ABSTRACT
According to one of the earliest and most commonly used theories of ideology, the Marxist theory, ideologies are distorted, mystified, and false conceptions that are opposed to knowledge and consciousness that are true, realistic, and objective. This theory understands power, status, and interests as the principal determinants of the consciousness of an economic class or a group whose thinking is ideological; that is, its thinking is politically and economically interested-its ideas rationalize the social and mental conventions that lend credence and support to its property and its power. According to this theory, ideological conceptions are to be contrasted with true or real conceptions of self, other, and world. At the basis of this idea is the accompanying one, that the clearest opposition exists between science and ideology, the scientist being free from the interested thinking of the politician, the partisan, or the bourgeois.
