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A New Old Meaning of “Ideology”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Charles W. Mills  and
Danny Goldstick
Charles W. Mills
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
Danny Goldstick
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

If there were a list of subjects about which it seems that there is definitely no more to be said—or that even if there were, nobody would want to hear it anyway—then surely the topics of ideology, in general, and ideology in Marxist theory, in particular, would have to rank very near the top. Diffusing outwards from Western Marxism's postwar preoccupation with the mechanisms of capitalist hegemony, the concept has now become virtually ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences. Yet we feel reluctantly impelled to add one more paper to this already overflowing pile, hoping to catch readers' attention even as reflexive ennui glazes over their eyes. For a (though not, we trust, the only) virtue of the thesis we are going to propose is its originality in relation to the contemporary spectrum of opinion. If we are right, then, in one of Marx and Engels' main uses of the expression “ideology” they were not referring to ideas at all, but to the social superstructure itself. Even on purely scholarly grounds, it would be of some interest that so many commentators could have missed this meaning of “ideology” in texts as thoroughly scrutinized as these have been. But more importantly, if our analysis is correct, then certain very famous passages in the Marxist corpus (such as the 1859 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and parts of the Critique of the Gotha Programme) have been misinterpreted for decades.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 417 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

1 Mills, Charles, “‘Ideology’ in Marx and Engels”, The Philosophical Forum 16 (1985), 327–346.Google Scholar

2 Of the twenty writers Mills surveyed, three held this position: Moskvichov, L. N., The End of Ideology Theory: Illusions and Reality, trans. Riordan, Jim (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974)Google Scholar; Therborn, Goran, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1980)Google Scholar; Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

3 Cf. Goldstick, Danny, “Reading Althusser”, Revolutionary World 23–25 (1977), 117Google Scholar and n. 20, 130–131.

4 For ease of reference, we are placing the main sources in the text itself, using the following abbreviations: Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.; New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1978) (MER)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works (in one volume) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968) (MESW)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Collected Works, vols. 3–29 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–1987) (CW)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl, Capital, vols. 1–2 (New York: International Publishers, 1967) (CAP)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963)Google Scholar (TSV 1).

5 The earliest mention of “ideology” we can actually find is in The Holy Family, where Marx makes a passing comment about Napoleon's “scorn of ideologists” (CW 4, 123).Google Scholar

6 Cf. Mills, , “‘Ideology’”, 340–343.Google Scholar

7 McLellan, David, Ideology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23.Google Scholar

8 For example, Bhikhu Parekh agrees that one sense of “ideology” in Marx means “idealism”, but he regards the 1859 “Preface” and Theories of Surplus Value appearances of the term as aberrant “sporadic usages”, and consigns mention of them to an endnote: see Parekh, Bhikhu, Marx's Theory of Ideology (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chap, one and also 230, n. 1 to chap. one. This oversight results, in our opinion, from a definition of “idealism” which conflates the sociological and ontological senses. Thus he says: “Idealism assumes that the spirit or consciousness is conceptually and, for some, even temporally prior to matter. For it matter is not and cannot be the ultimate reality, and cannot generate and explain consciousness” (ibid., 3). As we have argued above, this is simply mistaken, since one could be an ontological materialist (believing that matter is all that exists, and that ideas are brain events) and a sociological idealist (believing that ideas determine the course of history). Feuerbach himself was a theorist of this kind: see Marx, and Engels, , CW 5, 38–41, 57–59Google Scholar. For a useful discussion of different senses of “material” in Marx, see Collier, Andrew, “Materialism and Explanation in the Human Sciences”, in Mepham, John and Ruben, David-Hillel, eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 2, Materialism (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), 35–60.Google Scholar

9 Lenin, V. I., “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats”, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 151.Google Scholar

10 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 376.Google Scholar

11 McCarney, Joe, The Real World of Ideology (Brighton, Sussex and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Harvester and Humanities Press, 1980), 6Google Scholar. McCarney has been one of the most vigorous defenders of the neutral reading of “ideology” (what Mills designated as position [b]). For a more recent statement, see his “Recent Interpretations of Ideology”, Economy and Society 14 (1985), 77–93.Google Scholar

12 McMurtry, John, The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Therborn, , Ideology of PowerGoogle Scholar; Williams, , Marxism.Google Scholar

13 McCarney, , Real World.Google Scholar

14 Martin Seliger, for example, see Lenin's “inclusive and hence unorthodox use of ‘ideology’” as a “drastic change of the use of the term”, for which “Lenin offered no explanation”. In his opinion, this revision was basically forced upon Lenin by his activist commitments, “since it would have been self-defeating to go on insisting that as a matter of principle all consciousness is false consciousness, as Marx and Engels's dogmatic conception of ideology required”. See Seliger, Martin, The Marxist Conception of Ideology: A Critical Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 6, 83, 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The above account should make clear why we regard this judgment as resting on a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx and Engels' point.

15 For a good discussion of some of the issues involved, see Nielsen, Kai, “Marxism and the Moral Point of View”, American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987), 295–306.Google Scholar

16 See: Wood, Allen W., “The Marxian Critique of Justice”, in Cohen, Marshall, Nagel, Thomas, and Scanlon, Thomas, eds., Marx, Justice and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3–41Google Scholar; Buchanan, Allen E., “The Conceptual Roots of Totalitarian Socialism”, in Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D. Jr., Paul, Jeffrey, and Ahrens, John, eds., Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 127–144Google Scholar; Lukes, Steven, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

17 There is a partial overlap here with the conclusions of Mills's earlier paper, since, as noted, we do agree that one sense of the term means “idealism”. See Mills, , “‘Ideology’”, 343–344.Google Scholar

18 Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Wirth, Louis and Shils, Edward (Bonn, 1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968)Google Scholar. For one of many discussions of the “paradox” and Mannheim's “solution”, see Seliger, , Marxist ConceptionGoogle Scholar, chap, eight.

19 An anonymous referee for Dialogue asks how Marx's description in CAP 1 of “commodity fetishism” (sect, four of chap, one), and its role in mystifying capitalist social relations, fits with our conclusions about “ideology”. These pages are, of course, crucial in understanding Marx's views on one very important set of obfuscatory appearances, and they should be treated as such. But it is not “ideology” in Marx's sense, since fetishism characteristically involves the “naturalization” of the social, and is thus, within the geometry of the base-superstructure metaphor, equivalent to a “downwards”, anti-idealist conflation of socio-economic and natural causality. Cf. Norman Geras: “[Fetishism as a] type of mystification consists of reducing the social objectivity of the forms of capitalist relations to a natural objectivity”; “Marx and the Critique of Political Economy”, in Blackburn, Robin, ed., Ideology in Social Science (Glasgow: Collins, 1972), 296–297Google Scholar. Note that nowhere in the discussion of fetishism does Marx describe it as “ideology”; indeed the term hardly appears in the three volumes of Capital.

20 For an attempt along these lines, see Mills, Charles, “Determination and Consciousness in Marx”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19/3 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar