On Voluntary Servitude

False Consciousness and The Theory of Ideology

Michael Rosen

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745615967
  9780745605951
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745668482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book addresses a central theme in social and political theory: what is the motivation behind the theory of ideology, and can such a theory be defended?

I

Introduction

I Reich’s Question

‘What has to be explained’, wrote Wilhelm Reich, ‘is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don’t steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don’t strike.’¹ That, as a simple first formulation, is the question which lies behind this book. Why do the many accept the rule of the few, even when it seems to be plainly against their interests to do so? The theory of ideology gives one very distinctive kind of answer to Reich’s question. The reason, it claims, is that societies are systems that produce the kind of consciousness that prevents the members of a society from behaving as their interests would otherwise dictate. Ideology, in Theodor Adorno’s phrase, is ‘necessary false consciousness’.² But to assess this theory will turn out to be a complicated matter. In the first place, the nature of the answer that the theory of ideology is offering requires clarification. In what sense is ideological consciousness ‘necessary’? In what sense ‘false’? What is behind those terms? What assumptions must we make about the nature of society and the kinds of explanation that can be appropriately applied to it if a theory of ideology is to be possible? All of these issues will be addressed in more detail below, but, for now, it is important to pre-empt some misunderstandings.

First, I must make it clear that when I speak, as I shall throughout the book, of the theory of ideology, I am talking of a genus with a variety of species. It is no part of my case that all the theorists of ideology share exactly the same commitments – far from it. A browse through the Bodleian Library catalogue reveals more than 800 entries with the word ‘ideology’ in their title. Anyone hoping for some system in this profusion will be disappointed. They will find instead that the term has become part of a vast semantic delta through which shallow and muddy channels meander without apparent purpose. My object in this book is not to survey this delta but to guide the reader through it by locating what I take to be the main channel. To do so, I shall take a step back and identify the stream (or, as I shall argue, streams) of thought which originally fed it. Reich’s question will be our guide, and it will turn out that many current uses of the term ‘ideology’ will be only distantly related to what I take to be the central issues.³

A second point to be made at the outset is that my use of the phrase ‘false consciousness’ is not meant to foreclose the issue of whether ideology is a matter of false beliefs. On the contrary, as I shall argue in the second chapter, that is only one form that the theory of ideology can take. For the moment, I hope that the reader will allow me to take the phrase ‘false consciousness’ informally, in its broadest possible sense, meaning simply consciousness that is, in some way or other, deficient or inadequate.

Nor should it be assumed that the theory of ideology is committed to the view that unequal societies are reproduced by means of some positive set of shared beliefs, values or cultural practices – a ‘dominant ideology’, as it is sometimes called. False consciousness can, in principle, just as well be something negative: the failure to form an adequate, shared system of beliefs, values or practices. So the mere absence of a dominant ideology does not contradict the theory of ideology in the sense at issue here; that very absence could itself be ideological.

Finally, let me clarify the sense in which the theory of ideology is committed to the view that unequal or otherwise illegitimate societies reproduce themselves by means of false consciousness. The claim here is merely that this is a necessary condition for such societies’ preservation, not that it is always the sole means that they employ. As far as Marx is concerned, I believe that he thought ideology was indispensable to the survival of capitalist class society. But, of course, it would be absurd to say that Marx thought coercion played no part in the survival of capitalism; he simply believed that coercion was not enough.

The approach that I shall employ in this book is both historical and critical. At its centre is a historical account of the intellectual background from which the theory of ideology emerged. The point of this account is to help to identify the original scope and purpose of the theory and to articulate those conceptions of human nature and society that made it seem acceptable (or even self-evident) to social theorists. But I shall argue that we ought not to take for granted (that, indeed, there are good reasons for rejecting) the assumptions on which the theory of ideology has been based. The position I am presenting is thus critical not just of those theories of ideology that have actually been proposed but, more broadly, of any theory of ideology that proceeds from such assumptions.

Nevertheless, even if I succeed in unconvincing the reader about the theory of ideology, some fundamental issues remain. There is, first, Reich’s problem itself: what other kinds of account might there be of the maintenance of order in society – in unequal societies in particular? Moreover, to reject the theory of ideology is not to eliminate the question of ‘false consciousness’. While we may not be justified in supposing that unequal societies maintain themselves because societies in general have the power to produce ‘false consciousness’ in their citizens, there may still be a sense in which false consciousness is a pervasive feature of certain social orders (ours included). If so, then it is plainly a task of the very greatest importance to see what that sense might be. Finally, there is a question about the theory of ideology itself. Why did it seem so plausible? And what does it tell us about Western social thought that it should have been so?

II Method

For many, philosophers especially, such an attempt to marry criticism and history may seem to represent a confusion between distinct, even antithetical, enterprises. Put crudely, they see a division something like this. The philosopher clarifies and articulates a theory. The social scientist assesses it by confronting it with historical data. Finally, the historian of ideas retraces the development of theories and identifies the factors, rational or otherwise, that led to their adoption and abandonment.

It is a guiding supposition behind this book that such a division is oversimplified. On the contrary, to the extent that questions regarding the scope and structure of the theories themselves are intertwined with controversial questions of methodology and questions regarding the nature of the phenomena to be explained – and this is especially (although not exclusively) the case in the social sciences⁴ – a historical approach can play a valuable role in the evaluation of theories.

Any kind of explanation (or presumed explanation) can be divided into three. There is, first, what is supposed to be explained, what philosophers call the explanandum. Secondly, there is whatever it is – theory or something different⁵ – that we think is going to do the explaining, the explanans. Finally, there are the standards with regard to which we assess how well the explanation works: the structure and content of the explanans and the kind of relationship in which it stands to the explanandum. Now, what it is that theories attempt to explain and how they go about explaining them are not pure and presuppositionless starting points but will have their own history (which may, indeed, be the result of the development of theory elsewhere). To give an example, Darwinism explained something – why animals have characteristics that favour their survival in the environments they find themselves in – that other, pre-Darwinian biologies also explained. At the same time, it explained something else – why animals may also have characteristics that don’t favour their survival – that predecessor theories did not.⁶ After Darwin, Mendelian genetics then went on to explain one of the central parts of the Darwinian theory – how breeding could lead to the development of new species – and in this way amplified (and reinforced) Darwinism. Here, then, we have an explanation that vindicates itself by explaining both what its predecessors had explained and something further that those explanations had not. And it is itself explained (and thereby justified) by a successor theory.

But the development of the scientific view of the world is not simply a matter of accumulating and expanding explanations in this way. It also consists in deciding that certain things are not susceptible to explanation. Astrology, for example, starts from the idea that what has to be explained is that events, fortunate and unfortunate, happen to human beings at different times. What has led to the rejection of astrology among reasonable people is not that science has offered us a better explanation than the conjunction of the stars for this fact, but that we are now persuaded that it is not the kind of fact that can be explained at all.

Finally, then, there is the question of how to explain: what counts as a good explanation. This is the most controversial aspect, and, from the philosopher’s point of view, the most interesting. One way of looking at it is to see it as a second-order transformation of the first two aspects. That is, by explaining an explanation – showing how its explanation works, as Mendelian genetics does for Darwinism – we help to justify it. This usefully brings out the reflexive aspect of the enterprise – and its potential for iteration: if we think that an explanation requires explaining, might that second explanation not require a further explanation and so on?

The dilemma posed by the attempt to find standards by which to measure theories is an example of a problem that is central to and ineliminable from philosophy: what I will call ‘rational indeterminacy’.⁷ The problem is this. Let us say that some subject-matter (a belief, a procedure, a theory) is assessed by a certain set of standards or criteria that it fails to meet. What should fall in consequence? The subject-matter or the standards? In most areas of intellectual life the answer is easy: the standards are stable and should take priority. But this is not the case everywhere and at all times. The problem is particularly acute in philosophy for the following reason. The subject-matter of philosophy includes the nature of reasoning itself. So philosophy is inevitably reflexive: it attempts to argue philosophically for a certain conception of reason. The method it employs is something that it is its own proper business to justify.⁸

Natural scientific theories, for the most part, can draw upon agreement both about the subject-matter to be dealt with by the theory and about the standards by which theories are to be assessed. But in the social sciences things are, in general, not so simple.⁹ Ontology (what sorts of entities theories postulate), epistemology (what kind of access we have to those entities) and explanatory structure (the kinds of connection that we should look for between them) are all controversial. Those familiar with the literature on the philosophy of social science – in particular, the disputes surrounding ‘methodological individualism’ – will realize that we have reached a point at which dispute most often degenerates into a depressing sterility.

There are those philosophers and scientists whom we may call (I am afraid that not all of them will welcome the term) positivists. Positivists think that there are sufficient common features of good explanations to make it plausible, at least, to believe that there is a single set of standards against which all explanations can be measured. These standards are unchanging, although the appreciation of them may be greater or smaller at one time than another. For those who take this view the critical question is: does a particular explanation meet the standards that any explanation at any time must meet?

Then there are those who believe that different standards apply in different regions of human enquiry. For them the fact that an explanation should fail to meet standards ‘imported’ from elsewhere is, in principle, wholly unsurprising. Yet if we are not to fall into the worst kind of relativism, the standards we apply cannot be solely those that a theory itself proposes: in that case we should be simply allowing every theory to write its own warrant. But then from where, if not from timeless standards, might rational criticism come?

A leading example of the attempt to reconstruct social scientific theories according to methodological standards that are justified by their acceptance elsewhere, to which I shall make reference a good deal in what follows, is G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: a Defence. Cohen aims to show that ‘functional explanation’, which he takes to be characteristic of Marx’s historical materialism, does not require commitment to anything that a physical scientist need find methodologically or metaphysically offensive, but corresponds to the kind of explanation to be found quite unproblematically in Darwinian biology.

It has been said in response to Cohen that his reconstruction represents only one aspect of Marx’s enterprise and that Marx himself took himself to be operating according to different standards. As it stands, this is hardly a forceful objection. If it is the case that Marx’s theory can be reconstructed satisfactorily, but at the cost of elements of his method that he may have thought to be of vital importance – the ‘dialectic’, for example – then this will only be doing to Marx’s theory what he himself claims to have done to Hegel’s: extracting the ‘rational kernel from its mystical shell’.¹⁰

However, Cohen does not succeed, I will argue. I will try to show that his methodologically austere reconstruction fails to provide a sufficient defence for Marx’s claims with respect to that part of his account that is most relevant to the theory of ideology – the functional interpretation of the relationship of correspondence between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. The very great value of Cohen’s reconstruction, in my view, is just the opposite of what its author claims. Rather than providing a convincing defence of Marx, it enables us to measure more precisely than ever before the great distance that exists between the methodological assumptions and standards of evidence that rule in the physical sciences and in evolutionary biology and what would be required to vindicate Marx’s claims.

This throws important light upon Marx’s theory. It is widely appreciated that there are apparently distinct methodological strands in Marx’s work. This is unmissable in any comparison between the ‘Hegelian’ early writings and the later ‘scientific’ works on political economy. Marx’s interpreters have generally argued for one or the other of these as the basis for an understanding of the ‘true’ or ‘essential’ Marx.¹¹ The interpretation of Marx to be presented in this book, however, will show that deep tensions remain even in Marx’s later (supposedly ‘mature’) works. These tensions do not simply amount to prevarication or vacillation on Marx’s part but result from the strain of attempting to construct a theory that will do justice to two deep background beliefs about the ways in which societies change and, what is most fundamental to the theory of ideology, the reasons why they fail to do so.

A preliminary formulation of the two background beliefs informin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Forms of False Consciousness
• 3. Rationalism and False Consciousness
• 4. Unintended Consequences and the Idea of a Social System
• 5. Hegel
• 6. Marx
• 7. Critical Theory
• 8. The Theory of Ideology and Beyond
• Bibliography
• Index