Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) Read Online Free PDF

Mannheim left open for others to address. But he kept one vital issue, that bedevilled even later Marxists, hovering in the air: is it possible, and is it useful, to detach ideology from the Marxist notion of class?
The spread of ideology: Antonio Gramsci
    The contribution of Antonio Gramsci, the radical Italian Marxist theorist and activist (1891-1937) to the analysis of ideology is significant in ways both different from and parallel to Mannheim’s. Gramsci modified the Marxist understanding of the term working
within
a broadly Marxist tradition. He is best-known to students of ideology for his notion of hegemony. Ideological hegemony could be exercised by a dominant class, the bourgeoisie, not only through exerting state force but through various cultural means. Gramsci shifted ideology away from being solely a tool of the state. Ideology operated and was produced in civil society, the sphere of non-state individual and group activity. Here again the intellectuals surfaced as the major formulators and conductors of ideology and as nongovernmental leaders wielding cultural authority. Their permeation of social life was characteristically based on the manufacturing of consent among the population at large, so that the masses would regard their own assent as spontaneous. That process of forming consent – which Gramsci termed leadership as distinct from domination – necessarily preceded, and paved the way for, the dominance wielded through governmental power. Gramsci was therefore inclined to sharpen the distinction between ideology as a more conscious creation for its producers, and a more unconscious one for its consumers.
    One perspicacious move forward of Gramsci’s in investigating ideological hegemony was his sensitivity to its importance, albeit from a Marxist perspective. The establishment of hegemony involved the coordination of different interests and their ideological expressions, so that an all-embracing group, possibly society as a whole, would be engaged. Hegemony produced compromise – an equilibrium that took some account of the subordinate groups. Marxist class confrontation gave way to the building up of solidarity in a manner that could serve the Marxist end of a unified community. That was so because different ideologies maintained a state of conflict until one of them, or a combination of some, prevailed. The result was an intellectual, moral, economic, and political unity of aims with the semblance of universality. But there was also a liberal undertone to Gramsci’s theory of ideology, which he himself did not emphasize. It was based on a voluntarism embedded in civil society that we associate – at least on the surface – with free choice, consent, and material orintellectual markets. Another chink had been opened in the Marxist armour.
    Gramsci saw the notion of hegemony as a great advance, both philosophical and political, towards a critical and unified understanding of reality. In the course of the historical process a new intellectual and moral order could evolve, an ‘autonomous and superior culture’ with ‘more refined and decisive ideological weapons’. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony attempts to raise some questions Marx had left unasked. What are the forms that ideological control takes? What is the relationship, and the difference, between ideological and political domination? Can we account for the multiplicity of ideologies, and for their rise and fall? In what sense, if any, do people
choose
to believe in an ideology? With these questions on the agenda, a range of possible answers would be provided during the remainder of the 20th century.
    Gramsci’s theory of hegemony notwithstanding, his role is retrospectively more important for another aspect of analysing ideology. As against the abstract and rarefied nature of the Marxist conception of ideology, exposed as a way of concealing and inhibiting correct social practices, Gramsci sought to explore the working of ideology as a