Ideology

THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM ideology can be traced back to the European Enlightenment and especially to Destutt de Tracy, who is thought to be the first to use this term in print. There were, of course, earlier forms of the notion, for instance in Francis Bacon's concept of “idola.” Further development of the term in the 18th century is closely linked to the French Encyclopedists' struggle against all forms of religious and traditional thought. Even the modern origin of the term ideology is European; nonetheless, the concept has ancient roots as well. It appears, for example, in the 15th-century Greek equivalent of the struggle between the ancients and the moderns, when representatives of the latter, champions of science and civilization, attacked the old traditions and religion, in some cases attempting to explain scientifically the origin of ancient religious beliefs.

The concept of ideology reached its heyday in the great philosophical and social-scientific systems of the 19th century. French philosopher and founder of positivism Auguste Comte criticized the negativism of the enlightenment ideologists' attack on tradition and meta-physics, and argued that the forerunners of science had an important ordering function in society. What is reserved for the domain of purely intellectual activity in Comte is generalized to the entirety of mental production in society in Karl Marx. Marx stressed the historicity of the so-called material basis of ideology as well as the notion that human nature is itself a historical product just as much as its ideological correlatives. He further argued that the estranged or alienated forms of consciousness were not merely intellectual reflections but forms of human practice that play an active role in the functioning and transformation of society itself. The practical aspects of ideology were seen to be directly associated with the structure of class domination. Marx and Friedrich Engels generalized the question of ideology from the realm of science versus tradition to that of real versus mystified social processes, thus encompassing questions of theory and questions of political control within the same framework.

During the entire 19th century and early 20th century, the two aspects of the concept of ideology were elaborated upon. A broad array of terms seems to have been used in similar fashion. In the works of Georg Lukacs and Karl Mannheim, there emerged a tradition of the sociology that has been developed throughout the century, its most recent advocate being Jurgen Habermas, a prominent member of the Frankfurt School.

This approach, heavily represented in the Frankfurt School of German Sociology, has concentrated much of its effort on understanding the ideological basis of all forms of social knowledge, including the natural sciences. [Page 690]In France, Emile Durkheim (1965) elaborated the analysis of the relation between social structure and the organization of collective representations that are meant to reflect the former. Their wide-ranging ethnological ambitions had important influences on the development of anthropology in France and Holland and more recently among British symbolists. In the work of British functionalists, there has been a concentration on the way in which ideology maintains social solidarity, provides a “character” for the social order, or otherwise prevents social disintegration.

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