Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution

I. Ideology and Positivism: The Setting of the Problem This article will begin by posing a set of questions of some difficulty. I shall move toward framing them by considering an argument between two characters who can be thought of either as ideal types or straw men, according to predilection. I shall call one of them "the positivist," the other "the theorist of ideology." The positivist 1 believes that objective scientific inquiry will yield knowledge of society in the same way that it yields knowledge of nature. The theorist of ideology 2 charges that the positivist is under an illusion, since our knowledge of society is inevitably contaminated by the beliefs and concepts which express the interests of the dominant social group. On first statement these two views appear to be sharply opposed. But a moment's consideration reveals that things are quite otherwise. For the theorist of ideology to make good his claim about the positivist, he must presumably be prepared to claim also that he, the theorist of ideology, is able to discriminate those elements in the positivist's theories that are due to ideological contamination and those that have the status of genuine knowledge. If he cannot identify these two elements in positivist theorizing, how can he make good his initial claim? If he is able to identify and discriminate these two elements, then he