Terry Eagleton: Ideology, and introduction, published by Verso, fourth impression 1994 London
Ex: “ a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
Ideas, which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
Socially necessary illusions;”
Ideology as lots of useful definitions, sometimes contradictory; and it would be limiting to fix to it a single definition.
Some are pejorative, some not at all. For the pejorative ones, ideology is therefore considered as something other people have (as one would not claim to believe in illusions.)
Some of them “involve epistemological questions – questions concerned with our knowledge of the world”, others are concerned with practices, “actions-oriented” sets of beliefs. (P2) Two mainstream traditions:
Hegel- Marx-Lukacs: preoccupied by “true and false cognition, with ideology as illusion, distortion and mystification”
sociological concern, “concerned more with the function of ideas within social life than with their reality or unreality.” (P3)
Durkheim characterized “the ideological method as consisting in ‘the use of notions to govern the collations of facts rather than deriving notions from them’. (Emile Durkheim, the rules of Sociological Method, London 1982, p86) opposed to pragmatic or empirical knowledge. However, it is argued that there is no such thing as “presuppositionless” thought.
American sociologists: ideologies are rigid and unable to innovate; rhetorical, passionate. However, it seeks to “reconstruct society from the ground up in accordance with some bloodless blueprint”. P4
Ideology as ideas related to power: “To study ideology,(…) is to study the ways in which meaning serves to sustain relations of domination”. (John B Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge 1984, p4)
involving some ideas of legitimation and mystification.
However, it cannot be that the dominant political power only is ideological, since opposition thoughts two are ideological. In this view that it is not only a dominant power’s characteristic, Martin Seliger defines ideology as “sets of ideas by which men posit, explain and justify ends and means of organized social action, and specifically political action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order.” (Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics, London 1976 p11) This wider definition in however less compatible with the view of ideology as mystification. If it is excessively widened, (as to include any thought as ideology), it also loses its defining power and becomes too vague.
Ideology as “a matter of discourse, rather than language. It concerns the actual uses of language between particular human subjects for the productions of specific effects.” (P9) ”ideology is a function of the relation of an utterance to its social context”. Ideology as interested discourse? Problem of the scope of interests.
Ideology as false consciousness? Quite an unpopular view of ideology, as it is believed that there is some truth in everything. “Simply on account of the pervasiveness and durability of doctrines, we can generally assume that they encode, in however mystified a way, genuine needs and desires.” P12
Furthermore, as Jon Elster reminds, if ideologies are to be successful, they must “engage significantly with the wants and desires that people already have (…) and feeding them back to their subjects in ways which render these ideologies plausible and attractive.” P15.
However, one must not underestimate “systematically distorted communication” (Jurgen Habernas), in which on act or belief’s qualification is subject to ideological abuse. (ex: “using the word duty every time a man beats his wife.”) P14
In addition, though ideologies may be internally coherent and therefore plausible, it does not prevent them from containing false propositions.
What “false consciousness” could actually be concerned with is not the actual truth of propositions as language, but as a piece of discourse. (ex: ambulance on strike. Language: people will die; Discourse: get back to work.)
”true in its empirical content but deceptive in its force”
“To say that the statement is ideological is then to claim that it is powered by an ulterior motive bound up with the legitimation of certain interests in a power struggle.” P16 ideology as false consciousness can be taken as a valid argument, although ideological statements may point at some empirical truths. The second meaning of the statement, although it is moral, can be considered as false based on moral realism, which holds that moral statements can hold “values of truth and falsity.”
According to the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, “Ideology represents the way I ‘live’ my relations to society as a whole, which cannot be said to be a question of truth or falsehood.” P18 ideology as a set of practices linking the subject to the dominant “relations of production in a society”, and covering the practices of both stances (subject – dominant). Ideology express a will, and is therefore “performative” rather than “constative”.
However, it is not because Ideology would be a set of practices that it can exclude the question of falseness: “There is no reason to believe that (…) our lived experience need be any less ambiguous than our ideas.” P20
According to Raymond Geuss, there are two kinds of falsity other than epistemological ones: functional and genetic. “False consciousness may mean not that a body of ideas is actually untrue, but that these ideas are functional for the maintenance of an oppressive power, and that those who hold them are ignorant of this fact.” P25. According to Geuss, consciousness may be false because it ‘incorporates beliefs which are false (epistemological), or because it functions in a reprehensible way (functional), or because it has a tainted origin (genetic)’. (R. Geuss: The Idea of a Critical Theory, Cambridge 1981, chap 1)
Functional falseness, or mystification, does not always imply some sort of mistake on the part of the subjects, who might have realized the falseness in the Ideology, but still approve it for its relative performance. Peter Sloterdijk calls this ‘enlightened false consciousness”.
If ideologies falsify, it is because there is for now no better alternative to problems, and because “people would like to believe that they live in reasonably just conditions.” P28 Mystification is not “something inherent to ideological language” but “inherent in the social structure to which that language belongs.”
“In an entirely just society, there would be no need for ideology in the pejorative sense since there would be nothing to explain away.”
-ideology as “the general material process of production of ideas, beliefs and values in social life”. This includes how people live their social practices, and stresses “the social determination of though.”
-ideology (origin concept) “ideas and beliefs which symbolize the conditions and life experience s of a specific, socially significant group or class.”
-ideology as “promotion and legitimation of the interests of such social groups in the face of opposing interests.”P29 action orientated discourse.
The same definition can be changed by limiting it the dominant social power, in which case it would have a inufying property.
-ideology as legitimation through distortion or mystification.
-ideology with a false consciousness meaning, but arising from the “material structure of society as a whole” rather than from the interests of the dominant class.