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From false consciousness to functional necessities: rethinking ideology critique
Abstract
This paper discusses a shift in contemporary ideological justification and its implications for the critique of ideology. Traditionally, the critique of ideology aimed to dispel ideological illusions. However, it has become increasingly challenging to pinpoint these illusions. Instead, ideological justifications hinge more than ever on functional necessities, presenting themselves as the sole practical solution to a given problem. I argue that ideologies of functional necessities pose problems for the established standard model of ideology. In section 1, I discuss the standard model. In section 2, I introduce the “functionalist challenge” to the notion of ideology and lay out my reasoning for the contended inefficacy of simply dispelling ideological illusions. In section 3, I discuss the resulting problems for a critical theory of ideology and possible ways to address them.
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What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (a) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced by self-justifying power and (b) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa.
I argue that contemporary accounts of ideology critique—paradigmatically those advanced by Haslanger, Jaeggi, Celikates, and Stanley—are either inadequate or redundant. The Marxian concept of ideology—a collective epistemic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements—has recently returned to the forefront of debates in contemporary analytic social philosophy. Ideology critique has similarly emerged as a technique for combating such social ills by remedying those collective epistemic distortions. Ideologies are sets of social meanings or shared understandings. I argue in this paper that because agents must coordinate on them to be mutually intelligible, ideologies, on the fashionable contemporary account, are conventions. They are equilibrium solutions to a particular kind of social coordination problem. The worry is that changing pernicious conventions requires more than the epistemic remedy contemporary critical social theorists prescribe. It also requires overcoming strategic impediments like high first-mover costs. Thus contemporary proponents of ideology critique—the “new ideology critics,” as I’ll call them—face a dilemma. Either their account of social change fails to account for important strategic impediments to social change, in which case it is inadequate, or it incorporates a theory of strategic behavior, and thus merely reinvents the wheel, poorly. It adds nothing to prominent convention-based accounts of social change in the social sciences. More generally, this is an example of a pernicious trend in contemporary critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theorists have abandoned their predecessors’ commitment to engaging with social science, thereby undermining their efforts.
Realist ideology critique (RIC) is a strand of political realism recently developed in response to concerns that realism is biased toward the status quo. RIC aims to debunk an individual's belief that a social institution is legitimate by revealing that the belief is caused by that very same institution. Despite its growing prominence, RIC has received little critical attention. In this article, I buck this trend. First, I improve on contemporary accounts of RIC by clarifying its status and the role of motivated reasoning. Second, I show that realist ideology critics face a dilemma: either their account makes deeply implausible epistemological assumptions, or they temper its epistemology at the expense of rendering it toothless. I argue for each horn in turn before revealing the dilemma to be a false one by making a novel distinction between varying strengths of RIC based on their underlying epistemological assumptions. I propose Moderate RIC as a solution: upon discovering that one reason for your belief that a social institution is legitimate is likely malignantly epistemically circular, the belief should undergo further epistemic testing. I respond to three potential objections and suggest that Moderate RIC would make a fruitful addition to political theorists' methodological toolkit.
It is sometimes argued that ideal theories in political philosophy are a form of ideology. This article examines arguments building on the work of Charles Mills and Raymond Geuss for the claim that ideal theories are cognitively distorting belief systems that have the effect of stabilizing unjust social arrangements. I argue that Mills and Geuss neither succeed in establishing that the content of ideal theories is necessarily cognitively defective in the way characteristic for ideologies, nor can they make plausible which mechanisms ensure the alleged negative effects of the widespread acceptance of ideal theorizing. This does not mean that all hope is lost for the ideology objection, however. By turning to a second Marxian model of ideology, I argue that the ideological character of ideal theories is not so much a matter of their content, but rather of their form. Ideal theories falsely present the normative concepts that they use as semantically practice-independent and thereby block potential challenges from subordinate groups to dominant ideologies. It is therefore not the normative content of ideal theories which proves to be objectionable, but the particular role their concepts play in wider political discourse.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order analyses the history of a political order that emerged in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, dominated American politics in the 1990s and 2000s, and fractured during the 2010s when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders rose to prominence. Its power was built on an array of donors, policy entrepreneurs, and politicians that coalesced under Reagan. That coalition overturned the regulatory regime and ideological hegemony of New Deal order that had dominated American politics for forty years and made neoliberalism America’s dominant creed of political economy. The book argues that neoliberalism is a better term than conservatism for understanding the politics of this era. At the same time, it reworks the meaning and significance of neoliberalism. First, it insists that neoliberalism was much closer in character to the ideology of 19th century classical liberalism than is commonly acknowledged. Second, it argues that an elite-driven model for understanding neoliberalism is not sufficient to understand this ideology’s broad appeal; one must also reckon with how its promise of individual freedom drew both working-class Americans and erstwhile New Leftists to its banner. Third, the book identifies the collapse of the Soviet Union and of its legitimating ideology—communism—as critical factors in the neoliberal order’s triumph and restores the centrality of the Cold War to an understanding of our time. The book concludes with an analysis about how the problems left unsolved by the neoliberal order paved the way for Donald Trump’s rise and triumph.
Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racism is better understood as a set of practices, attitudes, social meanings, and material conditions, that systematically reinforce one another. Attitudes play a role, but even the cognitive/affective component of ideologies should include culturally shared habits of mind and action. These habits of mind distort, obscure, and occlude important facts about subordinated groups and result in a failure to recognize their interests. How do we disrupt such practices to achieve greater justice? I argue that this is sometimes, but not always, best achieved by argument or challenging false beliefs, so social movements legitimately seek other means.
Utopia should be understood as a method rather than a goal. This book rehabilitates utopia as a repressed dimension of the sociological and in the process produces the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, a provisional, reflexive and dialogic method for exploring alternative possible futures.
In this chapter, I try to make a case for the revitalization of the critique of ideology as a form of social critique. Although this concept cannot be solely attributed to Marxism, it did reach a certain “maturity”1 in Marx’s writings, and it has been embraced by the various traditions of “Western Marxism” up until contemporary Critical Theory. Today, the conjectural tide has turned against it. Does this mean, however, that there are no more ideologies — or merely that there is no more ideology critique? I build my case for a reconstruction of the critique of ideology on the following diagnosis: One, I believe that there still are certain social circumstances, certain forms of social domination that require a critique of ideology. Two, to regain and develop the concept of ideology critique, we must not only reopen the question of how exactly a critique of ideology works — even at the peak of its popularity, this was frequently anything but clear, as is often the case with popular theorems — but also critically reconstruct some of its basic assumptions. It is, then, a matter of both bringing the critique of ideology into the present and of finding a new understanding of it.
Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
Selections from the Chapter on CapitalSimple exchange. Relations between exchangers. Harmonies of equality, freedom, etc. (Bastiat, Proudhon)Transition from circulation to capitalist production.- Capital objectified labour etc.- Sum of values for production of values