Ideology

It is generally granted that the term ideology was first coined by French philosopher Compte Antoine Destutt de Tracy in the early years of the first republic. Destutt de Tracy's support for institutional reform, particularly of the French educational system, led him to side with the revolutionaries in 1789. He quickly decided that their program was too radical and extremist for his taste. As a result, he abandoned active political engagement, severed ties with the National Assembly, and subsequently found himself imprisoned in the Bastille for a year at the height of the crisis that ultimately led to the Reign of Terror of 1793–1794. It is believed that during his time in the Bastille, and under the influence of his readings of Condillac and especially Locke, he first formulated the notion of ideology.

For Destutt de Tracy, ideology was to be a critical epistemological program, a science of ideas, with practical political import. Consistent with the Anglo empiricists, Destutt de Tracy located the source of ideas in “feelings”—external and internal sense perceptions. If, on analysis, an empirical source could not be located for a particular idea, that idea was deemed vacuous and to be jettisoned. Ideology would thus provide an analytic tool by means of which individuals, free from external direction, could verify the correctness of their ideas and discard those which had no basis in empirical reality. It was Destutt de Tracy's expectation that the influence of religious indoctrination during children's education would be the main butt of this “scientific” analysis of ideas.

Upon his release, Destutt de Tracy began to attract a group of likeminded idéologistes, spawning a movement that ultimately came to significantly influence the Second Class of the National Institute, which was responsible for political and moral science and education. While the idéologistes had supported Napoleon's 1799 coup, the critical program of ideology soon came into conflict with Napoleon's designs, in particular his reestablishment of state religion. As a result, the idéologistes came under greater and greater suppression, with Napoleon himself ultimately dismissing them as dreamers and windbags—idéologues. And so, while Destutt de Tracy had clearly intended his science of ideology to be a tool to demystify something like a false consciousness he saw as imputed by religious indoctrination, by the time Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels take up the notion of ideology in the 1840s, the term, following Napoleon's contemptuous dismissal of those he viewed as obstacles to his political program, had ironically taken on the derogatory connotation of an abstract idealism expressing some kind false or distorted consciousness. Subsequent to Marx and Engels, the notion of ideology has been developed primarily within the broad Marxist theoretical tradition. As a result of the work of Louis Althusser in particular, a significant psychoanalytic dimension has also been brought into the analysis of ideology over the past several decades, particularly through figures associated with the development of postmodern and post-Marxist theory. While the term has taken on many different meanings—Terry Eagleton identifying sixteen, for example—in various areas of theory over time, the focus here is on identifying some of the main contours of the development of the notion within Marxist theory, through to contemporary post-Marxism.

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