Marx and the critique of ideology. From philosophy to science?

Abstract




In order to reveal the source of the inverted social relationships as reflected in consciousness through the dominant bourgeois ideology, Marx and Engels invoke, in German Ideology, a notion of science that is marked by the 19th century positivism. This is a notion of science as direct truth, which allegedly springs from the experience of real conditions of the social human life. This kind of ideology-free science is able to unmask and consequently to dissolve the fallacy of the ideological forms of consciousness, speculative philosophy included. Although Marx in his later works will abandon such an unfounded and contradictory notion of science, the very introduction of the term “science” in the field of theoretical struggle and the radical reconceptualization of the initial notion of science will be crucial in his intellectual course towards the Capital and the critique of ideology which develops there.