B ourgeois ideology in nineteenth-century England confronted a severe problem. Permanently crippled in phenomenological capacity, it needed to have constant resort to the Romantic humanist heritage—to that nebulous, elusive amalgam of Burkean conservatism and German idealism, forged by the later Coleridge and transmitted to Carlyle, Disraeli, Arnold and Ruskin, which offered an idealist critique of bourgeois social relations coupled with a consecration of the rights of capital.
Antonio Gramsci has commented on this ideological formation in nineteenth-century England. The old land-owning aristocracy is joined to the industrialists by a kind of suture which is precisely that which in other countries unites the traditional intellectuals with the new dominant classes. More specifically, it must appropriate the civilized aesthetic heritage of the aristocracy in order to equip itself with a world view capable of incorporating the proletariat.
The political left, in particular, tends almost instinctively to think of such dominant modes when it considers the topic of ideology; but what then do we call the beliefs of the Levellers, Diggers, Narodniks and Suffragettes, which were certainly not the governing value systems of their day?
Are socialism and feminism ideologies, and if not why not? Are they non-ideological when in political opposition but ideological when they come to power? Generally speaking, conservatives like Minogue are nervous of the concept in their own case, since to dub their own beliefs ideological would be to risk turning them into objects of contestation.
Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain but sophistry and illusion. Moreover, in this post-Nietzschean world, experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence is itself Hkely to be labelled sophistry and illusion, matters of fact being, as everyone knows, matters of interpretation.
Indeed, the place where a system of interested interpretations masquerades as a system of disinterested facts, where nature and universal essence are invoked and history and social existence obscured, where ideas are detached from the material conditions that enable them - this is the place where ideology lives, and this place no doubt is any society.
But if ideology is such an all-pervasive phenomenon, and if would-be demystifiers are positioned within the social totality, how can they ever become fully conscious of their own ideological conditioning, how can they find some uncontaminated free space that escapes ideology's operations, how can they transcend the situatedness of their own discourse?
Clearly, they cannot. And this is the uncomfortable consequence of embracing postrnodern dogmas concerning, among other things, antifoundationalism the belief that there are no empirical facts or rationalist ideas upon which knowledge is grounded , coherentism the belief that propositions about the world can only achieve the truth of internal coherence and do not correspond to any external frame of reference , and relativism the belief that everything is relative to the vocabulary and perspective of the observer whose own situatedness makes objectivity impossible.
Here is the double bind that words ineluctably get us into; there are metalanguages, but no metalanguage. Yet ifwe truly believed what wemechanicallyutter, then how could we presume to write about, say, ideology?
Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Ideology: An Introduction. Jul 24, Geoff rated it it was amazing. This review is a scab. It quickly becomes appar This review is a scab. It quickly becomes apparent that this elasticity of thought is necessary for a subject whose most committed and deepest thinkers have not even come to an agreement on what it means or what properties it holds or the effects it enacts or reflects.
This takes the form of a critique of the philosophy each propounds, seeking out the points where it either stands up to a deeper analysis or folds into contradictions with itself or other theories often enough sliding into contradictions within the same philosophy. It is also to some extent a simplifying system, one that reduces the complexity, plurality, and uniqueness of things into versions of ourselves and simulacra of our inculcated ideas.
I am already feeling uncomfortable drawing this fine a line in the definition, which means that Eagleton has succeeded in convincing me to not too thoroughly convince myself. The history of the critique of ideology is the evolution of theories about the sources and effects of these systems of belief.
Is ideology trickle-down mythologizing, always generated by a dominant class and coerced into the lower structures of society? Or on the contrary, as later Marx would postulate, is it something inherent in the structure of a post-capitalist society, the very relationships between human beings at all levels commodified and alienated and reified unto their very core?
If an oppressed class develops an ideology that persuades it into revolutionary activity, at what point does the oppositional ideology betray itself, then having to justify its own contradictions as the now dominant ideology? Is it even a question of true or false representations of the world, or is ideology driven unconsciously by our need to survive and feel whole within a fractured, atomized existence, within which we might otherwise lose all sense of identity?
Is it a question of linguistics, signification, discourse, or all of the above? Where, then, does one seek to find untainted meaning? And then the question would be, if not ideology, then what? But depending on which philosopher you are listening to, all these methods carry, to some extent, their own ideological baggage. Would radical revolution that does away with class hierarchies completely resolve the societal contradictions that ideology is born from, and thus the need for ideology, which would by consequence wither away?
Not if mythologizing is a fundamental and unavoidable part of what it is to be a human being, born with defective reasoning and imprisoned in a kind of faulty or false consciousness.
So what ideology would follow the end-of-ideology? Is the human not all-too-human? Eagleton doesn't proffer an answer, but puts forth a history and analysis of those who have sought one. A practical, pragmatic response would seem to be to nurture a healthy and pervasive skepticism when approaching interaction with the world at large, despite the inevitable mystification we all are subject to as conscious beings.
To trust evidence that is collated from provable facts, and not allow notions to dictate facts for you. To constantly question and put to test the institutions of hegemony that seek to keep us in a perpetual state of obedience. And also, importantly, not to live entirely in ideas, because ideas exist to enable possibilities in the world. View all 35 comments.
Oct 02, Andrew added it Shelves: theeeeeeory. So you should probably have some familiarity with their ideas beforehand, and you should be OK with a rather unsexy grumpy-old-man socialism I am, I donated to Bernie after all. And Eagleton comes up with more questions than answers, honest old grump that he is.
Apr 10, Naopako dete added it. View 2 comments. Oct 13, Simon marked it as read-enough-of Shelves: philosophy-read. He obviously knows a lot about this stuff but the breeziness with which he sweeps over important issues, the frequent use of highly tendentious examples, all of it clothed in a language of apparent care and precision, is dispiriting.
One example: his first chapter is on what ideology is. He is obviously drawing on a tradition of philosophical conceptual analysis here, and the intent is good. He starts by noting that the word "ideology" is used to mean a bunch of different things and that no single definition can capture them all.
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