What do you think?
Rate this book
Knowledge and Ideology: The Epistemology of Social and Political Critique
Ideology critique generally seeks to undermine selected theories and beliefs by demonstrating their partisan origins and their insidious social functions. This approach rightly reveals the socially implicated nature of much purported knowledge, but also brackets or bypasses its cognitive properties. In contrast, Michael Morris argues that it is possible to integrate the social and epistemic dimensions of belief in a way that preserves the cognitive and adjudicatory capacities of reason, while acknowledging that reason itself is inevitably social, historical, and interested. Drawing upon insights from Hegel, Lukács, Mannheim, and Habermas, he interprets and reconstructs Marx's critique of ideology as a positive theory of knowledge, one that reconciles the inherently interested and inextricably situated nature of thought with more traditional conceptions of rational adjudication, normativity, and truth. His wide-ranging examination of the social and epistemic dimensions of ideology will interest readers in political philosophy and political theory.
- GenresPhilosophyPolitics
316 pages, Hardcover
Published November 10, 2016
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 14, 2023
Amazing book. Succinctly summarizes everything important I have learned so far.
I find this quote very useful
" Another text from 1844 aptly summarizes Marx’s stance toward what he will later designate as “ideology.” Through the right kind of critique, Marx insists, we must “wake up the world from its dream of itself” and thereby “explain its own actions to it.” He then insists that this clarification does not occur through our forceful insistence upon some “dogma,” but through the “analysis of the mystical consciousness itself, which [currently] remains obscure to itself.”58 In all its forms, whether, religious, political, moral, philosophical, or economic, our consciousness initially represents the “dream” of our actions. In general, our actions or practice flow along their socially given or inherited course, without emerging into consciousness at the level of explicit reflection. Indeed, as we shall consider in Chapter 8, we generally inherit our customs and institutional roles – themselves just social patterns of action – through example and habituation, and we normally employ them without much conscious reflection. However, in the face of obstacles, we begin to reflect upon some custom or role, seeking to articulate its origins, its ends, its variations, and its location with some larger and interrelated set of practices. If obstacles promote theoretical reflection, they also frequently engender sublimation, particularly when the obstacles do not lie within some small-scale practice itself, but rather in the larger and often submerged structures that organize large segments of our social existence.
This sublimated consciousness of action is the ideological dream of our existence. It is also our principle conscious awareness of reality, and therefore it cannot simply be rejected or countered with dogmatic – though perhaps true – assertions. Instead, we must use the dream as our guide to reality, not merely or primarily by considering the way the dream represents reality, but also by considering how it emerges from or expresses reality. This is the principle assumption that guides Marx’s new method of reading, his distinctly epistemic critique of ideology."
I find this quote very useful
" Another text from 1844 aptly summarizes Marx’s stance toward what he will later designate as “ideology.” Through the right kind of critique, Marx insists, we must “wake up the world from its dream of itself” and thereby “explain its own actions to it.” He then insists that this clarification does not occur through our forceful insistence upon some “dogma,” but through the “analysis of the mystical consciousness itself, which [currently] remains obscure to itself.”58 In all its forms, whether, religious, political, moral, philosophical, or economic, our consciousness initially represents the “dream” of our actions. In general, our actions or practice flow along their socially given or inherited course, without emerging into consciousness at the level of explicit reflection. Indeed, as we shall consider in Chapter 8, we generally inherit our customs and institutional roles – themselves just social patterns of action – through example and habituation, and we normally employ them without much conscious reflection. However, in the face of obstacles, we begin to reflect upon some custom or role, seeking to articulate its origins, its ends, its variations, and its location with some larger and interrelated set of practices. If obstacles promote theoretical reflection, they also frequently engender sublimation, particularly when the obstacles do not lie within some small-scale practice itself, but rather in the larger and often submerged structures that organize large segments of our social existence.
This sublimated consciousness of action is the ideological dream of our existence. It is also our principle conscious awareness of reality, and therefore it cannot simply be rejected or countered with dogmatic – though perhaps true – assertions. Instead, we must use the dream as our guide to reality, not merely or primarily by considering the way the dream represents reality, but also by considering how it emerges from or expresses reality. This is the principle assumption that guides Marx’s new method of reading, his distinctly epistemic critique of ideology."
Displaying 1 of 1 review