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
xx
URL: http://www.d.umn.edu/~schilton/1610/Readings/1610.B+DReader.Carver.Ideology.html
Author: Stephen
Chilton [email] | Last
Modified: 2006-10-07
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