Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;The aim of this thesis is to explicate the concepts of ideology and science; in particular, social science, in the work of Marx and in later Marxism. Yet, in the literature on Marxism at any rate, the kind of significance they have for each other has been widely misunderstood. Historically the most important expression of such misunderstanding is the tendency in writings of 'Western Marxism' to assume that the central question concerns the precise nature of the distinction between science and ideology as rival or alternative forms of cognition. Problems that arise in connection with this body of thought include the following. How does science succeed in being ideological? How is the ideological status of Marx's own social science to be conceived? In what follows, three basic models, 'semantic', 'syntactic', and 'dialectical', will be distinguished. ;The first chapter is concerned with explicating the conception of ideology that operates in the work of Marx and in 'classical Marxism'. The second chapter deals with a basic misconception of this legacy. This is the idea that ideology is essentially to be understood as an epistemological category. The way is then clear to pose the question of the nature and status of Marx's social science. This is done in the third chapter, where it also proves possible to dispose of the claims of the syntactic model as the basis for an answer. The semantic model is a much more serious candidate and requires extended discussion. The paradigmatic version of the model in Western Marxism is the conception of Marxist social science as a 'critical theory of society'. The fourth chapter discusses the prototype of such interpretations in the work of the 'Frankfurt School' theorists. The next two chapters deal with more recent attempts by writers in the British analytical tradition to vindicate the project of Marxist social critique. The failure of the project in all these versions clears the ground for an inquiry into the claims of the dialectical model. This is pursued in chapters 7 and 8, paying close attention to the evidence on the subject yielded by Marx's writings. In the final chapter developments treated earlier at the level of relations between ideas are set in a historical context