ABSTRACT
The concept of ideology has a genealogy that traces through some central moments and dilemmas of modernity and postmodernity and a presence that recurs in the explanation of how societies are reproduced and human subjectivities are organized. Born during the French Revolution, under the shadow of the guillotine, it survived in the person of its originator, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, to become a guiding concept for the realization of the ambitions of the Enlightenment in the period following the Thermidorian Reaction, with its defeat of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. In this revolutionary setting, ideology was conceived as knowledge based on the certainties of fi rst principles and as an antidote to the prejudices and inexact pre-judgements of custom and tradition, especially as communicated through ordinary language. It was conceived, then, as the inverse of its now typical cluster of connotations and meanings in which misrecognition fi gures large. Yet this very splitting between valid and invalid forms of consciousness, knowledge or belief has continued to haunt notions of ideology throughout its subsequent career.
