  To illustrate, consider how someone’s cruelty might be masked by polite manners; this does not demonstrate that good manners have no worth. Legal ideology, too, might paper over injustice in ways that serve justice nonetheless. A functional argument about ideology, then, must concede the value of the phenomenon that serves ideological aims. Ideology cannot be devoid of emancipatory aspects altogether; if law trumpets justice, equality and freedom, then it must succeed in realizing these ideals, however imperfectly, in order for law to function as ideology. We can thus appreciate legal guarantees of a procedural kind for the genuine protection they offer the subjects of the law, whilst at the same time conceding the quietist politics that proceduralism might engender.