03.22.06
Ideology/Idealism
Of course, if Fukuyama is really an idealist then…
well, here’s Marx on ‘ideology’, ‘idealism’, ‘German Ideology’ style.
The problem is that Marx is a crypto-idealist and to reject all forms of idealism because of the context of Left Hegelians attacking the then Hegel establishment backfires. Kant’s transcendental idealism is the one thing that could have preempted the hopeless confusion over the soon to come ‘Marxist ideology’ stuck in materialism.
And of course we now accuse Marxists of ideology. Our usage has shifted, following more of the Mannheim concept of ideology (??? the history of this word is complex, and that of the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ even worse). Actually, all this would now scare us away from such figures as Kant, Hegel, Fichte…
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From Bhikkhu Parekh’s Marx’s Theory of Ideology
1 IDEOLOGY: IDEALISM AND APOLOGIA
Marx used the term ideology in two interrelated senses: first, idealism and second, an apologetic body of thought. He used it in both senses all through his life, although he generally tended to use it in the first sense in his earlier, and in the second in his later writings. We shall examine each usage in turn.
I
Even when as a young man Marx felt drawn to Hegel’s philosophy, he found the latter’s idealism unacceptable. He ridiculed it in a letter to his father and subjected it to a systematic critique in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right? In the Holy Family he turned his attention to the Young Hegelians. He traced their limitations to their idealism, and subjected it to a mixture of criticism and ridicule.3
In the Gemzan Ideology Marx continued his attack on the idealism of Hegel and the Young Hegelians with the significant difference that he now called them ideologists rather than idealists, and their systems of thought ideology rather than idealism. In the Critique he had in- variably called Hegel an idealist; in the German Ideology he calls him both an idealist and an ideologist, and uses the terms interchangeably. In Chapter VI of the Holy Family Marx had criticised Bruno Bauer for his speculative idealism; in the German Ideology he criticises him for being an ideologist. The charge is the same, only the name is different In other words the German Ideology carries on under a different banner a battle that Marx had begun in his first critique of Hegel and the Holy Family.
Marx’s preference’ for the new name was not inadvertent. He was familiar with de Tracy’s work and referred to him in the Holy Family. He was also aware of Napoleon’s ’scorn of ideologists’. In his view the science of ideology developed by de Tracy and his colleagues rested on the idealist assumptions, and so did the philosophy of the German philosophers. Accordingly he took over the term ideology, used it to mean idealism and called the thought of Hegel and the Young Hegelians ‘German Ideology’.
As he put it in a crossed-out paragraph in the German Ideology,.
1
There is no specific difference between Gennan idealism and the ideology of all the other nations. The latter too regards the world as dominated by ideas, ideas and concepts as the detennining principles, and certaiD notions as the mystery of the material world accessible to the philosOphers.
Marx’s usage is basically the same as that of the French ideologists. For both ideology refers to a systematic and self-contained study of ideas, the crucial differences being that while the French ideologists regarded it as a wholly legitimate inquiry, Marx took the opposite view.