Blackwell Reference Online

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From their roots in nineteenth-century social theory, consciousness and ideology have had an uneasy relationship. As initially conceived, consciousness and ideology were opposed to one another. Whereas ideology represented the concealment of power, consciousness entailed its unmasking. In this classical tradition, both concepts were ideational. Ideology was associated with systems of beliefs that naturalized inequality. Consciousness, by contrast, was the awareness, held by individual subjects, that these beliefs were distorted, partial, and interested. So perfect was this opposition that the phrase “ false consciousness” came to be synonymous with ideology, a conceptual inversion that created identity. As the concepts have developed during the twentieth century, ideology and consciousness are no longer understood to be necessarily opposed to one another. As with so many other conceptual couplets (structure/agency or power/resistance), elements that were initially conceived of as distinctive and opposed have been construed as internal components of a larger process of social construction. For instance, while there is still much that is contested about the nature and meaning of ideology, there is an emerging consensus over what it is not . Few contemporary sociolegal scholars would claim that ideology is a grand set of ideas that in its seamless coherence imposes belief. It is ... log in or subscribe to read full text