People can hold beliefs that work against their own interests because those beliefs were shaped by the interests of others.
The phrase comes from Engels's 1893 letter to Franz Mehring rather than from Marx, who never used it: Engels described ideology as thinking carried on consciously but with a false consciousness, its real motives unknown to the thinker. Later Marxists used it to explain why industrial workers did not become revolutionaries.
In practice
- A worker opposes a union because he has absorbed the view that unions protect the idle, a view his employer paid consultants to promote.
- A household votes against a tax on large inheritances it will never pay, in the hope of one day being rich enough to pay it.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the ruling-ideas mechanism, in which beliefs are shaped by those with the means to shape them. Another is aspiration: people adopt the views of the group they hope to join. A third, from psychology, is system justification, the motivation to see existing arrangements as fair.
- In its favour
- Offers an account of why material interest predicts political views poorly, and connects to measured work on system justification by Jost and Banaji.
- Against it
- Critics call it unfalsifiable and condescending: any disagreement can be diagnosed as false consciousness, and it assumes the theorist knows people's interests better than they do. People may weigh values other than material gain.
- Standing
- Contested on both empirical and moral grounds. Compare ruling ideas and What's the Matter with Kansas, a later form of the argument.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change