On voluntary servitude : false consciousness and the theory of ideology

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Title:

Author:

Rosen, Michael.

ISBN:

9780674637795

Personal Author:

Rosen, Michael.

Publication Information:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1996.

Physical Description:

xi, 289 p. ; 24 cm.

Contents:

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.

Subject Term:

Ideology.

Copies:

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Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168025430568	306.4 R813.O 1996	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Those who approach the history of political thought must pick their way through a veritable elephant's graveyard of grand theories. This book is aimed at one of the oldest and grandest of them all: the theory of ideology. The Age of Grand Theory has only recently ended, yet it is already hard to recall how many unquestioningly believed in the idea of ideology as false consciousness, most notably in Karl Marx's version of that idea. Michael Rosen diagnoses the underlying question to which the theory of ideology was meant to provide the answer: Why do people accept forms of political domination which it is against their interests to accept? This book provides a historical and critical analysis of that answer and of the way in which it came to be taken for granted in social theory.Rosen's postmortem makes it clear that Marx was never able to develop an adequate theory of ideology and that recent attempts at reconstructive surgery on what he did give us, by G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster, have been unsuccessful. However, by putting Marx into a history that runs from Plato and Augustine to Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas, Rosen shows that, though Marx may have failed, the rationalist tradition on which he drew is far from dead--that it is, in fact, the dominant tradition in Western political thought, with very few effective dissenters.This is a very rich and wide-ranging book in the history of ideas, written with philosophic rigor and great clarity.