ABSTRACT
Central to any debate about society and culture is the debate about ideology. Once again there are a number of significantly differing understandings which are addressed in Raymond Williams’s intellectual reference book Keywords, a sort of extended dictionary of important ideas. In the following extract it is useful particularly to focus on the difference between:
Ideology as abstract and false thought – the classic Marxist definition of a world turned upside down so that ‘ordinary’ and ‘natural’ relationships are made to appear those that best serve the interests of the ruling classes. An example might be views of human nature which stress the natural selfishness or competitiveness of human beings and which therefore implicitly support a system based upon selfishness and competitiveness such as Western Capitalism.
Ideology as a set of ideas from a definite class or group. This is the sense in which we can talk about working-class ideology, feminist ideology or the ideology of the ruling class.
There is then some direct continuity between the pejorative sense of ideology, as it had been used in the C19 by conservative thinkers, and the pejorative sense popularized by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (1845–7) and subsequently. Scott had distinguished ideology as theory ‘resting in no respect upon the basis of self-interest’, though Napoleon’s alternative had actually been the (suitably vague) ‘knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history’. Marx and Engels, in their critique of the thought of their radical German contemporaries, concentrated on its abstraction from the real processes of history. Ideas, as they said specifically of the ruling ideas of an epoch, ‘are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas’. Failure to realize this produced ideology: an upside-down version of reality.
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process. (German Ideology, 47)
Or as Engels put it later:
Every ideology … once it has arisen develops in connection with the given concept-material, and develops this material further; otherwise it would cease to be ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws. That the material life-conditions of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on in the last resort determine the course of this process remains of necessity unknown to these persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology. (Feuerbach, 65–6)
Or again:
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously indeed but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or his predecessors’. (Letter to Mehring, 1893)
Ideology is then abstract and false thought, in a sense directly related to the original conservative use but with the alternative – knowledge of real material conditions and relationships – differently stated. Marx and Engels then used this idea critically. The ‘thinkers’ of a ruling class were ‘its active conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood’ (German Ideology, 65). Or again: ‘the official representatives of French democracy were steeped in republican ideology to such an extent that it was only some weeks later that they began to have an inkling of the significance of the June fighting’ (Class Struggles in France, 1850). This sense of ideology as illusion, false consciousness, unreality, upside-down reality, is predominant in their work. Engels believed that the ‘higher ideologies’ – philosophy and religion – were more removed from material interests than the direct ideologies of politics and law, but the connection, though complicated, was still decisive (Feuerbach, 277). They were ‘realms of ideology which soar still high in the air… various false conceptions of nature, of man’s own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc …’ (Letter to Schmidt, 1890). This sense has persisted.
Yet there is another, apparently more neutral sense of ideology in some parts of Marx’s writing, notable in the well-known passage in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Philosophy (1859):
The distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production … and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological – forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
This is clearly related to part of the earlier sense: the ideological forms are expressions of (changes in) economic conditions of production. But they are seen here as the forms in which men become conscious of the conflict arising from conditions and changes of condition in economic production. This sense is very difficult to reconcile with the sense of ideology as mere illusion.
(Williams 1983: 154–6) What's Next?Louis Althusser suggested that ‘ideology is indeed a system of representation’. Collect a set of representations of any social group and consider how far they are affected by the ideology of our society.
