¹ Mills, Charles, “‘Ideology’ in Marx and Engels”, The Philosophical Forum 16 (1985), 327–346.Google Scholar

² Of the twenty writers Mills surveyed, three held this position: Moskvichov, L. N., The End of Ideology Theory: Illusions and Reality, trans. Riordan, Jim (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974)Google Scholar; Therborn, Goran, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1980)Google Scholar; Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

³ Cf. Goldstick, Danny, “Reading Althusser”, Revolutionary World 23–25 (1977), 117Google Scholar and n. 20, 130–131.

⁴ For ease of reference, we are placing the main sources in the text itself, using the following abbreviations: Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.; New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1978) (MER)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works (in one volume) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968) (MESW)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Collected Works, vols. 3–29 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–1987) (CW)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl, Capital, vols. 1–2 (New York: International Publishers, 1967) (CAP)Google Scholar; Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963)Google Scholar (TSV 1).

⁵ The earliest mention of “ideology” we can actually find is in The Holy Family, where Marx makes a passing comment about Napoleon's “scorn of ideologists” (CW 4, 123).Google Scholar

⁶ Cf. Mills, , “‘Ideology’”, 340–343.Google Scholar

⁷ McLellan, David, Ideology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23.Google Scholar

⁸ For example, Bhikhu Parekh agrees that one sense of “ideology” in Marx means “idealism”, but he regards the 1859 “Preface” and Theories of Surplus Value appearances of the term as aberrant “sporadic usages”, and consigns mention of them to an endnote: see Parekh, Bhikhu, Marx's Theory of Ideology (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chap, one and also 230, n. 1 to chap. one. This oversight results, in our opinion, from a definition of “idealism” which conflates the sociological and ontological senses. Thus he says: “Idealism assumes that the spirit or consciousness is conceptually and, for some, even temporally prior to matter. For it matter is not and cannot be the ultimate reality, and cannot generate and explain consciousness” (ibid., 3). As we have argued above, this is simply mistaken, since one could be an ontological materialist (believing that matter is all that exists, and that ideas are brain events) and a sociological idealist (believing that ideas determine the course of history). Feuerbach himself was a theorist of this kind: see Marx, and Engels, , CW 5, 38–41, 57–59Google Scholar. For a useful discussion of different senses of “material” in Marx, see Collier, Andrew, “Materialism and Explanation in the Human Sciences”, in Mepham, John and Ruben, David-Hillel, eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 2, Materialism (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), 35–60.Google Scholar

⁹ Lenin, V. I., “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats”, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 151.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 376.Google Scholar

¹¹ McCarney, Joe, The Real World of Ideology (Brighton, Sussex and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Harvester and Humanities Press, 1980), 6Google Scholar. McCarney has been one of the most vigorous defenders of the neutral reading of “ideology” (what Mills designated as position [b]). For a more recent statement, see his “Recent Interpretations of Ideology”, Economy and Society 14 (1985), 77–93.Google Scholar

¹² McMurtry, John, The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Therborn, , Ideology of PowerGoogle Scholar; Williams, , Marxism.Google Scholar

¹³ McCarney, , Real World.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Martin Seliger, for example, see Lenin's “inclusive and hence unorthodox use of ‘ideology’” as a “drastic change of the use of the term”, for which “Lenin offered no explanation”. In his opinion, this revision was basically forced upon Lenin by his activist commitments, “since it would have been self-defeating to go on insisting that as a matter of principle all consciousness is false consciousness, as Marx and Engels's dogmatic conception of ideology required”. See Seliger, Martin, The Marxist Conception of Ideology: A Critical Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 6, 83, 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The above account should make clear why we regard this judgment as resting on a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx and Engels' point.

¹⁵ For a good discussion of some of the issues involved, see Nielsen, Kai, “Marxism and the Moral Point of View”, American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987), 295–306.Google Scholar

¹⁶ See: Wood, Allen W., “The Marxian Critique of Justice”, in Cohen, Marshall, Nagel, Thomas, and Scanlon, Thomas, eds., Marx, Justice and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3–41Google Scholar; Buchanan, Allen E., “The Conceptual Roots of Totalitarian Socialism”, in Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D. Jr., Paul, Jeffrey, and Ahrens, John, eds., Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 127–144Google Scholar; Lukes, Steven, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

¹⁷ There is a partial overlap here with the conclusions of Mills's earlier paper, since, as noted, we do agree that one sense of the term means “idealism”. See Mills, , “‘Ideology’”, 343–344.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Wirth, Louis and Shils, Edward (Bonn, 1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968)Google Scholar. For one of many discussions of the “paradox” and Mannheim's “solution”, see Seliger, , Marxist ConceptionGoogle Scholar, chap, eight.

¹⁹ An anonymous referee for Dialogue asks how Marx's description in CAP 1 of “commodity fetishism” (sect, four of chap, one), and its role in mystifying capitalist social relations, fits with our conclusions about “ideology”. These pages are, of course, crucial in understanding Marx's views on one very important set of obfuscatory appearances, and they should be treated as such. But it is not “ideology” in Marx's sense, since fetishism characteristically involves the “naturalization” of the social, and is thus, within the geometry of the base-superstructure metaphor, equivalent to a “downwards”, anti-idealist conflation of socio-economic and natural causality. Cf. Norman Geras: “[Fetishism as a] type of mystification consists of reducing the social objectivity of the forms of capitalist relations to a natural objectivity”; “Marx and the Critique of Political Economy”, in Blackburn, Robin, ed., Ideology in Social Science (Glasgow: Collins, 1972), 296–297Google Scholar. Note that nowhere in the discussion of fetishism does Marx describe it as “ideology”; indeed the term hardly appears in the three volumes of Capital.

²⁰ For an attempt along these lines, see Mills, Charles, “Determination and Consciousness in Marx”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19/3 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar