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The Paradox of Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Justin Schwartz
Justin Schwartz*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH43210, USA
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Extract

Marx’s social theory seems to involve a sharp case of a well-known paradox in sociology of knowledge. The puzzle arises when we discover on the basis of scientific inquiry that belief in scientific claims is produced and maintained by noncognitive social interest or positions. The worry is that belief so produced is for that reason suspect. A cognitive interest is an intrinsic interest in the truth or warrant, or more broadly in the epistemic properties, of some claim or belief. But according to Marx’s theory of ideology,

The mode of production of material life conditions the … intellectual life-processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.2

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 543 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 My thanks for helpful comments on this paper are due to Linda Alcoff, Avner Cohen, Phil Gasper, Peter King, Michael Lowy, Janis Michael, Kurt Mosser, Calvin Normore, Peter Railton, James Scanlan, Marshall Swain, David Scarrow, and members of the philosophy faculties at Temple University and Denison University.

2 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick Collected Works (New York: International Publishers 1975-), vol. 29, 263Google Scholar. Hereafter, cited in text as CW followed by volume and page number. I generally follow the convention of attributing writings by Marx and Engels to Marx.

3 One may doubt whether Marx’s ideas were the ‘ruling ideas’ in ‘formerly existing socialism’ in anything more than name (see subsection VII.3, below).

4 The context here suggests that ‘ideological’ has a neutral, descriptive sense rather than Marx’s usual pejorative one; see section II.

5 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Engels, Frederick ed., Moore, Samuel and Aveling, Edward trans. (New York: International Publishers 1967), 10Google Scholar. All further references to Capital are to volume 1 of this edition.

6 A theory might be nonideological in this sense, i.e. uncaused by noncognitive social interests or positions, while belief in it is nonetheless thus ideological. A lonely genius might produce an idea for sheer love of truth, which is later taken up when social interests make it convenient. But that there may be nonideological scientific theories is no help if we cannot be justified in accepting them. The distinction is therefore practically irrelevant and I will use ‘belief in X’ and ‘X’ interchangeably.

7 See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Wirth, Louis and Shils, Edward trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World 1936)Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge, Gordon, Colin ed. (New York: Pantheon 1980) 109-33Google Scholar; Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Penguin 1966)Google Scholar.

8 See Bloor, David Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1976Google Scholar); Barnes, Barry Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977)Google Scholar; Kuhn, Thomas The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1970)Google Scholar.

9 See Quine, W.V. ‘Epistemology Naturalized,’ in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press 1969) 69-90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldman, Alvin Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986)Google Scholar; Robert, Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977)Google Scholar.

10 That is, I read Marx as a ‘historical reliabilist’ who grounds justification in a certain sort of causal etiology. I hasten to add that Marx does not offer, and is not interested in, an ‘analysis’ of knowledge or justified belief, in the sense of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for’s knows that (or has justified belief in) p,’ the quest for which has motivated the development of much contemporary reliabilist epistemology.

11 See Geuss, Raymond The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), part 1Google Scholar.

12 Ideology need not arise because it is in some groups’ interests that it prevail; but it may arise because of those interests. Jon Elster notes that just because a belief is caused by social interest is no reason to suppose that it necessarily serves those interests (’Belief, Bias, and Ideology,’ in Hollis, Martin and Lukes, Steven eds., Rationality and Relativism [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1982]123-48Google Scholar). Ideology may also derive from positional factors as well as interest.

13 Marx’s failure to mention this here may be due to the assumption of his controversial thesis that state (including military) activities have an economic explanation, i.e. are ‘superstructural’ phenomena ‘determined’ (bestimmt) by the ‘economic basis’ (CW, 29, 263). On that thesis, the reliability of knowledge acquired due to capitalist state interests in military power then ultimately depends on capitalist interest in profit. This is a charitable reading. Most probably Marx failed to mention the connection here because Capital is primarily concerned with the economic basis; he was not thinking about the superstructure when he wrote these passages.

14 See Bernal, J.D. The Social Function of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1967Google Scholar). Two case studies are Swetz, Frank J. Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1987)Google Scholar, on the development and spread of new mathematical techniques to serve merchant purposes in the fifteenth century, and Elkana, Yehuda The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy (London: Hutchison Educational 1974)Google Scholar, on the relation between the discovery of the conservation of energy and the development of the steam engine.

15 One need not be a Marxist to see the point. Thomas Hobbes, to take someone at the furthest remove from Marx in everything but genius, says, ‘For I doubt not, but if it had been contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle, should have been equal to the two angles of a square; that this doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able’ (Leviathan, Oakeshotte, Michael ed. [New York: Collier 1962], 84Google Scholar).

16 Marx excludes science from this catalogue of ideology, which he contrasts with ‘real positive science’ (CW, 5, 37). Why he thinks he can do this is the subject of this paper.

17 The same is true of Galileo’s prosecutor Cardinal Bellarmine, whose rejection of Copernicanism cannot be attributed either to mere cynicism or self-deception caused, in any simple way, by his interests as a high Church functionary.

18 The dependence of science on funding and institutional support provided by capitalists and the state for their own interests may be sufficient to raise the worry. If we accept Mill’s idea that, given human fallibility, vigorous competition among competing views is necessary for reliability, the influence of practical ends exerted through funding agencies and the like may sometimes reduce competition in the marketplace of ideas below the minimum required for confidence in the outcome. See Mill, John Stuart On Liberty, Rapaport, Elizabeth ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett 1978)Google Scholar. This may be right, but it is not Marx’s concern. In the case of natural science Marx’s reply to the different worry he addresses suggests a way to handle this problem as well.

19 See Quine, W.V. ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’ in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1961) 20-46Google Scholar; T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

20 Marx may have been influenced by Hegel’s discussion of work. Hegel says that the servant is forced to labor and thus to confront ‘the independence of the thing,’ the external object on which he works. The master merely consumes the products of this labor and is thus not forced to confront the world; he needs to learn neither what the servant learns about the world nor about himself in transforming it (Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller, A.V. trans. [Oxford: Clarendon 1977], 115-19Google Scholar). As I read Hegel, this story incorporates reliabilism about knowledge and the idea that the servant’s standpoint is episternically privileged with regard to the external world and the self.

21 The Eleventh Thesis has other, more obvious meanings as well, including an implicit criticism of the political quietism urged by Hegel, (Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Knox, T.M. trans. [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1952], 12-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar). But given the epistemological content of the other Theses, the proposed reading is a reasonable if incomplete gloss.

22 Kolakowski, Leszeck ‘Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth,’ in Towards a Marxist Humanism, Peel, Jane Z. trans. (New York: Grove 1968) 38-66Google Scholar. Calling (5)-(7) ‘pragmatic’ will seem misleading if, like Kolakowski, we suppose that pragmatists run things the other way, making practical success constitutive of truth rather than evidence for it. But they need not do so. That is part of the point of this paper. My reading is pragmatist in giving epistemic priority to practical action; Kolakowski’s picks up on the collapse of truth into practical success found in some classical pragmatists, such as James.

23 I take the talk of ‘mirroring’ and ‘reflection’ as metaphorical ways of asserting some version of a classical correspondence theory of truth and not as committing Marx to a ‘reflection theory’ as articulated, for example, by Lenin, (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Fineberg, Abraham trans. [Moscow: Progress Publishers 1962]Google Scholar). Unlike Lenin, Marx shows no signs of interest in working out a theory of truth. On the principle of imposing minimal constructions on his statements, he is best read as operating with the prereflective idea that true statements correspond to reality.

24 Lukács criticizes Engels for misreading Kant and more deeply for claiming that noncognitively driven scientific practice reveals anything about the world. Lukács maintains that natural science is not ‘praxis in the dialectical, philosophical sense,’ which means something like the self-conscious activity of which, Lukács supposes, the proletariat alone is capable. Rather it is a sort of Feuerbachian pure contemplation, doubly inadequate to discovery of truths because of scientific use of abstraction, experimental controls, and abstract mathematics, and because this use occurs, in capitalism, under the blind incentive of the market (History and Class Consciousness, Livingston, Rodney trans. [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1971], 131-3Google Scholar). He says nothing about natural science under socialism. I mention his view here only to indicate that whatever it amounts to it is not what Engels or I take Marx to mean.

25 This vulgarization found a murderous apogee in the Stalinist thesis of the ‘two world views; promulgated by Stalin’s ideological henchman Andrei Zhadnov in the late 1940s (see Löwy, Michael ‘Stalinist Ideology and Science; in Ali, Tariq ed., The Stalinist Legacy [Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1984] 168-84Google Scholar; Wetter, Gustav Dialectical Materialism, Heath, Peter trans. [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1958]Google Scholar). For this crude and preposterous theory, all beliefs, including scientific beliefs, are either ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’; the former are to be proscribed and the latter promoted by state authority, which replaced scientific norms in several fields, notably biology. See Graham, Loren R. Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press 1987Google Scholar). The catastrophic consequences of Lysenkoism for Soviet agriculture are further support for Marx’s views as I read them.

26 Quine, W.V.O. and Ullian, Joseph The Web of Belief, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House 1978)Google Scholar

27 Railton, Peter ‘Marx and Scientific Objectivity,’ in Boyd, Richard Gasper, Philip and Trout, J.D. eds., The Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1991)Google Scholar

28 See Idhe, Aaron The Development of Modern Chemistry (New York: Harper and Row 1964), 454-61Google Scholar.

29 Alchemy and scholasticism had selection criteria for practitioners and standards for forming beliefs and norms. But since (Marx would say) there was literally nothing to their subject matters, they lacked real objects which could provide corrective causal feedback. Their selection criteria and epistemic standards were therefore insulated from the sort of correction Marx has in mind for science.

30 This claim must be modified (see section II) where uncomfortable results, e.g., environmental consequences, of the capitalist subjection of nature cause ideological beliefs. Some feminist writers argue, more generally, that an interest in subjugating nature is patriarchal and distorting of aspects of nature which are best revealed by another approach (see Harding, Sandra The Science Question in Feminism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986]Google Scholar).

31 Schwartz, Justin ‘Revolution and Justice,’ Against the Current 42 (1993) 37-41Google Scholar

32 See Scanlan, James Marxism in the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), 48-52Google Scholar.

33 But elsewhere Marx writes, e.g., that class conflict ends ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes’ (CW, 6, 482, emphasis added). This seems more consistent with the Marx who thinks that ‘Men make their own history’ if not just as they please (CW, 11, 103). See Justin Schwartz, ‘How Not To Refute Marxism’ (unpublished MS) for a defense of the nondeterminist view.

34 See Geuss, part 2, and Fisk, Milton Ethics and Society (Brighton: Harvester 1980Google Scholar), part 3, for a discussion of this problematic notion.

35 Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon 1984Google Scholar)

36 See Schwartz, Justin ‘A Future for Socialism in the USSR?’ in Panitch, Leo and Miliband, Ralph eds., Communist Regimes: The Aftermath (Socialist Register 1991) (London: Merlin Press 1991) 67-94Google Scholar

37 In Marx’s day, and for several generations following, many European workers did become Marxist and sometimes revolutionary.

38 Real scholars working under incredibly difficult conditions in the ex-Bloc countries did much first rate work, especially on the problems of a planned economy. This is consistent with Marx’s qualified praise of the best bourgeois economics. The bourgeois counterparts of the party hacks include those whom Marx stigmatizes as ‘vulgar political economists’ such as (he thinks) Mal thus, who let their commitment to the existing order dictate their conclusions.

39 It should not be necessary to say that the interests of a group in some position have no greater moral weight merely because they are the most reliable sources for belief about a subject matter. Thus even if the standpoint of the proletariat is privileged with respect to economics, worker interests do not therefore merit greater moral consideration than those of women or Blacks.

40 See Goldberger, Nancy Rule et al., ‘Women’s Ways of Knowing,’ in Shaver, Phillip and Hendrick, Clyde eds., Sex and Gender (Newbury Park: Sage Publications 1987) 201-28Google Scholar; Hartsock, Nancy ‘The Feminist Standpoint,’ in Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill eds., Discovering Reality (Dordrecht: Reidel 1983) 283-310Google Scholar; Gilligan, Carol In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982)Google Scholar.