Relation between Ideology and History

Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher relatively

unknown until the mid-1960s when his works were published: For Marx
(1965), Reading Capital (1968) and Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (1971). He became famous for his revision of traditional Marxism
in his understanding of ideology. Moving away from classical Marxism
that spoke of the mechanistic base and superstructure dialectics, he
spoke of the “relative autonomy” of the superstructure.

However in relation to History, Althusser follows the footsteps of Marx

and Engels though in a different way. Like Marx, he believed that
individual agency was subsumed by historical processes and history
itself was seen as a “process without a subject”. In this Althusser closely
follows Marx’s remark in The German Ideology: “Morality, religion,
metaphysics, all the rest of ideology…have no history, no
development”. Althusser too claims that ‘Ideology has no history’. In
order to understand the relation between ideology and history as
discussed by Althusser in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatus”, we need to consider history as conceived by Marx and
Engels.

In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels introduced a

theory of the structure of society, which divides society into a base and
a superstructure. Peter Barry sums up: “The simplest Marxist model of
society sees it as constituted by a base (the material means of
production, distribution, and exchange) and a superstructure, which is
the ‘cultural’ world of ideas, art, religion, law, and so on”. According to
Marx and Engels, mankind has always been tied to the economic base
because of the necessity to produce the material needs that are
required for maintaining their existence. Marx and Engels see the
superstructure fundamentally as an illusion, a mere reflection of the
economic base, which serves the purpose of securing the reproduction
of the conditions of production. Moreover, Marx believed that
individual agency was subsumed by historical processes and history
itself was seen as a “process without a subject”. Marx and Engels’s
concept of history follows their base and superstructure model. They
argue that mankind has been tied to the necessity to produce the
material needs for their existence, the material base, from the
beginning of time. Since the superstructure is nothing more than an
illusion that stems from the material base, there is no historical
progress besides material progress.

Althusser agrees with Marx that Ideology is non-historical but in a

different sense than that argued by ‘The German Ideology’. He believes
that ideology is not-historical not as the orthodox approach would have
it but because it is omni-historical, just like Freud’s unconscious. In his
essay ‘The Unconscious’, Freud said that unconscious is timeless, not in
the sense that it is supernatural but because it is prior to any temporal
order or connections, being prior to the level of language , of culture
and so on. Althusser explicitly draws parallel between Ideology and
unconscious: “To give a theoretical reference-point here, I might say
that, to return to our example of the dream, in its Freudian conception
this time, our proposition: ideology has no history, can and must (and in
a way which has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but, quite the
reverse, is theoretically necessary, for there is an organic link between
the two propositions) be related directly to Freud’s proposition that the
unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it has no history”. Althusser draws a
step farther by rendering timelessness as eternal:’ Ideology is eternal,
exactly like the unconscious’.

Althusser is a structuralist Marxist. Structuralists do not see individual

experiences as being determined outside the forces of the structures of
society. Althusser too believed in structures affecting individuals. He
wanted to show how individual acts were already influenced by the
dominant ideology of the state. The individuals were “always-already”
in performing their individual acts. In other words, individual acts were
not carried out as the result of free will or agency, but were always and
already dependent upon, and part of, larger social structures and
influences. Althusser says that ideology is a structure, and as such is
"eternal," i.e. to be studied synchronically; this is why Althusser says
that ideology has no history. He derives this idea of ideology as a
structure from the Marxist idea that ideology is part of the
superstructure and he links the structure of ideology to the idea of the
unconscious, from Freud and from Lacan. Because ideology is a
structure, its contents will vary, we can fill it up with anything, but its
form, like the structure of the unconscious, is always the same. And
ideology works "unconsciously." Like language, ideology is a
structure/system which we inhabit, which speaks us, but which gives us
the illusion that we're in charge, that we freely chose to believe the
things we believe, and that we can find lots of reasons why we believe
those things.

Althusser advocated a non-teleological view of history. That is, he did

not believe in a unilinear notion of history that progressively develops
towards an end or goal. At any given point the social formation of a
society is influenced by the Ideological and Repressive State
Apparatuses which emerge from the dominant mode of production.
These social formations change depending on the mode of production
and in the interest of those in power.