The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘natural’ sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at the historically radical Newington Green Unitarian Church speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982
Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008
Reason Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009)
On Evil (2010)
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
The Event of Literature (2012) Yale University Press.

A dedicated Marxist literary critic in 2011 he publiTerry Eagletond an apology for the philosopher entitled Why Marx Was Right. Eagleton is currently DistinguiTerry Eagletond Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University; Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland and DistinguiTerry Eagletond Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame. Terence Francis 'Terry' Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist and critic widely regarded as the United Kingdom's most influential living literary critic.