False Consciousness Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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False consciousness is a concept often attributed to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that explains the oppressive processes and the possible misguiding effects of the dominant ideologies on individuals and masses. In fact, Marx and Engels do not use the phrase false consciousness in their collaborative writings, although they clearly acknowledge the fact that ideologies imply a view of reality that is “illusory, deceptive, partial, distorted” (McCarney 2005). The idea of a false consciousness was later used by several philosophers such as the French poststructuralist thinker Louis Althusser, who explained that whenever masses adopt the dominant ideologies, they get a false representation of reality.

The efficiency of ideologies precisely creates in the minds of the masses a kind of illusion about one’s place in society. For example, the working poor living in urban North America would feel less like victims or exploited workers if they regularly watched the evening news relate cases of poorer people living in the third world and facing natural disasters and political corruption. In other words, false consciousness is the distorted perception of the masses. According to Marxism, the common individual does not adopt a false consciousness because he or she is unintelligent or because he or she is voluntarily creating stories but rather because the dominant ideologies make the world and reality appear as represented by the dominants.

In that sense, the mass media often contribute to the reproduction and perpetuation of the false consciousness, while the alternative media often try to reveal and denounce it, traditionally appealing to the awakening of the silent masses and crying for social change. In the same fashion, totalitarian regimes, such as North Korea, encourage a flattering, idealized image of themselves and try to ban any kind of critique. In the first pages of his book False Consciousness (1962/1976), French sociologist Joseph Gabel identifies racism, such as anti-Semitism, and Stalinism as two important examples of false consciousness. Believers of these two ideologies were morally wrong although they were convinced that anti-Semitism and Stalinism were solutions for a better world.

The academic study of false consciousness is fundamental in disciplines such as political science, sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies. In 1960, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concepts of habitus and doxa to explain that most people accept the dominant ideologies as inevitable. The conceptual and theoretical study of false consciousness is also central in the works of European sociologists such as Karl Mannheim, Gyorgy Lukács, Raymond Boudon, and Nicholas Abercrombie.

Bibliography:

Althusser, Louis. On Ideology. 1970. Reprint, London:Verso, 2008. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. 1980. Reprint, Stanford University Press, 1992.
Gabel, Joseph. False Consciousness. Translated by Margaret A.Thompson. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Originally published as La fausse conscience. Essai sur la reification (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. 1845. See any edition.
McCarney, Joseph, “Ideology and False Consciousness,” Marx Myths and Legends, April 2005, marxmyths.org/joseph-mccarney/article.htm.