Contribution to the Theory of Ideology1

Theodor W. Adorno (1954)

The concept of ideology has generally entered the scientific language. "Only rarely", wrote Eduard Spranger recently, "is there any talk of political ideas and ideals, but very much of political ideologies".1a By relating to motivational contexts, intellectual entities are drawn from knowledge into social dynamics. The indispensable appearance of their view as well as their claim to truth is critically penetrated. The independence of intellectual products, even the condition of their independence itself, is thought together with the real historical movement of society in the name of ideology. It is in this movement that the products originate and in which they exercise their function. They should be in the service of particular interests, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Indeed, their separation itself, the constitution of the spirit sphere, its transcendence, is simultaneously determined as the social result of the division of labour. Already in its mere form this transcendence justifies a divided society. The share in the eternal world of ideas is reserved for that which is privileged by being excluded from physical labour. Motifs of this kind, which can be heard everywhere where ideology is mentioned, have set its concept and the sociology that handles it in opposition to traditional philosophy. Traditional philosophy still claims, albeit not in the same words, that the change of phenomena is related to the permanent and unchangeable being. The statement of a German philosopher, who still appears with a great deal of authority today, is well known. In the era of pre-fascism, he compared sociology to a thieving cat burglar. Such notions, which have long since seeped into popular consciousness and have contributed significantly to the mistrust of sociology, make reflection all the more necessary, as they mix up what has long been incompatible, sometimes blatantly contradictory. Above the dynamization of intellectual contents by critique of ideology one tends to forget that the doctrine of ideology itself falls within the historical movement and that, if not the substance, then at least the function of the concept of ideology is subject to the dynamics of historical change. What ideology means and what ideologies are can only be determined in this way by doing justice to the movement of the concept, which is at the same time one of the things.

If one disregards those oppositional countercurrents of Greek philosophy which have fallen into disrepute due to the triumph of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition and are only today laboriously reconstructed, the general conditions of false consciousness contents have been noticed at least since the beginnings of modern bourgeois society at the turn of the 16th and 17th century. Francis Bacon's antidogmatic manifestos for the liberation of reason proclaim the struggle against "idols", the collective prejudices that, as in the final phase of the age, burdened humanity at its beginning. His formulations sometimes sound like anticipations of thoughts of modern positivist language criticism, of semantics. He characterizes a type of idol that the spirit has to renounce, the idola fori, freely translated, the idols of mass society: "People join together with the help of speech; but words are added to things according to the views of the crowd. Therefore the inappropriate naming treats the spirit in a strange way... The words do violence to the spirit and disturb everything "2 Two things deserve to be emphasized in these sentences from the earliest modern Enlightenment. On the one hand, the deception is blamed on "the" people, i.e. as it were the invariant beings of nature, and not on the conditions that make them so, or to which they are subject as a mass. The doctrine of innate blindness, a piece of secularized theology, still belongs to the arsenal of vulgar ideology even today: by attributing the false consciousness to a basic condition of human beings or to their socialization in general, not only their concrete conditions are ignored, but moreover also the blindness is as it were justified as natural law and the rule over the blinded is justified from it, as Bacon's pupil Hobbes indeed did later. Furthermore, the deceptions of nomenclature, of logical impurity, are blamed on the subjects and their fallibility instead of objective historical constellations, just as Theodor Geiger recently again dealt with ideologies as a matter of "mentality" and denounced their relationship to social structure as "pure mysticism".3 Even Bacon's concept of ideology, if it is permitted to speak of such a concept, is as subjectivist as Kurrente today. While his doctrine of idols wants to help the emancipation of the bourgeois consciousness from church paternalism and thus fits into the progressive trajectory of Bacon's overall philosophy, the limits of that consciousness are already foreseeable with him: the intellectual perpetuation of conditions that are presented, for instance, according to the model of ancient states, which one strives for, and abstract subjectivism, which suspects nothing of the moment of untruth in the isolated category of the subject itself.

The politically progressive impulse of the criticism of false consciousness outlined by Bacon then became much more distinct in the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The left-wing encyclopaedists Helvétius and Holbach, for example, claimed that prejudices of the kind Bacon generally attributed to people had their specific social function. They served to perpetuate unjust conditions and opposed the realization of happiness and the establishment of a rational society. The prejudices of the great, according to Helvetius, are the laws of the small4 , and in another work: "Experience shows us that almost all questions of morality and politics are decided by power and not by reason. If opinion dominates the world, then in the long run it is the powerful who dominates opinions.5 One may think that the modern business of opinion research forgot this axiom and until recently believed that it was allowed to stop at the last date of the subjective opinions that were spread in each case, but one can recognize the change of function of the motives of the Enlightenment with the change of society. What was once critically conceived is now only meant to be used to determine what "is the case", and the findings themselves are affected by this. Statements about the surface of ideology, that is, about the distribution of opinions, take the place of the analysis of what they mean for society as a whole. Admittedly, even the encyclopedists have not yet fully achieved insight into the objective origin and objectivity of the social function of ideologies. In most cases, prejudices and false consciousness are still attributed to machinations of the powerful. As Holbach says: "Authority generally considers it in its interest to uphold valid views (les opinions reçues): the prejudices and errors which it considers necessary to secure its power are perpetuated by power which never obeys reason (qui jamais ne raisonne). "6 At about the same time, however, Helvetius, perhaps the greatest thinker among the encyclopedists, had already seen the objective necessity of what they otherwise ascribed to Camarillen's ill will: "Our ideas are the necessary consequences of the societies in which we live.

The motif of necessity is then central to the work of the French school, which called itself the idéologues, the researchers of ideas. The word ideology comes from one of its main exponents, Destutt de Tracy. It ties in with empirical philosophy, which dissected the human mind in order to expose the mechanism of cognition and trace the question of truth and commitment back to it. But his intention is neither epistemological nor formal. He does not seek out in the mind the mere conditions of validity of judgments, but instead he wants to examine the contents of consciousness itself, to observe, disassemble and describe mental phenomena like an object of nature, a mineral or a plant. Ideology, he once said with provocative formulation, is a part of zoology. Following Condillac's tangible materialistic sensualism, he wants to trace all ideas back to their origin in the senses. For him, it is no longer enough to refute false consciousness and to accuse what it is for, but all consciousness, right and wrong, is to be brought to the laws by which it is governed, and from there, however, only one step is left to the conception of the social necessity of all the contents of consciousness in general. The idéologues share the mathematical and scientific orientation with the older tradition as well as with the most recent positivism. Destutt de Tracy, too, places the origin and development of linguistic expression in the foreground; he, too, wants to combine a mathematical grammar and language with the examination on primary data, in which every idea would be clearly assigned a sign, as already Leibniz and the earlier rationalism had in mind. All this, however, is now being harnessed for a practical political purpose. Destutt de Tracy still hoped to prevent false, abstract principles from taking root by confronting them with sensual realities, because they not only hindered communication between people, but also the building of state and society. For his science of ideas, the ideology, he expected the same degree of certainty and security as physics and mathematics show. The strict methodology of science is to put an end once and for all to the arbitrariness and arbitrariness of opinions, as scourged by the great philosophy since Plato; false consciousness, what is later called ideology, is to dissolve before the scientific method. At the same time, however, it is precisely in this way that science and the spirit are given primacy. The school of ideologues, which was fed not only by materialistic but also by idealistic sources, remains faithful to the belief that consciousness determines existence, despite all empiricism. As the supreme science, Destutt de Tracy conceived of a human being as the basis for all political and social life. Comte's idea of the scientific and finally also the real-social role of sociology as a ruler is thus already virtually contained in the ideologues.

Her teaching was also initially meant to be progressive. Reason should prevail, the world should be set up for the benefit of mankind. Liberalistically, a harmonious balance of social forces is assumed, in which only everyone acts according to his own well-understood, self-transparent interests. This is also the way the concept of ideology initially worked in real political struggles. According to a passage quoted in Pareto, Napoleon, although his dictatorship was itself linked in so many ways to bourgeois emancipation, had already raised against the idéologues, albeit in a more subtle way, the accusation of the corrosive, which then accompanied like a shadow the social analysis of consciousness. In doing so, he emphasized, in language colored by Rousseau, those irrational moments that were later always invoked against the so-called intellectualism of critique of ideology, while again, ideology theory itself was fused with extreme irrationalism in its later phase with Pareto. Napoleon's words are: "It is the doctrine of ideologues - that blurred metaphysics which seeks the primary causes in a subtle way and on the basis of which the legislation of peoples is to be built, rather than adapting the laws of knowledge of the human heart and the lessons of history - to which all the misfortunes which have struck our beautiful France must be attributed. Their mistakes had to lead, as they did, to the regime of the men of horror. In fact, who proclaimed the principle of revolt as a duty? Who seduced the people by elevating them to a sovereignty they were incapable of exercising? Who has destroyed the sanctity of the laws and respect for them by no longer deriving them from the sacred principles of justice, the essence of things and the civil legal order, but exclusively from the arbitrariness of a people's assembly composed of men without knowledge of civil, criminal, administrative, political and military laws? When one is called to renew a State, one must constantly follow contradictory principles (des principes constamment opposés). History shows the image of the human heart; in history one must seek to discern the advantages and evils of the various legislations.8 However little lucid these sentences may be, and however much they confuse the natural law doctrine of the French Revolution with the later physiology of consciousness, it is clear that Napoleon, in any analysis of consciousness, sensed the danger of a positivity which seemed to him to be better placed in the heart. Also that later use of language which, in the name of "Realpolitik", uses the expression "ideologues foreign to the world" against allegedly abstract utopians, is apparent in Napoleon's pronunciamento. But he failed to recognize that the analysis of consciousness of the idéologues was by no means so incompatible with the interests of power. It was already accompanied by a technical-manipulative moment. The positivist doctrine of society has never renounced it and has always kept its findings available for opposing social purposes. Even the idéologues are in the domain of experts, and the knowledge of the origin and development of ideas is the domain of the experts, and what they have worked out should enable the legislator and the head of state to establish and maintain the order desired by him, which is of course still equated here with the reasonable order. But the idea that people can be guided by a correct knowledge of the chemistry of ideas prevails; in contrast to it, as in the sense of the scepticism which inspired the school of idéologues, the question of the truth and objective binding nature of ideas takes a back seat, as do those of objective historical tendencies on which society depends both in its blind "natural-law" course and in the potential of its conscious rational order.

These moments then became decisive in the ideology of scientific socialism. I shall refrain from discussing this doctrine. Its outline is common knowledge. On the other hand, however, the formulations on which it is based, especially the question of the relationship between the inner consistency and independence of the mind and its social position, would require meticulous interpretations. These would have to deal with central questions of dialectical philosophy. The truism that ideologies in turn have an effect on social reality was not enough. The contradiction between the objective truth of the spiritual and its mere being for others, which traditional thinking cannot cope with, would have to be determined as one of the things, not as a mere inadequacy of the method. Since today I am concerned with structural change and change of function of ideology and the concept of ideology, I would like instead to deal with another moment, the relationship between ideology and bourgeoisie. The intellectual motives from the prehistory of the concept of ideology, which I have reminded you of, all belong to a world in which there was not yet a developed industrial society, and in which there was hardly any doubt whether freedom was indeed achieved with the establishment of formal civic equality. Inasmuch as the question of the material life process of society has not yet arisen, in all those Enlightenment teachings the study of ideology has its special place: one believes that it is enough to put consciousness in order to put society in order. But it is not only this belief that is bourgeois, but the very essence of ideology. As an objectively necessary and at the same time false consciousness, as an entanglement of the true and the false, which is as much a separation from the full truth as from the mere lie, ideology belongs, if not merely to the modern, then at least to an unfolded urban market economy. For ideology is justification. It demands the experience of an already problematic social condition that must be defended, as well as the idea of justice itself, without which such an apologetic necessity would not exist, and which has its model in the exchange of comparable things. Where mere direct power relations prevail, there are actually no ideologies. The thinkers of restoration, eulogists of feudal or absolutist relations, are bourgeois simply by the form of discursive logic, of argumentation that contains in itself h an egalitarian, anti-hierarchical element, and therefore always merely hollow out what they glorify. A rational theory of the monarchical system, which is supposed to substantiate its own irrationality, would have to sound like an insult to majesty wherever the monarchical principle is still substantial: the substantiation of positive power by reason virtually annuls the principle of recognition of the existing. Accordingly, critique of ideology, as a confrontation of ideology with its own truth, is also only possible to the extent that it contains a rational element on which critique can work off. This applies to ideas like those of liberalism, individualism, the identity of spirit and reality. If, however, one wanted to criticize the so-called ideology of National Socialism in the same way, one would fall prey to powerless naivety. Not only does the level of the writers Hitler and Rosenberg mock all criticism. Their lack of standards, over which triumphing is one of the most modest pleasures, is a symptom of a state of affairs that is no longer directly affected by the concept of ideology, of necessary false consciousness. In such thoughts no objective mind is reflected, but they are manipulatively conceived, mere means of domination, which in principle no one, not even the spokesmen, expected to be believed or taken seriously as such. With a wink they refer to power: use your reason for once against it and you will see where you come to; in many cases the absurdity of the theses seems to be designed to try out what people cannot be expected to do, as long as they only hear the threat behind the phrases or the promise that something of the spoils will fall for them. Where ideologies have been replaced by the ukas of the approved worldview, critique of ideology must indeed be replaced by the analysis of the cui bono. One can see from this how little critique of ideology has to do with the relativism with which it is so often lumped together. It is, in the Hegelian sense, a certain negation, a confrontation of the spiritual with its realization, and presupposes as much the distinction between the true and the untrue in judgment as the claim to truth. Relativistic is not the critique of ideology, but the absolutism of totalitarianism, the decrees of Hitler, Mussolini and Zhdanov, who not without reason call their enunciations themselves ideology. The criticism of totalitarian ideologies does not have to refute them, because they do not claim autonomy and consistency at all or only in a very shadowy way. Rather, it is indicated to them to analyze what dispositions in people they speculate on, what they seek to evoke in them, and that is very different from the official declamations. It remains to be asked why and in what way modern society produces people who respond to those stimuli that require such stimuli and whose spokespersons are to a large extent the leaders and demagogues of all kinds. What is necessary is the development that led to such changes in ideologies, but not their content and structure. The anthropological changes to which the totalitarian ideologies are tailored follow from structural changes in society, but only in that, not in what they say, are they any substantial. Ideology today is the state of consciousness and unconsciousness of the masses as objective spirit, not the puny products that imitate and undercut it in order to reproduce it. Ideology in the true sense of the word requires itself to be opaque, mediated and, in this respect, also moderated in its power relations. Today, society, wrongly scolded for its complexity, has become too transparent for that.

But this is the last thing that is conceded. The less ideology and the more crude its inheritance, the more ideological research that promises to be measured against the diversity of phenomena at the expense of social theory. While in the Eastern Bloc the concept of ideology was turned into an instrument of torture, which, together with insubordinate thought, overtakes whoever dares to think it, it has on this side softened in the wear and tear of the scientific market, lost its critical content and thus its relationship to truth. Approaches to this can already be found in Nietzsche, who, of course, meant it differently and wanted to slap the pride of limited bourgeois reason in its metaphysical dignity in the face. Then, as today, Max Weber denied the existence or at least the recognizability of a total structure of society and its relationship to the spirit, and demanded that one should, with the help of ideal types that are not subject to any principle, only to the interest of research, pursue without prejudice what the primary and secondary are. In this he touches upon the aspirations of Pareto. If Max Weber restricted the concept of ideology to the proof of individual dependencies and in this way reduced it from a theory about the whole of society to a hypothesis about individual presuppositions, if not even to a "category of understanding sociology", then, with the same effect, Pareto, through the famous doctrine of derivatives, expanded it so that it no longer contains any specific difference. The social explanation of false consciousness becomes the sabotage of consciousness per se. For Max Weber, the concept of ideology is a prejudice that must ever be examined, for Pareto, everything is spiritual ideology - in both cases it is neutralized. Pareto draws from it the full consequence of sociological relativism. The spiritual world, as far as it is more than mechanical natural science, is denied any character of truth; it dissolves into mere rationalizations of interests, justifications of all imaginable social groups. The critique of ideology has become a jungle right of the spirit: truth as a mere function of the power that will ever prevail. In spite of all apparent radicalism, Pareto resembles the early doctrine of idols in that he does not actually have a concept of history, but rather attributes the ideologies, "derivatives", to people. Although he emphatically lays claim to conducting research into ideologies in a logical-experimental manner, according to the pattern of natural science, true to the facts, and in doing so is completely unchallenged by the critical reflections of Max Weber, with whom he shares the pathos of freedom of values, he uses expressions such as tout le monde or even les hommes. He is blind to the fact that social conditions change what he regards as human nature, and that this also affects the relationship between the driving motives, the residuals, and their descendants, derivatives or ideologies. A significant passage from the Traité de Sociologie Générale reads: "Derivatives are basically the means by which everyone uses... Up to the present, the social sciences have often consisted of theories made up of residuals and derivatives. They had a practical purpose: to make people act in a certain way that was considered useful for society. The present work, on the other hand, is an attempt to transfer those sciences exclusively to the logical-experimental level, without any intention of immediate practical utility, with the sole purpose of learning the laws of social results. . . On the contrary, those who wish to undertake research exclusively on the logical-experimental level must be extremely careful to avoid using derivatives: for them, they are an object of research, never a tool of argumentation.9 By referring to human beings as such instead of to the concrete form of their socialization, Pareto falls back on the older, almost pre-sociological, standpoint of ideological doctrine, the psychological one. He stops at the partial recognition that one must distinguish between "what a person thinks and says about himself and what he really is and does", without adhering to the complementary demand that "one must, even more in historical struggles, distinguish the phrases and imaginations of the parties from their real organism and their real interests, their idea of their reality". In a sense, ideological research is being steered back into the private sphere. It has been rightly noted that Pareto's concept of derivatives is closely related to the psychoanalytical concept of rationalization first introduced by Ernest Jones and then accepted by Freud: "Man has a ... strong tendency to link logical developments to non-logical actions. "10 Pareto's principled subjectivism, which points back to his subjective economy, does not actually derive the untruth of ideologies from social conditions and objectively predetermined delusional contexts, but from the fact that people subsequently try to justify and justify their true motives. He does not inquire into the element of truth of ideologies which is not psychologically comprehensible but only in relation to the objective conditions: they exhaust themselves, as it were, in their anthropological function. Hans Barth's formulation in "Truth and Ideology" is correct, according to which for Pareto the spiritual world, insofar as it claims to be something other than the investigation of causal relationships according to the model of mechanics, has neither inherent lawfulness nor epistemological value.11 The apparent scientificization of the doctrine of ideologies includes the resignation of science to its object. By making himself blind to reason in ideologies, as it was hegelially conceived in the concept of historical necessity, Pareto simultaneously abandons the legal claim of reason to judge ideologies at all. This doctrine of ideologies is itself perfectly suited to the ideology of the totalitarian power state. By first subsuming all spirituality to the purpose of propaganda and domination, it gives cynicism a scientifically good conscience. The connections between Mussolini's sayings and the Pareto tract are well known. Political late liberalism, which in the concept of freedom of expression had a certain affinity to relativism anyway, in so far as everyone was allowed to think what he wanted, regardless of whether it was true, because after all everyone only thought what was most favourable to his advantage and self-assertion, - this liberalism was by no means immune to such perversions of the concept of ideology. This also confirms that the totalitarian rule of mankind was not imposed on it from outside by a few desperados, that it was not an industrial accident on the straight highway of progress, but that in the midst of culture the forces of its destruction were maturing.

By extracting the doctrine of ideology from the philosophical theory of society, a kind of illusory exactness is created, but the real cognitive power of the concept is sacrificed. This can also be seen where the concept was absorbed by philosophy itself, in Max Scheler's work. In contrast to Pareto's shapelessly leveling theory of derivatives, he has endeavored to create a kind of typology, not to say ontology, of ideologies. Today, not quite thirty years later, his once much-admired attempt reads surprisingly naively:

"Among such classically determined formal ways of thinking, I count the following, for example:

2. consideration of becoming - the lower class; consideration of being - the upper class... .

4. realism (world predominantly as 'resistance') - underclass; idealism - upper class (world predominantly as 'imaginative').

5. materialism - underclass; spiritualism - upper class . .

8. optimistic future prospects and pessimistic retrospection - underclass; pessimistic future prospects and optimistic retrospection ... - Upper class.

9. contradiction-seeking thinking or 'dialectical' thinking - lower class; identity-seeking thinking - upper class ... . .

These are class-related tendencies of the subconscious mind to perceive the world predominantly in one form or another. They are not class prejudices, but more than prejudices: namely formal laws of prejudice formation, formal laws which, as laws of predominant tendencies to form certain prejudices, are only and solely rooted in the class situation - quite apart from individuality. ... etc. If they were fully recognized and understood in their necessary emergence from the class situation, they would constitute a new teaching piece in the sociology of knowledge, which I consider an analogy of Bacon's idol theory ... . as a 'sociological idolatry' of thinking, viewing and values. "12

It illuminates that, even in Scheler's own view, this too coarse scheme of upper and lower class, which shares with the philosophically polar opposite Pareto the absence of historical consciousness, does not approach the concretion of social structure, nor that of ideology formation. The contrast between static-ontological and dynamic-nominalist thinking is not only crude and undifferentiated, but also wrong with regard to the structure of ideology formation itself. What Scheler called the ideology of the upper class has today to a large extent just an extremely nominalistic character. Existing conditions are defended with the argument that their criticism is an arbitrary construction of concepts from above, that it is "metaphysics", and that research must be based on unstructured facts, "opaque facts": Pareto himself is the example of such an ultranominalist apologetics, and the social-scientific positivism prevailing today, which one would hardly attribute to the subclass of the Scheler scheme, shows the same tendency. Conversely, the most important of the theories that Scheler would classify as ideologies of the underclass have precisely opposed nominalism. They are based on the objective total structure of society and an objective concept of unfolding truth formed on Hegel. Scheler's phenomenological procedure, as a passive, constructivist measurement of philosophy in terms of ostensibly comprehensible entities, fell into a second degree of positivism, a kind of spiritual positivism, even in its late phase. But where the concept does not construct the thing, the thing itself escapes him.

With Scheler and Mannheim, ideology has become the academic branch of the sociology of knowledge. The name is significant enough: all consciousness, not only the false, but also the true, i.e. "knowledge", should be subject to the proof of social conditionality. Mannheim himself boasted of the introduction of a "total ideology concept". In his main work "Ideology and Utopia" it says something like

"With the emergence of the general version of the total ideology concept, the sociology of knowledge emerges from the mere doctrine of ideology... It is clear that the concept of ideology takes on a new meaning in this context. There are two possibilities. The first possibility is that from now on, in the study of ideology, one gives up any 'revealing' intention ... and limits oneself to working out everywhere the connection between the social situation and the view. The second possibility is that this 'value-free' attitude is subsequently combined with an epistemological attitude. This ... can ... lead either to a relativism or to a relationism that are not to be confused with each other "13

It is difficult to distinguish seriously between the two possibilities that Mannheim provides for the application of the total ideology concept. The second, that of an epistemological relativism or, with the nobler word, relationism, which Mannheim contrasts as the "epistemological" attitude of the first, the value-free study of the relationship between "state of being and view", i.e. between substructure and superstructure, is not at all in opposition to the latter, but at best outlines the intention to shield the procedures of a positivist sociology of knowledge by methodological raisonnements. Mannheim probably felt that the concept of ideology was only justified as that of a false consciousness, but is no longer powerful in terms of content and postulates it only formally, as an alleged epistemological possibility. In place of a certain negation, general worldview is taken, and then, following the example of Max Weber's sociology of religion, the demonstration of empirical connections between society and spirit. The doctrine of ideology breaks apart into a highly abstract, complete draft and monographic studies that defy concise articulation. In the vacuum in between, the dialectical problem of ideologies is lost: that they are false consciousness, but not only false. The veil that necessarily lies between society and its insight into its own essence expresses at the same time, by virtue of such necessity, this essence itself. Real ideologies become untrue only through their relationship to the existing reality. They can be true "in themselves", just as the ideas of freedom, humanity, justice are, but they act as if they had already been realized. The labeling of such ideas as ideologies, which the total concept of ideology allows, testifies in many cases less of irreconcilability with the false consciousness than of anger at what, in however impotent mental reflection, might point to the possibility of a better. It has been rightly said that those who are supposedly contemptuous of such ideological concepts often mean less the abused concepts than what they stand for.

Instead of theoretical discussions about how the concept of ideology should be formulated today, I would like to give you some indications about the concrete present form of ideology itself in order to initiate the discussion. The theoretical construction of ideology depends on what is actually effective as an ideology no less than, conversely, the determination and penetration of ideology requires theory. Let me first appeal to an experience which none of us can escape: that something decisive has changed in the specific weight of the mind. If I may recall for a moment art as the most faithful historical seismograph, there seems to me no doubt that it has been weakened, which contrasts sharply with the heroic times of modernism around 1910. The social thinker cannot be modest in attributing this weakening, from which other intellectual areas such as philosophy are hardly spared, to a so-called decline in creative powers, or to the evil technical civilization par excellence. He will rather feel a kind of rock shift. In contrast to the catastrophic processes in the deep structures of society, the spirit itself has assumed something ephemeral, thin, powerless. In the face of the present reality, it can hardly assert its claim to seriousness unbroken in the way that it was taken for granted in the cultural beliefs of the nineteenth century. The shifting of rocks - literally one between the layers of the superstructure and the substructure - extends into the most subtle immanent problems of consciousness and spiritual formation and paralyzes rather than lacks forces. The spirit, which does not reflect on it and continues as if nothing had happened, seems to be condemned to helpless vanity beforehand. If ideology has ever reminded the spirit of its frailty, its self-consciousness must now face up to this aspect; one could almost say that today consciousness, which already Hegel essentially determined as the moment of negativity, can only survive to the extent that critique of ideology takes it up in itself. Ideology can only be meaningfully spoken of to the extent that an intellectual emerges from the social process independently, substantially and with its own demands. Its untruth is always the price of this detachment, the denial of the social reason. But also its moment of truth clings to such independence, to a consciousness that is more than the mere imprint of the existing and that strives to penetrate the existing. Today, the signature of ideologies is rather the absence of this independence than the deception of their claim. With the crisis of bourgeois society, the traditional concept of ideology itself seems to lose its object. The mind splits up into the critical truth, which is alienated from appearance but esoteric and estranged from the immediate social causal relationships, and the planning administration of what once was ideology. If one determines as the inheritance of ideology the totality of those intellectual products which today fill the consciousness of people to a great extent, then one may understand by this less the autonomous spirit, blinded to its own social implications, than the totality of what is made up to capture the masses as consumers, and if possible to model and fix their state of consciousness. The socially induced false consciousness of today is no longer an objective spirit, also in the sense that it is by no means blindly, anonymously crystallized from the social process, but is scientifically tailored to society. This happens with the products of the cultural industry, film, magazines, illustrated newspapers, radio, bestselling literature of all kinds, among which novel biographies play a special role, and now in America especially television. It goes without saying that the elements of this ideology, which is quite uniform in itself, in contrast to many of the techniques used to disseminate it, are nothing new, that many of them are virtually fossilized. It ties in with the traditional difference between the high and the low cultural sphere, which was already apparent in antiquity, whereby the low sphere is rationalized and integrated with run-down remnants of the high spirit. Historically, the schemes of the contemporary cultural industry can be traced back in particular to the early days of English vulgar literature around 1700. It already possesses most of the stereotypes that are now grinning at us from the screen and television. However, the social consideration of this qualitatively new phenomenon must not be duped by the reference to the venerable age of its components and the argument based on it of the satisfaction of primal needs. For it is not these components that matter, nor the fact that the primitive features of today's mass culture have remained the same throughout the ages of an underage humanity, but the fact that they are all under control today, that a closed system has been made of the whole. No sooner is escape tolerated than people are surrounded on all sides, and with the achievements of perverted social psychology, or, as it has been aptly called, reverse psychoanalysis, the regressive tendencies are promoted, which the growing social pressure is in any case releasing. Sociology has taken possession of this sphere under the title of communication research, the study of mass media, and has placed particular emphasis on the reactions of consumers and the structure of the interplay between them and producers. Such studies, which hardly deny their origins in market research, certainly cannot be denied their cognitive value; but it seems more important to treat the so-called mass media in the sense of critique of ideology than to be modest about their mere existence. Its tacit recognition through descriptive analysis is itself an element of ideology.

In view of the indescribable violence which the media exercise on people today, which in a broader sense also includes sport, which has long since been passed over into ideology, the concrete determination of its ideological content is immediately urgent. It aims at synthetic identification of the masses with the norms and conditions which, whether anonymously, are behind the culture industry or are consciously propagated by it. Censorship is practised on everything that does not agree, conformity is practised down to the most subtle emotions. The culture industry is able to play the role of an objective spirit in so far as it links up with anthropological tendencies that are awake in those it supplies. It takes up these tendencies, reinforces and confirms them, while everything that is insubordinate is either omitted or expressly rejected. The inexperiential rigidity of the thinking prevailing in mass society is possibly hardened by this ideology, while at the same time an exaggerated pseudo-realism, which provides the exact image of empirical reality in everything external, prevents what is offered from being seen as something already preformed in the sense of social control. The more alienated people are from the manufactured cultural goods, the more they are persuaded that they are dealing with themselves and their own world. What one sees on the television screens resembles the all too familiar, while the counter-arguments of slogans, such as that all foreigners are suspect or that success and career are the highest in life, are smuggled in as once and for all given. If one wanted to condense into one sentence what the ideology of mass culture actually boils down to, one would have to present it as a parody of the sentence: "Become what you are": as an exaggerated duplication and justification of the already existing state, including all transcendence and all criticism. As the socially effective spirit limits itself to only once again presenting to people what anyway constitutes the condition of their existence, but at the same time proclaims this existence as its own norm, they are fastened in the unbelieving belief in pure existence.

Nothing is left as ideology, but the recognition of the existing itself, models of a behaviour that submits to the superiority of the circumstances. It is hardly a coincidence that today's most effective metaphysics attach themselves to the word existence, as if the doubling of mere existence by the highest abstract determinations drawn from it were synonymous with its meaning. To a large extent this corresponds to the state in the minds of men. They no longer accept the ludicrous situation that threatens every day with avoidable catastrophe in the face of the open possibility of happiness as the expression of an idea, as they might still feel about the bourgeois system of nation states, but they accept the given in the name of realism. First of all, the individuals experience themselves as pawns and calm themselves down in the process. But since ideology says little more than that it is as it is, its own untruth shrinks to the thin axiom that it cannot be other than what it is. While people bow to this untruth, they secretly see through it at the same time. The glorification of the power and irresistibility of mere existence is at the same time the condition for its disenchantment. Ideology is no longer a shell, but only the threatening face of the world. Not only by virtue of its interweaving with propaganda, but also by its own form, it turns into terror. But because ideology and reality move towards each other in such a way; because reality, in the absence of any other convincing ideology, becomes itself, it would require only a small effort of the mind to cast off the appearance of being at once almighty and trivial.

1954

Footnotes

1 The contribution belongs in the context of the ongoing joint work with Max Horkheimer. - The author would like to thank Heinz Maus and Hermann Schweppenhäuser for their contribution.

1a E. Spranger, Wesen und Wert politischer Ideologien, in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2 (1954), S. 118 ff.

2 F. Bacon, Novum organum, in: The Works of Francis Bacon, London 1857, Vol. I, S. 164. - Vgl. H. Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie, Zürich 1945, S. 48. The author owes several proofs of the development of the concept of ideology to Barth's work.

3 Th. Geiger, Kritische Bemerkungen zum Begriffe der Ideologie, in: Gegenwartsprobleme der Soziologie, Potsdam 1949, S. 144.

4 C.A.Helvétius, De l'Esprit; in Übersetzung zitiert nach Barth, op.cit., S.65.

5 C. A. Helvétius, De l'Homme; in Übersetzung zitiert nach Barth, op. cit., S.66.

6 d'Holbach, Système de la Nature, A Paris, l'an deuxième de la République Françoise une et indivisible, I, IX, S. 306/07; in Übersetzung zitiert. - Vgl. Barth, op. cit.. S. 69.

7 C. A. Helvétius. De l'Esprit; vgl. Barth. op. cit.. S. 62.

8 In Übersetzung zitiert nach V. Pareto, Traité de Sociologie Generale, Paris 1933, Vol. II, § 1793, S 1127.

9 V. Pareto, op. cit., Vol. II, § 1403, S. 791; in Übersetzung zitiert.

10 V. Pareto, op. cit., Vol. I, § 180, S. 92; in Übersetzung zitiert.

11 H. Barth, op. cit., S. 345 (Anmerkungen).

12 M. Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, Leipzig 1926, S. 204 f.

13 K. Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie, 3. Aufl., Frankfurt a. M. 1952, S. 70 f.