On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology

by Michael E. Rosen

Those who approach the history of political thought must pick their way through a veritable elephant's graveyard of grand theories. This book is aimed at one of the oldest and grandest of them all: the theory of ideology. The Age of Grand Theory has only recently ended, yet it is already hard to recall how many unquestioningly believed in the idea of ideology as false consciousness, most notably in Karl Marx's version of that idea. Michael Rosen diagnoses the underlying question to which the theory of ideology was meant to provide the answer: Why do people accept forms of political domination which it is against their interests to accept? This book provides a historical and critical analysis of that answer and of the way in which it came to be taken for granted in social theory.Rosen's postmortem makes it clear that Marx was never able to develop an adequate theory of ideology and that recent attempts at reconstructive surgery on what he did give us, by G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster, have been unsuccessful. However, by putting Marx into a history that runs from Plato and Augustine to Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas, Rosen shows that, though Marx may have failed, the rationalist tradition on which he drew is far from dead--that it is, in fact, the dominant tradition in Western political thought, with very few effective dissenters.This is a very rich and wide-ranging book in the history of ideas, written with philosophic rigor and great clarity.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, History, Political Science

289 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1996

About the author

Michael E. Rosen is a British political philosopher who is active in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental European intellectual thought. He is currently a professor at Harvard University.

Rosen holds a B.A. in philosophy, awarded in 1974, and a D.Phil. awarded in 1980, both from Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to joining Lincoln College, Oxford, he served as a lecturer in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1981, an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard from 1981 to 1982, a special fellow in politics at Merton College, Oxford, from 1982 to 1985, and a lecturer in philosophy at University College London from 1986 to 1990.

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Reviews

[Samuel Weiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

For most of tbe book, Rosen provides a history of philosophy where he traces the development of two presuppositions for the theory of ideology: first, that the false consciousness, instead of merely being a individual's cognitive failing, is the cause and consequence of unjust societies; and secondly, that society is a self-maintaining and self-reproducing totality or system. This history concludes with a discussion of how Hegel and Marx bring these two presuppositions together to develop a theory of ideology (I'll discuss Rosen's views on Marx a little later). This is generally well-written, though Rosen has a tendency to discuss philosophical ideas which aren't strictly necessary for his aim of showing the development of the two aforementioned presuppositions. This is particularly true of the penultimate chapter, which is a discussion of the treatment of ideology by Hegelian Marxists like Adorno and Walter Benjamin. I'm not sure why this chapter was included: Rosen seems less familiar with these thinkers and lacks the knack of clearly expressing their ideas. Moreover, much of the dicussion consists of their views on aesthetics, which he only tendetiously links to their thoughts on ideology.

The largest chapter is on Marx's treatment of ideology. It mostly consists of an argument against analytical Marxists, principally the GA Cohen of Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. These Marxists attempted to argue that the key parts of Marx's philosophy can be approached through the methods of analytical philosophy and the social sciences without having any committment to a Hegelian metaphyiscs. Rosen relies on the well-known criticisms of Cohen's use of functional explanations to interpret Marx (most of these criticisms come from John Elster's Makng Sense of Marx) and convincingly concludes that Marx's account of ideology depends on his quasi-Hegelian belief in the second presupposition of the theory of ideology. Such a claim is difficult to support under analytical Marxism's methodological individualism: it requires metaphysical committments. Rosen concludes the books by arguing that, instead of committing to Hegel, the relative stability in unjust societies can be explained by factors other than ideology, though the mechanisms he suggests appear quite weak. My own view is that the second presupposition can in fact be supported, even without necessarily committing to Hegelianism. For example, I imagine it would be possible to construct a plausible theory of ideology through an Aristotelian reading of Marx.

[Zakir · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rosen is clearly incredibly well read, and he’s able to cull an impressive selection of sources on the pre-history of the theory of ideology, but he’s astoundingly off base about Marx, and so he winds up jousting at windmills through all the chapters that are supposed to be key to his argument.