ABSTRACT
"Ideology" as a concept was a crucial tool for Western progressives in universities in the 1960s and 1970s seeking both to theorize the repressive dimension of ostensibly liberal capitalist states and to challenge their own disciplines as generally complicit with that repression. This chapter tries to relate the concept of "ideology" to some of the literature in social epistemology inspired by Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Insofar as "ideology" is taken to be the Marxist concept crucial for illuminating and explaining the cognitive patterns, then it should be a valuable exercise to see whether, or to what extent, "ideology" in some form can provide a useful instrument for engaging current debates in the field. The epistemic status of "ideology" was clearly negative in a presumptively non-relativist way. That is, "ideology" was a critical pejorative term referring to something bad, something that had to be avoided if truth were to be achieved.
