Notes on Ball & Dagger reader
Terrell Carver (1946-)
"Ideology:  The Career of a Concept"

These seem to me to be the highlights of the "career" of the term, "ideology":

• Original usage by the Comte de Tracy as meaning "the study of ideas", in the Enlightenment sense (or maybe pseudo-Enlightenment sense) that everything could be apprehended by reason.  It may have started with a positive (or at least neutral) sense, but it became tarnished with a connotation of oversimplification.
• Napoleon Bonaparte turned against ideology in that old sense (not least because he was in the process of making himself a military dictator), and so in France, at least, official sentiment made the term a negative.
• Karl Marx saw systems of ideas (and thus "ideologies") as being used by the ruling class to justify their own rule, both to themselves and, more important, to the subordinate class.  They serve to confuse and distract the subordinate class, to create "false consciousness".  To Marx, his work was not ideology but exactly the reverse:  it revealed the existing ideologies as confusing, distracting, and so on.  This tradition has run through progressive thought ever since, so I will not dwell here on the successive refinements of the term by Frederick Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.
• Karl Mannheim, the German sociologist, generalized this into a recognition that ideas cannot be studied apart from the structure, and in particular the class structure, of the society holding them.  If this is true, then we face a problem of trying to discern truth when we ourselves are bound by social circumstances.  This is a problem that occupied most of the 20th century social philosophy (and even the philosophy of science) in one way or another.  But the answers that have emerged are not well known in the United States, so here, ...
• ... ideology is a bad term one gives to others' points of view, with the particular connotation of "blind thinking".  There is an old joke that goes, "I have beliefs;  you have opinions;  they have an ideology."  [I didn't say it was a great joke.]

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

• Carver notes Karl Mannheim's distinction among "lies", "particular" ideology, and "total" ideology.  What does he mean by that distinction?  Give examples.

OTHER, MISCELLANEOUS LECTURE NOTES

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