ABSTRACT
The term ideology was coined by Destutt de Tracy at the end of the eighteenth century. He was aiming to define a science of mental phenomena, which he saw as the necessary corollary of the materialist philosophy of Holbach and Helvetius and the sensate philosophy of Condillac. Such a science should, in its author’s view, provide a rational foundation to the critique of intellectual traditions which characterized the Zeitgeist of the second half of the eighteenth century. A famous reference by Napoleon to the ‘idéologues’ (ideologists) of his time gave a pejorative sense to the term. For Marx the term refers to the ‘false consciousness’ which results from the class position of social actors: the reality of social relations appears deformed to them by virtue of their interests and more generally by the one-sided perspective to which they are condemned as a result of their position in the production system. Mannheim made Marx’s viewpoint more systematic, and tried to avoid the uncertainty to which it led by developing the concept of the freischwebende intelligentz (the free-floating intelligentsia): according to Mannheim, intellectuals held a position which is essentially detached or ‘floating’ in respect of the different classes which make up what has come to be called the ‘social structure’. Thus there is a guarantee in principle of the possibility of an objective viewpoint through which the realities of social relations, as well as the illusions of ideology and false consciousness, can be revealed. (It should be noted that Mannheim would progressively abandon this optimistic position developed in Ideology and Utopia.) With Lenin the concept of ideology returned to a more positive connotation: ideologies are part of the panoply of antagonisms of the class struggle. Lenin thus distanced himself from the Marxian use of the concept of ideology. For Marx, social theories developed by the proletariat-or more properly, in the name of the proletariat-bear the stamp of truth, whereas those of the bourgeoisie were held by him to be more typical of ideology and false
consciousness. For Lenin, whose cynical point of view creates many fewer difficulties than that of Marx, ideologies are the doctrinal weapons with which social classes arm themselves.
