Part I
Theories
The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the âSociology of Knowledgeâ
Stuart Hall
âIdeologyâ is a term which does not trip lightly off an English tongue. It has stubbornly refused to be ânaturalisedâ. English political theory sometimes refers to âideologiesâ, meaning simply âsystematic bodies of ideasâ. But the concept is largely descriptive â it plays no significant analytic role. Generally, the concept of âideologyâ has never been fully absorbed into Anglo-Saxon social theory. In his important collection of essays published in 1949, Robert Merton included two essays on âThe Sociology of Knowledgeâ and on âKarl Mannheimâ.1 In his introduction to this section, Merton self-consciously signalled these pieces as marking the ârediscoveryâ of the concept of ideology for American social science. This ârediscoveryâ was conducted in the context of a general contrast between two radically different styles of thought â the European (where the concept has played a significant role) and the American (where it had up to that point been largely absent). But Mertonâs opening was not followed by a flood of new studies informed by this concept. What he called âthe sociology of knowledgeâ has, until very recently, remained a minority interest in American empirical social science.
In his labour of rediscovery, Merton openly acknowledged thatâ In this respect, as in others, Marxism is the storm centre of wissensociologie [the sociology of knowledge] ⊠we can trace out its formulations primarily in the writings of Marx and Engels.â The absence of an interest in the problem of ideology in American sociology thus clearly relates to the absence anywhere in this tradition of thought, until very recently, of any major open confrontation with Marxist concepts. An interesting essay could be written on what concepts did duty, in American social theory, for the absent concept of âideologyâ: for example, the notion of norms in structural functionalism, and of âvaluesâ and the âcentral value systemâ in Parsons. Mertonâs mind had undoubtedly been directed to this absence by the growing body of work in the study of mass communications and public opinion. But the concept of ideology was never rigorously applied to this promising area of work.2
Bacon called for a thorough-going investigation and critique of the roots of conventional wisdom â what he called a âcriticism of the idolsâ. And Helvetius â a favourite of Marxâs â made much of the proposition that âOur ideas are the necessary consequence of the societies in which we liveâ. But most of the recent âoverviewsâ of the concept ideology agree that the word itself, in its modern meanings, originated with that group of savants in the French Revolution who were entrusted by the Convention of 1795 with the founding of a new centre of revolutionary thought â an enterprise which was located in the newly founded Institut de France.3 It was to this group that the term âidĂ©ologuesâ was first applied. Their fate constitutes a salutary warning for all ideologues. For a time this group of thinkers constituted the spokesmen for revolutionary ideas â the French Revolution âin thoughtâ. Their aim was to realise in practice what they conceived as the âpromiseâ of the Revolution â the freedom of thought and expression. But they were hoisted on the horns of a dilemma which has dogged the concept of âideologyâ from its inception. As Lichtheim points out, they were concerned with âideologyâ in two senses, which were logically incompatible. First, they saw the relation between history and thought â the tide of the Revolution and the âideasâ which expressed it. But they also wanted to advance certain âtrueâ ideas â ideas which would be true whatever historical conjuncture they were located in. They thus compromised â âfor the sake of ideasâ â with that historical agent who they imagined had the power to make their ideas come true: Napoleon Bonaparte. This was an ill-judged faith. Napoleon took them up in 1799, in the âmomentâ of Brumaire, in order to win support in the class where the savants had greatest influence â the educated middle classes. He even signed his proclamations to the army during the 1798â9 period, âGeneral en Chef, Membre de Iâlnstitutâ. But by 1803, in the âmomentâ of his Concordat with the Church, he abandoned them, deliberately setting out to destroy the Institutâs core, the âclasse des sciences morales et politiques, from which liberal and republican ideas radiated throughout the educational establishmentâ. âThe story of Bonaparteâs degenerationâ, Lichtheim concludes, âcan be written in terms of his relation with the ideologuesâ.
The interest in ideology did not, however, altogether disappear with the disbanding of this group. Destutt de Tracy inaugurated a ânatural history of ideasâ, treating the history of the contents and evolution of the human mind as a species of zoology â an enterprise whose warrant he claimed to have found in such sources as Locke and Condillac. He called his study Elements dâldĂ©ologie (1801â15). But de Tracyâs work was shadowed by the same contradiction as his predecessorsâ. He wanted to unmask the historicity of ideas â but he also wanted this unmasking to yield a true and universal knowledge of human nature. His âmaterialist themeâ was âcrossed by a normative purposeâ. The contradictory nature of this project revealed its true Enlightenment roots. Even Comte, the direct inheritor of this line of inquiry, did not escape its contradiction. In line with his massive evolutionary schemas, Comte also conceived of a branch of âpositive scienceâ which would be devoted to the evolution of the human mind as a âsocialâ process. But he too thought that this study would reveal that the social was subject to âinvariable natural lawsâ. Lichtheim describes this as a âchilling thoughtâ which, despite itself, aimed âto sustain reasonâs faith in itselfâ. What these and other examples from this period suggest is that, from its modern inception, the concept of âideologyâ has been shadowed by its âOtherâ â Truth, Reason, Science.
Whatever else it signals, the concept ideology makes a direct reference to the role of ideas. It also entails the proposition that ideas are not self-sufficient, that their roots lie elsewhere, that something central about ideas will be revealed if we can discover the nature of the determinacy which non-ideas exert over ideas. The study of âideologyâ thus also holds out the promise of a critique of idealism, as a way of explaining how ideas arise. However, the difficulty is that, once the study of ideas is placed at the centre of an investigation, an immense theoretical labour is required to prevent such a study drifting, willy-nilly, into idealism. This dilemma is clearly revealed in the history of one of the major philosophical currents which has informed the study of ideas and ideologies â the tradition inaugurated by Kant.
Kantianism (with its roots in both Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism) took the abstract Enlightenment notion of âReasonâ and subjected it to a thorough-going critique. Kant asserted the primacy of the structures and categories of âmindâ over matter. It was âmindâ which organized experience into intelligible wholes. Mind âconstructedâ reality. The trace of Kantianism is to be found in many of the subsequent theories of âideologyâ; though â because it was itself a critical idealism â it did not promote a study of the historical roots of knowledge. The story is not so straight-forward with Kantâs main rival â Hegel, even though Hegel âout-idealisedâ Kantâs reluctant idealism. For it was Hegelâs aim to heal the Kantian division of the world into the knowledge of things, produced by our mental categories, and âthings in themselvesâ, which were radically unknowable. Hegelâs method for overcoming this discontinuity was the dialectic. The dialectic proposed a specific conception of the relation between knowledge and the world, between mind and matter, between the Idea and History: the relation of the dialectical supersession of each by the other. Once the Hegelian synthesis had been toppled from its idealist base and inverted â as it was by his radical disciples â it did once again produce the problem of the historical roots of knowledge as a theoretical problem. Thus for Feuerbach (who carried through the âinversionâ of Hegel in its most radical form) and in the work of the Left Hegelians who followed him, a task of central importance lay in unmasking the human and sensuous roots of religious ideas.4 Feuerbachâs work, Marx observed, âconsists in resolving the religious world into its secular basisâ. But
He overlooks the fact that after completing this work the chief thing remains to be done âŠthe secular basis ⊠must itself therefore first be understood in its contradiction and thenâŠrevolutionized in practice.
Here Marx explicitly advanced to a materialist theory of ideology on the back of Fsuerbachâs inversion of Hegel.
For Hegel, of course, particular knowledges â one-sided knowledge, knowledge at any particular âmomentâ â were always partial. Analytic Reason could not overcome this limit. But in Dialectical Reason Hegel glimpsed the possibility of a truly universal knowledge. If one âmomentâ consisted of the objectivation of Mind in History, another âmomentâ represented the appropriation of History in Mind. Thorough-going idealist as he was, Hegel fixed the final apotheosis in the second of those synthetic leaps â in the disappearance of the âRealâ into the âRationalâ. Then â just like the Revolutionary savants before him â he could not resist actually locating this Universal Moment in a particular historical conjuncture. The savants chose Napoleon â Hegel chose the Prussian State. This âconcretizationâ served Hegel no better than Napoleon had served the savants.
Hegel recognized that concepts were historical: but, he argued, âhistorical concepts possess true generality because they relate to a universal agent that unfolds through the histories of particular peoples and civilizationsâ. Thus, Marx argued, for Hegel, âconceptual thinking is the real human being ⊠the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production.â6 But the Hegelian system, once âinvertedâ, led to precisely the opposite conclusion: âthe realâ â what Feuerback called âsensuous human natureâââ is the only motor of history; ideas are simply the projections of the essential human nature and human praxis which they reflect. It was from this âinverted dialecticâ that Marx proceeded, by a further break, to inaugurate a historical materialist theory of ideology. (Though, as we know, his first attempt to do so â The German Ideology â still contains traces of the âinversionâ he was breaking from, particularly in its undifferentiated notion of âhuman praxisâ.) It is certainly within this general framework that we must understand Marxâs famous assertion that âit is not consciousness which determines being but⊠social being determines consciousnessâ.7 But the materialist theory of ideology must be understood as a break with Hegelâs system â not merely as setting Hegelâs idealism on its materialist feet; since, as Althusser has shown, the inversion of a system is still the system inverted.8 For Marx, Feuerbach simply resolved religion into its âhuman essenceâ. But the point was to ârethinkâ human essence as âthe ensemble of social relationsâ. Thus, the Left Hegelians unmasked the âtruly human rootsâ of religion: Marx unmasked the historical roots of the Left Hegelians. He called this his âsettling of accountsâ with his âerstwhile philosophic conscienceâ.
The materialist path out of Hegel and Kant was neither the only nor indeed the most dominant residue of this theoretical encounter. In German thought, the problem of ideology is framed, for the rest of the century, by a double exposure: caught as Stedman Jones has argued, between the dissolution of the Kantian, and the dissolution of the Hegelian systems.9 Each leaves its distinctive trace. This circuitous path is not without its surprising short-cuts back to Marxism. We refer here to the line which winds its tortuous way from Hegel through Dilthey, Simmel and Scheler, to Max Weber and the neo-Kantians; and thus to LukĂĄcs, Goldmann and Mannheim. The starting point for this line of descent lay in Hegelâs conception that, until its final unity with Spirit, Mind was continuously, through the process of the dialectic, objectivating itself in palpable forms in the world (History). Mind was given what Hegel called âobjective formâ. For a lengthy period, the study of ideology is nothing more nor less than a study of Objective Mind.
Though Hegel was no evolutionist, he was not so far removed from the impulse of the Enlightenment as to be incapable of conceiving this endless dialectic as arranged into distinct stages or epochs: the âageâ of Religion, the âageâ of Poetry, the âageâ of Science â crowned, of course, by the Age of Philosophy. These epochs had a shadowy history sketched within them, though they were in no sense precisely rooted in a historical periodization. Indeed, like much Englightenment thought, they began with what looked like a historical moment, but was, in fact, something rather more like the essential moment of genesis of all human history: that is, with the Greeks. It was the neo-Hegelians â Dilthey above all (1833â1911) â who really seized on this notion of Mind objectivating itself through History in a sequence of distinct stages; and who set about constructing both an âobjective social psychologyâ and an âobjective historyâ â a history of the stages of. human thought â on its foundations.10 Ideas, Dilthey argued, could be conceived and studied as a series of forms, arranged progressively into stages extending through history. Each stage was characterised by its own âstyle of thoughtâ. The many different objectivations of each period could be studied as a whole, because they all reflected a particular âoutlookâ on the world, a world-vision, a Weltanschauung. Distinct Weltanschauungen could be identified for each period, for each society. Diltheyâs notion was thus easily extended into the idea that each nation or âpeopleâ possessed its own distinctive Weltanschauung or âSpiritâ. This idea connected with earlier ideas of the âVolkâ, stemming from German Romanticism, and fed into subsequent ideas about the peculiar historical character and destiny of each nation or national culture. A central theme in German thought could thus be plotted in terms of the complex history of this definition of âSpiritâ (Geist), in its successive manifestations through to its debased coinage by fascist ideology in the 1930s. Marx once accounted for the radical etherialization of this whole tradition in terms of the âover-d...