Ideology

In plain terms

Two quite different things are called ideology.

One is neutral: any organised set of political beliefs. Everyone has one, and saying so is not an accusation.

The other is critical, and it is the interesting one. An ideology in this sense is a way of seeing that makes a particular arrangement look like the way things naturally are - so that the question of whether it could be otherwise does not arise. Its distinguishing feature is that it does not present itself as a view at all. It presents itself as description.

Which makes it hard to detect from inside, and makes the charge easy to abuse. Calling an opponent's position ideological while treating one's own as simply factual is the commonest move in political argument, and it is exactly what the concept warns against.

As a philosopher would put it

Marx and Engels's formulation is that the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class, and that consciousness is determined by material life rather than the reverse. The camera obscura image - ideology as inverting the real relation - is theirs.

Later developments move away from deception. Gramsci's account makes ideology a lived, organising force rather than an error. Althusser's ideological state apparatuses - school, family, church, media - work by interpellation, hailing individuals as subjects who then recognise themselves in the role, which makes ideology constitutive rather than merely distorting. Žižek's version holds that people know perfectly well what they are doing and do it anyway, so ideology operates at the level of practice rather than belief.

Mannheim's sociology of knowledge generalises the problem into the reflexivity objection: if all thought is socially conditioned, the critique is too, and no vantage point remains from which to identify anyone's ideology as ideology.

What is actually disputed

Whether the critique can be made from anywhere.

Mannheim's paradox is the standing problem: if social position shapes thought, the critic's position shapes theirs, and the concept turns on itself. Marxist replies have located a privileged standpoint in the proletariat, whose position is said to give it no interest in the concealment; standpoint theorists have generalised the move; and critics regard both as claiming an exemption nobody has established.

The alternative is to drop the claim to a view from nowhere and treat ideology critique as local and fallible - which is intellectually honest and gives up much of what made the concept powerful.

A separate dispute concerns whether ideology involves false belief at all. If it is a matter of practice rather than doctrine, as Žižek argues, then showing people that a belief is false changes nothing, because they were not holding it as a belief.