IdeologyTheory.pdf

2016

Capitalist subjectivity can be thought of as being structured by mass-society and ideologies. This seems especially apparent in times of crisis. To a certain extend we can grasp these ideologies as illusions of the collective mind. However, I’m concerned that this perspective is too general to describe the specific character of modern-type ideologies such as nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism. The critical theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed a differentiated concept which can help us to understand the specifics of the above ideologies. In this essay I will point to an as of yet unresolved contradiction within their concept. My aim is to resolve this contradiction by reconstruction, using Detlev Claussen’s notion of religions of everyday life (Alltagsreligionen) in the process. After this I will make a case for renewing the concept of ideology as an analytic tool and I will end by sketching some preliminary thoughts on its use in

Le illusioni della mente collettiva

Capitalist subjectivity can be thought of as being structured by mass-society and ideologies. This seems especially apparent in times of crisis. To a certain extend we can grasp these ideologies as illusions of the collective mind. However, I’m concerned that this perspective is too general to describe the specific character of modern-type ideologies such as nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism. The critical theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed a differentiated concept which can help us to understand the specifics of the above ideologies. In this essay I will point to an as of yet unresolved contradiction within their concept. My aim is to resolve this contradiction by reconstruction, using Detlev Claussen’s notion of religions of everyday life (Alltagsreligionen) in the process. After this I will make a case for renewing the concept of ideology as an analytic tool and I will end by sketching some preliminary thoughts on its use in this fashion.

Chavez's Children: Ideology, Education, and Society in Latin America, 2015

Before beginning my analysis of the case study of revolutionary Bolivarism and of the Bolivarian school system, 1 it would like to offer some preliminary clarifications on the notion of ideology adopted in the present study. Starting from Clifford Geertz's definition of ideology as a cultural system, 2 it is possible to indicate a few general theoretical features of ideology, which also serve to highlight the development, the social organization, 3 the mechanisms of social reproduction, and the structure and function, of the institutions associated with ideology. These features include: the primacy of the practical-social function; the reinforcing of the identity and organization of the social group; the linguistic characterization according to the us/them opposition; the level of resolution; the legitimation by procedure; the educational power. The most typical quality of ideology is the primacy of the practical-social function over all other functions. Althusser was the first theorist to highlight this aspect: "There can be no question of attempting a profound definition of ideology here. It will suffice to know very schematically that an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigor) of representation (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society." 4 The practical goal is, for the cultural-ideological system, a constant necessity, but it is also a structuring doctrinal element that provides value and meaning to all other elements. Ideology is a theoretical discourse whose goal is a concrete action that will reflect it in the closest way possible: its imperative is "act on reality according to your principles." The first goal of ideology is therefore that of acting on reality, where by reality one means a social and political reality, in the most classic and Aristotelian sense of the word. Even when ideological intervention addresses apparently non-social and non-political questions, say environmental issues, there always are political-social aspects that involve ideology. Each ideology corresponds thus to an ideological action. From this

LOUIS ALTHUSSER builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology functions in society. He thus moves away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology. In the earlier model, ideology was believed to create what was termed "false consciousness," a false understanding of the way the world functioned (for example, the suppression of the fact that the products we purchase on the open market are, in fact, the result of the exploitation of laborers). Althusser explains that for Marx "Ideology is [...] thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For those writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of the 'day's residues'" (Lenin 108). Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan's understanding of "reality," the world we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. (See the Lacan module on the structure of the psyche.) For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the "Real conditions of existence" due to our reliance on language; however, through a rigorous"scientific" approach to society, economics, and history, we can come close to perceiving if not those "Real conditions" at least the ways that we are inscribed in ideology by complex processes of recognition.

The authors seek out to investigate the concept of ideology from a philosophical perspective. This study attempts to answer the very difficult question whether one can talk about “ideologies’’ after the end of the Cold War. Starting from the sources of this concept and from the definition provided by its inventor, Antoine Louise Destutt de Tracy, that of “science of ideas”, the authors consider that, irrespective of the negative connotations associated with the concept in time, one should continue discussing it.

The Sociological Quarterly, 1994

Throughoput its history, "ideology" (the concept and theory) served as social science's foil, an opposing standard against which it defined its own knowledge-as-truth. As social science since mid-century has undergone changes in its idea of itself and its methods of inquiry, the theory of ideology has served as register, visably recording these changes. Works by the structuralists and poststructuralists, especially Althusser and Foucault, forced upon social theorists a profound rethinking of power and its operations and moved "ideology" away from the theory of false consciousness towards a view of ideology as cultural practice. For some, ideology theory is obsolete (due to its classical roots as "false consciousness") or redundant (due to its links to "culture"). Despite the merits of these arguments, a provisional argument on behalf of ideology theory is offered.

Critical Horizons, 2019

On Jaeggi's reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions under which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it entails a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation. 1. Jaeggi on Ideology Rachel Jaeggi has advanced a conception of ideology and ideology critique according to which the normative task of critique must be properly connected with its explanatory task in order for critique to be immanent and promote change. In what follows I discuss Jaeggi's view in the light of a moderately cognitivist conception of ideology. I maintain that the explanatory task places three connected demands on a theory of ideology that relate to the functional, the epistemic, and the genetic dimension of ideology. In this context, I try to outline how these demands impact on the normative and progressive dimensions of ideology critique. In the present section I review Jaeggi's main claims concerning the connection between the analytical and the critical tasks of a theory of ideology, focusing in particular on the interlocking of

Liberation School, 2021

This article outlines Marx’s understanding of ideology. It traces his historical-materialist approach to investigating the relationship between ideas, material reality, and modes of production through several of his works. This allows us to take in the theory’s nuances about life and consciousness, as well as to draw out examples that are still relevant and applicable today. In particular, we focus on the theory of commodity fetishism and the function of the wage in producing the bourgeois ideological conception of the atomized individual. Proposing a move from “true/false” to “correct/incorrect,” the end of the article returns to the importance of popularizing and promoting Marxist ideology to understand and transform the world today, as revolutionaries have done throughout the socialist struggle to break the chains of exploitation and oppression.

Ideology plays a significant role in contemporary social and political thinking. It is not always clear what meaning is applied to the term by those who employ it even though it plays a larger part in present-day discussions of various disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, political science, communication. It is essential to trace the historical notion of ideology and how it evolved in the minds of various philosophers and theorists. This paper aims to comprehend the term ideology, its history and primarily the notion through the work of these eminent thinkers.

The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology: Two Volume Set

By contrast with many political concepts, ideology has fairly clear beginnings. Whilst several early enlightenment thinkers developed important accounts of the role of ideas as part of their challenge to the existing intellectual frameworks, 5 the term ideology emerged out of the French enlightenment, and in particular the work of Antoine Destutt de Tracy. De Tracy's Éléments d'Idéologie sought to lay the foundations of a new science of ideasan idea-logybased on a largely materialist theory which rooted ideas in physiological sensations. 6 De Tracy and fellow ideologues like Joseph Marie Degérando, George Cabanis and Constatin de Volney enjoyed a short period of success in revolutionary France. 7 They fell foul, however, of Napoleonwho, after a brief period of patronage, rapidly turned against them as his French Empire came under criticism from liberals and republicans. 8 The ideologues were directly suppressed from 1803 onwards, with Napoleon declaring them 'dreamers and dangerous dreamers', 'brooders' and 'empty brains', who pursued a 'shadowy metaphysics' to which 'we must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered'. 9 The immediate post-Napoleonic era retained this division between a broad vision of ideology on the one hand, and a narrower, negative meaning on the othera famous organising narrative for discussing the conceptual ambiguity of the term. De Tracy's Éléments remained popular in some circles, but forces loyal to the restored Bourbon monarchy (as well as others both inside and outside France) railed against 'ideology' as denoting dangerous republican radicalism. 10 In consequence, this negative usage gained the upper hand, and by the time of the 1848 revolutions 'Napoleon's association of "ideology" with abstract metaphysics and utopian, political liberalism became a widespread pejorative usage'. 11 Such an understanding of ideology remained a largely untheoretical notion of public political rhetoric, but laid the foundation for its much more intellectually influential mobilisation by Karl Marx.

Louis Althusser's essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which appeared English in 1971 as a chapter in his book entitled Lenin and Philosophy, reinvigorated Marxist literary criticism in the West. Before Althusser's essay was published, most Western critics held the. Hegelian view that ideas (including those expressed in literature) drive historical change. Traditional Marxist criticism presented the opposing view. Following the Marxist understanding of base and superstructure, it was assumed that the economic conditions and relations of production (base) were simply refl ected in cultural phenomena such as literature (superstructure). Literature, in this view, was inevitably an expression of ideological "false consciousness" supporting oppressive political and economic relations. But Marx himself suggested that the simple "reflection" role was not adequate. If the Greek tragedies of Sophocles were simple reflections of the economic conditions of ancient Greece, he asked, why were they still popular? Building on Marx's materialist account of language and consciousness, Althusser makes two significant advances over the traditional understanding of ideology. First, he rejects as an oversimplification the concept of ideology as merely false consciousness. For Althusser, there is no unmediated access to truth; all consciousness is constituted by and necessarily inscnbed within ideology. Second, for Althusser, there is no clear dividing line between base and superstructure. Ideology effectively "produces" social subjectivities and mediates the subject's experience of reality. On the one hand, this theory points to openings for revolutionary change. Since it is a corruptible material phenomenon, the superstructure can never perfectly reflect the base. On the other hand, since language and consciousness are material products, phenomena such as literature have real material effects. Ideology can be a "soft" insidious extension of the power of a repressive state apparatus. Constant, vigilant critique of ideology is required in order to resist reactionary tendencies and promote emancipatory revolution.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2003

The study of the notion of ideology shows that this corpus lends itself to a wide variety of different definitions. A certain opposition runs all the way through this set of definitions. Ideology would appear to be torn between a conception that emphasises its distortion and dissimulation dimensions and another conception which views as a set of social representations. After

Pólemos. Materiali di filosofia e critica sociale, 2016

Overcoming the Nature Versus Nurture Debate, 2023

The concept of ideology is central to the understanding of the many political, economic, social, and cultural processes that have occurred in the last two centuries. And yet, what is the nature of the different ideologies remains a vague, open, and much disputed question. Many political, sociological, and ideological studies have been devoted to ideology. Very little, on the other hand, has been done from the philosophical field. And this despite the fact that there are undoubtedly many philosophical questions related to ideology and its role in modern industrialized societies. Just a few examples of ideology-related philosophical questions suffice to prove the point: What objects do ideologies deal with? Are the ideologies testable? Are there true ideologies? Do they evolve? How are ideologies related to societies? Is the existence of ideologies inevitable in modern societies? What is the relation of ideology to science? Is science just another kind of ideology? Are we, as human beings, innately predisposed to believe in ideologies? Or, instead, ideologies proliferate through indoctrination and propaganda? Are ideologies necessarily harmful?... and much more. In this article I try to answer some of these questions from a philosophical point of view, taking a materialist approach. I begin by characterizing ideology as a complex, multi-layered concept. Then, I briefly discuss the material systems on which ideological movements operate, that is, societies and concrete human groups. I identify at least 11 different elements that seem to be present in most ideologies, and I compare these characteristics with those of contemporary science and technology. Although some superficial similarities can be identified, there are deep differences that make ideology completely different from science. The similarities, however, are stronger with technology. Ideologies continually evolve with technological advances, social changes, and even with mere fashion. The current fragmentation of ideologies caused by the widespread use of new technologies and social networks has given rise to new phenomena of ideological propagation which, in my opinion, are very dangerous, particularly for open societies. I discuss these processes, within the context of the nature vs nurture debate, along with the question of whether we can get rid of ideologies.