CONCEPTS OF IDEOLOGY IN MARX*

Gydrgy Markus

There is surprising agreement concerning the significance of Marx's theory of

ideology, inasmuch as it is generally regarded as one of his major contributions
both to a general social theory and to philosophy . Through the introduction of
this theory, Marx is said to have seriously contributed to a fundamental
reorientation-an historically and socially oriented "turn"-in the treatment of
problems concerning human knowledge and cognition. This agreement about
the historical importance of the theory nevertheless goes hand in hand with an
almost complete disagreement about the content of these significant views. Both
Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of the Marxian concept of ideology
seem to disagree about even the most elementary - questions concerning its
meaning. Does the notion of ideology carry a negative-pejorative emphasis, or is
it in this respect value-neutral and therefore capable of being applied to Marx's
own theory, which could in turn be characterised (at least in its intentions) as a
"scientific ideology"? Does science, including the natural sciences, represent the
principal opposite of ideology, or is it just one of the forms of its manifestations?
Is the theory of ideology essentially a genetic one, dealing above all with
problems concerning the historical origin of ideas regarded as effects of other
causes? Or is it a functional theory that basically deals with problems related to
the effects which ideas and their systems-treated as relatively independent
causes-can and do have in other areas of socially significant behaviour? To all
these, certainly very basic, questions one can find widely differing, even diametri-
cally opposed, answers.
The situation becomes even more paradoxical if one turns from the secondary
interpretative literature toward those perhaps more significant writings which
attempt to continue the tradition initiated by the Marxian conception of ideol-
ogy. On the one hand, it seems unclear how these theories can appeal to a
common ancestry at all, since they deal with quite divergent, almost unrelated
topics ., In the so-called concept of "ideological state apparatuses"- developed in
structuralist Marxism by Althusser, for instance, the term "ideology" refers
essentially to the functioning of such institutions as the family, the school system,
the Church, and the mass media. In the works of Marxists such as Lukacs or
Lucien Goldmann, however, ideology almost exclusively denotes the paradig-
matic products of high culture-great philosophical systems, exemplary works
of art, the historically most significant social and economic theories, and so on .
On the other hand, and despite the radically divergent problematics they deal

*This is an expanded and revised draft of a lecture first presented at the Department of Philosophy,
New School for Social Research, New York, April 1981 .
 IDEOLOGYAND POWER

with under the common name of ideology, both of these views have one thing in
common, namely, that their standpoint is strangely irreconcilable with the best
known, so to say. "introductory", statement of Marx on ideology : it is not ideas
which make or transform history, because ideas are mere sublimates of material
life activities in the heads of individuals . So Althusser regards the ideological
state apparatuses as organisations through whose operation the empirical indi-
vidual first becomes constituted as the allegedly active subject in society ; these
apparatuses are ascribed a determining role in the ceproduction of the dominant
system of social relations . Analogously, representatives of so-called humanist or
historicist Marxism-especially following the historical trauma of Fascism-
have either underlined the emancipatory potential of (at least some) products of
autonomous high culture, or (like Adorno and Horkheimer) they have empha-
sized that the loss of the autonomy of high culture has been one of the basic
causes of a foreclosure of real possibilities of emancipation in modern society .
I have referred here, essentially for rhetorical purposes, to the vagaries which
mark the history of the reception and interpretation of the Marxian conception
of ideology, to find some justification for a renewed attempt to disentangle an old
and rather boring question : What did Marx mean by "ideology"? But the
problems just indicated may perhaps also provide some initial support for my
own emphasis on the complexity and heterogeneity of the theoretical concept of
ideology as it is actually used within the texts of Marx . I shall try to argue in the
following that Marx deployed this concept in distinctly different contexts, for
different purposes and that, accordingly, this concept has recognizably different
meanings in his writings . And while the three different meanings of ideology I
shall try to distinguish are clearly interconnected, any attempt to perceive these
as various aspects of a unified broader approach contains not only some signifi-
cant lacunae-a fact indicated by Marx himself-but may well also contain some
inner strains which are not so easy to overcome .

If one turns to the very texts of Marx in which he either directly addressed (or
at least alluded to) the problematics of ideology, it becomes rather evident that
the term is most frequently used in a critical, directly polemical way. In The
German Ideology, for instance, the concept of ideology invariably has a negative,
what is more, unmasking meaning. It designates those philosophical and social-
political theories which conceive ideas and their systems as the mainsprings of
historical progress . Ideological theories transform themselves-and thereby
their creators, the intellectuals-into the hidden demiurges of history . True, at
some points Marx seems to operate even in these polemical contexts with a
broader concept, one that embraces all those cultural objectifications which
history by reference to some metahistorical, eternal principle in general (thus the
Feuerbachian theory of religion is regarded as ideological since it explains
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

religion in terms of an ahistorical human essence) . But, fundamentally, the

critique of ideology in this sense means the "unmasking" of any attempt to
demonstrate the supremacy of spirit in history .' The concept of ideology is a
polemical tool directed against all variants of historical idealism . In opposition to
this idealism, Marx poses his theoretical and, above all, practical materialism : .it
is not theoretical transformations of interpretations of the world, but the practi-
cal transformation of the material life conditions of society and the material
life-activities of products that constitutes the terrain of decisive social struggles
through which the fate of human progress is resolved . This is precisely the
(rather simple) point of the famous, and often over-interpreted, metaphor about
the camera obscura : in ideologies, as in a camera obscura, everything appears
upside-down because-per definitionem-ideological systems of belief suppose
themselves to be the ultimate determinants of human material activities where-
as, in real life, the practically enacted and institutionalised relations between
producers constitute both the ultimate source and the criterion of efficacy for the
culturally elaborated systems of social belief.
To this concept of ideology corresponds a definite intellectual practice-that
of critically unmasking beliefs through a demonstration of their social determina-
tion and genesis . In these polemical contexts, Marx employs a genetic method of
critique of ideologies, the essence of which consists in the reduction of systems of
thought to the conscious or unconscious social interests which they express . To
discover behind the haughty phrases about the transcendent . power or eternal
rule of ideas, the hidden sway of well-defined-but completely unthematized-
narrow class or group interests is to radically refute their validity . And it is in the
context of this criticism as unmasking that ideologies appear-perhaps at first
glance in a contradictory way-both as alien to real-life speculations and as
transpositions of the dominant material relations of power into the realm of
thought . By transforming definite social interests into the requirements of
human reason as such, these systems of thought contribute to the stabilisation of
the given relations of social domination : the fixation of.belief becomes a mode of
legitimation .
It is possible that by borrowing the term "ideology" from the last representa-
tives of the French Enlightenment, Destutt de Tracy and his small philosophical
coterie, Marx indicates an awareness about the traditions and roots of his own
conception. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that his polemical, unmasking
concept of . ideology stands in a relation of direct continuity with some elements
in the heritage of the Enlightenment, particularly with its "critique of preju-
dices", conceived as socially induced deformations of reason . So one can trace
back-as Hans Barth actually did-the intellectual ancestry of this concept to. the
Baconian criticism of the idols of marketplace and theatre-or even further, to
the sophists and to Greek enlightenment in general . But one should also add that
Marx is the critic of this tradition as well as its continuator . From the standpoint
of his theory of ideology, a criticism of prejudices in the name of an impartial
reason or an eternal and normatively conceived human nature is itself deeply
ideological . Marx's polemics against the hidden interests constituting and
 IDEOLOGY AND POWER

determining the systems of ideology are not conducted in the name of an

ahistoric rationality allegedly able to overcome all historical limitations ; they are
instead conducted in the name of historically and socially defined, concrete and
"limited" needs and sufferings which are produced and induced by the same
social interests . In the contexts we are speaking about, the theory of ideology to a
large extent provides a criticism, even a self-criticism, of the "professional
consciousness" of intellectuals who, as "producers of ideas", are bent on ascribing
a mythical efficacy to their own activity . In this way they create for their own
activity a bogus legitimation, and thereby they render themselves incapable of
understanding its real social determination and function : through this lack of
critical self-awareness they become-often quite unwittingly-apologists of a
given, pre-fixed system of social domination and injustice .

If this polemical unmasking concept of "ideology" is the most frequent,

preponderant one in Marx's writings, there are, however, passages in his works
where the same term acquires another, systematic-explanatory meaning . One
has only to look at the famous Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, to see an example of this non-polemical type of meaning .
Here ideology clearly designates not a specific, criticizable type of socio-
philosophic theory but a much broader range of human activities : definite
branches of "cultural production" (geistige Produktion) and their products, and a
corresponding level of social interaction and conflict . The main function of this
explanatory, essentially functional. concept of ideology is to provide a part of the
answer to the question Marx already posed in The German Ideology : How, and
through what mechanisms do the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas
in society? This question is evidently equivalent to the Weberian problem of how
systems of social rule are legitimated under conditions of inequality and
exploitation.
At this point one "philological" remark is pertinent. In the whole corpus of his
writings, as Korsch pointed out, Marx never applied the term "ideology" to the
phenomena of everyday consciousness . For him . (and in opposition to many
latter-day Marxists), the social domination of the ideas of the dominating class is
primarily not the result of the latter's monopoly over the means of dissemination
of ideas ; it is not a matter of indoctrination into a definite type of culture
produced aside from everyday practical life and only intellectually superimposed
over its actors . On the contrary, it is Marx's theory of the social determination of
everyday thinking which provides the basis both for an answer to the question
posed above and for an understanding of the functional role of ideologies in
society . It is therefore necessary to elaborate briefly on this point, which can be
designated as a theory of "false consciousness - -a term which of course appears
only in Engels.
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

According to Marx, a social system like capitalism, at least in some negative

sense, is self-legitimating . Through the very working of its socio-economic
mechanisms it produces in the individuals caught up in its practices a matrix of
thought, a way of directly perceiving and interpreting social reality which
systematically excludes the possibility of its overcoming, both through imagina-
tion and action . I am referring here of course to the Marxian theory of fetishism
which is -primarily discussed in his later economic writings . In these writings,
Marx argues that for those who are engaged in the market activities of selling and
buying-i .e ., practically every member of a capitalist society-social relations
with other individuals inevitably appear as relations between things ; what is
more, these anonymous social functions assume the appearance of matters which
are seemingly contingent upon free individual choice. This personification of
social roles constitutes the reverse side of the fetishistic reification of social
relations . This distorted and mystifying way of understanding the world in which
individuals live and act is not primarily the result of some specific process of
acculturation in the sense of the transmission to, and appropriation by, individu-
als of some institutionally fixed "doctrines" . Rather, it is the direct outcome of
the experienced life-activities of the concerned individuals . Marx certainly did
not deny the role of language ; and generally that of a broadly conceived inherited
culture in the formation of "false consciousness" . As a matter of fact, he was
keenly interested in the social function of language, though his remarks on this
count hardly go beyond a somewhat naively historical etymology . But he did
insist that the "bewitchment of intellect" primarily derives not from "language
idling" but from historically constituted life-conditions . What he underlines
again and again is the fact that fetishistic modes of thought "arise from the
relations of production themselves", that they are the "direct and spontaneous
outcomes" of the elemental social practices of individuals . These forms of
thinking directly fix and merely generalize the practical life-experiences of the
isolated social actors ; fetishistic forms of thinking enable individual social agents
to orient themselves successfully within the given system of social relations,
which are taken as a fixed prius of their life . Undoubtedly the Marxian theory of
fetishism is heavily infected by the Hegelian terminology of "appearance", which
refers not to mere semblance, but to a "false reality", a form of immediacy in
which reality itself distortedly "expresses" and "manifests itself" ("sich
darstellt", as Hegel wrote) . This poses a whole series of disquieting problems,
and not only highly abstract, philosophical questions concerning the feasibility of
an ontological theory of truth which, prima facie, seems to be implied by Marx's
terminology . His constant insistence that fetishistic perceptions and notions are
not mere "illusions" and errors of a confused thinking, that the categories of
bourgeois economy are "socially valid, and therefore objective forms of thought"
for this whole historical epoch, also contains the completely straightforward idea
that these forms. of thought are not merely socially produced and determined, but
are in fact pragmatically effective, and in this sense real, valid and "correct" .
Individuals caught up in these relations can successfully orient themselves within
their given framework only in these terms. If they go shopping and do not want
 IDEOLOGYAND POWER -

to squander their money, for example, they have to treat the price of different
commodities as if it were a property independent of the utility of these commodi-
ties : only by comparing relative prices with relative utilities can individuals make
a "reasonable" choice, a "good buy" . This also means that the knowledge that the
price of a commodity is solely the phenomenal form of its value, and that the
latter is dependent upon socially necessary labour time, and so on, is about as
relevant to a "good buy" as the detailed knowledge of quantum electro-dynamics
is to someone exchanging a blown fuse .'
In addition, and indeed behind this pragmatic efficacy of false consciousness,
there lies hidden its social effectivity, its capacity to foreclose the possibility of a
rational collective transformation of the given social conditions . Just as fetishistic
ideas successfully guide isolated individuals in their effort to assert their private
interests within these given relations, so these ideas also render the totality
completely opaque, transforming it into a matter of unintelligible naturalness or
technical necessity . In this sense, fetishism represents for Marx the manifesta-
tion on the level of everyday thinking of that gulf between societal and individual
possibilities, the progressive widening of which is seen as one of the basic
tendencies of that whole "pre-history" he designated as alienation. To use Marx's
own examples : as long as one conceives price or value as a mystical, "natural"
property of things themselves, the very idea of a society where objects of utility
do not function as commodities remains inconceivable ; as long as wages are
understood as remuneration for labour done, one can formulate the demand for
fair, equitable wages but not even imagine a society where human productive
activities would be posited in some other social form than that of wage labour ;
and so on. The fetishistic categories which "invert" the real relations and make
them "invisible" are not only expressive of thinking which unreflexively accepts
the social world as given : these absurd "category mistakes" of spontaneous
everyday understanding also systematically exclude the possibility of a totalizing
reflection both upon the historical-practical constitution of this world and the
social determination of this way of thinking. And since these categories consti-
tute that natural language of imagination and thinking within the framework of
which individuals form and articulate their practical intentions, expectations and
motives, they thereby acquire a truly causal efficacy . False consciousness is not a
passive reflex of the "surface relations" of a society which is somehow consti-
tuted and reproduced independently of this consciousness ; this consciousness is a
necessary factor in the creation, reproduction and unintended, socially uncon-
scious transformation of this society . One quotation from the Grundrisse illus-
trates this point . Speaking about the early forms of mercantilism, Marx empha-
sizes that while money fetishism is an absurd "illusion about the nature of money
and blindness toward the contradictions contained within it", it has also been "an
enormous instrument in the real development of the forces of social production",
precisely because "it gave money a really magic significance behind the backs of
individuals" .3 This is why Marx's own theory of fetishism is above all a critique of
everyday consciousness-primarily of the consciousness of its own subject and
addressee, the working class . By unravelling the social determinations of spon-
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

taneous social awareness, Marx attempts to foster a theoretical impulse towards

the acquisition of real self-consciousness . In the last instance, of course, this
self-consciousness can be attained only in practice, since the ultimate overcoming
of fetishistic thinking is not a matter of knowledge, but of the creation of
collective practical alternatives, in the light of which the unintelligible natural-
ness and mystical immutability of present-day social institutions are dissolved .
If it is this conception of "false consciousness" which provides the foundation
of Marx's answer to the question concerning how the ideas of the ruling class
"normally" rule the whole of society, it is nevertheless evident that the theory of
fetishism does not constitute the whole of Marx's answer . To be sure, in a
negative sense capitalism as a system of social domination tends to legitimate
itself . But even though a spontaneous, fetishistic mode of thinking renders
radical and rational criticism impossible, it is at the same time too confused,
fragmented and self-contradictory to insulate itself from practical-intellectual
criticism. Moreover, when the automatic mechanisms of market production do
not ensure the undisturbed reproduction of the underlying social relations, the
fetishistic categories also tend to lose their pragmatic validity and effectiveness .
During those periods of economic crisis, the web of "appearances" tends to
dissipate and the relations of social domination manifest themselves in relatively
naked form . The mere reproduction of everyday life-practices is not sufficient to
legitimate capitalism-precisely because this reproduction process is itself punc-
tuated by objective tensions and disturbances .
This is the point where the explanatory-functional concept of ideology enters
into the architecture of Marx's social theory . Institutionally disseminated sys-
tems of ruling ideas are seen by Marx to systematize the confused and chaotic
conceptions of everyday thinking, to lend a degree of logical coherence to their
fragmented structure, to explain away (and thereby apologize for) the most
widely encountered experiences that contradict the seeming self-evidence of
fetishistic categories . The Church, the Church-dominated school system, and
various political and juridical institutions are the social organisations which
Marx most frequently connects with the fulfilment of this task. Thus, in his later
writings, Marx sometimes applies the term ideology to analyze the functioning
of these institutions, whose personnel are described in turn as "the ideological
strata of the ruling class".' These institutions are nevertheless conceived by him
as mere transmitters and propagators of ideas which are elaborated elsewhere-
in the sphere of cultural production, of high culture conceived as an internally
differentiated branch of the overall social division of labour. In general it is these
cultural-"spiritual" objectivations belonging to the spheres of religion, philos-
ophy, social theory, political economy and art-but not natural science, it should
be noted-which Marx regularly designates by the common name of ideology .
'These are the forms, as Marx states in the Preface, in which men become
conscious of their social conflicts and fight them out.
Despite the fact that Marx extends the concept of ideology to all these
activities and their social function in general, his attitude towards this wide range
of cultural creations is in fact markedly differentiated. In the most elaborated and
 IDEOLOGYAND POWER

best-known case of his critiques of ideologies, that of the critique of bourgeois

economy, this differentiation is unambiguously stated and ofserious importance
for Marx's own economic theory. While Marx repeatedly and emphatically states
that bourgeois economy as a whole is a form of ideology, he at the same time
directly counterposes the "scientific" economy of the classics (above all, the
Physiocrats, Adam Smith and Ricardo) to the apologetic pseudo-science of
"vulgar" economy. (This fact also clearly indicates that, for Marx, being scientific
and being ideological in a given context are not mutually exclusive enterprises.)
The same type of distinction can be observed if one compares Marx's critique of
the.young Hegelians with his repeated criticisms of Hegel: not only is the tone of
these criticisms strikingly different but, more importantly, so also is the whole
method of criticism itself, and in ways which definitely.parallel Marx's different
attitudes toward, say, Smith and Malthus . Even in Marx's sparse remarks about
art-compare his treatment of Eugene Sue and Balzac-one can find a similarly
drawn practical distinction .
At the risk of overinterpretation, I would suggest that Marx consistently
distinguishes between what can be called "ideologies of the historical moment"
and ideologies that represent epochal cultural values . 5 Concerning the first (e.g.,
vulgar economy), the situation is rather clear. These are cultural "products"
which directly provide the intellectual material for those (aforementioned)
institutions which disseminate ideas that serve immediately apologetic purposes.
The claim to (scientific, philosophical or artistic) truth of these ideologies is a
mere veneer that conceals their defence and articulation of specific, narrow,
particularistic, interests which are tied to the immediate, practical realities of the
present .6 It is in relation to these ideologies that Marx adopts the type of criticism
earlier characterised as "unmasking" : the reduction of the content of views to a
specific configuration of interests . If one merely glances at Marx's truly volumi-
nous criticisms of Hegel or Ricardo from this viewpoint, it is immediately
striking how little Marx applies to them this method of "explanation through
interests". Certainly, he characterises them as theoreticians of bourgeois society,
as representing its standpoint. Yet Marx refers to the specific, concrete situation
and interests of, say, the German bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century only
in cases where he intends to indicate and explain some internal inconsistency of
the Hegelian theory of.the state and not the theoretical kernel andsignificance of
Hegel's philosophy.
At this point two questions arise. On the one hand, how, and on the basis of
what criteria, does Marx draw this distinction between two types of ideology?
And, on the other hand, what is the social significance ofthese cultural creations
here described as "epochal cultural values"? In a sense, these two questions are
closely interrelated. True, the distinction which Marx draws between, say, vulgar
and classical economy is to a considerable degree based on accepted and "trivial"
cultural criteria. In his critique of Malthus or Smith, Marx spends an enormous
(one is inclined to say, disproportionate) amount of space to prove their lack of
originality or even outright plagiarism, the presence of eclectic confusions or
logical contradictions, the missing explanatory power in regard to elementary
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

observations concerning regularities of economic life, and so on-a fact worth

mentioning if only because it suggests that he treats as self-evidently valid these
inherited criteria of evaluation specific to, and accepted within, a given sphere of
cultural activities . But such considerations certainly do not exhaust his criticisms .
For it is actually the way Marx criticizes those works which in fact meet these
elementary criteria that best demonstrates what constitutes for him their signifi-
cance, what makes them ultimately a "cultural value" .
There is a definite methodological parallelism (to which della Volpe has
already drawn attention) between the Marxian critiques of Hegelian philosophy,
on the one side, and that of the classics of English economy, on the other . First, in
all these cases Marx actually departs from the criticism of a method of thinking .
This is rather self-evidently so in the case of Hegel, but one should remember
that his whole analysis of Smith's system is also embedded in an unravelling of
the contradictions between his dual, esoteric and esoteric modes of explanation,
while the discussion of the Ricardian economy departs from a dissection of the
analytic method of the latter.' And in all these cases he actually attempts to
demonstrate how a definite way of thinking results in the exclusion of a definite
problematics, in the failure even to state questions of a definite type . So Marx
argues that the seemingly innocent, common sense empiricism of Ricardo
prevents him from raising theoretical questions about the socio-historical gene-
sis of the value-form itself; Ricardo is logically forced to accept (as self-evident)
the value- and commodity-character of objects of utility, as if they were the
inevitable, "natural" characteristics of any economy based on a developed system
of division of labour . 8 Similarly, the idealist hypostatization of self-consciousness
in Hegel is treated by Marx as necessarily leading to an identification of aliena-
tion with the materially objective character of human activities and, in the final
analysis, with human finitude as such-and thereby inevitably excluding the very
ability to imagine its practical overcoming .
What makes the work of Ricardo or Hegel epochally significant, what makes
these thinkers theoretical representatives of a type of society, and not merely
ideologues of a definite social group in a given country at a given moment, can be
summed up in the following three points :
1 . Their unthematised, taken-for-granted assertions and premises appear not as
arbitrary assumptions, but as necessities of thinking, as outcomes of a method,
of a definite type of "logical constraint" .
2 . At the same time, the "unconscious" presuppositions of their systems actually
express, fix in thought, some fundamental characteristics of capitalist society ;
these presuppositions are related not to some momentary constellation of
particular interests within this society, but to its essential life-conditions . It is
these latter which they elevate-through their methodically unfolded logic-
into universally binding norms or, alternatively, into untranscendable natural
necessity .
3 . These thinkers not only consistently ("cynically") follow through their own
consequences, but also attempt to solve intellectually-from their fixed point
of departure-a whole range of problems and contradictions which are
 IDEOLOGYAND POWER

manifested in the everyday life of this society . The "creativity" of such works
of culture is not to be found merely in their individual originality, but
primarily in their strenuous effort to overcome in thinking those conflicts of
real life which challenge and potentially undermine the universal validity of
their silently adopted principles . In this sense they do not simply parade
interests as universal ones ; rather, they attempt to universalise those interests
which dominate the given form of social life . Insofar as they succeed in this
attempt, they make explicit and manifest the definite limits of a thinking
which takes for granted and posits as unalterable the basic conditions of
existence of a given, type of society . These works of culture are not only
intellectual, but also historical-paradigmatic closures of thought . They must
therefore be unravelled or critically overcome if thinking about another future
is to be freed, if this future can be claimed not only as a desirable utopia, but
also as rational possibility .
In these senses, the Marxian conception of ideology is not merely a form of
social explanation ; it also represents a definite type of hermeneutics, a "herme-
neutics with emancipatory intent" (to borrow an expression suggested by S .
Betihabib) . The essence of this emancipatory hermeneutics cannot be reduced to
the search for some "sociological equivalent" to the point of view presented in
any text. The critique of ideology as hermeneutics of course insists on the
insufficiency of a merely "immanent reading" of the text, for it demands a
comprehension and interpretation of the transmitted cultural tradition which
situates this text in its own social-historical context . But it does so with the aim of
discovering in the "classical" texts themselves those "unconscious presupposi-
tions", those unreflected "prejudices" which both structure and set a limit to the
possibility of rational discourse within them . Marx offers a hermeneutics which
posits the constraint of concepts as a consequence of the constraint of circum-
stances, a hermeneutics which is guided by the intention of contributing to the
removal of the second through the removal of the first . According to him, only
this type of reading can, in one and the same act, capture the original meaning
and the real historical significance of a text, and thereby realize the classical
hermeneutical postulate of Enlightenment : to understand a work better than its
own author did.

I have tentatively indicated two types of contexts in which the concept of

ideology occurs in Marx and, corresponding to them, the two meanings this term
acquires in his writings . But there is also a third one which-in contrast to the
polemical-unmasking and explanatory-functional uses of this concept-I will
designate as the critical-philosophical sense of ideology. When discussing the
overall results and consequences of the divorce between manual and mental
labour underlying the whole course of historical civilisations, Marx sometimes
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

employs or implies a concept of ideology which seems to refer not to specifiable

works (which are either unmasked and criticized or interpreted through histori-
cal explanation) but, rather, to a definite type of culture in general, and to a
definite way of understanding cultural objectivations which is, according to him,
both deceptive and at the same time "adequate" to this type of culture . "[T]he
autonomisation of thoughts and ideas is only a consequence of the autonomisa-
tion of personal relations and contacts between individuals . . . . [N]either
thoughts, nor language constitute a realm of their own ; they are merely expres-
sions of real life.-9 The critical edge of this implied conception of ideology is
directed primarily against any comprehension of cultural creations which per-
ceives them as representations which "correspond" to reality (or embodiments
of equally transcendent values), which thereby acquire an allegedly timeless
validity . To this conception Marx counterposes a view of cultural objectivations,
which are analysed as expressions of the active-practical life-situation of definite
(actual or potential) social agents who may acquire through these life-forms a
consciousness of their historically situated needs and potentialities . In this sense
culture never constitutes an autonomous realm of values over practical and social
life. In the final analysis, it is an articulation of the conflicts of this social life,
whose ultimate function consists in making the solution of these conflicts
possible .
The apparent autonomy of high culture fiom social life is, in one sense; the
ideological illusion, the illusion of a culture which in its totality functions as
ideology . For the ultimate and hidden preconceptions, and the fundamental
problem-content of any work of culture, always remain determined and circum-
scribed by those practical possibilities and attitudes that are open to the typical
social actors-its potential addressees-under the given conditions of their
existence. So when Marx is engaged in the age-old practice of all philosophers-
explicating the "true meaning" of the philosophical tradition in his own
language-he invariably insists upon a translation of even the most abstract and
timeless problems and categories into the practico-historical. In his view, the
speculative question concerning the relationship between matter and spirit
ultimately refers to the practical problem concerning the relation of physical and
mental labour ; the philosophical phrases about "substance" should be deciphered
as attempts and proposals to clarify the possible relationship between human
activities and that system of inherited objectivations which for every generation
constitutes the ready-found prius of its life.
The ideological illusion that high culture is autonomous is in another sense
stark reality : the reality of a society in which high culture has become a sphere
divorced from the life of the majority, where both its creation and enjoyment is
the privilege of a few. Cultural elitism is not merely a problem of education and
the dissemination of learning : its overcoming demands a dismantling of its
ideological transposition, which in turn requires a new culture which directly and
openly addresses itself to the problem of real-historical life, a culture which
adjudicates mundane conflicts not from the vantage-point of an eternal truth
bestowed by an impartial judge, but from the point of view of a committed
 IDEOLOGYAND POWER

participant . The realisation of philosophy is possible only through its overcom-

ing as philosophy. And it is characteristic that Marx-always at great pains to
avoid designating the natural sciences as "ideology"-seems at some points to
implicate them, insofar as their cultural form is concerned, in the same type of
criticism . "Science [he writes concerning the development of the machine pro-
duction that compels the inanimate limbs of machinery, by its very construction,
to act as a purposeful automaton] does not exist in the consciousness of the
worker, but acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power
of the machine itself. . . . The accumulation of knowledge and skills, of the
general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as
opposed to labour, and therefore appears as an attribute of capital. . . ."to
In this broadest, critico-philosophical sense, ideology is the culture of an
alienated society where goal-realisation and goal-positing-the criticism ofpre-
viously transmitted meanings, the performance of socially codified, meaningful
tasks, and the creation of new social meanings-become radically divorced from
each other. Humans therefore do not have-either individually or collectively-
control over the general results of their own activities and the ensuing direction
of their own development . Ideology is an alienated form of social self-
consciousness, since it brings historical conflicts to awareness only by transpos-
ing them into what appears to be a sphere of mere imagination and thought .
Social tasks and possibilities which can be solved and realised only in practical
collective activity therefore assume the form of eternal questions to which some
religious, philosophical or artistic answer is sought. Critique of ideology in this
sense is a critique of cultural objectivations which confronts them with their real
life-basis, against which they assert their autonomy and which therefore remains
for them hidden and unreflected, an externally imposed barrier to imagination
and thought . Conversely, this critique of ideology also-andperhaps primarily-
assumes the form of a critique of this life-basis by confronting it with its
paradigmatic cultural objectivations . Critique of ideology is a critique of a form of
social existence in which the awareness of social needs and possibilities can be
achieved only in a sphere divorced from, and contrasted to, life, a sphere that has
to remain a mere "culture", a value and ideal which is both unattainable and
irrelevant for the overwhelming majority .

IV

This very cursory overview perhaps succeeds in indicating that the three
meanings of ideology which seem to be equally present in Marx's oeuvre are not
completely independent and isolated from each other, but are at least vaguely
unified both in their practical intent and in the theoretical framework they all
ultimately presuppose. However, no discussion of Marx's views on ideology is
adequate, even in a minimal sense, if it fails to mention at least those "gaps" in
his conceptions to which in some measure and on some occasions he himself
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

draws attention . Two problematic gaps seem to be of paramount importance in

this respect.
In a footnote to Capital, Marx makes the following remark : "In fact it is much
easier to discover through analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of
religion than, in the opposite way, to develop from the actual relations of life in
question the form in which they have been apotheosized. This latter method is
the only materialistic, and therefore scientific one ."" This passage again makes
abundantly clear that Marx's own idea of a critique of ideologies is in no way
identical with a reductionist, sociological explanation of the content of certain
cultural creations. But this remark also brings sharply into relief a requirement
whose fulfilment in Marx's own theoretical practice seems to be rather proble-
matic : the need for an historical explanation of cultural forms themselves, of
genres like religion, art, philosophy, science and their various subdivisions . That
the internal division of culture into various types of practices is a changing
historical phenomenon which at the same time, and in each historical moment,
presents a number of normatively fixed possibilities and criteria for creative
activities, is undoubtedly a major problem which a theory of ideology (especially
in its broadest, critico-philosophical sense) cannot by-pass . One can enumerate a
number of Marxian observations that may be related to the question so posed .
These observations include-his discussion of the origin and general character of
speculative philosophy in The German Ideology ; his note in the Grundrisse (one
that hardly goes beyond Hegel, admittedly) about the animosity of bourgeois
society toward definite forms of art such as epic poetry ; his highly interesting,
though dispersed and unsystematic, remarks in his various economic manu-
scripts about the social preconditions of the emergence of political economy as
science ; and so on . However, all these observations have not only a highly
schematic, but also a rather accidental character . They certainly do not indicate
how the problem, so energetically stated by Marx, can and should be approached
in general terms . This absence of an answer to the problem of cultural genres is
all the more significant, because in his own critical practice-as I indicated
above-Marx does seem to accept as self-evidently valid those criteria of evalua-
tion which (in the nineteenth century) were inherent and tied to the predomin-
ant cultural forms . In a sense it would be true to say that-especially in his later
writings-Marx seems to take inherited cultural genres for granted, and that this
makes his "philosophical" concept of ideology as the culture of an alienated
society rather (and at least) indeterminate . It was only a much later generation of
Marxists-one which included Lukacs and Goldmann, Benjamin and Adorno-
who directly faced the problem of cultural genres, though predominantly with
reference to the arts alone .
The second problem is not completely unrelated to the first, and can again be
introduced with a quotation from Marx . At the end of his somewhat enigmatic
and abruptly terminating methodological discussion in the Grundrisse, he states
the following : "The difficulty lies not in the understanding that Greek art and
epic are bound up with certain forms of social development . The difficulty is that
they still afford us artistic pleasure and in a certain respect they count as a norm
 IDEOLOGY AND POWER

and as an unattainable model ."'z It is again clear that this "difficulty" is much
broader and more profound than the given example . For the "functional"
concept of ideology in Marx sometimes rests upon an account of the paradig-
matic character or epochal significanceof cultural creations . These paradigmatic
creations are seen to articulate the limits of imagination and thought which are
bound up not with momentary, passing group interests, but with the essential,
structural characteristics of a whole stage of social development . But this concep-
tion advanced by Marx has its limits-it remains strictly historical . As it stands, it
does not account directly for the fact that, at least in some cultural genres like the
arts or philosophy, some of the cultural heritage of past epochs (the social
conditions of which we may even have difficulty reconstructing) preserves its
significance for the present cultural practices of creation and reception alike.
This problem-that culture may exert a living relevance far beyond its original
epoch-certainly cannot be solved by merely referring to the now elementary
observation that the list of "classical" works itself undergoes deep changes in the
history of cultural transmission and reception : this fact certainly indicates that a
theory of cultural tradition ought to be an historical one, but it does not render
such a theory superfluous . _
Marx's own short answer to this "difficulty" seems to be contradicted by this
now elementary observation . However, this is not the only and the most discon-
certing feature of his reply. In general, he answers the question about the
persisting artistic significance of some ancient Greek works by referring to the
specific place Greek antiquity occupies in the history of human development as
such. This antiquity is seen to represent the "normal childhood" of humankind,
"its most beautiful unfolding"; its manifestations-as childhood memories in
general-therefore exercise upon us an "eternal charm". Leaving aside Marx's
(indubitable) Europocentrism, this reply, if taken literally, is suggestive of a most
disturbing application of the biologic imagery of "maturation and growth" to
history. Clearly, this would lend an openly teleological character to the whole
Marxian conception of social progress. Perhaps one should interpret this state-
ment much more liberally, above all by connecting it with an Hegelian, herme-
neutical concept of memory as "Er-innerung" . This was actually Lukacs' project:
He in his late Aesthetics, developed a conception of art as the collective memory
ofhumankind by drawing upon this formulation of Marx. But even granting this
most liberal and imaginative interpretation, the difficulty indicated by Marx
seems to be much broader and more general than any answer along the lines
proposed by him is able to solve. Marx does not account at all for the different
role tradition plays (and the different form it takes) within different cultural
genres ; that is, he ignores the specific form of historicity immanent within, and
characteristic of, distinct cultural forms . Since the function of inherited tradition
is an important aspect and component of the often-discussed problem of the
"relative independence" of ideology, the question essentially left open by Marx
becomes of paramount theoretical significance.
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

It is certainly justified to indicate at this point that Marx never intended nor
claimed to create a systematic theory of ideology. The heterogeneous and mostly
critical uses he made of this concept can be seen in retrospect to have enclosed a
definite field of investigation and to have suggested/outlined an essentially
unified theoretical approach to this field . No doubt, to speak about "gaps in
Marx's theory of ideology" implies a critical judgment according to a criterion-
comprehensiveness-which is in this case certainly inappropriate. It is, however,
justified to ask whether the failure of this theoretical approach to account
adequately for some of the most comprehensive and striking characteristics of
the domain it encloses indicates more than a mere lack of (perhaps never
intended) comprehensiveness . Are not the "gaps" I have mentioned more than
mere lacunae? Are they not expressions of internal strains within the conception
itself?
A short essay certainly cannot answer this question . But since no one, whose
interest in Marx is not solely antiquarian, can simply neglect it, I would in
conclusion like to suggest some considerations that may be relevant to such an
answer. Without further explanation, I will take up one problem, in respect of
which the internal consistency of the Marxian conception of ideology'has been
very often queried, and to which the earlier exposition has also referred . This is
the question of the relationship between ideology and the natural sciences .
As has already been indicated, Marx had rigorously avoided applying the term
"ideology" to the content of the theories of natural science, even though his
criticism clearly implicated both the cultural-institutional form of their devel-
opment and the character of the social application of their results in contempor-
ary capitalist society. In fact, though he was completely aware of the historical
connection between the emergence of the natural sciences and the capitalist
mode of production, 13 he consistently chose to characterise natural scientific
knowledge in explicitly universalistic-rather than historico-socially specific-
terms . He described it, for example, as "the general cultural" [geistige] product
of social development" ; as "the product of the general historical development in
its abstract quintessence" ; as (in contradistinction to co-operative labour) "uni-
versal labour" ; as "the general productive force of social brain" ; and as "the most
solid form of wealth, . . . both ideal and at the same time practical wealth" . 14 Now
it certainly can be argued that the use of such universalistic metaphors indicates a
serious inconsistency within a theory which, insisting that consciousness never
can be anything else but the consciousness of an existing historical practice,
underlines the social determination and historical embeddedness and limitation
of every system of ideas . According to this argument, the treatment of .natural
sciences as "non-ideological" must be regarded as one of the signs of mere
evasiveness, as a specific instance of a flight from the untenable or undesirable
relativistic consequences of a thoroughgoing historicism which renders the
whole conception of ideology in Marx beset by internal contradictions .
 IDEOLOGY AND POWER

As it stands, this criticism seems to me invalid, for it falsely constructs the

problem to which the Marxian theory of ideology addresses itself. This problem
is not that of the historicity ofall thinking in general. Rather, the Marxian theory
is concerned with those specific social-historical conditions which make it
impossible for thinking to recognise self-reflectively its own historical constitu-
tion and which thereby lock this thinking into a system of categories or images
that both justifies and attempts to perpetuate its very historical limitations. Marx
takes it for granted that there is no thinking "without preconditions", that all
systems of ideas-natural scientific as well as "ideological"-are historically
situated and therefore also limited . It is equally evident tohim that the mere form
ofscientificity, understood as the satisfaction of a set of purely epistemological or
methodological criteria, is never able to ensure by itself the exclusion of the
possiblity of an "ideological closure" . He distinguishes theories of natural sci-
ences from forms of ideology not because he ascribes an ahistoric validity to the
former, but because he wants to distinguish two different-and by virtue of their
different social constitution and functions-opposed processes of historical
change in the broad field of culture. On the one hand, natural sciences are
historical, in the sense that they exist as an uninterrupted process of critical
inquiry in which earlier theories become constantly replaced by more abstract-
general and mote exact ones on the basis of an ever-expanding experimentation
and observation that is both constantly spurred on and at the same time con-
trolled by the experiences and requirements of productive material practice. It is
this organic link of the natural sciences with the everyday practical results and
experiences of the process of production that ultimately ensures that their
historical change takes the form of an intellectual progress, viz., the accumula-
tion and growth of knowledge . The concept of ideology, on the other hand,
explains why such progress cannot be observed in other fields of cultural
creativity . The concept of ideology indicates that, in antagonistic societies,
individuals can reach the level of social self-consciousness (as distinct from the
social consciousness of their relation to nature) only by making deliberate choices
between cultural objectivations and world-views whose struggle and dispute
cannot be resolved by purely intellectual means, and whose historical alteration
therefore cannot be conceived according to a model of accumulation and growth.
Marx's distinction between natural science and ideology is therefore not only
internally coherent, but also in complete accordance with some of the most
fundamental and pervasive conceptual distinctions that belong to the basic
framework of his theory of history: the distinction between material content and
social form; between the productive forces and the relations of production; and,
ingeneral, between the practical relations of humans to nature and the relations
of social intercourse between humans, a distinction which he at the same time
identifies with the axes of continuity and discontinuity in history. The contrast
between the natural sciences and ideologies can thus be seen as the consistent
application of these principal dichotomies to the field of cultural production
proper .
So the problem indicated by certain critics hardly proves Marx guilty of any
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

direct inconsistency . Nevertheless, a simple outline of his (largely implicit)

"solution" to this problem raises a number of rather disquieting questions . First,
such an outline makes clear that at least some of the particular presuppositions of
the Marxian concept of ideology are rather immediately tied to a nineteenth
century view of scientific progress which is nowadays difficult to defend . One
must not necessarily accept the viewpoints of Feyerabend or even Kuhn to
apprehend that the conception of scientific development as a unilinear, cumula-
tive growth neither fits the historical facts ; nor is defensible in view of the
complex interrelationship between observation and theory in the natural sci-
ences . From a contemporary perspective, Marx seems in particular to have
missed the point that the natural sciences' explicitly empirical basis does not
render their historical situatedness transparent, primarily because the funda-
mental underlying paradigms in terms of which their empirical data are con-
structed can be clearly recognized as such only after some alternative and
competing ways of interpretation have been offered. Secondly, a reconsideration
of the Marxian conception of ideology indicates the extent to which it is
embedded in a theory of historical progress which sustains itself upon a key
dichotomy between the continuous growth in human mastery over nature and
the discontinuous transformations in the relations of broadly conceived social
intercourse-a theory of progress which today can be addressed with many
questions .
But the problem under discussion here not only indicates difficulties concern-
ing the relationship between the particular details and the most abstract-general
presuppositions of the Marxian view . It also makes comprehensible Marx's
rather strange combination of a radical philosophical criticism of the total culture
of bourgeois society as alienated-ideological with the unquestioned acceptance of
the validity of inherited cultural criteria, above all those of the sciences . There is
no doubt that, at least in his late oeuvre, Marx conceived his own theory in
conformity with the cultural model of the natural sciences emancipated from the
domination of capital . Directly connected with the everyday life-experiences of
its social addressees, theory makes these . experiences comprehensible in their
historical specificity and necessity, and thereby, at one and the same time, is
converted into "true science" capable of unlimited progress (since it makes its
own historical presuppositions transparent as "empirically observable and verifi-
able states of affairs") and a "popular force" .
Not only Marx's uncritical attitude toward the cultural form of the natural
sciences makes his program of a consistent "scientisatiori" of the cognitive
content of the cultural heritage theoretically suspect . This weakness appears also
to have its reverse side, namely, the Marxian theory's essentially "negativistic"
conception of everyday consciousness . It seems to be more than accidental that
the Marxian theory of everyday consciousness, at least as far as its systematic
achievements are concerned, lays all the emphasis on the necessarily fetishistic
character of everyday thinking in capitalist society in general . Theory can locate
the emancipatory impulses of its own subject and addressee, the working class,
only in the . form of unarticulated needs, frustrations and anxieties or, more
 IDEOLOGY AND POWER

usually, in that of "objective interests" . It thereby by-passes the problem that

even "spontaneous" resistance to capitalist society finds its expression indefinite
cultural forms . (It was Gramsci who first faced the problems involved in this
phenomenon.) The Marxian theory of ideology therefore in fact assimilates the
relationship of critical theory and its addressees into the model of "learning a
science" . This in turn seems to revoke the radical conception of the critical theory
itself. Marx's near-contemptuous attitude to everything that today would be
labelled as "working class culture"-consider his dispute with Weitling-rather
dramatically illustrates this point .
But, above all, the problems associated with this program of overcoming the
"illusions of ideology" through a simultaneous "scientisation and popularisa-
tion" of theory and culture in general are of a practical nature . If the shibboleth so
often heard today-"the crisis of Marxism"-has any meaning at all, it should
designate a whole historical process whose end result we are now facing . This
process is one in which, in a situation of deep and generally recognised social
crisis, Marxist theory enjoys an unprecedented "scientific" (i .e., academic)
respectability, while at the same time its theoretically "respectable" (intellectu-
ally honest and serious) forms have no impact or connection with radical social
movements of any kind . In a sense, the history of Marxism has turned full circle .
In these times, Marxian theory has reproduced that initial situation which it so
confidently set out to change-the complete divorce between theory and prac-
tice . If one is inclined, however, to trace back (at least partially) this failure to the
original self-interpretation of the theory-to its lack of critical reflection upon
itself as a specific cultural form-one should also remember that the historical
experience of radical attempts to challenge directly the autonomy of high culture
in the name of social emancipation have proved to be equally negative, and often
even much more disastrous . These challenges to autonomous high culture have
been assimilated into the dominant institutional forms of cultural production
and reception with conspicuous ease (as in the case of many artistic experiments
and movements : Brecht, surrealism, etc .) ; or (as the case of the Bolshevik
program of the "politicization" of culture indicates) they have resulted in the
transformation of high culture into ideology in the crudest sense-into sheer
apologies for the existing relations of dominance and oppression, which as a
consequence become culturally desolate. To understand this history, to. "apply"
the theory of ideology to the theory of ideology itself, today seems to be a
necessary and unavoidable task.

General Philosophy
University of Sydney
Australia

Notes
1 . Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin, 1958), vol. 3, p. 49 (hereafter cited as MEW).
2 . 1 should indicate at this point that fetishism-the historically specific form of everyday con-
 DISAPPEARING IDEOLOGY

sciousness under capitalism-does not for Marx represent the sole type of socially induced
distortions of experience and interpretation of the world in which individuals immediately live.
In relation to pre-capitalist societies, he makes at least fleeting references to the "idolatry of
nature" as an historical phenomenon analogous to fetishism . As the third volume of Capital
makes clear, this idolatry involves both the personification of natural forces and things upon
which human activities arestill dependent and the corresponding naturalisation of social roles, in
which relations of personal dependence and bondage manifest themselves .

3. Grundrisse (Berlin, 1953), pp . 136-137 .

4. See, for example, MEW, Vol. 26, 1, pp. 145-146, 256-259.

5. This abbreviated terminology is certainly quite alien to Marx . The only place(tomy knowledge)
where he explicitly formulates a contrast resembling the one drawn here is in his criticism of
Storch (MEW, vol. 26, 1, p. 257; see also p . 377), where he distinguishes the "ideological
components of the ruling class" from its "freecultural-spiritual (geistige) production" . From the
standpoint of his whole theory, this latter (and certainly accidental) designation is rather
questionable, and is therefore not used here .

6. See, for example, Marx's general characterization of vulgar economy in MEW, vol. 26, 3,
pp . 430-494.

7. Cf . ibid., vol. 26, 1, pp . 40-48, 60-69; vol. 26, 2, pp. 100, 161-166, 214-217; vol. 26, 3,
pp . 491-494, 504.

8. The following formulation is rather typical of this train of thought in Marx : "Classical economics
pear as bearers of the latter, the various fixed and mutually alien forms of wealth to their inner
unity and to strip them of that character due to which they stand side by side, indifferent toward
each other; it seeks to comprehend the internal interconnection apart from the multiplicity of
forms of appearance . . . In this analysis, classical economics now and again falls into contradic-
tions; it often attempts to accomplish this reduction and to demonstrate the identity of thesource
of the various formsdirectly, without mediating links . However, this necessarily followsfrom its
analytic method, with which the critique and comprehension inevitably begins. It has no interest
in genetically developing the various forms, only an interest in their analytic reduction and
unification, because it departs from these forms as given premises . . . Classical economics ulti-
mately fails, and is deficient because it conceives the ground-form of capital, production directed
towards the appropriation of alien labour, not as a social form, but as the naturalform of social
production-a mode of comprehension for thediscarding of which it itself clears theway" (ibid.,
vol. 26, 3, pp . 490-491) .

9. /bid., vol. 3, pp. 432-433 ; see also Grundrisse, pp . 82-83.

10 . Grundrisse, pp. 584, 586.

11 . MEW, vol. 23, p. 393.

12 . Grundrisse, p. 31 .

13 . See, for example, ibid., p. 313: 'Just as production founded on capital creates, on the one hand,
universal industriousness-i .e ., surplus-labour,value-creating labour-so it creates, on the other
hand, a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general
utility. Both science itself and all the physical and mental qualities appear as bearers of the latter,
while there appears to be nothing higher-in-itself, nothing legitimate-for-itself outside this circle
of social production and exchange . . . Hence the great civilising influence of capital . . . For the
first time, nature becomes a mere object for humanity, a mere matter of utility ; it ceases to be
recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical knowledge of its autonomous laws itself
appears merely as a ruse to subjugate it under human needs, either as an object of consumption, or
as a means of production."
 IDEOLOGYAND POWER

14. The first of two quotations appear in Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, Marx-
Engels Archiv(Moscow, 1933), vol . 2, vii, pp. 156 and 160; the reference to "universal labour" is
found in MEW, vol . 25, p . 114 ; the last two sentences are taken respectively from Grundritte, pp.
586 and 439.