Destutt de Tracy publishes in 1801 “Elements of ideology”
It is Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) which forged this term to indicate science that he proposed to build and which would be the theory of the theories (Elements of ideology-Ideology itself, 1801). In the wake of Condillac, he wanted to establish the genesis of the ideas starting from the feelings. Other thinkers united with him (P.J.G. Cabanis, Daunou, C. of Volney, D.J. Garat, P. Laromiguière).
This multi-field group called “the ideologists” perpetuated the enthusiasm of the Lights by affirming indefinite progress of the Man. He played a big role in the constitution of many social sciences. Initially influence the programs of the universities, it was fought by the Empire (the pejorative connotation of the term is due to Napoleon) and by the Restoration before being rehabilitated by IIIe République.
The criticism of the ideology (Marx)
In the German Ideology (1845), Marx and Engels define the ideology as “inversion of reality”, comparable with the image of the camera will obscura of which the painters of the Rebirth were used for themselves to represent reality.
K. Mannheim (Ideology and Utopia, 1929) distinguishes at Marx a “concept of the total ideology” - the whole of the illusory and fixed representations that a company alienated by its division in classes gives itself itself - which is the principle of screening of the real conditions of existence; it extends to the unit from the company.
In addition, a “concept of partial ideology” recovers the more offensive speeches and partisans that the dominant class produces to ensure its own maintenance. Insofar as these speeches are those which dominate the ideas of a given company, the two concepts are not without interferences. It is thus in the logical step of a criticism radical and unit that Marx is caught some initially with the ideology then attaches to the criticism of economics and politics, strategic places of the ideological expression and the effectiveness of its power of illusion.
False Conscience of Gabel
Taking again the total concept, J. Gabel (False Conscience) revealed the characteristics common of alienation to the sociological direction described by Marx and the psychological direction described by Binswanger. Joining together thoughts as various as those of Bergson, Lukács, C. Lefort or R. Aron, it identifies the ideology with a forfeiture of the dialectical thought and the manner of being in the world: reification, detemporalisation and abstractive surspatialisation, depersonalization and “desaxiologisation” which are the signs of schizophrenia.
The thoughts of T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, H. Marcuse and H. Lefebvre, like those of P. Bourdieu, E. Morin, G. Overflow (through the concept of “spectacle”), G. Deleuze and F. Guattari are in the prolongation of the reflection of Marx on the ideology.
The Marxist inversion of the concept
Systematizing the thought of Marx and Engels under the term of “historical materialism”, the Marxism is constituted very quickly like a distinct philosophy, then like a new field of knowing and being able. An orthodoxy is born from a party representing the class, internally arranged hierarchically in the fields of the knowledge and the power. The aspects “the aufklarists” most summary of the thought of Marx are carried to paroxysm by the means of scientism.