Ideology

Ideology (from Greek idéa + lógos — “discourse on ideas”) — A concept with a complex history whose uses oscillate between technical neutrality and radical critique. It was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) to designate a “science of ideas,” an empirical, anti-metaphysical analysis of the sensations and concepts that compose human thought; Napoleon Bonaparte, however, turned the word into an insult by calling the philosophers of the National Institute idéologues, seen as abstract dreamers oblivious to the realities of power. Its most influential meaning comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who in The German Ideology (written 1845–46) hold that “the ruling ideas of each epoch are the ideas of the ruling class”: like a camera obscura, ideology inverts the real and presents as natural and eternal what is historical and contingent. (The phrase false consciousness, falsches Bewusstsein, does not appear in The German Ideology; it was coined by Engels himself in a letter to Franz Mehring in 1893.) Antonio Gramsci reformulated the idea through the concept of hegemony, the cultural consent by which the subordinate class assimilates the dominant worldview through the institutions of civil society (school, Church, press). Louis Althusser, in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), described how ideology interpellates individuals, constituting them as subjects. Karl Mannheim, in turn, in Ideology and Utopia (1929), shifted the problem toward the sociology of knowledge, showing that all thought is socially conditioned and opposing to ideology the utopia that points toward transformation. In current usage, the term varies between a pejorative sense (dogmatic belief) and a neutral one (a coherent system of political values, such as liberalism or socialism).

← Glossary