order to establish itself, is crucially founded on embedding as common sense a whole bundle of beliefs – ideas beyond question, assumptions so deep that
the very fact that they are assumptions is only rarely brought to light. In the case of neoliberalism this bundle of ideas revolves around the supposed naturalness of ‘the market’, the primacy of the competitive individual, the superiority of the private over the public. It is as a result of the hegemony of this bundle of ideas – their being the ruling common sense – that the settlement as a whole is commonly called ‘neoliberal’. (13)

Ideology plays a key role in disseminating, legitimising and re-invigorating a regime of power, profit and privilege. Neoliberal ideas seem to have sedimented into the western imaginary and become embedded in popular ‘common sense’. They set the parameters – provide the ‘taken-for-granteds’ – of public discussion, media debate and popular calculation. (17)

The ideology of competitive individualism has also been imposed via the stigmatisation of the so-called ‘undeserving’ poor. ‘Welfare scroungers’, who cannot provide for themselves through their own efforts, are labelled morally deficient- ‘idlers who prefer a lie-in to work’, ‘living on benefits as a “life-style” choice’. Similarly, everyone – parents, students, clients, patients, taxpayers, citizens – is expected to think of themselves as consumers of ‘products’ that will bring them individual economic advantage, rather than as social beings satisfying a human need, producing something of use, or participating in an experience of learning from which others as well as themselves may benefit. In these ways, neoliberalism has been engaged in constructing new entrepreneurial identities and re-engineering the bourgeois subject.

Looking at the broader cultural picture, we detect similar tendencies: in consumer and celebrity cultures, the drive for instant gratification, the fantasies of success, the fetishisation of technology, the triumph of ‘life-style’ over substance, the endless refashioning of the ‘self’, the commercialisation of ‘identity’ and the utopias of self-sufficiency. These ‘soft’ forms of power are as effective in changing social attitudes as are ‘hard’ forms of power such as legislation to restrict strikes. (18-19)

Grossberg, “Ideology”:
Antonio Gramsci (1971) emphasized the complexity of the relationships that define human reality at any particular time and place; and he rejected the assumption that such relationships were the necessary result of transcendental forces – like the economy. Consequently, he opposed the tendency to assume that class and/or economic relations necessarily provided the truth about everything. Instead, he argued that human reality was the product of the work of producing or articulating relationships. His concept of hegemony describes an ongoing struggle to create ideological consensus within a society, while his concept of common sense emphasizes the fragmentary and contradictory nature of the unconscious meanings and beliefs with which people make sense of their world. (176)

Louis Althusser (1970) once more turned the concept on its head by defining ideology as the systems of representation in which people live their relationship to the real conditions of their lives. Ideology is an indispensable dimension of human life, the means through which experience itself is produced. Experience becomes a political reality rather than a natural ‘‘fact’’ that remains free of political determination. For Althusser, then, ideology is always embedded in the actual material practices of the language use of particular social institutions, which he called ideological state apparatuses. (177)