Ideology

Ideology (from French idéologie; to Ancient Greek ἰδέα idéa, here "idea", and λόγος lógos "doctrine, science" - actually "doctrine of ideas") stands in the broader sense educationally for worldview. In the narrower sense, going back to Karl Marx, it refers on the one hand to the "false consciousness" of a society; on the other hand, in the US sociology of knowledge, it refers to any system of norms that groups use to justify and evaluate their own and others' actions as ideology. Since Marx and Engels, the concept of ideology has referred to "ideas and world views that are not based on evidence and good arguments but aim to stabilise or change power relations".

The concept of ideology according to Marx, which plays a central role in Western Marxism, assumes that the dominant self-image is different from the objectively possible self-image of the respective stage of social development. According to Marx, since material conditions and interests determine thought, the ideology of society is influenced by the interests of dominant social groups, e.g. the bourgeoisie, in order to justify them. Through a critique of ideology, these interests can be counteracted in order to create a picture of society that is correct and complete according to the state of knowledge in the sense of a general interest. The theory of ideology undergoes an important further development in Georg Lukács, who links it to a theory of totalitarianism: The complete appropriation of the individual by socially organized activities and structures leads to the fact that the individual can only understand himself within these structures and thus develops a suitable ideology himself.

In the sociology of knowledge, on the other hand, ideology has become established as a term for formulated guiding principles of social groups or organizations that serve to justify their actions - their ideas, insights, categories and values. Accordingly, they form the necessary "we-feeling" that ensures the internal cohesion of any human community. This concept of ideology is also applied to the systems of ideas of political movements, interest groups, parties, etc., when speaking of political ideologies.

In social discourse, the two concepts of ideology are often not sufficiently distinguished.

The function of ideology

Ideology is - according to Karl Mannheim - "functionalization of the noological level" and thus instrumentalization of human cognitive capacity, or more concretely - according to Roland Barthes - "transformation of history into nature."

Ideology secures the demanded legitimation for the existing order and satisfies the need for security and meaningfulness, which can no longer be guaranteed by religion: "The comfortable would all too gladly like to hypostatize and stabilize the random suchness of everyday life, which today includes romanticized contents ('myths'), into the absolute, so that it does not slip away. This is how the uncanny turn of modern times takes place, that the category of the absolute, which was once called upon to capture the divine, becomes an instrument of concealment for everyday life, which certainly wants to remain with itself."

On the other hand, ideology runs the risk of ultimately not being able to do justice to a complex reality as a closed system of meaning and of ultimately failing as a model for explaining the world. Since "ideology is always self-referential, that is, it always defines itself by distancing itself from an Other whom it rejects and denounces as 'ideological'", it solves "the contradiction of the alienated real through an amputation, not through a synthesis".

Roland Barthes complements Karl Mannheim's thesis of the functionalization of cognition by ideology with the functionalization of myth, which ideology instrumentalizes: "Semiology has taught us that myth is charged with founding historical intention as nature. This approach is precisely that of bourgeois ideology. If our society is objectively the privileged domain for mythic meaning, it is because myth is formally the most appropriate instrument of ideological inversion by which to define it. At all levels of human communication, myth effects the inversion of antinature into pseudonature."

The history of the concept of ideology is closely linked to the history of bourgeois society. Ideology as we understand it today only becomes possible after the "disappearance of the divine point of reference" which is already announced with the beginning of empiricism in Bacon's "Idolae", Kant - who prefaces his "Critique of Pure Reason" with a quote from Bacon about the Idolae - then confronts the traditional understanding of being with the constantly recurring admonition in the four antinomies and also in the transcendental dialectic, He thus creates "after the objective ontological unity of the world view had disintegrated" the basis for Hegel's dialectical world view, which "can only be conceived in relation to the subject" and could only claim validity as "a unity transforming itself in historical becoming" (ibid.) could claim validity. Only now, after the end of the French Revolution, does it make sense to speak of bourgeois ideology or, more generally, of a concept of ideology, which was then also immediately applied pejoratively by Napoleon to the term actually applied value-free as the "doctrine of ideas" by the late Enlightenment thinkers in the wake of Condillac and the empirical tradition. Finally, the essential contribution to today's understanding of ideology may have been made by Karl Marx, who states in the "Misery of Philosophy": "... the same people who shape the social relations according to their material mode of production also shape the principles, the ideas, the categories according to their social relations".

Even if Mannheim first tries to distinguish between value-free and evaluative ideologies, he nevertheless comes to the conclusion that the value-free concept of ideology "ultimately slides over into an ontological-metaphysical evaluation" In this context, Mannheim then also speaks of the "false consciousness" that ideology inevitably creates: "It is thus primarily outmoded and outlived norms and forms of thought, but also ways of interpreting the world, which can fall into this 'ideological' function and do not clarify, but rather obscure, accomplished action, existing inner and outer being.“

Roland Barthes deplores the resulting foreshortened view of reality as an "impoverishment of consciousness" achieved by ideology as bourgeois: "It is bourgeois ideology itself, the movement through which the bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, history into nature".

See also

• Ism
• Image of man
• Political myth
• Criticism of Religion