Ideology and False Consciousness: Marx and His Historical Progenitors

In 1831 Hegel predicted that the English Reform Bill would fundamentally challenge the governing aristocracy. "As a result of reform," he wrote, "the route to Parliament may be open to ideas which are opposed to the interest of this class and which therefore have not yet entered its head" (Hegel's Political Writings, Oxford University Press, 1969, 324). As we shall see, Hegel's statement anticipated Marx's concept of false consciousness. However, Christopher Pines' Ideology and False Consciousness ignores Hegel's unique contribution - a damaging omission in an otherwise valuable book devoted in part to Marx's "historical progenitors. "

Hegel's discussion of the aristocratic mentality in his article on the English Reform Bill closely parallels Marx's concept of false consciousness, as defined by Pines. For Hegel, English landowners did not reject arguments favoring electoral reform because of an immense conspiracy to trick the masses. Rather, they were genuinely deceived by their own propaganda and blind to its sociopolitical implications. Moreover, like other ruling groups in history, aristocrats had idealistic fantasies about their actual motivations; they attributed their views solely to rational thinking rather than recognizing the material (and distorting) determinants of their thought.

There are many similar constructions in Hegel's writings. After all, the German philosopher invented the notion of class consciousness. In Hegel's Philosophy of Right, for example, the agricultural, business, and government classes each have their own particular structure of thought, their own "class...