"Sociological idealism" was Charles Mills's term for one kind of critique of ideology in Marx, namely, a critique of views that, incorrectly, treat ideas as the primary cause of events in the socio-economic world. Marx's target was the Left Young Hegelians (whose heirs in the legal academy were the flash-in-the-pan Critical Legal Studies), but the critique extends much more widely: every day, the newspapers and social media are full of pontificating that assumes that ideas are driving events. Marx was always interested in the question why ideologists make the mistakes they do. Here's the account Jaime Edwards and I offer in our forthcoming Marx book about Marx's explanation of this phenomenon (Edwards is mostly responsible for this astute account, which draws on his dissertation):
Why, then, do social theorists almost universally succumb to this sort of idealism? Again, sociological idealism involves both a failure to recognize the social origins of one’s thinking and an overestimation of thought’s influence on social transformation. Marx suggests the first failure stems from a theorist’s diminished contact with the basic material conditions resulting from the division of labor, that is, from the fact that ideologists labor only in the domain of ideas (think of university professors or opinion writers at newspapers). Their overestimation of the causal power of ideas Marx attributes to a bias resulting from their own professional status and its preoccupations. Ideologists in general make the mistake of believing that ideas govern social reality, and the ideologists working within each particular ‘ideological subdivision’ come to view social reality as largely governed by their areas of specialty. The cleric believes that social reality is ultimately governed by spiritual forces, legal theorists believe it is legal ideas, and the same with ethicists, metaphysicians, economists, political theorists, and so on. Theorists systematize thinking within their respective domains, and this “exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers” encourages the valorization of their particular domain of research (MECW 5: 446-7). This is “why the ideologists turn everything upside-down”, i.e., why they imagine the explanatory relationship between material conditions and theoretical ideas to be the reverse of what it actually is: “everyone believes his craft to be the true one [and] illusions regarding the connection between their craft and reality are the more likely to be cherished by them…The judge, for example, applies the code, he therefore regards legislation as the real, active driving force” (MECW 5: 92). This is an illusion owing to social position, and Marx’s suggestion is that it can be explained both as a result of what we would now call a cognitive bias (a theorist overestimates the significance their particular specialty plays in the world because of the significance it plays in their own life), as well as what we would now call a motivational bias (a theorist comes to ‘cherish’ their role and desires it to have a greater significance than it truly does).
Recent Comments