Power of Ideas

Ideology and Marx

Ideology refers to groups of interrelated ideas, beliefs, and values. The term ideology was coined by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy (1801). The emancipatory power of ideas was a crucial feature of the European Enlightenment, and ideology was seen as the science of ideas that would eventually dispel prejudices and superstitions. In this context, ideas such as the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, and fraternity) and, more generally, ideas rooted in rational discourses were viewed as driving away not merely the obsolete ideas of the ancient regime, but also its economic, political and social structures. Eugene Delacroix's famous painting (“La Liberté guidant le peuple” (“Liberty Leads the People,” 1831) gives eloquent artistic expression to this view of people led by ideas.

Marx's intervention in the discussion of ideology was decisive. Ideologies, he claimed in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), were part of the social superstructure—it is not “the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx [1844] 1972, 4). Far from initiating social change and transformation, ideas substantially reflect the material conditions of production, and especially the interests of ruling classes. Ideas do not evolve by themselves, nor are they the product of some abstract cognitive processes. Still less are ideas manifestations of a sovereign reason or subjectivity. Instead they emerge, come into conflict with each other, prevail or decline broadly in line with changing social, economic, and political conditions. Furthermore, ideologies (like the superstitions of old) are systematically distorted forms of consciousness, which allow for domination to go unnoticed or be regarded as natural. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marx's well-known description of religion as “the opium of the people” and in “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions” (Marx 1956). Far from dismissing religion and other ideologies as irrelevant or redundant, Marx saw them as decisive weapons in class conflict.

With Marx, the concept of ideology acquires a deprecatory quality: at best, as unscientific bundles of ideas; at worst, as false consciousness. Ideas are correspondingly stripped of any independent power they might have had as generalized vehicles of social emancipation. Science, on the other hand, is seen as objective, yet unavailable to classes whose material interests it threatens. The distinction between science and ideology has been a constant focus of debate, not least within Marxism itself. The chronic difficulty in drawing a hard and fast line between the two has made Marxism itself subject to its own critique, as the ideological expression of a particular class interest and a specific form of false consciousness.

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