Manifest Destiny: Ideology and Cultural Construct

"Ideology" is the term used in Marxist theory for the belief structures that exist in a society. In Hegel's philosophy, ideas are treated as having an independent existence, and human behavior is explained by people's voluntary allegiance to ideas they find worthy. That is, in Hegel's view, human behavior is motivated by conscious choices to pursue abstract ideals.

The preceding is, of course, an oversimplification of Hegel, but it represents the young Marx's perception of what seemed inadequate about Hegel's theory of history. Marx thought that Hegel had everything upside-down, and proceeded to rectify it. He proposed that the economic means of production are the independent variable in human history, and that the social structure of a society must be compatible with its basic economic system. Further, the ideology of the society must be one that justifies the social system in the minds of its members. This is set forth succinctly in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will . . . The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structur

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unless he or she somehow learns how to take them off. Hence, Eagleton says, Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their authors' psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the "social mentality" or ideology of an age. That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men . . . are constrained . . . by material necessity (6). On this issue of how conscious people are of the ideology of their society, Milner observes that Durkheim argues that the categories of knowledge are neither derived empirically nor innate, but are constituted by and through systems of thought that are themselves socially variable: "A concept is not my concept; I hold it in common with other men . . . [The] collective consciousness is . . . a synthesis sui generis of particular consciousness . . . this synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas, and images which, once born, obey laws all of their own." The collective consciousness is thus absolutely central to social order; it is only through it that society is able to control, inde
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Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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