Ideology and the History of Science

Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term "ideology," considered his new discipline a general science of our "intellectual faculties, their principal phenomena, and the more remarkable circumstances of their activities" (1801, p. 4). Convinced of the sensationalist epistemology of Locke and Condillac, Destutt de Tracy believed one could resolve all ideas into the sensations that produced them and thereby test their soundness. The sensationalist assumptions of his project led him to propose that "ideology is a part of zoology" (1801, p. 1), and he consequently paid close attention to the way physiological circumstance shaped and often misshaped ideas. Though Karl Marx appropriated this concept of ideology, he explored not physiological but cultural determinants. He concerned himself with the way material and economic conditions influenced ideas, especially when they produced a false consciousness of the supposed reality to which they referred. Marx believed his principles of analysis would allow him to distinguish sound ideas from those tainted by particular circumstance. The concept of ideology from its beginning has thus depended upon the presumption that some ideas can escape the kind of distortion from which others suffer. During our century, the concept of ideology has speciated. In the social sciences and humanities, it has come to be applied with a variety of different assumptions and meanings. 1 Historians and philosophers of science, however, have usually sustained the original presumption that a clear distinction can be made between true or at least 'rationally sound' and false ideas. Karl Popper, for instance, conceives ideology as a pseudo-scientific system like psychoanalysis or, for that matter, Marxism that pretends to science but essentially lacks the requisite rational methodology. For Popper, of course, the rational method of science, by which it can be distinguished from its ideological counterfeit, is falsificationism. The uncritical and stubborn adherence to a position, protecting it from confuting evidence by developing ad hoc hypotheses, clearly indicates an ideological conception. It is in this Viennese vein that Georges Canguilhem (1988), mentor of Foucault, defined a scientific ideology: