Ideology and Modern Culture

Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication

John B. Thompson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this major new work, Thompson develops an original account of ideology and relates it to the analysis of culture and mass communication in modern Societies.

Thompson offers a concise and critical appraisal of major contributions to the theory of ideology, from Marx and Mannheim, to Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. He argues that these thinkers - and social and political theorists more generally - have failed to deal adequately with the nature of mass communication and its role in the modern world. In order to overcome this deficiency, Thompson undertakes a wide-ranging analysis of the development of mass communication, outlining a distinctive social theory of the mass media and their impact.

1

The Concept of Ideology

For two centuries the concept of ideology has occupied a central, if at times inglorious, place in the development of social and political thought. Originally introduced by Destutt de Tracy as a label for a proposed science of ideas, the term ‘ideology’ quickly became a weapon in a political battle fought out on the terrain of language. Originally imbued with all of the confidence and positive spirit of the European Enlightenment, for which the science it described was supposed to represent a culminating stage, ‘ideology’ quickly became a term of abuse which alleged the emptiness, the idleness, the sophistry of certain ideas. The concept of ideology had a difficult birth and, as if this were not enough, the subsequent life history was hardly blissful. Taken up in differing ways by the emerging social sciences of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concept of ideology was pulled in one direction and pushed in another, and all the while it remained a term which played a role in the political battles of everyday life. When we use the concept of ideology today, we employ a concept which bears the traces, however faintly, of the multiple uses which characterize its history.

In this chapter I want to retrace the historical contours of the concept of ideology, with a view not only to highlighting the twists and turns of a complex intellectual itinerary, but also to preparing the way for a more constructive approach. I want to inquire, not only into the origins and development of this concept, but also into the prospects for reformulating the concept today, for re-conceptualizing ideology in a way which draws upon the accumulated sense of the concept while avoiding the many pitfalls which can be discerned in its past. My account of the history of the concept will, necessarily, be selective and will neglect many figures and diversions which would merit discussion in a more thorough survey.¹ But I shall aim to identify the main contours, the main lines of development in a history which has by no means drawn to a close. I shall begin by discussing the origins of the concept of ideology in late eighteenth-century France. Then I shall examine some of the ways in which the concept is employed in the work of Marx. While Marx is undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of the concept of ideology, his writings do not offer a single, coherent view. He uses this term occasionally and erratically; and one can discern several different themes which are associated with its use. In the third part of the chapter I shall consider the work of Karl Mannheim. Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia is a key text in this complex history; it focused the concept of ideology on the general problem of the social determination of thought, and thus treated the analysis of ideology as co-extensive with the sociology of knowledge. In the final sections of this chapter I shall resist the tendency, exemplified by Mannheim’s work, to generalize the concept of ideology. I shall offer a formulation of the concept which preserves its negative character, which treats it as a critical concept but which rejects any suggestion that the analysis of ideology is a matter of pure polemics. I shall formulate a conception of ideology which draws on some of the themes implicit in the history of this concept, but which seeks to provide a basis for a constructive approach to the interpretation of ideology in modern societies.

Ideology and the Ideologues

The term ‘ideology’ was first used by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy in 1796 to describe his project of a new science which would be concerned with the systematic analysis of ideas and sensations, of their generation, combination and consequences. Destutt de Tracy was a wealthy and educated nobleman who had studied the works of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Holbach and Condillac. While de Tracy supported many of the reforms associated with the French Revolution, he, like other intellectuals of noble descent, was imprisoned during the Jacobin Terror.² To de Tracy and some of his fellow prisoners, it seemed as though Robespierre was seeking to destroy the Enlightenment. For these intellectuals, the barbaric anarchy of the Terror could be countered by a combination of philosophy and education based on the systematic analysis of ideas: this was how the legacy of the Enlightenment could be pursued in a revolutionary age. While many ex-nobles and intellectuals died or were put to death during the Terror, de Tracy was released from prison soon after the fall of Robespierre in 1794. In late 1795 de Tracy and his associates rose to a position of power in the new republic with the creation of the Institut National. The Institut was a replacement for the royal academies which had been abolished by Robespierre. In addition to an Academy of Sciences and a Class of Literature and Fine Arts, the Institut included a Class of Moral and Political Sciences. The latter class was headed by a section concerned with the analysis of sensations and ideas, a section to which de Tracy was elected in 1796.

Destutt de Tracy outlined the aims of the new discipline for which he had assumed responsibility in a series of memoirs delivered to the Class of Moral and Political Sciences in the course of 1796. Following Condillac, de Tracy argued that we cannot know things in themselves, but only the ideas formed by our sensations of them. If we could analyse these ideas and sensations in a systematic way, we could provide a firm basis for all scientific knowledge and draw inferences of a more practical kind. The name de Tracy proposed for this incipient and ambitious enterprise was ‘ideology’ - literally, the ‘science of ideas’. Ideology was to be ‘positive, useful, and susceptible of rigorous exactitude’.³ Genealogically it was the ‘first science’, since all scientific knowledge involved the combination of ideas. It was also the basis of grammar, logic, education, morality and, ultimately, ‘the greatest of the arts …, that of regulating society in such a way that man finds there the most help and the least possible annoyance from his own kind’.⁴ Through a careful analysis of ideas and sensations, ideology would enable human nature to be understood, and hence would enable the social and political order to be rearranged in accordance with the needs and aspirations of human beings. Ideology would place the moral and political sciences on a firm foundation and cure them of error and ‘prejudice’ - an Enlightenment faith that de Tracy inherited from Condillac and Bacon.

While de Tracy envisaged the possibility of extending the science of ideas to the social and political realm, most of his contributions were concerned with the analysis of intellectual faculties, forms of experience and aspects of logic and grammar. His four-volume Élémens d’Idéologie, published between 1803 and 1815, examined the faculties of thinking, feeling, memory and judgement, and the characteristics of habit, movement and the will, among other things. De Tracy became increasingly concerned with the development of a consistent and rigorous naturalism in which human beings are regarded as part of material reality, as one rather complex animal species among others. Hence, in de Tracy’s view, ‘Ideology is part of Zoology’, and the analysis of human faculties is essential because ‘our understanding of an animal is incomplete if we do not know its intellectual faculties’.⁵ De Tracy’s later writings continued the original project of ideology qua science of ideas, embedding this project within a thoroughgoing naturalism. But by the time these writings appeared, the term ‘ideology’ had acquired a new and quite different sense, a sense which would soon eclipse the grandiloquent aims of its inventor.

Destutt de Tracy and his associates in the Institut National were closely linked to the politics of republicanism. They generally shared Condorcet’s vision of the perfectibility of human beings through education, and Condillac’s method of analysing sensations and ideas. They attributed the excesses of the Revolution to the fanatical fervour of the Jacobins rather than to the revolutionary institutions as such, which they saw as pillars of progress and enlightenment. Given this close connection with republicanism, the fate of the doctrines of de Tracy and his associates was dependent to some extent on the fate of the Revolution itself. On his return from Egypt in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a successful coup d’état and became First Consul, a position which he held, with complete authority, for ten years. Napoleon drew on some of the ideas of de Tracy and his associates in devising a new constitution and rewarded some members of the Institut with lucrative political positions. But at the same time he distrusted them, for their affiliation with republicanism presented a potential threat to his autocratic ambitions. Hence Napoleon ridiculed the pretensions of ‘ideology’: it was, in his view, an abstract speculative doctrine which was divorced from the realities of political power. In January 1800 an article in the Messager des relations extérieures denounced the group which is ‘called by the name metaphysical faction or “idéologues”’ and which, having mishandled the Revolution, was now plotting against the new regime.⁶ As public opinion began to turn against the Revolution, Napoleon - who later claimed to have coined the term ‘idéologues’ - exploited this shift in order to disarm the representatives of republicanism.

Napoleon’s opposition to the idéologues intensified during the following decade and reached a climax as the empire which he sought to establish began to collapse. The idéologues became the scapegoat for the failures of the Napoleonic regime. Returning to Paris in December 1812 after the disastrous Russian campaign, Napoleon accused the idéologues of undermining the state and the rule of law. Addressing the Council of State in a speech subsequently published in the Moniteur, he condemned ideology and characterized it as the very obverse of astute statecraft:

We must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered on ideology, that shadowy metaphysics which subtly searches for first causes on which to base the legislation of peoples, rather than making use of laws known to the human heart and of the lessons of history. These errors must inevitably and did in fact lead to the rule of bloodthirsty men … When someone is summoned to revitalize a state, he must follow exactly the opposite principles.⁷

As Napoleon’s position weakened both at home and abroad, his attacks on ideology became more sweeping and vehement. Nearly all kinds of religious and philosophical thought were condemned as ideology. The term itself had become a weapon in the hands of an emperor struggling desperately to silence his opponents and to sustain a crumbling regime.

With the abdication of Napoleon in April 1814 and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, Destutt de Tracy was returned to a position of political influence, but by then his original programme of ideology had been dissipated and tarnished by the conflicts of the Napoleonic period. Originally conceived of as the pre-eminent science, the science of ideas which, by providing a systematic account of the genesis, combination and communication of ideas, would provide a basis for scientific knowledge in general and would facilitate the natural regulation of society in particular, ideology had become one orientation among others and its philosophical claims had been compromised by its association with republicanism. Moreover, as the term ‘ideology’ slipped into the political arena and was hurled back at the philosophers by an emperor under siege, the sense and reference of the term began to change. It ceased to refer only to the science of ideas and began to refer also to the ideas themselves, that is, to a body of ideas which are alleged to be erroneous and divorced from the practical realities of political life. The sense of the term also changed, for it could no longer lay claim unequivocally to the positive spirit of the Enlightenment. Ideology qua positive and pre-eminent science, worthy of the highest respect, gradually gave way to ideology qua abstract and illusory ideas, worthy only of derision and disdain. One of the basic oppositions that have characterized the history of the concept of ideology - that between a positive or neutral sense, on the one hand, and a negative or critical sense, on the other - had already appeared in the first decade of its life, although the form and content of this opposition was to change considerably in the decades that followed.

The demise of Destutt de Tracy’s original project of ideology seems hardly surprising today. The ambitious generality of this project, like that of others which preceded and succeeded it, was bound to give way to the development of specialized disciplines which could pursue particular fields of inquiry in depth, unhindered by the pretensions of a would-be foundational science. What is interesting about de Tracy’s original project is not so much the nature and content of the project itself (indeed, his writings, already largely forgotten, would be totally neglected today had they not been linked to the concept of ideology) but the fact that this project highlights the conditions under which the concept of ideology emerged and began its circuitous history. The concept emerged as part of the attempt to develop the ideals of the Enlightenment in the context of the social and political upheavals that marked the birth of modern societies. However far the concept of ideology has travelled since the days of the Institut National, however varied its uses have become, nevertheless it remains tied to the ideals of the Enlightenment, in particular to the ideals of the rational understanding of the world (including the social-historical world) and of the rational self-determination of human beings. The ways in which this link is expressed vary considerably from one figure to another. If for de Tracy the link was direct and explicit (ideology was the pre-eminent science that would facilitate progress in human affairs), for Napoleon it was implicit and oppositional (ideology was the pretentious philosophy that incited rebellion by trying to determine political and pedagogical principles on the basis of abstract reasoning alone). The unique contribution of Marx consists in the fact that he took over the negative, oppositional sense conveyed by Napoleon’s use of the term, but transformed the concept by incorporating it into a theoretical framework and political programme which were deeply indebted to the spirit of the Enlightenment.

Marx’s Conceptions of Ideology

Marx’s writings occupy a central position in the history of the concept of ideology. With Marx the concept acquired a new status as a critical tool and as an integral component of a new theoretical system. But in spite of the importance of Marx’s work in this regard, the precise ways in which Marx employed the concept of ideology, and the ways in which he dealt with the many issues and assumptions surrounding its use, are by no means clear. Indeed, it is the very ambiguity of the concept of ideology in Marx’s work which is partly responsible for continuing debates concerning the legacy of his writings. In this section I shall not attempt to examine all of the different shades of meaning which may be conveyed by Marx’s varied uses of the term ‘ideology’, nor shall I trace the ways in which this term is employed by Marx’s associates and followers, such as Engels, Lenin, Lukács and Gramsci.⁸ I shall seek instead to identify several distinctive theoretical contexts in which the concept of ideology operates in the work of Marx. In doing so I shall attempt to elicit several distinct conceptions of ideology in Marx, conceptions which overlap with one another, of course, but which nevertheless relate to different issues and to different movements of thought. For Marx’s work offers us not so much a single coherent vision of the social-historical world and its constitution, dynamics and development, but rather a multiplicity of views which cohere in some respects and conflict in others, which converge on some points and diverge on others, views which are sometimes explicitly articulated by Marx but which are sometimes left implicit in his arguments and analyses. I shall try to show that these different views create distinct theoretical spaces, as it were, in which several conceptions of ideology coexist without being clearly formulated or cogently reconciled by Marx himself.

Ideology and the Young Hegelians: the polemical conception

Marx was familiar with the work of the French idéologues and with Napoleon’s attack on it. During his exile in Paris in 1844-5 he had read and excerpted some of Destutt de Tracy’s work. It was immediately after this period that Marx and Engels composed The German Ideology, a lengthy text in which they criticize the views of the ‘Young Hegelians’ such as Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner. In characterizing the views of these thinkers as ‘the German ideology’, Marx and Engels were following Napoleon’s use of the term ‘ideology’ and were drawing a comparison between the work of the idéologues and that of the Young Hegelians: the work of the Young Hegelians was the equivalent, in the relatively backward social and political conditions of early nineteenth-century Germany, of the doctrines of de Tracy and his associates. And just as Napoleon had poured scorn on these doctrines, thus giving the term ‘ideology’ a negative inflection, so too Marx and Engels derided the views of their compatriots. Like the idéologues, the Young Hegelians laboured under the illusion that the real battle to be fought was a battle of ideas, that, by taking up a critical attitude towards received ideas, reality itself could be changed. Marx’s and Engels’s critique of the Young Hegelians’ ‘critical thinking’ was an attempt to disarm the approach of their erstwhile associates. Their aim was ‘to debunk and discredit the philosophical struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation’.⁹ The Young Hegelians thought they were radical but were in fact quite conservative, mere sheep who took themselves for wolves. In branding their views as ‘the German ideology’, Marx and Engels sought to discredit them by association with doctrines which had been fervently denounced in France several decades earlier.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels thus employ the term ‘ideology’ in a polemical way. Their target is specific - the views of the Young Hegelians - and ‘ideology’ is used as a term of abuse. The views of the Young Hegelians are ‘ideological’ i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Concept of Ideology
• 2 Ideology in Modern Societies
• 3 The Concept of Culture
• 4 Cultural Transmission and Mass Communication
• 5 Towards a Social Theory of Mass Communication
• 6 The Methodology of Interpretation
• Conclusion: Critical Theory and Modern Societies
• Notes
• Index