On Voluntary Servitude E-Book

Michael Rosen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 739

Beschreibung

This book addresses a central theme in social and political theory: what is the motivation behind the theory of ideology, and can such a theory be defended?

Leseprobe

On Voluntary Servitude

False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology

MICHAEL ROSEN

Polity Press

Copyright © Michael Rosen 1996

The right of Michael Rosen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press in association with Black well Publishers Ltd.

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ISBN 0–7456–0595–8ISBN 0–7456–1596–1 (pbk)ISBN 978-0-7456-6848-2 (ebook)

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Contents

Preface

1   Introduction

I     Reich’s Question

II    Method

III   Background Beliefs

IV   Society as a System and ‘Political False Consciousness’

V    Ideas and Historical Narrative

VI   The Rise of ‘Social Science’

VII  Rationalism

VIII Providentialism

IX    Marx and the Frankfurt School

X    Preview

2   The Forms of False Consciousness

I     Analysis

II    The Scope of ‘False Consciousness’

III   Ideological Irrationality

IV   Is all Ideological Consciousness Irrational?

V    Is all Ideological Consciousness ‘False’?

3   Rationalism and False Consciousness

I     Rationalism and Pessimism: Plato and Augustine

II    Political Humanism, Tyranny and Deception: De la Boetie and Machiavelli

III   The Changing Passions

IV   Amour-propre

V    Religious False Consciousness

VI   Rousseau: Amour-propre and False Consciousness

VII  Adam Smith: Sympathy and Authority

VIII Conclusion

4   Unintended Consequences and the Idea of a Social System

I     Antecedents: Aristotle and Augustine

II    Bossuet and Providentialism

III   Vico

IV   The Four Stages Theory

V    Adam Smith: Unintended Consequences and the ‘Invisible Hand’

VI   The Problem of Development

VII  The ‘Organic’ against the ‘Mechanical’: Herder

VIII The ‘Organic’ against the ‘Mechanical’: Kant and Schiller

5   Hegel

I     Division and Nature

II    Development

III   History and Freedom

IV   Geist and the Individual

V    False Consciousness: the Phenomenology of Spirit

VI   Schein

VII  The Overcoming of ‘False Consciousness’

6   Marx

I     The Emergence of the Theory of Ideology

II    The Critique of Religion

III   The ‘Reflection’ Model

IV   The ‘Interests’ Model

V    The Correspondence Model

VI   Essence and Appearance

VII  A Hegelian Marx?

VIII Unified Labour?

7   Critical Theory

I     The ‘Aura’

II    Adorno’s Transformation of Idealism

III   Benjamin’s Marxism

IV   Anti-Rationalism and False Consciousness

V    Ideology and Anti-Realist Epistemology: Horkheimer and Habermas

VI   Conclusion

8   The Theory of Ideology and Beyond

I     Arguments against the Theory of Ideology

II    Compliance without False Consciousness: The Coordination Problem

III   Non-Ideological False Consciousness

IV   Ideology as False Consciousness

V    Beyond Rationalism and Providentialism

Bibliography

Index

The truthful presentation of error is indirect presentation of truth.Novalis

Preface

This is a book that is written against a certain position, a position that, it also claims, has been taken for granted by many of the most influential social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such, I am aware that it will invite a certain kind of response. Even if its arguments are successful (perhaps, particularly if its arguments are successful) it is likely that many of those whom it addresses will dispute the ascription: deny that they (or those famous names whose authority they follow) ever thought any such thing. Attributions of this kind are, of course, difficult to establish. It is one thing to argue against a position held and stated explicitly, it is another to show that that position is one to which an author is implicitly committed. In the end, perhaps, the most that one can hope for is to reverse the burden of proof. I think that those who believe they can draw the kind of conclusions that are characteristic of the theory of ideology without making the assumptions I attribute to them at least owe us a more explicit account of what different assumptions they make and why these are more defensible.

However that may be, I know of one undeniably appropriate target for my arguments: my own earlier self. I started to think about social theory in the early 1970s, a time when such thinkers as Lukács, Althusser, Sartre, Habermas, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Gramsci and Godelier were first becoming known in Great Britain. It seemed to me then that what these otherwise very disparate writers had in common was their conviction that the determination of ideas in society was something that needed to be explained systematically, as a result of social structure or historical forces prior to the individual. The chief line of cleavage, as I saw it, was between those who believed that the source of this determination lay in some kind of a collective, social subject and those who took the social process to be generative but agentless – between, to put it crudely, neo-Hegelians and structuralists. The questions that interested me were: Which of these two was right? and, What would follow philosophically from that fact?

What I did not consider at that time was the possibility that neither of the two positions was correct. Yet, as I continued to think about the issues, it became increasingly clear to me that the claims made on behalf of the social determination of ideas were both excessively sweeping and alarmingly imprecise, while such empirical evidence as I could find to support them was either thin or, to say the least, questionable. Thus another question more and more forced itself upon me: If claims made about the social determination of ideas were, in fact, not true, why should they nevertheless have seemed to be so obvious to so many? The task, then, was to look at the intellectual weaknesses of the position, while, at the same time, looking for the reasons for its appeal.

Having reached this point at the end of the 1970s, I might have set out to write a book whose conclusions would not have been very dissimilar to the ones presented here had it not been for the appearance of G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: a Defence. In that justly celebrated book Cohen advances a position that I had not, until then, considered seriously: that it might be possible to make claims regarding the determination of one element of social life by another very similar in content to those advanced by the Continental theorists but without making any assumptions about ‘collective agency’ or ‘generative structures’ – indeed, without giving any ontological commitments that the most parsimonious natural scientist should find shocking. I find that position no more persuasive now than I did when I first encountered it, but the imagination and rigour with which its author has defended it set me a serious challenge, one which at once delayed my project and forced me to raise the level of its discussion.

As I have worked my way towards my present views I have incurred many debts that I must acknowledge, even if I cannot repay them. Alex Callinicos and Charles Taylor listened to my stuttering first attempts to articulate my sense of the problems with patience and sympathy. G. E. M. de Ste Croix very kindly gave me the benefit of his extensive knowledge regarding the development of Marx’s thought. It was at an early stage, too – longer ago than I think either of us would care to remember – that John Thompson persuaded me to offer my project to Polity Press. Since then he has been an exemplary editor, fully equal to the heavy demands I have placed on his tolerance. I am deeply grateful for his engagement and support.

Later, I learned a great deal from a seminar at University College London, among whose participants I must single out Matt Brandi, Mark Hannam, Bill Hart and Andrzej Szahaj for special thanks. Martin Jay read a paper of mine that was later to be incorporated into Chapter 7 as well as discussing many other issues with me at, alas, all too infrequent intervals over the years, and I have benefited from his great knowledge of Continental social thought. I am grateful to the Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford, for granting me two terms of sabbatical leave, and thank especially my colleague David Goldey for cheerfully taking on the burdens caused by my absence. That I managed to write a first version of the book during that precious time is due to my good fortune in being allowed to concentrate on my work while being able to take advantage of those around me. In particular, I would like to thank Rosamund Diamond and David Ish-Horowicz for their many acts of generosity.

That first version has now been transformed thanks to the enormously detailed comments of three friends: Jerry Cohen, Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Wolff. I cannot overstate how much I owe to their thoroughness, acuity and erudition. It would be impossible to acknowledge individually all the points I have taken from them; suffice it to say that any gross errors of fact or reasoning that still remain have in all likelihood been newly introduced by me or are the result of stubbornness on my part in the teeth of their good advice. In addition, I have received very valuable comments on all or part of the book from Stefan McGrath, Brian O’Connor, Alan Patten, Bob Stern, John Thompson, Gavin Williams and Hannes Wittig. I am most grateful to them all.

Thanks are due to Caroline Richmond for her skilful copy-editing and to Tom Runnacles for his work on the index.

I have left until last the debt that I owe Charlotte Klonk, for it is at once my greatest and least easy to express. Throughout, it has been her sympathetic criticism that has set me the standards at which to aim and her unwavering support that has given me the encouragement to do so.

I

Introduction

I Reich’s Question

‘What has to be explained’, wrote Wilhelm Reich, ‘is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don’t steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don’t strike.’1 That, as a simple first formulation, is the question which lies behind this book. Why do the many accept the rule of the few, even when it seems to be plainly against their interests to do so? The theory of ideology gives one very distinctive kind of answer to Reich’s question. The reason, it claims, is that societies are systems that produce the kind of consciousness that prevents the members of a society from behaving as their interests would otherwise dictate. Ideology, in Theodor Adorno’s phrase, is ‘necessary false consciousness’.2 But to assess this theory will turn out to be a complicated matter. In the first place, the nature of the answer that the theory of ideology is offering requires clarification. In what sense is ideological consciousness ‘necessary’? In what sense ‘false’? What is behind those terms? What assumptions must we make about the nature of society and the kinds of explanation that can be appropriately applied to it if a theory of ideology is to be possible? All of these issues will be addressed in more detail below, but, for now, it is important to pre-empt some misunderstandings.

First, I must make it clear that when I speak, as I shall throughout the book, of the theory of ideology, I am talking of a genus with a variety of species. It is no part of my case that all the theorists of ideology share exactly the same commitments – far from it. A browse through the Bodleian Library catalogue reveals more than 800 entries with the word ‘ideology’ in their title. Anyone hoping for some system in this profusion will be disappointed. They will find instead that the term has become part of a vast semantic delta through which shallow and muddy channels meander without apparent purpose. My object in this book is not to survey this delta but to guide the reader through it by locating what I take to be the main channel. To do so, I shall take a step back and identify the stream (or, as I shall argue, streams) of thought which originally fed it. Reich’s question will be our guide, and it will turn out that many current uses of the term ‘ideology’ will be only distantly related to what I take to be the central issues.3

A second point to be made at the outset is that my use of the phrase ‘false consciousness’ is not meant to foreclose the issue of whether ideology is a matter of false beliefs. On the contrary, as I shall argue in the second chapter, that is only one form that the theory of ideology can take. For the moment, I hope that the reader will allow me to take the phrase ‘false consciousness’ informally, in its broadest possible sense, meaning simply consciousness that is, in some way or other, deficient or inadequate.

Nor should it be assumed that the theory of ideology is committed to the view that unequal societies are reproduced by means of some positive set of shared beliefs, values or cultural practices – a ‘dominant ideology’, as it is sometimes called. False consciousness can, in principle, just as well be something negative: the failure to form an adequate, shared system of beliefs, values or practices. So the mere absence of a dominant ideology does not contradict the theory of ideology in the sense at issue here; that very absence could itself be ideological.

Finally, let me clarify the sense in which the theory of ideology is committed to the view that unequal or otherwise illegitimate societies reproduce themselves by means of false consciousness. The claim here is merely that this is a necessary condition for such societies’ preservation, not that it is always the sole means that they employ. As far as Marx is concerned, I believe that he thought ideology was indispensable to the survival of capitalist class society. But, of course, it would be absurd to say that Marx thought coercion played no part in the survival of capitalism; he simply believed that coercion was not enough.

The approach that I shall employ in this book is both historical and critical. At its centre is a historical account of the intellectual background from which the theory of ideology emerged. The point of this account is to help to identify the original scope and purpose of the theory and to articulate those conceptions of human nature and society that made it seem acceptable (or even self-evident) to social theorists. But I shall argue that we ought not to take for granted (that, indeed, there are good reasons for rejecting) the assumptions on which the theory of ideology has been based. The position I am presenting is thus critical not just of those theories of ideology that have actually been proposed but, more broadly, of any theory of ideology that proceeds from such assumptions.

Nevertheless, even if I succeed in unconvincing the reader about the theory of ideology, some fundamental issues remain. There is, first, Reich’s problem itself: what other kinds of account might there be of the maintenance of order in society – in unequal societies in particular? Moreover, to reject the theory of ideology is not to eliminate the question of ‘false consciousness’. While we may not be justified in supposing that unequal societies maintain themselves because societies in general have the power to produce ‘false consciousness’ in their citizens, there may still be a sense in which false consciousness is a pervasive feature of certain social orders (ours included). If so, then it is plainly a task of the very greatest importance to see what that sense might be. Finally, there is a question about the theory of ideology itself. Why did it seem so plausible? And what does it tell us about Western social thought that it should have been so?