Stuart Hall, "The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of K...

The concept of "ideology" has been largely descriptive and not fully absorbed into Anglo-Saxon social theory. However, in the 1950s, Robert Merton's essays on "The Sociology of Knowledge" and "Karl Mannheim" marked a rediscovery of the concept for American social science. Marxism is the storm center of "Knowledgesociologie," with its formulations primarily found in the writings of Marx and Engels. However, the concept of ideology was never rigorously applied to this promising area of work.

Roger Bacon called for a thoroughgoing investigation and critique of conventional wisdom, while Helvetius suggested that our ideas are the necessary consequence of societies. Most recent overviews agree that the term ideology originated with the group of savants in the French Revolution who were entrusted with the founding of a new center of revolutionary thought. They compromised with Napoleon Bonaparte for the sake of ideas, but by 1803, they abandoned them, destroying the Institut's core.

Despite the disbanding of this group, the interest in ideology did not entirely disappear. Destutt de Tracy inaugurated a "natural history of ideas," treating the history of the contents and evolution of the human mind as a species of zoology. However, his work was shadowed by contradictions, revealing its true Enlightenment roots.

Ideology refers to the role of ideas and the idea that they are not self-sufficient and their roots lie elsewhere. The study of ideas holds the promise of a critique of idealism, as it helps explain how ideas arise. However, the study of ideas requires immense theoretical labor to prevent it from drifting into idealism. This dilemma is evident in the history of Kant's tradition, which critiqued the abstract Enlightenment notion of "Reason" and asserted the primacy of the structures and categories of "mind" over matter.

Hegel, a rival to Kant, aimed to heal the Kantian division of the world into knowledge of things and things in themselves. Hegel's method for overcoming this discontinuity was the dialectic, proposing a specific conception of the relation between knowledge and the world, mind and matter, and Idea and History.

Feuerbach and the Left Hegelians followed him, focusing on unmasking the human and sensuous roots of religious ideas. Marx advanced a materialist theory of ideology, arguing that historical concepts possess true generality because they relate to a universal agent that unfolds through the histories of particular peoples and civilizations.

The transformation of the problem of "ideologies" into the study of Weltanschauungen constitutes something like the dominant tradition in German thought for most of the nineteenth century. Lukács's work, The Soul and Its Forms and The Theory of the Novel, are directly Hegelian and Diltheyean in inspiration. Lucien Goldmann forms the theoretical basis of The Hidden God, giving it a further Marxist or sociohistorical gloss.

The relationship between Protestantism and capitalism is a significant topic in Marxist theory, with both Marx and Engels pointing to the connection. In the German historicist school, R. H. Tawney and Christopher Hill emphasize the importance of considering the role of ideology and religion in analyzing the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the seventeenth century. Marxism breaks with the expressive totality central to the Geisteswissenschaft approach by addressing the full complexity of social formations and not assuming a "given" or immediate correspondence between levels. Ideologies are not self-sufficient but are not empty or false forms, making them an important area of analysis for Marxism.

The Protestant Ethic is an intellectual tour de force that argues that the structure of Puritan ideas and the rationalization of capital accumulation are essential for the development of capitalism. It opposes the notion that economic change directly provides the content of capitalist ideas and suggests that the "homology" between capitalism and Puritanism is more important. Ideologies can create an inner compulsion in a class by pointing to the psychological aspect of ideologies without falling into individual psychologism. They have their own complex internal articulation whose specificity must be accounted for.

Capitalism emerged at the level of ideology, not through the gradual erosion and secularization of Catholicism but through the intensified spiritualization of Puritanism. Europe becomes capitalist at the ideological level by setting everything, including man's worldly activity, directly under God's supervision. Max Weber's work could be rescued from his argument without doing violence to his argument.

The struggle over method in the 20th century led to the development of irrationalism, which emerged as a response to the polarization of positivism and historicism. This impulse was rooted in German Romanticism and resurfaced again in European thought in the form of Vitalism, where Nietzsche believed that there was no guiding philosophy or method left. Max Weber's response to this idea was to construct sociological concepts heuristically in terms of typical actions, meanings, and orientations ascribed to typical individual actors. Alfred Schutz, a phenomenologist, attempted to develop a more rigorous sociological approach from this Weberian synthesis, arguing that all that could be "known" consisted of the contents and structures of consciousness, and that meaning was the product of intention.

The sociology of knowledge, developed by Schutz, has evolved to focus on social relations as structures of knowledge, treating knowledge in its widest everyday sense and not confusing it with systematic ideas. Marxist theory of ideology, which focuses on the historical development of society, has a different problematic than phenomenology, which assumes that historical reality is based on what men say, imagine, and conceive.

Durkheim, the "father" of positive social science, focused on analyzing patterns of social interaction governed by norms and institutional structures. He believed that social phenomena had a reality of their own and must be analyzed using rigorous methods. Durkheimean positivism selfconsciously closed itself off from the Subject-Object dialectic introduced by Hegel, which began with already objectivated social reality and treated the "knowable" world as a reification. Durkheim belonged to the neo-Kantian tradition, which studied "noumenal" reality through its appearance through "phenomenal" reality.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, emphasized the study of "the life of signs at the heart of social life" as a resumption of the "forgotten part of the Durkheim-Mauss programme." Lévi-Strauss's structuralism was influenced by Marx, Freud, Rousseau, the schools of Prague linguistics and Russian formalism, and the anthropological linguistics of Franz Boas. Lévi-Strauss's first application of structuralism was made to two classical themes of Social Anthropology: kinship systems and totemism.

The key difference between classical and Lévi-Strauss's structuralism lies in the meanings of the term "structure." Classical Social Anthropology understood the observable structures of a society, while Lévi-Strauss viewed it as the underlying system of relations between terms conceptualized on the model of a language. This approach cut down on the notion that men "named" simple functional objects in the real world. Lévi-Strauss believed that understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another, and that true reality is never the most objective of realities.

Structuralism is a significant development in the analysis of culture and knowledge, shifting from content to forms or structure. It relates to the arrangement of things and objects in the Australian primitive world through the logic of totemic classification. Structuralist linguistics, particularly Saussure's work on contrastive features of the phonetic system, was crucial in helping Lévi-Strauss develop a method for decoding their production. The basic elementary "move" for structuralism allowed analysts to express cultural significations in terms of the former, transposing them into the classifications, elements, and rules of selection and combination.

The birth of structuralism as a general theory of culture and the structuralist method is considered a "Copernican" revolution in the sociology of knowledge. However, its seminal character has been retrospectively repressed as intellectual fashion has tended to swing away from Lévi-Strauss's work toward other points in the structuralist field. There are at least three lines of descent: the development of a specifically "Marxist structuralism," marked by the work of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, and the two applications of the structuralist method to the field of the semiotic.