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THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY

The basic principle of materialism is that human consciousness rests on certain material conditions without which it would not exist. Marx and Engels stated this argument quite early in their careers when attacking (and inverting) Hegelian idealism. But

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the argument goes beyond a mere abstract claim that the "superstructure" of ideas reflects the material base. It is not simply a matter of the basic economy determining a set of ideas. There is an intervening set of processes that take account of multiple social classes, their conflicts, and even their degrees of relative autonomy. As Marx and Engels state in The German Ideology, the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class because they control the means of mental production.

There are two refined notions here. One is that social classes have a propensity to see the world in a particular way. Ideas reflect their economic interests and also the social conditions that surround these interests. Ideas as ideology serve the double purpose of exalting oneself but also of acting as weapons to cloak one's interests in an ideal form and to gain deference for them. The aristocracy of the feudal era, for example, espoused the ideals of honor and loyalty. This reflected their position as soldiers and it also implicitly upheld their hereditary claims to own land and to receive humble obedience from their serfs. For "honor" meant both bravery in combat and chivalrous politeness to "honorable" opponents of the same class; the idea also implied that "honor" came from family and breeding and that it excluded both mere profitmaking pursuits like those of the merchants and artisans as well as dirty productive work like that of the peasants who supported them. Similarly the bourgeoisie created a new set of ideals: freedom, equality, "the eternal rights of man." Behind this abstract universalism was a class message: it spoke revolutionary words against the hereditary aristocracy, proclaiming the dignity of commerce, working for a living, and rising by amassing one's own wealth. It simultaneously elevated the universal rule of money, which knows no pedigree; put down the aristocracy; and tried to keep the workers in their place by holding out the abstract notion of equality without mentioning that the competition of the marketplace was stacked against them.

In political battles, different ideals become the rallying point for antagonistic classes. Marx cut through the contending parties of France before the 1848 revolution -- the "Legitimatists," who wanted to restore the old Bourbon monarchy, and

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the "Orleanists," who supported a rival royal house -- to point to the economic interests that clustered in each camp: the landed property holders speaking for "Legitimacy" and the new finance capitalists advocating the "progressive" policy of Orleans. Politics is fought out in terms of a code, which always must be translated; classes rarely sail under their true colors.



The ideologies of the higher classes always reflect their own interests, albeit in idealized form. That is because they have the capacity to control the material means by which ideas are produced. These are the means of mental production: the books, printing presses, newspapers, or church pulpits that announce the viewpoint of those who can afford to pay the bills. Intellectuals, too, are specialists in ideas who nevertheless have to make a living by fitting into the economic structure of the time. In medieval feudalism, intellectuals could only live either by becoming priests or monks and drawing income from the landed estates of the church, or by attaching themselves to some noble patron who expected to be entertained. That is why intellectuals, although free in principle to formulate whatever ideas they can conceive, nevertheless tend to create ideologies favoring the class that feeds them: medieval poets who extol the noble virtues, or priests whose theologies declare the hereditary ranks of society to reflect the eternal order given by God.

When an economic era changes, new forms of support for intellectuals open up -- the market for books and newspapers that began in capitalist England and Western Europe in the 1700s, for instance, or the school systems with their demand for teachers. When intellectuals have a choice among alternative means of support, their intellectual autonomy is enhanced, and they can formulate criticisms of the old order and even go over to the revolutionary side. But this does not mean that ideas are simply free floating and autonomous: they always reflect the social and material circumstances of intellectuals and become revolutionary precisely at those times -- like the late 1700s when French intellectuals were the harbingers and drumbeaters for the coming 1789 revolution -- when the material basis of society and of intellectual production are changing.

Engels and Marx never developed the theory of the means

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of intellectual production systematically. But the general conception has been quite fruitful in later sociology. Engels and Marx were mainly concerned with the production of political ideologies. The theory of the material and social conditions applies to various forms of intellectual creation. Arnold Hauser and others have used it to explain the changing forms of art and literature in different historical periods. This line of thought also set off the sociology of science, which began in the 1930s when Marxist scientists such as J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, and Boris Hessen attempted to show how science arises only within certain historical and economic conditions. That is not to say that the sociology of science has proceeded in a strictly Marxist direction; Robert Merton and others reacted to the Marxist challenge by attempting to show the inner normative social organization of science in its own right.

In recent years we have gotten closer to a conception of science as a series of nested layers of institutions: economic and political systems at the outside that under certain conditions (some of which we have seen in the Prologue) allow university systems or research laboratories to exist. These in turn become an intermediate layer of social and material conditions within which scientists and other intellectuals can operate. But inside this realm, scientists carry on their own conflicts: they break up into separate networks attempting to exploit particular kinds of laboratory equipment; they treat ideas as "intellectual capital" to be invested (in the terminology of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu); and in Thomas Kuhn's words, they divide into conservatives defending their "paradigms" or into radicals carrying out intellectual "revolutions." Recently sociologists who have examined what actually goes on in scientific laboratories point out that what is considered to be "knowledge" is shaped by the material setting of the research equipment itself and by the ways that results can be announced through the material medium of print. We understand now a good deal more about the means of mental production and are moving closer to Engels and Marx's aim of showing just how ideas reflect their material social circumstances.

I have considered the theory of ideology in two of its offshoots: the explanation of political ideas held by the dominant

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classes and the production of specialized ideas by intellectuals. The general theory of ideology has other ramifications as well. It implies that each social class has its distinctive culture and outlook on the world, reflecting the social circumstances in which it lives. This analysis of class cultures, as we will see, took on considerable refinements with Weber's concept of status groups, and it has been developed much further with the empirical research of the twentieth century. In Chapter 3, I will attempt to show how even the Durkheimian tradition adds an important link to the theoretical explanation of why different classes inhabit different intellectual and moral universes. Engels and Marx, with their overriding concern for politics, did not go too far in this direction. But they did contribute some important leads.

In his discussion of the German peasant uprisings at the time of the Reformation, Engels attempted to show why the peasants had to put their revolutionary claims in a religious form. Marx took up Engels's idea in The Eighteenth Brumaire to explain why the peasants of France supported the dictator Louis Bonaparte against the Paris revolution. In both cases the general idea is that peasants are immobilized and isolated in their tiny villages and farms. These material conditions kept the peasants from forming any conception of themselves as a class with common interests against other social classes. All they could see was their own local interests plus an unknown but hostile world outside. For this reason peasant consciousness took the form of a mystification: in the one case, it consisted of religious ideas about the impending millennium and the downfall of the Antichrist who ruled the world disguised as the Pope; in the other case, it consisted of a nationalist mythology about the Emperor Napoleon who had come to save France. Both of these ideologies left the peasants at the mercy of political forces they could not realistically comprehend.

From a theoretical viewpoint, the explanation given by Engels and Marx opened the way to an understanding of some crucial mechanisms of class cultures. We can begin to see that all social classes do not form their ideologies in the same way. Higher classes, which are better interorganized and can control the means of intellectual production, have ideologies that are

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more abstract and self-exalting; subordinated classes have ideologies that are much less serviceable as weapons for their own interests but that nevertheless reflect the material condition of their own lives. We begin to see that there is ideological stratifiction and ideological domination as well as sheer economic and political domination. We enter the realm where there is a relationship between real violence and what Bourdieu calls "symbolic violence." And we see the mediator between these two realms: the social and material conditions of everyday life that make up the means of mental production.


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1031


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