Abstract

The aim of the article is to define the meaning of the concept of ideology which is proper to Marx. To do so, it examines the writings of the young Marx, earlier than German ideology, bringing together those elements in the 1844 Manuscripts which were to lead to the establishment of the concept of ideology. The article thus shows how the concept of ideology presumes a certain “parallelism” between social life and the life of consciousness, between the process of the production of the material conditions of life and the production of ideal forms, of the ideological representations which are thus shown to be the imaginary and inadequate forms of consciousness. In the case of the dominated, such ideal forms necessarily accompany the stunted and limited forms of social life. In the case the dominant class, they duplicate forms of social life separated from the material conditions of production.