Abstract

In this book Christopher Pines demonstrates that Karl Marx conceived of ideology as false consciousness. He shows how the different meanings of false consciousness found in the writings of Marx and Engels reflect the influence of the views of the Baconian-French Enlightenment and of Hegelian Feuerbachian philosophies. Pines argues that, for Marx, the diverse senses of false consciousness all generally denote a social consciousness that takes certain false things to be true regarding matters of significance to class-divided societies.