Abstract

The article confronts two criticisms of ideology: first, the Durkheimian approach; second, the Foucauldian model. Both return to social practices in order to deactivate the concept of ideology. However, while Foucault eliminates at the same time the concept of ideology and the concept of social totality, Durkheim maintains the centrality of the latter by claiming society as a whole is the effect of solidarity, not of ideology. I discuss these two ways of understanding social practices, their epistemological backgrounds and consequences for critique. On the one hand, I show how, lacking the concept of totality, Foucault must reduce critique to unlimited acts of critique of an ontologically fixed “power”. Durkheim, on the other hand, lacks to explain why the social actors often do not use the critical potential of their own solidarity in order to criticize society. My article concludes by proposing a new theory of ideology: as every ideology is an act of totalization, grounded in the idealization of the categories allowing this totalization itself, it seems that solidarity, understood as a scientific established principle of totalization, lacks its own idealization. Therefore, I argue, sociological knowledge of solidarity must transform itself into ideology in order to become a critical category for the actors themselves.