Theory is divided into 'hard' determinism and 'soft' determinism - the latter supported by Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume, for example. Soft determinism decouples coercion from causality, and purports that agents can still have 'free will' in a deterministic universe since causes do not impose their wills on man. Under determinism, we are no more than the result of the interaction of our environment and heredity. Thus, a 'SuperBeing' could, if he was aware of all these variables, be able to predict all our future actions. Marx stood Hegelianism on its head, by arguing that the economic base of society effectively determined the cultural superstructure.
Discourses are visible textual manifestations of ideology .
Discourses often represent the ideologies of the powerful against the powerless and the repressed. This is as true of discourses based on, say, racist and nationalist assumptions as it is on sexist ones.