Ideology

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Ideology is a system of views and ideas that people adhere to, using its framework to perceive, interpret, and evaluate being. While it is common to speak of specific political ideologies, one can also speak of ideology as a general social phenomenon. In class society, ideology always has a class character reflecting the position of a given class and its interests. Marxism, for its part, is a method of analysis based in the critique of the ideology that dominates modern capitalist society.

The concept of ideology has changed and become more precise in the course of the development of knowledge. The term "ideology" was introduced by the French philosopher and economist Antoine Destutt de Tracy in The Elements of Ideology. Proceeding from the principle that our knowledge originates in sensations, he asserted that ideology, which he described as the "science of ideas", made it possible to establish firm foundations for things like politics, ethics, education, etc. Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis and other later representatives of the school of French materialism and sensualism wrote about ideology in the same sense. In the Napoleonic era, however, the term acquired a nuance of scorn. People who approached social life from the standpoint of abstract principles and understood nothing of the practical questions of real politics began to be known as ideologists. Karl Marx had similar thoughts on the matter, referring to Tracy as a "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" (fischblütige Bourgeoisdoktrinär).

Marxist perspectives on ideology

Marx

Marx's basic theory of ideology can be found in the base-superstructure model, saying that the ruling class of any society constructs an idealist superstructure to defend its social interests, which are found in the material base. However, as the lower classes become larger and more organised, they will gradually become class conscious and generate their own ideology. Eventually they gain enough power to act on this new ideology, and overturn the previous material conditions to their benefit.

Hence, it has been argued that Marx's concept of ideology can be distinguished into two separate phenomena: thinking characteristic of a rising class, and thinking characteristic of a class that is in power. The former seeks to narrate the struggles an oppressed class faces, and posits a better society that overcomes them. The latter tries to maintain the status quo by rationalising it and giving people ways to understand their position within it. Both are limited in their perspective and ultimately wrong.

Although ideology finds a place within what Marx calls the superstructure, the two terms are not synonymous. There is also the political superstructure of the state, which consists of real institutions with a function beyond the development and maintenance of ideas. It has also been argued that we should distinguish between the idealistic superstructure as a whole and ideology, since for Marx there also appear to be non-ideological elements to this superstructure.

Marx famously uses the term "ideology" in the title of his unpublished 1845 book The German Ideology, in which he explains the naive idealist doctrines written by his fellow Young Hegelians as emerging out of the historical position of the politically impotent German bourgeoisie. This book is significant because it includes his formulation of historical materialism, the importance of which to ideology he explains as follows,

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.

What people say is rooted in their material activity. This means that we can learn about a society's ideology by understanding their material conditions, and learn about their material conditions by understanding their ideology. He goes on,

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In their ideology, ideologues will always discover that eternally true principles account for the specifics of their preferred society. They develop elaborate ethical systems to justify what they were already doing. The perspective of these ideologies is thus upside-down, since they begin with their conclusions and end with their assumptions.

This can be read through the lens of the Marxist notions of alienation and reification. In alienation, the products of human activity apparently begin to live a life of their own, and come to exert power over their producers. Reification elevates historical social relations into inherent attributes of things and people. On both accounts this is precisely what happens to ideological constructions.

Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci innovated on Marx by theorising different class interests to be competing for cultural hegemony. He broke with Marxist-Leninist thought at the time by looking at ideology not as a merely idealistic phenomenon, but one with a material reality, continually affirmed by hegemonic apparatuses within civil society.

One way in which this hegemony expresses itself is in the common sense notions of people under capitalism. Through popular media, education and religious activity, as well as day-to-day life under capitalism, ideological notions get inserted into people's common wisdom. Because of the diversity of influences it is rife with internal tensions and contradictions, which most people are unaware of. Gramsci was not dismissive of the common sense of the masses however, and saw it to contain a healthy core of good sense (buon senso). This good sense is naturally critical of the ideology within common sense, capable of working out its contradictions, and has to serve as the basis of a popular form of ideological critique that will result in a philosophy of praxis.

Gramsci also made the distinction between "organic ideologies, those, that is, which are necessary to a given structure, and ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”.

To the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity which is “psychological”; they “organise” human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc. To the extent that they are arbitrary they only create individual “movements”, polemics and so on (though even these are not completely useless, since they function like an error which by contrasting with truth, demonstrates it).

— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, "The Concept of Ideology"

Gramsci thought it nonsensical to focus on ideological systems that do not express the historically necessary beliefs of some subsection of society.

Althusser

Louis Althusser coined the term "ideological state apparatus" in reference to the institutions of the state, such as schools, churches, and the media, which assist in reproducing the conditions of production of capitalism by supporting the state ideology. Althusser recognized that this reproduction was ensured not only by ideological state apparatuses, but also by the repressive state apparatus (army and police) which functioned principally by the use or threat of violence. However, no ruling class could maintain state power over a long period if it lost hegemony over the ideological apparatuses. Althusser has been criticized for giving too little importance to ideologies of resistance against the capitalist state in his formulation.

Žižek

Main article: Slavoj Žižek

Further reading

Primary sources:

• The German Ideology (1845) by Karl Marx
• Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970) by Louis Althusser
• The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Žižek

Secondary sources:

• The Concept of Ideology (1979) by Jorge Larrain
• Ideology: An Introduction (1993) by Terry Eagleton
• Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (2013) by Jan Rehman

External links

• Robert Paul Wolff's lecture course on ideological critique