Tom Atchison's Dissertation on False Consciousness (home)

• Chapter 1 - Introduction

  • 1.1 "God created me to be a slave"

  • 1.2 Historical background 1:Ideology and false consciousness

  • 1.3 Historical background 2: Debates about pluralism and power

  • 1.4 Historical background 3: The idea of a critical social theory

  • 1.5 A look ahead

• Chapter 2 - False Consciousness as a Concept

  • 2.1 The general idea

  • 2.2 The schema

  • 2.3 Some examples

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 "God created me to be a slave"

On October 12, 1997, under the title "God Created Me To Be a Slave," The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a story describing the plight of some 90,000 persons. Though technically free citizens of Mauritania (human bondage having been abolished by government decree three times, most recently in 1980), these black Africans serve their Arab masters under conditions approximating chattel slavery: hard labor compensated only by meagre food and shelter, brutal punishment administered at the whim of their masters, status passed from parents to children, no education, no right to refuse to provide any service, including sex. Yet, as the title signals and as the article is at pains to emphasize, they accept their condition, and their masters do not chain them or fear that they will rebel or run away.

Most of the article is devoted to descriptions of the conditions of the slaves' lives, of efforts to make their emancipation real and not just technical, and of government foot-dragging and duplicity. But the author (Elinor Burkett) comes back again and again to the slaves' passivity and acceptance of slavery. By the end she has offered a rudimentary theory to explain it: "thought is the product of custom and culture," and nothing in the custom or culture of these slaves has given them the conceptual tools to criticize or question their status, to imagine an alternative, or to formulate a project of their own. "The possibility of rebellion, like the possibility of a world made up entirely of free men and women, is inconceivable among people who have lost their collective memory of freedom." Instead their culture has given them a religion, Islam, which is interpreted by local religious authorities to endorse slavery, and an accompanying belief in the division of the human species into very different kinds. The sentence quoted in the title reads in toto, "God created me to be a slave, just as he created a camel to be a camel." The speaker is a young woman, Fatma Mint Mamadou, who had run away from her master when, after a particularly severe beating, she feared for her life. But her flight is described as impulsive, unplanned, and motivated by an instinctual drive to survive, not by any rejection of her status or any challenge to her master's rights. She left her three small children behind, because "they belonged to her master, not her."

In the perspective offered by the Sunday magazine of our nation's 'newspaper of record', this story seems calculated to arouse, perhaps, our sympathy and indignation, but even more our wonder; that anyone could be so thoroughly pacified while so cruelly exploited. Fatma appears as the mysterious other. (Colonialist myths may be lurking in the neighborhood.) But there is a style of radical social theory which would urge us to recognize in Fatma's case a common human predicament, a kind of damage that we too may have suffered. My business herein is to explore, and (so far as I can) vindicate one of the pervasive themes which recurs in that style of social theory, the theme of social mystification and illusion, of psychological or internalized oppression, of manipulated consensus and manufactured consent -- in a phrase, false consciousness.

'False consciousness' is a notion that plays an important role in various kinds of radical social theory. For classical marxism it is workers' 'false class consciousness' -- their ignorance of the real nature of the socioeconomic system they inhabit and of their objective class interests within that system -- which accounts for their failure to rally to the socialist cause. Many feminists turn to concepts like 'male-identification' and other variants of false consciousness to explain some women's resistance to feminist programs or their rejection of feminist accounts of 'women's experience', and consciousness raising is often identified as a central task of feminist practice -- evidently implying that the unraised consciousness is in some way deficient. Writers and activists who claim to speak for 'liberation struggles' in the so-called third world say that an important obstacle to their struggle against imperialism and colonialism of various sorts is the 'internal' or 'cultural colonization' of the people they want to liberate. Here in the U.S. theorists of 'Black liberation' and other minority liberation movements see themselves as facing similar obstacles, like 'internalized racism'. And, among domestic critics of the imperialist and neo-colonial policies of the U.S. government, those who think that those policies are not in the interest of most U.S. citizens point to the manipulation of public opinion and the construction by the media of a distorted picture of the world as key factors in explaining public support for the government position. In each case false consciousness -- a socially constructed amalgam of ignorance, error, and illusion -- is not only an important element in the theorists' picture of social reality but also a crucial part of their explanation of the fact that their theories are rejected or ignored by many of the people to whom and for whom they claim to be speaking.

This last fact is the source of considerable uneasiness. Critics of radical theories have seen in the appeal to false consciousness a crude attempt to save the theories from disconfirmation or to impose radical priorities on people quite properly committed to other values. And some supporters of radical social movements have worried that the use of concepts like 'false consciousness' or 'male identification' reflects an insensitivity to the actual experience of oppressed people or an attempt to enforce conformity on a diverse movement. Such worries have led some feminist writers, for example, to insist that "every woman's experience is valid" and to condemn appeals to false consciousness as arrogant and unfeminist. In a similar vein, 'postmodern' writers have insisted on the situated and socially constructed character of every discourse, including that of radical social theorists, whose pretension to have hold of a 'truth' which can serve them as a yardstick for others' 'false consciousness' must therefore be empty.

While I take these worries very seriously and admit that 'false consciousness' is a concept which can be abused, I think it is also a concept which is needed for political analysis and political practice. I hope to provide an elucidation and vindication of the notion, as well as a way of telling which uses of it are abusive and which are not. Of course, the usefulness and importance of a way of theorizing cannot be established by philosophical analysis alone. Critical social theories, theories giving a central role to false consciousness, must be tested against the experience of the various groups of people on whose behalf they are supposedly constructed. In fact, I will suggest, they need to be worked out with the active participation of the people they are about. (They need to be a project of self-understanding, quite literally.) I do not propose to undertake the kind of research/dialogue necessary to establish the truth of marxism, feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism. Rather, I hope to show that proponents of these theories are not (always) doing something conceptually or methodologically or morally or politically objectionable when they use false consciousness as part of an explanation of people's actions or failures to act or as part of an account of their experience. At the same time I want to show that some ways of developing (and deploying) such theories are objectionable.

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1.2 Historical background 1:Ideology and false consciousness

The word 'ideology' (actually its cognate "ideologie") was first used — by a group of French thinkers around the turn of the 19th century — to designate the science of ideas. These "ideologues," followers of Locke and Condillac, wished to establish a natural science aimed at explaining the origins of ideas, mainly in sensations. They thus hoped to supplant metaphysical and theological understandings of human mentality, with a naturalistic (zoological) approach.[1] This use of the word has survived in dictionaries (see, inter alia, the OED) but not, so far as I can discover, anywhere else.

Napoleon is generally credited with initiating the next major use of "ideology." The Emperor, irritated by their liberal criticisms of his regime, closed the ideologues' school, dissolved their discussion circle, and gave the words "ideologie" and "ideologue" a pejorative connotation which they have largely retained to this day. He associated the ideological with the chimerical and impractical, and he also initiated the practice of characterizing the ideas of one's opponents (but not one's own ideas) as ideological.

I think it safe to say that the wide currency the word enjoys is a consequence of its having been taken up into Marx's extremely influential social theory. Marx's theory of ideology figures centrally in his materialist conception of history. It is an important part of what Marx intends in his famous assertion that "social being determines consciousness,"[2] and it provides a major tool in his criticism of bourgeois political economy. Just what Marx meant by "ideology" is a subject of some controversy, and some commentators have accused him of confusion and inconsistency on this as on many other points.[3] It is clear enough that he used the term to refer to beliefs and belief systems and that he had in mind mainly, perhaps entirely, those beliefs which are false, or at least misleading or incomplete. In Engels' phrase ideology involves "false consciousness."[4] Various narrower interpretations have been proposed. It has been suggested that Marx meant to include in the class of ideological beliefs only those which reach the public stage, only those which are about human nature and the nature of human societies, only those which are unscientific or "undialectical," only those which serve class interests, or only those which are typically held by members of a certain class or other social group.[5] It has also been suggested that he had in mind not particular beliefs but rather the conceptual framework or generative rules which lie behind particular beliefs as grammatical rules lie behind the sentences of a language.[6]

It is also controversial what Marx's theory of ideology asserts. Perhaps he meant that all ideas[7] are, in some sense, socially determined. Perhaps he held that all socially determined ideas are, in some sense, false. Perhaps he thought that ideologies are specific to classes so that proletarians could be expected to have one ideology and capitalists another. Perhaps he thought that "ruling class ideas" are likely to be inculcated in members of subordinate classes. Perhaps he thought that people's beliefs about society would be false as long as the division of labor persists. Perhaps he thought that people's beliefs about society would be false only in those periods of "contradiction" when the social relations of production have been outstripped by the development of the forces of production. Perhaps, on the other hand, it is just during those pre-revolutionary times that a more correct consciousness can break through the prevailing ideological distortion. Certainly Marx was not entirely clear and consistent on these points.

Without attempting the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of giving an interpretation of Marx's view which resolves the many difficulties created by his conflicting and sometimes implausible texts, I will briefly sketch a rather simplistic theory which, I think, is not entirely at odds with Marx's intentions. Ideology may be defined, in Adorno's phrase, as "socially necessary illusion (Schein)."[8] Ideological illusions are socially necessary in two senses: First they serve to preserve a social order from radical change by making that order seem, on the whole, legitimate and well suited to the interests of its members and/or by making the costs of change seem too high. Second they are brought about by social processes (socialization, education, mass communications) which are thus an important part of the social order. These social processes are largely controlled by members of the ruling class, i.e., the class which controls the means of production. Alternatively, they may be brought about by a more spontaneous process, wherein people are taken in by the deceptive surfaces of social life. (No one has to deceive or manipulate them.) In periods of social change (which come about because the forces of production have developed to the point where new social relations are required for their full implementation and further development) one of the subordinate classes (which is in the best position to carry out the implementation of the newly developed forces of production) seeks to supplant the ruling class and, generally after violent revolutionary struggle, succeeds. Part of the revolutionary struggle consists in struggling to disseminate a new ideology which legitimates the revolutionary efforts and, eventually, the rule of the rising class by representing the institutional changes which are in the interest of its members as being in the interest of all the members of society (or at least all the members of non-ruling classes). Ideologies are sometimes put forward with conscious intent to deceive, but more often they are believed also by the people they benefit. This is partly due to self-deception or wishful thinking, and partly it is due to the 'deceptive appearances' which confuse both rulers and ruled. In any case, the rulers benefit by being shielded from awareness of the oppressive role they play or are striving to play. In our time a class, the proletariat, has developed whose interests really are identical with the interests of all the (non-ruling class) members of society and whose rise to power will bring about the abolition of classes, of class struggle, and of the need for social illusions.

The concept of ideology which figures in this theory is "critical" in the sense that to describe a belief as ideological is to criticize it. The criticism which is involved is the claim that the belief is false and, moreover, serves to blind at least some people to their real interests. Hence, the later tendency to use such phrases as "ideologically false consciousness" or just "false consciousness."[9] Marx's followers began very soon after his death to use the term "ideology" not in his critical sense, but rather in a neutral sense which applied to all political, social, and economic thinking including the ideas of Marxists themselves. In the writings of Bernstein and Lenin we find no hesitation in speaking of "proletarian" and "communist" ideology. Although this tendency is not universal, much Marxist usage now seems to coincide with that of many Western social scientists. "Ideology" in many mouths refers to any political belief system or, at least, to any conception of human nature and society which has normative content and thus is able to legitimate political programs. False consciousness drops out of the picture and we simply have contending world views, normative belief systems, and the like.

In the l950's and 60's several American and European social scientists (Aron, Shils, Bell, etc.) proclaimed the "end of ideology" and in so doing used the word in a pejorative sense which ironically reversed Marx's.[10] For it was Marxism and other "extremist" doctrines whose relevance was supposedly at an end, to be replaced by "pragmatic" or "civil" politics. Ideologies were held to be doctrines which led people to pursue radical social change by infecting them with a passion for utopia, whereas a pragmatic or rational approach to politics involved negotiating the best deal possible within the existing (fairly responsive) political system or pursuing a gradualist program of reform. These writers tended to follow Marx's lead in predicating the possibility of an end to ideology on the historical development of industry, which brings consensus in the wake of affluence. But they were less demanding than Marx was of the social conditions for the abolition of class conflict and, hence, ideology. Better working conditions and a higher rate of pay (allowing a so-called higher standard of living) are undoubtedly an improvement over nineteenth century working class life, but these improvements do not begin to effect the structural transformation Marx believed would allow the demise of ideological illusions and utopian strivings. Class struggle may be only latent in the affluent society, but pending the abolition of private property in the means of production, the division of labor, and the coercive power of the state a Marxist must judge that the interests of the working class would be best served by revolutionary change, and that conflict will break out whenever working class people become conscious of this and feel able to do something about it.

The historical development of the concept of ideology has left its usage in a rather untidy condition. Some writers, perhaps most, use the term in a non-pejorative sense to refer to any fairly systematic set of political beliefs. Of these, some emphasize the normative character of the beliefs they wish to call "ideology;"[11] others emphasize the fact that comprehensive political belief systems, even if not explicitly evaluative, must include beliefs about how society works and how it could work which are not, practically speaking, subject to any empirical test.[12] Many writers continue to use the word, in something like Marx's way, to designate a theory or belief system which serves class (or other dominant group) interests, by representing what benefits a few as benefitting all, or as inevitable, or as natural, or as legitimate (when this representation is false).

Aside from the question of how to define "ideology," there is also much discussion of whether the concept is still (if it ever was) a useful one in political analysis and criticism. Some writers think that it is time to give the concept up as a bad job, leading only to over-simplification and bringing along questionable assumptions. I'll discuss one such argument, Foucault's, in later chapters.[13] But for many, it retains its usefulness as a central concept in political analysis, helping us see how struggles over ideas and meanings can be an important part of political conflict more generally and how beliefs and attitudes can play an important role in preventing political conflict from arising. This leads to our next topic.

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1.3 Historical background 2: Debates about pluralism and power

In The Power Elite and other writings C. Wright Mills presented a view of the U.S. as a place where ideology played a role in heading off political conflict. Mills' analysis of the power relations present in American society includes the claim that many people in American society are afflicted with more or less vaguely felt troubles which can be removed only by major changes in the social structure. Because people do not know that such changes would improve their lot and are possible, they do not seek to bring them about. They suffer from false consciousness. (He didn't use the term in The Power Elite, but he did in The Sociological Imagination and in other writings).[14] Part of the power of the 'power elite' consists in its ability to encourage and sustain this false consciousness. Against those theorists who saw the political processes in America as fairly responsive balancers of conflicting interests, Mills claimed that the most important and far-reaching questions about the nature of our society and of possible alternatives to it are never raised, much less resolved, by the political process. The consensus which lies behind the competition of various interest groups for favorable legislation, a share of public funds, etc., is not a product of free and informed public discussion but of apathy, confusion, ignorance, and stereotypical thinking fostered wittingly and unwittingly by the political, educational, and communicational institutions of mass society.[15]

This analysis clearly included a rather severe criticism of the existing processes of policy formation — a criticism involving value judgments about, among other things, the quality of most people's lives. Social theorists who want to regard themselves as scientists, and who think that the scientific approach to the study of social life requires us to leave behind our evaluative commitments when we do science, tend to reject Mills' way of doing social theory. They want to separate description and explanation from criticism, which Mills does not do. Nelson Polsby's book Community Power and Political Theory, for example, contains a rejection of the legitimacy of Mills' approach. According to Polsby, when Mills ascribes false consciousness to American working people, he is merely imposing on them his own middle class commitment to political participation. The objective interests which Mills would have people pursue are 'constructs' of his own and not something properly belonging to the people in question. From Polsby's perspective, a social theorist must take people's behavior as the best guide to what their interests are and not impose his own values on them.[16]

A rejection of the legitimacy of the concept of false consciousness can also be discerned in the writings of theorists who use so-called rational choice models in political analysis. According to Riker and Ordeshook[17] the business of the political theorist is to examine the processes by which the preferences of individuals become the choices of society. Part of this enterprise involves determining what the preferences of various individuals in fact are. To do this the theorist must assume that the people in question are rational and then see what goals their behavior can be construed as rationally pursuing. The temptation to be avoided in this kind of investigation is the temptation to say that one's subjects are irrational when their behavior does not seem to be construable as a pursuit of the goals the theorist thinks appropriate. Despite their insistence that "in a practical science the moral and the descriptive go hand in hand,"[18] Riker and Ordeshook claim that "we have no objective method to determine what goals are right or proper for a particular situation"[19] and hence we can charge people with irrationality only when they fail to pursue any goals at all. That people might be making a mistake by pursuing some goal which it is not in their interest to attain (or by failing to pursue some goal which is in their interest) does not enter into the framework.

These positions were soon attacked by a series of writers who argued that, by attempting to be value-free, these approaches to the study of politics manage to smuggle an endorsement of the status quo into their theories and explanations. Worse (from a scientific point of view) they fail to understand what is really going on in the societies they are studying. (For convenience I will focus on the "pluralists" and their critics, the "elitists." But a similar argument has been run by critics of the rational choice school.[20]) Not wishing to make value judgments about what is really important or about what is really in people's interests, the pluralists (so-called because they said that political power was dispersed among a variety of interest groups) investigated political systems by studying the conflicts that arose in the public arena and its institutions. Studying a city, they would focus their attention on the issues that came before the city council, for example, and try to discover what outcomes were being advocated by which groups, and who got their way, and how. To the question "Who rules here?" they would answer, "Whoever prevails on the political conflicts in the public arena." As it turned out, that meant that the answer was "No one," because different groups prevailed depending on the issue, the occasion, and other adventitious factors. The political system seemed to accommodate a variety of competing interest groups and to be open to whatever grievances any group felt like bringing before it. In short, Mills was wrong. There is no power elite.

But the elitists struck back: You have not discovered that there is no power elite, they argued. You have simply defined your problem in such a way as to rule it out by fiat. We can't just assume that the issues which come into the public arena (before the city council, say) are the only important issues or the only locus of conflict. There may be groups with grievances who do not bring them into that arena. They may, for example, believe that they have no chance of winning a struggle in that arena and so give up before it starts. They may be kept out by behind the scenes manipulations, or by rules which make it hard for them to gain access, or by informal norms precluding the legitimacy of their issue. If so, and if any or all of this may be attributed to the actions or the capacity to act of some group, then that group may be a power elite after all. Thus was born the notion of a "second face of power."[21]

Soon followed by a third: keeping grievances from making it into the arenas of public political dispute would be easier if the people whose grievances they were didn't even know they had them. If some people could so shape the perceptions and values of other people that those perceptions and values kept them from even recognizing, much less pursuing, their legitimate grievances, then the first group would have exercised a very effective sort of power, but it would be invisible to the pluralist observer. (Mills' theory of 'mass society', you will remember, was of this kind. People experienced 'troubles,' but they did not have a clear sense of their institutional sources or what might be done about them.) By having defined "power" and "interest" in ways that excluded these more covert exercises of power and less obvious interests, the pluralists managed to convey the message that American democracy was working well, and that the prevailing property relations (which were, by and large, not a subject of overt political conflict) were legitimate. The critics wished to dispute these propositions. And, as evidence that their concerns were relevant to empirical political science, they pointed out that the pluralists' insensitivity to latent conflicts prevented them from anticipating the upheaval which spilled into the streets and the political arena in the 1960's.

An acrimonious and protracted debate ensued, which included a good deal of discussion of false consciousness and the related notion of real or objective interests. It is not clear (to me anyway) what the upshot of this debate was. But it put the issue of false consciousness on the agenda of relatively mainstream political science. I will return in Chapter 6 to one product of the debate: Nelson Polsby's 1980 update of his classic pluralist tract Community Power and Political Theory, in which he makes some concessions to his critics, but argues for sharp limits to the usefulness of any notion of false consciousness. His position, in 1963 and in 1980, included a commitment to a behavioral approach to political theory, which was to be value free, to be based on observable evidence, to put forward only empirically disconfirmable propositions, and so on. He was, in short, like many political scientists, committed to the idea that political theory should be scientific, and to an understanding of science expressed in the writings of such philosophers as Karl Popper and Imre Lakatosh. From that perspective, imputations of false consciousness seemed to rest on unscientific and illegitimate value judgements about what was really good for people, how they ought to live and the like -- judgements Polsby consistently termed "preferences of the analyst." Is there any alternative to this way of understanding political and social science?

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1.4 Historical background 3: The idea of a critical social theory

On one view, there is no necessary connection between methods of producing knowledge and how that knowledge is to be used: science provides information or explanation, and then people can do with it what they will. But the proponents of critical theory saw a connection. For some there was an important distinction between 'instrumental reason' and 'critical reason,' and knowledge developed for the purpose of prediction and control would be quite different in its form from knowledge developed for the purposes of critical self-awareness and emancipation. But for Jurgen Habermas (in his middle phase anyway) there are three kinds of knowledge, each correlated with a particular kind of practical interest or project.[22] There is empirical-analytical knowledge (for which Popperian philosophy of science does provide an adequate account) aimed at prediction and control of natural phenomena. There is interpretive knowledge aimed at being able to understand and communicate with sign-using speakers. And there is reflection, aimed at assessing and revising our own practices. Moreover, these three kinds of knowledge can be ranked in an order. Some aspects of human behavior can be understood with the tools of empirical analytical science. (Empirical regularities can be discovered in human behavior.) But for the most part these regularities will in fact depend on rules, norms, and institutions which must be interpreted in order to be understood. (A purely behavioral account of a wedding would leave out almost everything important to understanding what was going on. A social scientist studying the effect of changes in welfare law on poverty rates may be able to use quantitative methods to compare the effects of different policies, but the variables correlated --"poverty rate, " "workfare vs. unconditional entitlement," etc.-- have their place in a meaningful social world, and their adequacy as tools of understanding have to be assessed from that point of view.) But the regularities in human behavior which arise from social institutions (etc.) are not like natural laws. Institutions change over time and vary from place to place. Moreover, one way that they change is that people decide to change them in light of reflective knowledge which includes both an interpretive understanding (in terms of rules, norms, etc.) and an empirical-analytic explanation of the (often unintended) consequences of those practices or institutions. The task of a critical social theory is to develop this third kind of knowledge.

How does false consciousness come into this picture? For creatures like us, who have the power to reflect, institutions and practices are contingent. Their continuation depends on our continuing participation. (People could, for example, simply stop getting married. Of course, participation in institutions is often enforced with sanctions. But even the galley-slave could let go of his oar and take the consequences.) They are based, that is, on consent. But people do not always recognize this. They give their practices and institutions a false objectivity, as if there were no alternatives, as if they did not have a choice. Moreover, even when they recognize the possibility of withholding their consent, people may decide to give it on the basis of misunderstandings and misjudgments of a variety of kinds, or without much reflection. In either case, we can say, they have false consciousness. The task of a critical social theory, then, is to dissolve the spurious objectivity of social institutions and practices by showing that they have a history, and to criticize the false legitimations that produce unwarranted consent. This criticism is partly historical : showing that a form of consciousness is reflectively unacceptable by showing how it developed under conditions of coercion rather than rationally. It is partly internal : showing that forms of consciousness fail to satisfy the standards already contained in the going social practices, which is often a matter of showing that the practices themselves fail to live up to their own professed standards. And, for Habermas but not for some other critical theorists, it is partly transcendental : showing that certain norms are presupposed by any communicative practice, regardless of what the participants might currently think.

The roots of this approach to social theory are supposed to be found in Marx. Marx's theory emphasized the historical variability of social institutions and charged "bourgeois political economy," for example, with falsely universalizing an historically contingent economic system, that is, with supposing that the laws of capitalist production were the laws of any possible mode of production. He also charged that bourgeois political economy built into its theory various errors which had the effect of concealing the exploitive character of capitalist society, thus contributing to its legitimation. Marx's economic theory allegedly exposed those errors and thus had the potential to help undermine that legitimacy (for those who could read and understand it!). But these errors were not only the errors of an influential theory. The theory was, in some ways, simply an expression of attitudes and conceptions that came naturally to people whose experience was shaped by the capitalist mode of production. Consequently, Marx's critique of capitalist economic theory was (or became) also a critique of capitalist common sense.

Marx was not only a writer. He was an activist who spent much of his life trying to organize an international working class movement. What did his theory have to do with this movement? I think there is some tension in his work around this point. On the one hand Marx was quite insistent that what he had come up with was a science. On the other hand, he liked to say that communist theory was just "the self consciousness of the working class movement." It's not clear how to fit these together, and it's not clear how to articulate the relationship of critical social theory more generally to the people on whose behalf it is supposed to be developed. If it is a science, then it is tempting to say that it can be developed by intellectuals (even bourgeois intellectuals like Marx) and then explained to the oppressed workers. If, on the other hand, it is their self-consciousness, then it would seem to need to be developed by them. (Perhaps some bourgeois intellectual fellow travelers could then summarize and tidy up.)

False consciousness now comes into the picture again. Given that the oppressed workers are caught up in capitalist social relations and thus in the illusions those relations generate, as well as being subject to ruling class propaganda, it looks like their 'self-consciousness' is not going to develop in the right direction on its own. It looks like somebody who has broken free of those illusions is going to have to guide and teach them. This was Lenin's view. It represents one way to resolve the tension sketched above. But Marx produced a rather trenchant criticism of this approach in his Theses on Feuerbach, "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are the product of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances, and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society."[23] We'll see how Marx sought to resolve this dilemma in a moment, but first it is worth noticing another possibility.

If false consciousness is the product of "circumstances and upbringing," then perhaps we can hope that those circumstances will change all by themselves, bringing consciousness along with them. This is the way Marx's theory of history sometimes sounds. In his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx sketches a picture of historical change that seems to give human will and consciousness only a subsidiary role, if any. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being," he says, "but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness," and the conditions that produce revolutionary change are almost mechanical. "Relations of production" are overturned by "forces of production," and everything that happens "must be explained from the contradictions of material life" and not from "the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this struggle and fight it out."[24] I don't think Marx meant us to understand this process quite so mechanistically, but if we did, we could then conclude that we didn't need to worry about changing people's minds, the automatically changing social circumstances would do that anyway. (Of course, with this picture, why would we want to do anything?) At any rate, some critics of capitalism have expected it to self destruct in such a way that false consciousness would be overcome under the press of events, with theory or education having very little to do with it.

Marx's own view combined elements of both these resolutions, but also added, I think, a third element. Marx did think that consciousness changed with social conditions, and that only when conditions were, so to speak, ripe could people break free of the mentality of their society. And he thought that conscious revolutionaries, somewhat "ahead of their time," could facilitate this process. But he also thought (and this is the third element) that people's minds were changed primarily through changed activities. The Third Thesis on Feuerbach, quoted above, concludes, "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice." This is not an unambiguous statement, but, in light of other things Marx wrote, I think he meant to emphasize that people must change themselves and their circumstances at the same time and they must do it themselves. It can't be done either to or for them.

What understanding of critical theory does this suggest? Some writers who have tried to work out a general understanding of critical theory[25] have developed an educative model. Their idea is that critical theorists first develop a theory, and then, like (good) teachers, present it to their audience in an understandable language and help them overcome their predictable resistance to its insights, with the important caveat that they must be willing to decide at some point, if their pupils continue to reject the theory, that it's just wrong, and they need to rethink it. Brian Fay has developed this idea most clearly. I would like to push a little further in the direction suggested by such phrases as "the self-consciousness of the revolutionary movement" and propose a participatory or dialogical model of critical theory. This model, which is best exemplified (as far as I know) in the second wave of the women's liberation movement, expects the theory to be worked out by members of the oppressed group themselves, in the gradually evolving circumstances of a struggle for social change. There will still be what one might call an educational moment in this process, as members of this group propose insights to one another, or consult experts of one sort or another. There may even be some role for "outside agitators." But the primary work must be done by the agents themselves as they work out their own self-understanding. This process may not get started without some kind of push from circumstances (social crisis or breakdown) or from sympathizers outside the repressive social system. But it can only go forward in the hands of the oppressed themselves. (Paolo Freire's 'pedagogy of the oppressed' seems to me to be close to this way of thinking, but still framed in the language of education.)

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1.5 A Look Ahead

Ignorance and error, folly and delusion, manipulation and deceit -- surely the importance of these phenomena, and others like them, in human affairs can scarcely be denied, and would not be denied by any reasonably well-informed student of history. Why then has the idea of 'false consciousness' been so widely rejected and denounced? For one reason, the notion is deployed as part of a project of social criticism, and those who identify with or value the institutions and practices which are criticized are understandably hostile to the terms of the criticism. But there are more troubling reasons as well. Those reasons can be divided into two categories: epistemological objections and moral/political objections. The epistemological objections say that theorists who talk about 'false consciousness' are claiming to know something that they don't know (perhaps can't know), for example, what is in someone's real interest or which of their needs are 'real,' and/or that they are reducing, over-simplifying, or misconstruing the complexity of people's experience. The moral/political objections say that theorists who talk about 'false consciousness' are arrogantly claiming to speak for people when they have no right to do so (perhaps could not have such a right) and/or that they are being insulting or condescending in their accounts. There is considerable overlap between these two sorts of objections. In the pages to come I will try to work through a number of variations on these themes, rejecting objections that are ill-founded, accepting those with merit and revising the project of a theory oriented towards the critique of false consciousness as necessary.

On the other hand, we might ask, why try to hang on to a notion that has come in for so much criticism, some of it well-deserved. My motives, no doubt, have partly to do with my own history, a history which has often included a strong sense of discovering that I had been pretty seriously in the dark about my own motives and feelings and about the effects of my actions on others, and an equally strong sense, going back at least to the Vietnam War, that many of my peers were pretty clueless about what was going on in the world. But there are less personal reasons as well. It seems to me to be an initially plausible hypothesis, fairly well supported in my experience, that people do 'internalize' their oppression, that, in addition to fear and self interest keeping people in check, confusion and mystification keep them off balance. So false consciousness seems important just to understand what is going on in the world and why people do what they do. Among the people I want to understand, of course, is myself. And I do not claim to be immune to the condition I am writing about. Indeed, as I indicated above, my interest in the topic stems in part from my own processes of gradual dis-illusionment, and encounters with my own classism, racism, and sexism.

False consciousness also seems to me to be something that political activists and organizers need to think about. Not, I hasten to say, so that they may reinforce their sense of smug superiority to the benighted masses. But it is necessary, I think, to consider ideological struggle as well as money and power. It can be useful to consider the ideologies at play when you are speaking, or otherwise 'doing' politics.

Lastly, for the philosophers among us, a consideration of false consciousness is part of political theory, because, as John Rawls and David Gautier have both argued, the contractarian theories which have drawn so much attention in the last few decades, based as they are on notions of consent and agreement, have built into them the commitment to avoid false consciousness. Consent is not genuine unless, as Rawls puts it, "nothing is hidden."[26]

Here is a brief sketch of the chapters to come. The second chapter will explain a general notion (or schema) of false consciousness in such a way as to make it applicable beyond a Marxian frame of reference to a range of critical theories and movements. It will also contain a description of various examples of false consciousness to illustrate the general ideas being developed. Each of the next four chapters will then take up one of the four elements identified in Chapter Two as belonging to the general notion of false consciousness, and will discuss some of the difficulties involved in understanding or accepting the claims implicit in that element. Chapter Three will consider the idea that false consciousness is false in the face of worries about whether the sorts of 'consciousness' identified by critical theorists can be false and can be legitimately contrasted with a 'true consciousness.' Chapter Four will consider the idea that false consciousness is produced (or constructed) by oppressive social orders in the face of worries about whether such an idea is not too mechanistic or economistic and worries about what the connection is supposed to be between the genesis of false consciousness and its falseness. Chapter Five will take up the idea that false consciousness helps to maintain oppressive social orders in the face of worries about whether such a notion does not greatly overestimate the importance of false consciousness and/or greatly underestimate the complexity of the forms of consciousness being theorized. Chapter Six will take up the notion of real interests, explain why the notion is important, show how several ways of understanding real interests are inadequate, and suggest a better way of making out the notion. Finally, a concluding chapter will sum up and point to further work which needs to be done.

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Chapter 2: False Consciousness as a Concept

In this chapter I want to sketch a general notion of false consciousness and to illustrate its applicability in a variety of cases.

2.1 The General Idea

As it happens, the first use of the term "false consciousness" -- by Engels in a letter to Franz Mehring dated July 14, 1893[27] -- does not fully exemplify this pattern. Engels wrote, "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces." The mistake, in Engels' view, is to suppose that one's philosophical or religious or legal ideas are the product of an "independent process of development," that one has arrived at one's views by intellectually responding to "the thought of previous generations." "It is above all this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain that dazzles most people." The reality behind this appearance is that changes in ideas (and in institutions) are "the reflection in thought of changed economic facts." Ideas are "brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes." What Engels neglects to bring out (in this letter, at any rate) is how this sort of mistake is useful to a dominant group, how it helps to reinforce a social status quo. Moreover, the mistake he is discussing lies not in the content of the ideas in question, but in a view of their origin.

Here and elsewhere Engels expresses a view of ideology as false primarily in virtue of its inversion of the real order of causes. People imagine that social change is the product of improved thinking, that revolutionary principles are first discovered by visionary thinkers and then put into practice to revolutionize social life, whereas in fact the principles change only because the society, and especially its economic 'base', has already changed. (This view of ideology is present throughout the writings of Marx and Engels, as far back as The German Ideology of 1845-6.)

Denise Meyerson cites Engels' letter at the outset of her book False Consciousness, and takes him to have given this name to the phenomenon she wishes to discuss in her book. But I think she fails to notice the narrowness of the conception that Engels is articulating: Engels isn't much interested in what an ideology says, his attention is on the question of what explains it. Meyerson, on the other hand, understands false consciousness to be, in the first instance, the self-serving beliefs of the dominant groups in a society, particularly those beliefs that represent social arrangements as being in everyone's interest when they are really of benefit only to the dominant. This does correspond to something that Marx and Engels discussed often, to an important strain in their theory of ideology, but it is not what Engels is talking about in his letter to Mehring. In Meyerson's account Engels' "motive forces" turn into "motives," so that the key to explaining ideological beliefs is the motive people have for holding those beliefs. And that motive is that the beliefs are useful in concealing the oppressive or exploitive character of the existing social arrangements. In Engels' view, I think, people's motives are not in question. Rather their beliefs are to be explained as 'reflections' of their economic circumstances in a variety of ways, despite the fact that their motives may be impeccable (the disinterested search for truth) or self-serving (the attempt to win the favor of the powerful or fame or tenure).[28]

Nonetheless, Engels' usage did not persist.[29] By the time Georg Lukacs wrote History and Class Consciousness in the 1920's it was common to speak of false consciousness as a phenomenon not only of 'ideologists' but of whole classes of society, indeed, of all classes of society. Lukacs also cites Engels' letter in a misleading way, changing the referent from "the thinker" (who is confused about the real causes of his ideas) to "men," who are epistemically limited by their class position. For Lukacs, people who are falsely conscious are not just "caught up in their own narrow prejudices."[30] Such prejudices are common enough, but they can, in favorable circumstances, be overcome through education and the exercise of reason. The limitations stemming from one's class position, which produce false consciousness, cannot be overcome in these ways. They are "the objective result of the economic set-up."[31] For everyone in pre-capitalist societies, and for everyone but proletarians in capitalist societies, false consciousness is the inevitable result of the "objectively misleading" character of society as it appears from one's class standpoint. Only from the standpoint of the proletariat is it even possible to grasp "the nature of society."[32] And even from this epistemically privileged position, the truth must be won through long struggle and a process of political maturation.[33]

The presumption that false consciousness was a central category of Marxist theory grew to the point that John Plamenatz could write that "By false consciousness, Marx appears to have meant . . . [never mind what he thought Marx meant]," despite the fact that Marx never used the term.[34] And Herbert Marcuse could write, "The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest is still meaningful" (as if the distinction was not only familiar and central to his tradition, but was suspected of being quite worn out).[35] In recent years there has been a reaction against this presumption, however. Joe McCarney in The Real World of Ideology and Alex Callinicos in Marxism and Philosophy (among others) have argued that the notion of false consciousness was mistakenly imported into Marxism by Engels and has no basis in Marx's own mature thought. In their view Marx's theory of ideology is not epistemological but practical; its emphasis is not on the falseness of ideology but on its role in the class struggle. I can't here rehearse the details of this debate, but I think Christopher Pine's Ideology and False Consciousness: Marx and his Historical Progenitors shows fairly decisively that Marx criticized ideologies for their falseness and their failure to be scientific throughout his work, and that without using the term he did indeed make the concept of false consciousness central to his account of history and society.[36]

By now, a number of writers have begun to see Marxism as just one instance of an approach to social theory for which false consciousness is a central phenomenon. According to this view, a "critical social theory" is theory which is intended to be practical in a distinctive way. A critical social theory is supposed to give an account of people's social circumstances and self-understandings which is useful to them (and not, or not only, to others who might like to control or manipulate them). It is supposed to show them how they have misunderstood themselves and their society and how those misunderstandings are contributing to the perpetuation of social arrangements which frustrate or oppress them. By enlightening them in this way, the theory is supposed to empower people to change those frustrating or oppressive social arrangements. In short, critical social theories are supposed to contribute to social change by dissolving or undermining false consciousness. And this kind of theory might be developed not only by Marxists trying to convince workers to struggle against capitalism, but also by feminists trying to convince women to struggle against male domination, by liberationists trying to empower people of color to struggle against racial oppression, nationalists trying to encourage colonized peoples to fight colonialism, gay and lesbian activists fighting heterosexism, and so on.[37]

When understood in this way, critical social theories may seem to embody a questionable sort of optimism. If the theory is going to be able to be practical in this particular way (producing social change through enlightenment), then the obstacles to social change must be largely found in consciousness (in false consciousness). In my view, it would be a mistake to build this kind of optimism into one's methodology. (It would be a mistake awfully close to the one Marx attributed to the Young Hegelians in The German Ideology.) The dissolution of false consciousness may more often be a necessary condition of social change than a sufficient one, and I think the phenomenon can be important without being the linchpin of an oppressive social structure. It is enough if it is sometimes one of the obstacles to desirable social change (or to self-understanding or empowerment). Whether false consciousness is important in this way in any particular historical situation is a matter for empirical investigation.[38]

Are critical theorists entitled to presume that false consciousness is likely to be an important phenomenon? Is there any reason to suppose that social stability will typically or normally require illusions or errors of some kind? Here is a sketch of an argument for thinking so: So far (beginning at least as far back as we have a historical record, which is to say, since societies began to be fairly large and complex) most (perhaps all) societies have been oppressive. That is, they have systematically and substantially and unfairly privileged some of their members and disadvantaged others. (The apparent ubiquity of male domination seems to me to be enough to establish this premise, if nothing else is.) But squarely facing up to the fact that social institutions and practices are oppressive is uncomfortable for both oppressors and oppressed. It is uncomfortable for oppressors because they want to think well of themselves and this is not easy to do while recognizing fully that one's privileges are undeserved, that others suffer unjustly for one's benefit, and so on. (This premise should not be read as denying that people can be rapacious and cruel or denying that they can live by codes of conduct which endorse the infliction of undeserved suffering on others. It should be read as denying that they can do these things without believing themselves to be justified in some sense.) It may even be that oppressors must avoid these discomforting recognitions in order to maintain the self-confidence they need to carry off their dominant role. As Meyerson puts it, "Roughly, people who are blind to the exploitative nature of their activities make better exploiters."[39] Facing up to oppression may be uncomfortable for the oppressed, too, perhaps because it is disheartening or perhaps because it casts doubt on the legitimacy of one's having consented (or continuing to consent) to one's situation. But in any case, given that the more privileged groups will generally be in a position to exercise a disproportionate influence on the beliefs and attitudes of members of other groups, their self-serving beliefs and attitudes will be transmitted, at least to some extent, to the others. Moreover, the spread of these beliefs and attitudes will be useful to the privileged, giving them reasons to try to influence the oppressed in this way (though their dominant position in society might well give them considerable influence whether they tried to exert it or not, whether they recognized its possible role in augmenting their power or not). Why would privileged groups benefit from spreading their self-serving beliefs among the oppressed? Because, as has often been observed, it is hard to rule by sheer unalloyed force. Some measure of consent or acquiescence on the part of the subordinate groups makes the job easier (some would say: possible). So, where there is oppression (which is just about everywhere), there will be motives (not necessarily all conscious) for covering it up and there will be means and opportunities to do so.

I called this a sketch of an argument and it is surely no more than a sketch. Every part of it is debatable, and several parts are not very clear. Many questions can be raised: how might dominants influence the beliefs and attitudes of subordinates and with what degree of success? How else might false consciousness arise? How can we discover whether erroneous beliefs and attitudes are actually present in a social group? When are we entitled to conclude that such beliefs are important sources of social stability? How can we identify people's real interests (which is part of what is necessary to conclude that they are oppressed)? What sorts of mistakes or illusions can function in the indicated way? Some of these questions will be discussed in the pages to come, but my goal will not be to vindicate this argument. I suspect it could be vindicated, but only by a far more comprehensive survey of cultures and time periods than can be attempted here. I will try instead to show that the notion of false consciousness makes sense, and that we have good reasons to think that it is important to the understanding of some social situations.

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2.2 The Schema

Now I want to state what I will call the schema of false consciousness more explicitly.

"Social order" might range from a family to a nation-state to a 'mode of production' like capitalism.

I have been using the term "oppression" rather freely and without much explanation. (I glossed it above as "systematic, substantial, and unfair disadvantage.") Like many others who have written about critical social theories[40] I will not say much about oppression. As I am using it here, it is more or less interchangeable with "domination," "exploitation," or even "injustice." What is crucial is that there is some serious and systematic wrong, which it is the business of critical theory to address and the business of political struggle to alter. In other contexts it can be important to recognize that these concepts are not generally interchangeable, that, for example, "oppression" refers to a socially structured limitation or constriction of some for the benefit of others, while "exploitation" refers to a process by which some people's labor, effort, or attention, or the results of these, are appropriated by others.[41] These categories can overlap but they are not coextensive. (Heterosexism is a kind of oppression which is harmful to lesbians and gays, but not because it exploits them.)

"Produce" is, perhaps, misleadingly transitive (somebody is doing something to somebody else). Indoctrination is only sometimes what is meant. There are also alleged to be effects on consciousness of participation in the practices that make up a social order and of training which involves more 'learning how' than 'learning that.' As we shall see, there is also the idea that human beings are prone to making certain cognitive errors, which then 'naturally' lead to false beliefs.

"Interests" is the term most often used in this connection, but "need" is common as well (in Marx, for example).[42] Often it is a matter of people failing to pursue (or being prevented from pursuing or hindered in their pursuit of) emancipation or liberation or freedom, which is simply assumed to be a good thing. Sometimes we might just as well speak of "what is really good for people" as of "real interests."

Notice that, when the false consciousness in question is the oppressor's, the person whose interests are obscured is someone else (the oppressed). Very often the real interests in question are interests in social change, but they may also be more personal -- as when someone might say that it would be in a woman's interest to leave her husband, and what is keeping her from doing it is not (only) her personal loyalty to her husband but her loyalty to patriarchal ideas about what she is capable of or what it is reasonable to expect men to do or the like. (Of course, often there will be no clear distinction between the personal and the social.)

Again, the metaphorical "obscure" may carry a misleading sense of agency, as if the false consciousness was doing something or hiding something. The false consciousness may just be a mistake about what is really in someone's interests.

In paradigmatic cases, I will say, we find all the elements of this schema. But, of course, they need not go together. True beliefs (about the powerfulness of the oppressors, say) could play the functional role of stabilizing a social structure, and could be inculcated because of their usefulness for that function. Stabilizing beliefs might arise adventitiously and not because they are useful to elites. False beliefs might be destabilizing (an exaggerated sense of the vulnerability of the oppressors). And so on.

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2.3 Some Examples

Some General Patterns

Here are a few ideas that come up again and again in allegations of false consciousness:

1. False naturalization -- it is often claimed that people are taking some aspect of themselves or of their society to be 'natural' when it is in fact conventional or historically variable or 'socially constructed'.

2. False necessity -- it is often claimed that people are taking some feature of themselves or their society to be necessary (the necessity would seldom be logical; it would be causal or historical or psychological) when in fact that feature could be different.

3. False generalization -- it is often claimed that people are mistakenly supposing that some feature of their experience, exemplified here, is typical (of a group of people, of societies generally) when it is not.

(These first three patterns are not clearly differentiated.)

4. False superiority -- it is often claimed that people are mistakenly supposing that one way of living or acting or feeling (or whatever) is better than another when in fact the socially disvalued way of acting (etc.) is no worse or is better (e.g., colonialist disparagement of colonized culture).

5. Internalized oppression -- it is often claimed that, where oppressors disparage and degrade the oppressed, there is a tendency for the oppressed to 'take in' the negative attitudes and stereotypes, and to believe (at some level) that they are who the oppressors say they are.

The writings of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi offer an account of the colonial situation which is influenced by Marxism, but significantly different. Their account includes the claim that, under the impact of colonization, the colonized are brought to accept, in part, the image of themselves perpetrated by the colonizers. Colonial culture is pervasively racist, and the colonized eventually accept, to some extent, the racial stereotype that has been developed by the colonizers. This makes it more difficult for the colonized to identify their own potentialities, to understand the nature of the system which exploits them, and to act effectively in their own interests.

In Renate Zahar's useful summary, the account given by Fanon and Memmi shares several elements with the classical Marxist account of false consciousness.[43] The colonized are deceived insofar as they accept the negative image of themselves promulgated by the colonizers. They are led by this deception to act against their interests (to collaborate, to give up tradition and resistance, to strive for assimilation -- which is held up as their ideal but is in fact made impossible for them). Overcoming these false beliefs and rejecting these alien norms is held to be a necessary pre-condition for their developing"revolutionary class consciousness."[44] But there are differences, too. Marxism sees capitalist society as integrated largely by the market and by the illusions 'naturally' produced by the market ('free' exchange, commodity fetishism, the 'power' of capital, etc.). Colonial society has only a rudimentary market, and rudimentary commodity production. For the most part, its economy is subordinated to that of the colonizing nation and to the world market, so that the exchange relations are patently unequal and are clearly established by conquest and maintained by repression. In this context it is racism which provides the crucial legitimating ideology. It is the racial inferiority of the colonized which justifies their conquest and exploitation in the eyes of the colonizers and, as time goes on, in their own eyes as well.

The situation, according to this analysis, is complex. The colonized suffer material deprivations (malnutrition, mis-education, confinement, etc.) which produce real disabilities. Capacities which one never has the opportunity to exercise may atrophy. Activities in which one can never realistically hope to participate may lose their interest.[45] Moreover, malingering is one form of resistance. Made to work for the benefit of the colonizer, why would the colonized want to give their best effort? But on top of these phenomena there is another: the colonized, constantly bombarded with degrading images of themselves, "give [their] troubled and partial, but undeniable, assent."[46] Acceptance of racist stereotypes can function on the one hand as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Told you are stupid or lazy, you come to believe that you are stupid or lazy, and you act stupid or lazy. Then "what began as a figment of the imagination eventually becomes a reality."[47] On the other hand (and more clearly a species of false consciousness), the acceptance by the colonized of the colonizers' portrait of them leads them to misperceive themselves and their traditional culture. This again is twofold (at least): The colonized believe the colonizer's lies about what traits they do and don't possess. And they accept the colonizer's devaluation of the actual traits of the colonized and his exaltation of the colonizing culture.

For Fanon and Memmi, one false solution to the colonial situation is simply to reverse the racist norms, to reject European culture and affirm the traditional culture of the colonized. They reject the posture of "Negritude" adopted by some of the targets of French colonialism, because it involves rejecting European science and technology when these might actually be of some use, because it involves an uncritical romanticization of traditional cultures, and because it comes perilously close to accepting (though revaluing) the racist stereotypes.

[48] She noted some differences however: Women had never been a separate people, they had never known a time before the 'masters' came, they had no 'native' culture. Instead they were immersed in a culture which was created by and for men, where women's absence was taken as evidence of incapacity, and where the images and theories on offer contained explicit or implicit messages of female inferiority. Colonial culture was like this too (in relation to the colonized) but not so hard to resist. In addition women were subject to sexual objectification, that is their sexual parts and functions were treated as what they primarily were, as their identity, and as something made to be used by men. This had to do both with how women were treated by men (i.e., as sex objects) and how women learned to treat themselves (i.e., as a project of self-improvement to meet 'the beauty standard'). The cumulative effect of all this was (as in the colonial case) a pervasive diminishment of women's sense of 'personhood,' that is, of their sense that they could do the sorts of things that persons can do: act on their own authority, choose, be responsible.

Second wave feminists also developed criticisms of (some) psychiatric diagnoses, alleging that they categorize as mental disorders what are really just women's unhappiness with patriarchal oppression or their deviance from male norms.[49] To the extent that women accept this categorization, this would seem to count as a form of false consciousness. Feminist therapy has a good deal of overlap with feminist consciousness raising. This is an example of an apparently scientific, apparently objective approach to understanding people and their problems that has been (putatively) unmasked as a perpetrator of oppression and of false consciousness.

Some of Bartky's later writings show an evolution of feminist thinking under the influence of Foucault. Considering the job our culture gives women to do, of shaping and ornamenting their bodies, in light of Foucault's concept of 'discipline,' she says "Femininity is an artifice, an achievement."[50] To achieve femininity women must learn feminine 'body language', they must diet and exercise to attain the right sort of shape, and they must care for and adorn the surface of their bodies (skin and hair) to achieve the right look. In doing all this they are 'inferiorizing' their bodies by marking them as 'to be looked at by men' and by adopting in each case one side of a polarity of which the other, male, side carries more value. (Female body language takes up less space and moves with less authority than the male; ideal female size is smaller than, shape is weaker than, the male; successful female surface management produces "just a pretty face.") Moreover, the project as a whole is a 'set up': "every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail."

With the shift from a conceptual framework derived from Marx to one derived from Foucault, Bartky says, we are no longer thinking of false consciousness (though there is mystifying patriarchal ideology as well). Instead, she wants to say, "not only women's lives but their very subjectivities are structured within an ensemble of systematically duplicitous practices."[51] The practices are duplicitous in that they have a covert function (inferiorization) quite different from their overt function (beautification). Women internalize, then, not only patriarchal ideas or theories, not only the male 'gaze', but also a sense of identity which is bound up with their mastery of the disciplines of femininity. Like many contemporary feminists (and others), Bartky wants to reject the terminology of false consciousness to describe this result. But she speaks in the very next sentence the old language: "overt" and "covert functions," "The phenomenal forms in which it [the system of gender subordination] is manifested are often quite different from the real relations which form its deeper structure." And a few pages later, she says the disciplines of femininity are demanding, but "the harshness of a regimen alone does not guarantee its rejection, for hardships can be endured if they are thought to be necessary or inevitable."[52] Where appearances mask real relations, and hardships are (wrongly) thought to be necessary and inevitable, I think we can still speak of false consciousness.

In On Her Own: Growing Up in the Shadow of the American Dream Ruth Sidel describes and analyses the aspirations and self-conceptions of a variety of young women living in the U.S. She concludes that, for many of these young women, an overly optimistic picture of their career prospects (the American Dream) sets them up to blame themselves for the way their lives actually work out (i.e., not so well). She hypothesizes that this is "the function" of the American Dream as a piece of ideology: to lead individuals to blame their less-than-hoped-for attainments on their own inadequacies and not on the social arrangements. Here the false consciousness is almost the opposite of the usual picture of the oppressed. One thinks of oneself (falsely) as empowered to do virtually anything, without a realistic sense of the difficulties that stand in one's way or of the mathematical certainty that most must fail (since there is so little room at the top). Many other writers have made similar observations.[53] Here we have function, and falsehood, but no theory of how the consciousness is produced (or of how the functionality might explain the fact that it does get produced).

Finally, to illustrate the way the term has been taken up (ironically, no doubt) by anti-radical thinkers, we may quote Isaiah Berlin:

One may argue about the degree of difference that the influence of this or that individual made in shaping events. But to try to reduce the behavior of individuals to that of impersonal 'social forces' not further analyzable into the conduct of the men who, even according to Marx, make history is 'reification' of statistics, a form of the 'false consciousness' of bureaucrats and administrators who close their eyes to all that proves incapable of quantification, and thereby perpetrate absurdities in theory and dehumanization in practice.[54]

Having described a schematic notion of false consciousness and illustrated some of its applications, I now turn to a discussion of each element of the schema. Each element has been the target of objections which have persuaded many people that the notion of false consciousness is indefensible. I will try to show that some of these objections are ill-founded, and that others, though cogent, can be met without entirely abandoning either the notion of false consciousness or the kind of critical social theory which relies on that notion.

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