Definition of Ideology

Abstract

As we argued earlier, one of the most important contributions of Althusser to the general theory of Marxism is the revitalization of the notion of ideology. Karl Marx himself rarely used the word ideology, both as a term and as a critical concept. In this sense, there is not only no systematic theory of ideology in Marx’s opus, but also ideology as a notion, as well as a term, has a negative meaning in Marx’s philosophical writings. However, in his subchapter on commodity fetishism, Marx provides a general outline of what can be understood as his most consistent (albeit generic) development of the theory of the critique of ideology. This is probably best epitomized by what is now a very famous formulation: “they do this without being aware of it.” Slavoj Žižek writes that for Marx, the misperception or the fallacy here is on the side of the being and not of knowledge. He writes that “we have made a decisive step forward: we have established a new way to read the Marxian formula ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’: the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already in the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing.”