Ideology

It is here that we meet for the first time in this book a theory of ideology, a notion which seems to have all but disappeared from contemporary social science with its emphasis on language and discourse and the assertion or implication that the way in which people see the world is the world.

Although ‘ideology’ was originally used to refer to a possible ‘science of ideas', it was taken over by Marx and Marxists and used in various ways. At its simplest, it is used to mean a set of ideas which serve the interests of a particular social class. In the Hegelian tradition, developed through the work of Georg Lukacs (Lukacs 1971), the notion of totality and a ‘second nature’ is central. In the first volume of his Capital (Marx 1970), Marx argues that the market system works to disguise relationships between human beings as relationships between things, commodities, and that human beings themselves come to be seen, and see themselves, as commodities, governed by the workings of the market. The attempt to use the methods of the natural sciences in the social sciences reproduces this, also treating people and relationships as things. These things are isolated for analysis and seen as static and one-dimensional. They are separated from the dynamic totality of historical development. The separation of the social sciences from each other is part of this: rather as the chemist might break down and analyse a compound substance into its various parts, so the social sciences break down human beings and human relationships into supposed component parts and study those parts in isolation from each other - sociology, psychology, economics, history all develop along their separate paths, searching for their own laws, or at least their own forms of knowledge.

This process of analytic study might very well be important for the social sciences, but it remains ideological as long as we do not situate our study in the wider context. For example, to study male psychology or female psychology as ifit were fixed and unchanging and unconnected with changes at all levels in the wider society is ‘ideological’, blind to a wider reality which thus remains beyond understanding and criticism. Similarly, when sociologists study the emotions simply in terms of the social rules about showing emotion, their work is ideological since it excludes understanding that comes through biology, different types of psychology and history.

But this is only one dimension of ideology; Adorno developed a radical critique of what he called the culture industry (Adorno 1967), and after the Second World War Marcuse developed a theory of one-dimensionality (Marcuse 1964). The ideal underlying these critiques is of an autonomous individual able to make more or less rational decisions of his or her own, able to analyse and criticize the different ideological discourses imposed upon him or her and able also to stand out against the group or the crowd, thinking for him- or herself and arguing with others. The implication is that such a figure can provide the basis for a real and open democratic system. The possibility of developing such abilities was undermined not just by systems of ideas but also by the cultural forms of modern capitalism. Art and music had become ways of lulling the senses and producing a feeling of ease rather than challenging people to think. Mozart was played to Jews as they were marched to the gas chambers, and Beethoven is played to cows to increase their milk yield.

Adorno, himself a major musical scholar as well as a philosopher and social theorist, was a champion of Schoenberg and twelve-tone music: it is impossible to listen to this with a sense of ease.

For Marcuse it was the development of consumer-based capitalism that produced ‘one dimensionality' (Marcuse 1964), producing a false contentment and directing peoples' energies and ambitions into objects rather than relationships, binding them into the system by manipulating their desires. Frankfurt writers were among the first to try to hitch social theory to psychoanalysis in order to understand the ideological workings of society, particularly the way in which the working classes came to support Hitler in Nazi Germany (Adorno et al. 1950) and the way in which people could be enslaved to consumer goods in late capitalism (Marcuse 1964). The details of their social theory are less important for our present purposes than the way in which they develop the notion of rationality as part of an ongoing, and in fact never-ending, dialectical process. Too great an emphasis on one side of the thinking process, for example, the analytic method of the natural sciences, produces the myth of science and the very real result of fragmented knowledge. On the other hand, too much emphasis on the totalizing process of dialectical thought aligns thinking with the totalitarian dynamics of modern and late capitalism. In Minima Moralia (Adorno 1974) Adorno suggests that now the whole is the source of untruth, and that truth can only be found in individual suffering.

Rationality becomes in this view more than anywhere else a form of oppositional thinking, a constant process of criticism which produces a scepticism similar to that inherent in modern scientific practice - so that everything must be questioned - but in which that questioning is a process which must go beyond the immediate sense data with which the sciences are concerned. Thinking must criticize the process of thinking itself; the ability of a society to allow this sort of constant self-reflection, and to enable as many people as possible to achieve it, is one criterion by which we can judge that society. Rationality is thus at the centre of concerns about individual autonomy and political theory.

Towards the end of their lives, Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly pessimistic about the possibilities of political change and the establishment of a full democracy. They opposed the radical student movement of 1968 on the grounds that the activism espoused by the students made critical and reflective thinking even more difficult. It was partly as a reaction to this pessimism that Habermas, a student of Adorno, developed his ideas.