The use of the word ideology in the pejorative sense of false consciousness is found not only in the writings of Marx himself but in those of other exponents of what has come to be known as the sociology of knowledge, including the German sociologists Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, and numerous lesser figures. Few such writers are wholly consistent in their use of the term, but what is characteristic of their approach is their method of regarding idea systems as the outcome or expression of certain interests. In calling such idea systems ideologies, they are treating them as things whose true nature is concealed; they consider the task of sociological research to be the unveiling of what Mannheim called the “life conditions which produce ideologies.”

From this perspective, the economic science of Adam Smith, for example, is not to be understood as an independent intellectual construction or to be judged in terms of its truth, consistency, or clarity; rather, it is to be seen as the expression of bourgeois interests, as part of the ideology of capitalism.

The sociology of knowledge in subsequent formulations sought support in Freudian psychology (notably in borrowing from Sigmund Freud the concepts of the unconscious and of rationalization), in order to suggest that ideologies are the unconscious rationalizations of class interests. This refinement enabled sociologists of knowledge to rid their theory of the disagreeable and unscientific element of bald accusation; they no longer needed to brand Adam Smith as a deliberate champion of the bourgeois ethos but could see him as simply the unconscious spokesman of capitalism. At the same time, these sociologists of knowledge argued that Freudian psychology is itself no less a form of ideology than is Adam Smith’s economics, for Freud’s method of psychoanalysis is essentially a technique for adjusting rebellious minds to the demands and constraints of bourgeois society.

Critics of the sociology of knowledge have argued that if all philosophy is ideology, then the sociology of knowledge must itself be an ideology like any other idea system and equally devoid of independent validity; that if all seeming truth is veiled rationalization of interest, then the sociology of knowledge cannot be true. It has been suggested that although Weber and Mannheim inspired most of the work that has been done by sociologists of knowledge their own writings may perhaps be exempted from this criticism, if only on the ground that neither of them put forward a consistent or unambiguous theory of ideology. Both used the word ideology in different ways at different times. Weber was in part concerned to reverse Marx’s theory that all idea systems are products of economic structures, by demonstrating conversely that some economic structures are the product of idea systems (that Protestantism, for example, generated capitalism and not capitalism Protestantism). Mannheim, on the other hand, tried to restore in a more elaborate form Marx’s suggestion that ideologies are the product of social structure. But Mannheim’s analysis may have been obscured by his proposal that the word ideology should be reserved for idea systems that are more or less conservative, and the word utopia for idea systems of a more revolutionary or millenarian nature. Mannheim did not, however, remain faithful to this stipulative definition, even in his book entitled Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1929).

On the other hand, Mannheim was well aware of the implication of the doctrine that all idea systems have a class basis and a class bias. As a way out of the dilemma he envisaged the possibility of a classless class of intellectuals, a “socially unattached intelligentsia,” as he put it, capable of thinking independently by virtue of its independence from any class interest or affiliation. Such a detached group might hope to acquire knowledge that was not ideology. This vision of a small elite of superior minds rising above the myths of ordinary society seemed to some readers to put Mannheim closer to Plato than to Marx and to cast new doubts on the claim of the sociology of knowledge to be a science.

Ideology, rationalism, and romanticism

If some theorists emphasize the kinship between ideology and various forms of religious enthusiasm, others stress the connection between ideology and what they call rationalism, or the attempt to understand politics in terms of abstract ideas rather than of lived experience. Like Napoleon, who held that ideology is par excellence the work of intellectuals, some theorists are suspicious of those who think they know about politics because they have read many books; they believe that politics can be learned only by an apprenticeship to politics itself.

Such people are not unsympathetic to political theories, such as Locke’s, but they argue that their value resides in the facts that are derived from experience. Michael Oakeshott in England described Locke’s theory of political liberty as an “abridgment” of the Englishman’s traditional understanding of liberty and suggested that once such a conception is uprooted from the tradition that has given it meaning it becomes a rationalistic doctrine or metaphysical abstraction, like those liberties contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which were so much talked about after the French Revolution but rarely actually enjoyed, in France or elsewhere.

Whereas Oakeshott saw ideology as a form of rationalism, Edward Shils, a U.S. political scientist, saw it more as a product of, among other things, romanticism with an extremist character. His argument was that romanticism has fed into and swelled the seas of ideological politics by its cult of the ideal and by its scorn for the actual, especially its scorn for what is mediated by calculation and compromise. Since civil politics demands both compromise and contrivance and calls for a prudent self-restraint and responsible caution, he suggested that civil politics is bound to be repugnant to romanticism. Hence Shils concluded that the romantic spirit is naturally driven toward ideological politics.