Article from Margin Notes 1
Writers have spilled rivers of ink over the term “ideology.” This steady flow has become a deluge of mediocre tomes from uninquisitive minds. The result of this flood is that the term now usually connotes a mere pejorative rather than anything of substance. Anyone who wishes to avoid submersion must seek higher ground. Yet academia has shown itself to be a lowland compared to those who have merged theoretical insight with practical activity. It is little wonder, then, that the most coherent conceptions of ideology come from those who stand in large part outside the academy. For this reason, any investigation into ideology must start with the insight of the Young Marx, who noted that philosophy had contended itself with criticizing thought in its abstract form. This was a half-complete task; it did not criticize the real conditions which give rise to illusory abstractions.
The ambiguous relationship of the Frankfurt School to academia provided fertile ground for a critical theory of ideology. This ambiguity was not of the members’ volition. Misfortunes asserted themselves upon the group but also allowed for reason to work its cunning. The concept of ideology played a central role in the Frankfurt School from the time of Horkheimer’s ascent as director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS). Of course, the Frankfurt School was not the first to investigate the concept. Indeed, one of the first treatments of the concept in the Frankfurt School corpus criticizes extant theories of ideology. However, by dint of their influence and voluminous output, the Frankfurt School’s conception of ideology is a watershed moment in the development of the concept. At its head during these halcyon years was Max Horkheimer, who somewhat facetiously accepted previous director Carl Grünberg’s description of the IfS as a “dictatorship of the director.”
Horkheimer’s 1930 critique of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia is a fruitful starting point for an explanation of the critical theory of ideology. Mannheim’s theory not only has historical importance but is also a useful case study in how abstract and value-free theories of ideology content themselves with retreating to abstraction rather than explaining how ideology functions in the social reproduction of concrete life. By contrast, the theory of ideology that the Institut für Sozialforschung develops is an antidote to these common maladies. Hence, this essay first describes Horkheimer’s criticism of Mannheim in section 2 before laying out the concept of ideology that Horkheimer developed during the 30s. Those unfamiliar with Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge should consult Appendix 3 to orient themselves before continuing.
After laying out Horkheimer’s critique of Mannheim, the essay then turns to Horkheimer proper. This section, section 3, forms the bulk of the essay (for obvious reasons), and is for that reason divided into subsections. Subsection 3.1 mainly summarizes the main problems with the sociology of knowledge and lists the pitfalls that a critical theory of ideology should avoid. Next, subsection 3.2 distinguishes between Ideologietheorie and Ideologiekritik, and I argue that these two moments of a critical theory of ideology are both present in Horkheimer’s early work. As one of the primary pitfalls of the sociology of knowledge is its methodology, subsection 3.3 covers methodological matters, arguing that the proper means to analyze ideology in capitalist social relations requires the adoption of a dialectical method. After the methodological background, subsection 3.4 deals with ideology theory, arguing that Horkheimer’s conception of ideology views it as playing a specific functional role in class relations. Subsection 3.5 deals with the other half of the formula: the critical moment of the critical theory of ideology. Throughout this analysis, one sees the contraposition of ideology as falsehood to the concept of totality. Consequently, subsection 3.6 provides some further contextualization of totality as a concept. As the reader may wish for a concrete example of the critical theory of ideology, I end section 3 by recapitulating Horkheimer’s analysis of the bourgeois revolutionary and applying it to Tommaso Campanella. The essay then concludes by flagging some further areas for research.
Horkheimer begins his critique of Mannheim with a methodological point. Mannheim treats Marxist thought as part of his “sociology of knowledge” which explains a social totality. Yet the true purpose of Marxist thought is to change the world, not to explain it.
Mannheim distinguishes between particular and total ideologies. The former consists in ascribing the origin of a specific belief to bias or interest. By contrast, the latter casts doubt on an entire opposing Weltanschauung. Much like Kant’s claim that the judgments of experience are the result of our application of the categories, Mannheim argues that our worldviews are the result of categories that are the result of our given situational determination. We thus do not think universally; our social group conditions our thought. Thus, not only what we know is subject to situational determination, but how we think. Hence, the charge of false consciousness has become universalized. Though he invokes false consciousness, Mannheim wants a generalized version of ideology that is not restricted to Marxism.
Despite this point of agreement with expressivists, Mannheim is no positivist. His approach diverges from positivism due to his insistence on the historical element of truth. While positivism held fast to the adage that “facts are stubborn things,” Mannheim insisted that there was no ahistorical unified truth that could survive unblemished. Rather, the validity of a system of thought depends on its historical moment.
To return to 1930, Mannheim diagnoses methodological pluralism as the cause of the crisis in thought.
The trouble is that Mannheim misuses Marx. Marx “wanted to transform philosophy into positive science and praxis.”
A similar problem befalls Mannheim’s conception of history. This theory does not point to determinate historical entities but appeals to a “realm beyond history.”
Despite his Kantian pretensions, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge requires dogmatism to buttress it. This is not a problem for the revolutionary critique of ideology, as it tries to do away with metaphysical superstitions. By contrast, Mannheim seeks to ossify them. Marx was correct to cast doubt on abstract humanity as a substitute for flesh and blood men. Hence, Mannheim views the human essence as the subject of history, but for Marx it is the concrete human being “in a definite historical moment.”
For Mannheim, particular ideology is particular because the conditional nature of the determining social situation bars the bearer of any particular ideology from making claims to absolute truth. But the claim of situational determination is incoherent, since it presumes that it itself is not situationally determined; it thereby treats standpoints under the aspect of eternity.
Moreover, Mannheim depoliticized ideology, especially in the move between particular and total conceptions of ideology. In so doing, he worsens the analysis by failing to account for the link between the political and economic distribution of power and the social concepts in play.
By a general total concept of ideology, Mannheim means that intellectuals understand that situational determination limits every ideology, including one’s own. As such, no ideology can reach eternally valid truth. This renders every pattern of thought ideological. Since Mannheim strips ideology of its accusatory nature, he renders it meaningless. Now, the term merely signifies that a claim lacks access to a mind-independent truth. All ideologies are born in the original sin of situational determination. To be consistent, one must give an account of the categories that one is using, including what “being” and Weltanschauungen are. In contrast to the general total concept of ideology is the special conception of the total concept of ideology. In the special conception, one merely puts into question competing ideologies. The special conception shows promise in giving an account of the relevant categories.
A similar problem applies to Mannheim’s notion of ideological appropriateness. Mannheim also must resort to a spiritual examination of the criteria of ideological appropriateness. He grounds the appropriateness of an ideology to its “correctness” to its time (i.e., not obsolete or utopian). But this correctness is itself not based on “an explicit, scientific theory of society.”
At first glance, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge provides us with an excellent negative example: that is, an example which shows us what to avoid. There are 3 interrelated problems with the model that one would be wise to avoid. First, Mannheim’s model posits strange metaphysical entities which should not exist by the model’s own suppositions. These entities include the appeal to a transcendental, ahistorical humanity. The theory of situational determination cannot explain the existence of such entities. The ideal type which corresponds to an ideology is another example. It putatively stands in for groups of flesh and blood people. Yet this entity stands over and above the conceptual schema that said flesh and blood people use in everyday life.
This is due to a second pitfall with the model, Mannheim’s attempt to give a value-free analysis of ideology causes him to rely on such metaphysical entities. The net result of this is that, despite its scientific pretensions, the sociology of knowledge loses explanatory power when compared to a less metaphysically cumbersome theory. This is most notable with the pseudo-normative concept of utopia. A utopian ideology is a state of mind which “is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs.”
The concept of utopianism falls prey to a third problem with the theory. That the quasi-normative description of utopianism does not solve the previous problem because Mannheim adds the normative concepts post hoc. Hence, the concept has no grounding in the theory itself. The extent to which utopianism is a normative concept is unclear. By reducing ideology to a cognitive framework, Mannheim reduces utopianism to a mere epistemic fault.
What would a critical theory of ideology that avoids these pitfalls look like? Remarkably like that of the early Frankfurt School. Thus, what follows is a sketch of the critical theory of ideology as present in the Institut für Sozialforschung during its heyday in the 1930s, a sketch which avoids the pitfalls of the sociology of knowledge.
At this juncture, one must distinguish between two interwoven but nonetheless distinguishable tasks that any critical theory of ideology must provide. On the one hand, it must provide an Ideologietheorie: a theory of how ideologies function and the role they play in larger social structures. On the other hand, it must provide an Ideologiekritik: it must show that the ideologies in question obscure or render unintelligible some facts of social life. The received wisdom regarding the Frankfurt School is that it had the latter but lacked the former. This received wisdom is false, as it ignores the way in which both concepts are intertwined for the first generation of Critical Theorists. In what follows, I show that the Frankfurt School’s development of an Ideologietheorie is rather quite prominent, so long as one knows where to look. In particular, the Frankfurt School’s functionalism places ideology within the context of capitalist social relations. Afterward, I show that the Frankfurt School’s adjectival conception of ideology provides the critical half of the equation, giving ideology an obfuscatory role regarding immanent contradictions in social relations.
A few words on what constitutes a critical theory of ideology are in order. The critical element is not vacuously filled by any subjection of assumptions to scrutiny. Indeed, this element is ostensibly part of the most vulgar bourgeois critiques of ideology that emerged during the early modern period, i.e., the ascendent era of capitalism in Europe. However, the articulation of ideology critique in capitalist society both then and now is class-based, as Horkheimer notes that “the criticism of the system [of relations that reproduce capitalist social life] is to be the prerogative of those who have an interest in it.”
But in raising this point about the nature of criticism, I have inevitably stumbled across the question of methodology. After all, if the mere academic exercise of exposing illusions does not suffice for a critical theory of ideology, what other steps are necessary? As we have seen, Mannheim’s conception of social determination is too abstract and imprecise to function as a starting point. To that end, the following section explains the methodological principles which the Frankfurt School uses in its quest.
Recall that one problem with Mannheim’s conception of ideology is that it is too vague and therefore allows the reader to insert their preferred theory of ideology into the account. To avoid this pitfall, one must use a different method than Mannheim’s, lest it fall prey to the very same indeterminate metaphysical entities one should do away with. Hence, as a matter of method, one must stress the non-autonomy of thought from activity. The oft-quoted Marxist claim that “legal relations as well as the forms of state [...] have their roots in the material conditions of life”
“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”
Karl Marx, *Grundrisse* (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 100.
Moving from the concrete to the abstract uncovers the abstract relations which govern the (previously empty, formalistic) concreta, but these abstract relations in turn can only attain validity on the basis of an investigation of definite material social relations. Consequently:
“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation Anschauung and conception.”
Ibid., 101.
Within the abstracta that one uncovers via this process is the seed of the social relations which give it its validity. For instance, “the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole.”
One therefore returns to the concrete, but this time as a set of concrete relations which are the result of dialectical investigation and not dogmatically assumed. These concrete facts are social in nature, as the asocial conception of a human essence is one which treats sensuous activity as if it were mere contemplation.
Another advantage of Marx’s dialectical method is that it not only avoids the problems of the overly abstract and indeterminate methodology of Mannheim, but also the overly specific and asocial methodology which ostensibly lies in contraposition to it. Bukharin notes that nearly every economic figure associated with the Marginal Revolution argues for the subjective theory of value using examples of isolated atomic individuals and then presuming that such examples scale up to a social level.
Society (as is consciously or unconsciously assumed) is not an arithmetical aggregate of isolated individuals; on the contrary, the economic activity of each specific individual pre-supposes a definite social environment in which the social relation of the individual economies finds its expression [emphasis mine]. The motives of the individual living in isolation are entirely different from those of the “social animal” (zoon politikon). The former lives in an environment consisting of nature, of things in their pristine simplicity; the latter is surrounded not only by “matter” but also by a peculiar social milieu. The transition from the isolated human to society is possible only by way of the social milieu. And indeed, if we were dealing only with an aggregate of individual economies, without any points of contact between them, […] there would be no society. Of course, it is theoretically quite possible to embrace a number of isolated and remote economies in a single conception, to force them into a “totality” as it were. But this totality or aggregate would not be a society [emphasis mine], a system of economies closely connected with each other with constant interaction between them. While the former aggregate would be one we had artificially constructed, the second is one that is truly present. Therefore the individual economic subject may be regarded only as a member of a social economic system, not as an isolated atom.
Ibid.
Individualistic models of social science à la Hobbes and Böhm-Bawerk therefore create a false totality that does injustice to both the particular and the general. But the excursus on the Marginal Revolution shows us a second problem with extant attempts to unite social sciences under the banner of philosophy: namely, that different social sciences embrace mutually exclusive philosophical assumptions and methodologies.
A methodology like that of Marx, one which searches for the material social relations which lie immanent in the abstracta of a given ideology, is necessary for a critical theory of ideology. By investigating the dialectic between ideology and material relations, we also solve the problem of the disconnect between ideology as such and its bearers in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, that is, a gap between “the mundane struggles of everyday historical life, and next to them also the conflicts of the ‘systems of Weltanschauungen.’ ”
Moreover, while Mannheim’s attempt to give a value-free conception of ideology has a scientific veneer, his eschewing of the normative side of ideology requires a strict fact/value distinction which itself is unscientific. This division is a common problem to scientific inquiry of the time, especially of positivism. As Horkheimer notes in “Notes on Science and the Crisis,” scientific inquiry does not stand outside the “dynamisms of history,”
“First, science accepts as a principle that its every step has a critical basis, yet […] the setting of tasks, lacks a theoretical grounding and seems to be taken arbitrarily. Second, science has to do with a knowledge of comprehensive relationships; yet, it has no realistic grasp of that comprehensive relationship upon which its own existence and the direction of its work depend, namely, society.”
Ibid., 7.
Underlying both these problems is the need for science to be directed by “the necessities of social life,”
One material relation that undergirds this intellectual fragmentation is the division of labor in capitalist societies. Here, Lukacs’ work on reified consciousness presaged later critiques of scientific inquiry by the Frankfurt School. The mere fact that there are psychological implications of commodity fetishism is obvious. After all, it involves misperceiving the social relations of labor as “an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor”
Why assume intellectual labor is any different? The mere fact that there is an intellectual division of labor is mundane, but leads to profound consequences. The intellectual division of labor leads to an isolation of specialized fields from one another, which in turn limit their utility and scholarly output. Buck-passing on matters of fact leads some disciplines (especially in the social sciences) to uncritically accept the object of their investigation, weakening the overall scientific value of the endeavor. But this uncritical acceptance also distorts the goals of scientific inquiry. For Horkheimer,
“A conception [of theory] is needed which overcomes the one-sidedness that necessarily arises when limited intellectual processes are detached from their matrix in the total activity of society. In the idea of theory which the scholar inevitably reaches when working purely within his own discipline, the relation between fact and conceptual ordering of fact offers a point of departure for such a corrective conception. The prevailing theory of knowledge has, of course, recognized the problem which this relation raises. The point is constantly stressed that identical objects provide for one discipline problems to be resolved only in some distant future, while in another discipline they are accepted as simple facts.”
Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," 199.
Hence, what makes something ideological is not just a question of the researcher uncritically accepting the object of analysis (thought that is part of the formulation). Rather, ideology also required that the aims of investigation also determined by entities other than the researchers themselves. The researcher is not a Kantian agent who can set their own hypothetical ends, but rather a part of a capitalist process who must subordinate these ends. This subordination may be immediate, in the case where one subordinates the ends of research to one’s boss or research and development board, or mediately via attempts to reify one’s consciousness (as occurs when one chases academic trends rather than pursue one’s self-selected goals).Both the input and the output of intellectual research are determined in scientific inquiry. Social totality determines both the object of analysis and the researcher as subject, both of which determine the aims. Social totality needs to be taken into account. I shall henceforth refer to the two ways in which social totality determines intellectual activity (that is, it both determines the object of analysis, which the researcher must uncritically accept, and the telos toward which the activity aims) as double determination.
One of two consequences follow from this intellectual division of labor. Either scholars must content themselves with the role that the division of labor provides for them, in which case many questions worth investigating are left unanswered,
The Ideologietheorie of the Frankfurt School finds its most fleshed out form when investigating the self-conception of the so-called “early modern” thinkers who represented the nascent bourgeoisie contra decadent feudalism. This is because thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes were the first to broach the subject of ideology, that is, the question of “how the social situation relates to the prevailing ideas that come to be recognized as false.”
For Horkheimer, ideology is not merely an individual falsehood, but has a “specific function in social struggle.”
The predominant ideas of an epoch have roots that go deeper than the ill intentions of certain individuals. Such ideas are endemic to a given social structure, whose outlines are given by the way in which individuals sustain themselves at the time. The basic process whereby primitive hunters or fishermen secure their existence dictates not only their material mode of life, but in a certain sense their intellectual horizon as well. Similarly, the form of life based upon this primitive level of development not only conditions the actual life of the individuals, but also has a significant influence on their knowledge of the external world, as well as on the content and structure of their general understanding of life. The same point applies to more differentiated forms of society: the intellectual life of individuals is bound up with the life process of the social body of which they are a part and which determines their activity [emphasis mine].
Ibid., 360.
Ideology, then, is not a precondition for agency or group formation, but rather the result of a material social process. However, it is a result which subsequently serves as a presupposition of the social process in a dialectical manner. To conflate ideology, i.e., a result of the process of social activity, with the activity itself, is to make a category error. There is a whiff of more traditional Marxism in this account:
it is impossible to understand the content or nature of peoples intellectual makeup without knowledge of the epoch in which they live, or indeed (leaving the primitive peoples aside) without knowing the specific position they occupy in the social production process. The vital functions necessary to sustain and further human existence have not been combined within every single individual since the time of the primitive hunters and fisherman; rather, such functions are distributed amongst the various groups within society. But this also entails the differentiation of the whole of thought [geistige Leben], which develops internal contradictions.
Ibid., 361.
More orthodox strands of Marxism would mostly concur that one cannot understand one’s intellectual makeup without understanding their position in class relations. However, this is a weaker claim than the Vulgar Marxist conception of strict reflection theory. This weakening of the Vulgar Marxist view allows Horkheimer’s view to escape historical relativism, as “[t]he relativity of a proposition and ideology are two rather different sorts of things. The limits to what may be [sic] rightly be called ideology are constantly set by our current state of knowledge.”
Given that the Frankfurt School thinks that ideology is the result of a social process, one might rightly ask what function gives rise to ideology. Here, the notion of ideology as false and obfuscatory comes to the fore. In “Notes on Science and the Crisis,” Horkheimer sketches out the way in which earnest attempts to ascertain the truth may still count as ideological insofar as they obfuscate the true nature of society:
Not only metaphysics but the science it criticizes is ideological, in so far as the latter retains a form which hinders it in discovering the real causes of the crisis. To say it is ideological is not to say that its practitioners are not concerned with pure truth. Every human way of acting which hides the true nature of society, built as it is on contrarieties, is ideological, and the claim that philosophical, moral, and religious acts of faith, scientific theories, legal maxims, and cultural institutions have this function is not an attack on the character of those who originate them but only states the objective role such realities play in society. Views valid in themselves and theoretical and aesthetic works of undeniably high quality can in certain circumstances operate ideologically, while many illusions, on the contrary, are not a form of ideology. The occurrence of ideology in the members of a society necessarily depends on their place in economic life; only when relationships have so far developed and conflicts of interest have reached such an intensity that even the average eye can penetrate beyond appearances to what is really going on, does a conscious ideological apparatus in the full sense usually make its appearance. As an existing society is increasingly endangered by its internal tensions, the energies spent in maintaining an ideology grow greater and finally the weapons are readied for supporting it with violence.
Max Horkheimer, "Notes on Science and the Crisis" from *Critical Theory*, 7-8.
That ideology obfuscates the immanent contradictions in society does not entail that one may simply dispel ideological illusions via shining a light upon it. Contra later Critical Theorists who insist on ideal discursive conditions, ideology is not merely illusion, and hence no number of exhortations to the truth can suffice to remove it.
Ideologies may function well in their role, but like other machines, can break down and cease to function. When ideologies break down, not all its adherents jump ship. Rather, when the ideological superstructure and its requisite institutions falter or no longer can no longer play their role in the reproduction of society, those who benefit from the prevailing social order remove the mask of liberal humanitarian reasoning to reveal the hideously fiendish face of brutality beneath it. Or, as Horkheimer notes in Dawn and Decline, “[t]he less stable necessary ideologies are, the more cruel the methods by which they are protected.”
If ideology is functional, where is this functionalism? The answer is that it lies in human action and thought. To that end, the following section lays out the obfuscatory function that ideology plays in hiding the immanent contradictions of bourgeois society.
As we have seen, the concept of ideology is not an abstract metaphysical entity like a Weltanschauung, but a functionalist process. Rather than stipulate ideology as abstracta à la Mannheim, the Frankfurt School treats ideology as adjectival. That is, to paraphrase Herr Morain, for the Frankfurt School, ideology is false consciousness, with an emphasis on false and not on consciousness. That ideology is conceived of as falsehood is not unique to the Frankfurt School, obviously, but what separates the IfS is its recognition that there is a moment of truth in ideology and in all thought. This subsection traces the causal chain that gives rise to ideological distortions, starting from its most abstract components toward a more determinate answer based in the capitalist mode of production itself.
The aforementioned paragraph from “Notes on Science and the Crisis” shows that ideology is not bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense: that is, speech which is unconcerned with the truth whatsoever.
But why does science in the capitalist epoch tend toward ideological obfuscation? If ideology is neither bullshit nor malicious falsehood, then one may rule out the Vulgar allegedly-Marxist theory that it is merely a matter of bourgeois self-interest to deceive the masses. Theories that rely on conspiratorial deception are themselves non-Marxist, as they attribute agency to the putative Great Men of History instead of the masses engaged in antagonistic economic social relations. Rather, focusing on why this paragraph on ideology appears in “Notes on Science and the Crisis” is elucidatory. The rest of the essay contains a theme that returns in the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment: the instrumentalization of reason. Speaking of scientific inquiry before 1914, Horkheimer notes that the Enlightenment program of bourgeois criticism against Scholasticism had fulfilled its task by the mid-19^th^ century.
The root of this failure is not science itself but the social conditions which relegate it to a bureaucratic role in the day-to-day management of capital instead of rational inquiry. Scientific inquiry is in the grasp of two contradictions, as Horkheimer explains:
First, science accepts as a principle that its every step has a critical basis, yet the most important step of all, the setting of tasks, lacks a theoretical grounding and seems to be taken arbitrarily. Second, science has to do with a knowledge of comprehensive relationships; yet, it has no realistic grasp of that comprehensive relationship upon which its own existence and the direction of its work depend, namely, society.
Ibid., 8.
These two contradictions are related, since both stem from a lack of investigating society. More critically, these contradictions arise because the economic order on which scientific inquiry depends is itself enmeshed in immanent contradictions. The reification of human activity encompasses not only the factory floor, but also the ivory tower. The division of intellectual labor has incentivized the renunciation of totality. Moreover, the aims of science are not its own, as science “is determined in the scope and direction of its work not by its own tendencies alone but […] by the necessities of social life as well.”
The growth of this thought is ideological insofar as it papers over the immanent contradictions within economic activity and the legal form. Yet this is not a function of malevolent actors suppressing the truth, but rather the result of Enlightenment’s ambiguous relationship with capital. The Enlightenment’s aim of liberating humanity from its superstitions may have extirpated existing myths, but in so doing it marshaled up myths of its own: those of rationalization, formalization, and regulation.
If ideology is fundamentally false, then what is conversely true? Here, the concept of totality as the opposite of ideology is important to stress.
The concept of ideology must be counterposed to that of totality. Since ideology both obfuscates immanent contradictions in a social totality and plays a role in class struggle, totality must strip away the illusory element of ideology. But how might one go about doing this? Here, two facets of the Frankfurt School tradition provide us with the tools to overcome the overgrowth of ideology that papers over the real foundation of capitalist social relations: that of interdisciplinarity in the critical theory of ideology and doing justice to the particular. Immediately upon his ascension to the directorship of the IfS, Horkheimer stressed the need for interdisciplinary investigation to address the crisis of scientific knowledge. In his inaugural address in this capacity, Horkheimer attempted to lay out the lacunae in extant attempts at uniting disparate phenomena under the label of totality.
Social philosophy, the discipline with which Horkheimer identified himself, requires viewing people not as autonomous, atomic individual subjects (as bourgeois philosophy since at least the time of Hobbes has done), but rather as “members of a community”
These social philosophies are right to articulate a supra-individual sphere, but also have shortcomings: they are still too positivistic and individualistic.
The crisis of the social sciences has its origin in the division of labor that makes the social sciences possible in the first place. In particular, the strict bifurcation of empirical social research and social philosophy renders both worse off than uniting the two via a dialectical continuum. The heart of this dialectical relation is one of interdisciplinarity: “the task is to […] pursue […] larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods, to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context.”
There is one remaining problem. Recall that Mannheim’s account of ideology is lacking because it is so broad that it does not do justice to the particular, as it involves placing competing worldviews in a titanic struggle over and above the political struggles that flesh and blood people undertake. Despite our best efforts, one may worry that the comprehensive critical theory of ideology sketched out here is still inadequate in this respect. The idea of totality is counterposed to ideology: totality is truth and ideology is false. Hence, we need some concept of totality to explain why ideology is false consciousness. This task has become more pressing given the increasing broadsides against the concept of totality in the decades since the decline of the original generation of the Frankfurt School.
Of course, critiques of totality are not new. These criticisms have been, historically, the domain of the Right and levied against liberal insistence on the sovereignty of reason.
The solution to this problem first appears in the Young Marx’s writings, which stress that criticism which contented itself with criticism of ideas was insufficient as it did not apply this analysis to concreta. This does not imply that we know material relations a priori, as Marx’s hitherto mentioned analysis of the method of political economy shows. To give putatively concrete entities more determinate content requires us to put concreta in the context of social relations, thereby giving material conditions a totality. It is for this reason that Marx considered all previous versions of materialism deficient; by foregoing the social and practical elements of material relations, one treats materialism as a mere object of contemplation.
It is for this reason that the IfS’ insistence on both a theoretical and empirical element to their research as well as a collaborative work ethic allowed it to prosper, if only for a moment. The image of the bourgeois intellectual, isolated and productive, is one which is ill-suited to the task of remedying the faults with scholarly inquiry today. Its reified nature suits those with niche interests, but the academy’s self-perception as an outdated relic has some merit today. The ceaseless exhortation for academics to justify themselves belies an insecurity that they can no longer serve either capital or knowledge. In attempting to serve both masters, the modern academy has served neither.
By contrast, Horkheimer saw fit to stress that totality is the way out of the intellectual crisis of our age. The crisis arose in the first place because disparate fields assume contradictory but useful assumptions which seem impossible to reconcile into a totality.
At this point, the reader may wish for a concrete example of what a critical theory of ideology looks like, and how it is connected to the concept of totality. Luckily, Horkheimer provides us with one when analyzing the bourgeois revolutionary in his sprawling essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements.”
To fully appreciate the interwoven nature of the Frankfurtian Ideologiekritik and Ideologietheorie we must recognize that the predominant object of analysis that Horkheimer examined during the 1930s was bourgeois philosophy. Being a good historical materialist, he traces its development during the ascent of the Third Estate from the 16^th^ to 18^th^ centuries in “Egoism and Freedom Movements.” In said essay, Horkheimer’s theory that philosophy in the Early Modern period responds to and develops out of the rising power of the (as of yet still subordinated) bourgeoisie is intertwined with a critique of said philosophy as obfuscatory. This obfuscation arises not due to malevolence, but is an inversion of the real premises on which capitalism operates.
At first glance, one may think that the substantive disagreements between thinkers in this period prevents a systematic analysis of philosophical thought therein. Every student of political philosophy knows that writers never tire of contrasting Hobbes the pessimist with Rousseau the optimist, of those whose view of human nature as selfish and reprobate drives them to conservatism with those whose view of human nature as virtuous and uncorrupted drives them to liberalism or anarchism.
Yet despite this apparent antinomy, there are points of unification between the two camps. The first is a rejection of the Aristotelian conception of value that governed previous forms of political thought in the West in favor of a view of human nature that appealed to “historical, political, and psychological analysis.”
One further commonality between the camps is the condemnation of egoism and pleasure. Examples of this abound: from not only Machiavelli’s repeated insistence that a corrupt city can only stay free with great difficulty,
Yet at the same time as this development of bourgeois morality, bourgeois political economy also develops. The pre-capitalist prohibition on usury
That such a doctrine became popular as the bourgeoisie gained its footing expresses bourgeois social power; were there no ascendent capitalist relations, there would be no need to hammer home the critique of egoism ad nauseam. The proof of this is the inconsistency with which the espousers of this moral schema apply it to different social groups. While many of these moralists inveigh against luxury, many are reluctant to fully trust the poor. This is most prominent with Luther, whose thunderous polemic against the Peasants’ Revolt reaches almost comical proportions.
This antinomy between the economic demand for competition, and therefore self-interest, on one hand, and the moral demand to eschew self-interested behavior has psychological effects on the bourgeois subject. The moral demand requires that one forgo lower pleasures for the sake of higher ones, and one is supposed to take pleasure in putatively uniquely human virtues.
This brief overview of the schematic of bourgeois revolutionary thought shows that Horkheimer’s account of ideology is at once both a detailed theory (which places thought in the context of the social conditions which give rise to it) and a critique of ideology (insofar as the moral system is obfuscating an immanent contradiction in bourgeois society).
There are a few loose threads that provide opportunities for further research beyond the scope of this essay. One may object that in the course of the investigation into ideology, I have remained too abstract insofar as I insufficiently investigated the material basis on which the ideological superstructure arises. In plain terms, one may argue that the critical theory of ideology is a project which aims at describing and unmasking the elements of the superstructure, but is insufficiently attentive to the matters of the economic base. One avenue for further research, then, is the application of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of ideology to the economic relations that form the real basis of society.
Of course, when talking about the real foundations of society, one must give a good account of how the real foundation of economic relations gives rise to the superstructure. One would find oneself in good company if one were to look to legal relations as a sort of bridge between the two, insofar as legal relations not only specify the conditions under which economic relations may be carried out, but also tie these relations to other spheres of life. Here, one should note that already by the time that Horkheimer ascended to his position as head of the IfS, Marxists of various backgrounds had criticized positivism for its uncritical approach to science. Evgeny Pashukanis rightly noted that legal positivism commits this sin when treating the legal form and its corresponding categories as eternal, unchanging essences instead of ideological categories that spring forth from the development of capitalism.
A good Marxist would rightly note that not just the legal form, but also the political economy on which it is based, has an ideological character thanks to its inability to criticize the premises which serve as foundational in its science. The net result is that said sciences lapse back into dogmatism and paper over the real fissures within bourgeois society with a false unity. Classical political economy, with its Smithian insistence in a transhistorical “certain propensity in human nature […] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”
Of course, any economist who would sully himself by deigning to read this essay (and therefore reading outside his own hallowed field) would rightly protest that Smith is outdated and that not all economics uses abductive reasoning of this type. Indeed, given the more quantitative nature of economics today and the indebtedness the field owes to the Marginal Revolution, Smith’s work is not even the same type of academic endeavor as that of the modern economists. Fair enough. But this does not mean that economists escape the problem of double determination. The model of homo economicus as a rational, self-interested agent underlies most microeconomic theories, but is itself an assumed fiction of dubious validity. Already by the turn of the 20^th^ century, bourgeois economists had criticized the view. Thorstein Veblen’s famous dismissal of the (now heterodox) Austrian School points out that not only is the view of human nature used oversimplified, but so removed from common sense views of human agency as to be useless:
“The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down upon him, where upon he follows the line of the resultant. When the force of the impact is spent, he comes to rest, a self-contained globule of desire as before. Spiritually, the hedonistic man is not a prime mover. He is not the seat of a process of living, except in the sense that he is subject to a series of permutations enforced upon him by circumstances external and alien to him.”
Thorstein Veblen, "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" *The Quarterly Journal of Economics* 12, no. 4 (1898): 373-97, 389-90. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882952.
Stylistic prose aside, Veblen’s essay is instructive as it is an example of how economic models lose their explanatory power when one dares criticize its undergirding assumptions. Not only the concept of homo economicus but the desire-satisfaction or hedonistic theories of the good that much of microeconomics assumes is philosophically suspect. The former falls prey to an obvious Euthyphro problem while the latter fell out of favor after criticism from Robert Nozick,
Despite its dubious philosophical origins, economic concepts reign supreme in areas even beyond its intended use. The rise of Law and Economics as an academic field stands out as one such area thanks to its increasingly predominant role in legal reasoning over the past several decades. The work of Richard Posner often involves porting over economic concepts to the law, and in so doing, porting over the uncritical abstractions of the field into real social relations. While a substantive critique of modern economic thought would be a fruitful endeavor, one should keep in mind that the neoclassical turn occurred decades after the collapse of the IfS, and hence a dialectical criticism of the movement is beyond the scope of the paper.
I conclude by remarking on the theoretical virtues of the Frankfurtian account of ideology. Too often in contemporary theories of ideology, one sees that the author has forsaken a definite methodology, instead treating the concepts ad hoc. This consequently weakens the Ideologietheorie as the theory has no determining grounds on which it can stand. Of course, this in turn prevents the critical aspect of ideology critique from reaching its full force, as there is no method by which one can adjudicate the falsity of the object of investigation.
On these matters, the Frankfurt School’s conception of ideology stands as a shining beacon which rises above the detritus of the tomes published after it. The IfS’ insistence on not accepting the given without subjecting it to critique, on the inability of bourgeois thought to adequately self-criticize, and by reiterating time and again that “it is not enough merely to correlate [...] ideas with some social group [...] [w]e must penetrate deeper and develop them out of the decisive historical process from which the social groups themselves are to be explained,”
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