ABSTRACT
In Karl Marx’s social philosophy “ideology” has a rather pejorative connotation. Ideology normally refers not so much to specific rationalizations as to a broad worldview that encompasses a whole paradigm of rationalizations. Faced with a set of beliefs, one may seek to uncover a substrate that underlies all of them and call it an ideology. Beliefs in different realms of experience may be based on different cognitive foundations, but these foundations may themselves have a common underlying substrate, which should properly be called an underlying ideology. An ideology, as Mannhein uses that term, refers to a way of thinking about social reality, about the human condition, matters clearly related to value orientations. The pejorative aspect of ideology in the Marxist formulation of sociology of knowledge appears in what Marx saw as the subordination of cognitive and moral frameworks of thought to class interests, in particular to the economic interests of the dominant and therefore exploiting class.
