The Social Structure of Ideology

Abstract

We concluded the last chapter by noting that there is a difference between the prescriptive concerns of many philosophers and the more descriptive and explanatory concerns that underlie the network theory of knowledge. Unfortunately a concern with global prescription that breaches the requirements of impartiality, symmetry, causality and indeed reflexivity is built deeply into many areas of social science. Thus there are many attempts to explain the generation of true knowledge in ways that are different in kind from that which is false. One such area is the analysis of what is called ideology. In fact, however, work on ideology also contains much that is consistent with the requirements of impartiality and symmetry, and is posed in terms of an idiom of social interest that sits comfortably with the network theory. Accordingly, it is important to tease the impartial and the symmetrical from the partial and the asymmetrical and examine the consequences for a theory of knowledge of doing without the notion of ideology at all. We start with the writing of Marx in which, as has often been noted, the concept of ideology achieves its first approximately modern statement.¹