Ideology by Eagleton Terry;

Author:Eagleton, Terry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Notes

1. Théorie, Pratique Théorique et Formation Théorique: Idéologie et Lutte Idéologique, p. 29.

2. N. POULANTZAS, Political Power and Social Classes (London, NLB 1973), p. 207.

3. Théorie, Pratique Théorique …, pp. 30–1.

4. Ibid., p. 26.

5. [Note added in February 1973:] The vague use of ‘metaphysical discourse’ subsequently inherited by sociology (social cohesion, the bond between men, etc….) loses the specificity of the concepts involved here, the fact that they belong to a historically determined political problematic. It was this problematic which, in the second half of the 19th century, gave sociology its status and position in the ensemble of practices then introduced by the bourgeoisie to mould the men necessary to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. It was a time when, after the establishment of those relations, the bourgeoisie had twice faced the possibility of its extinction as a result of the proletarian riposte. More astute than ‘Marxist’ scholars who prate endlessly about the ‘spontaneously bourgeois’ ideology of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie recognized in 1848 and 1871 that, even if they used the same words (order, republic, ownership, labour …), the workers were thinking differently. Hence the necessity for the bourgeoisie to strengthen the ideological weapons of its dictatorship. The political threat gave the new human sciences their place among the techniques for moulding the ‘normal’ man necessary to the system; a moulding which encompassed the detection of criminals or the prevention of suicides, as well as the selection of the cadres or parliamentary education of the masses (i.e. the parliamentary and electoral repression of the autonomous political practice of the masses). It also gave them their problematic as a science of the phenomena which consolidate or break up social cohesion. Its characteristic questions were: What principles strengthen the cohesion of a group? What criteria allow the most suitable ones to be chosen for such and such a position? Or, more crudely still: How can one identify in the physiognomy of a crowd, or in the dimensions of someone’s skull, the danger that they represent for the social order? It is not difficult to spot behind the elaboration of the ‘sociological method’ the preoccupations of the detective Bertillon, author of anthropometry, or of the military doctor Lebon, theoretician of crowds and their ‘ring-leaders’.

The important thing here is that Althusser separates these concepts of the bourgeoisie’s ‘police-reason’ from the political dangers and manoeuvrings of power which underlie them, in order to relate them to a function of the social whole in general. This is naturally complemented by a conception of science above and beyond classes, which reproduces precisely the ‘scientistic’ ideology that crowns the evidence of ‘police-reason.’ If a direct line leads from this abstract conception of ideology to the validation of Kautsky’s thesis of ‘the importation of Marxism into the working class’, it is perhaps because this line reproduces in theory the historical collusion of social-democracy in the bourgeois attempt to domesticate the working class, to wipe out its cultural identity. The pitiful bankruptcy of social-democracy must indeed have something to do with this ‘importation of consciousness’.

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