Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self‐defeating Behavior

One of the most persistent legacies of Karl Marx and the Young Hegelians has been the centrality of the concept of "ideology" in contemporary social criticism. The concept was introduced in order to account for a very specific phenomenon, viz. the fact that individuals often participate in maintaining and reproducing institutions under which they are oppressed or exploited. In the extreme, these individuals may even actively resist the efforts of anyone who tries to change these institutions on their behalf. Clearly, some explanation needs to be given of how individuals could systematically fail to see where their interests lie, or how they might fail to pursue these interests once these have been made clear to them. This need is often felt with some urgency, since failure to provide such an expla- nation usually counts as prima facie evidence against the claim that these indi- viduals are genuinely oppressed or exploited in the first place. There is of course no question that this kind of phenomenon requires a special sort of explanation. Unfortunately, Feuerbach, Marx, and their follow- ers took the fateful turn of attempting to explain these "ideological" effects as a consequence of irrationality on the part of those under their sway. 1 While there are no doubt instances where practices are reproduced without good reason, the ascription of irrationality to agents is an explanatory device whose use carries with it significant costs, both theoretical and practical. In this paper, I will argue that many of the phenomena traditionally grouped together under the category of "ideological effects" can be explained without relinquishing the rationality postulate. Using the example of a collective action problem, I will try to show how agents can rationally engage in patterns of action that are ulti- mately contrary to their interests, and how they can rationally resist changing these patterns even when the deleterious or self-defeating character of their actions has been pointed out to them. I think that an approach such as this, one that is sparing in its ascription of irra- tionality and error, has two principal advantages. First, it allows one to engage in social criticism while minimizing the tendency to insult the intelligence of the people on whose behalf the critical intervention has been initiated. This may reduce the tendency exhibited by some members of these groups to reassert their autonomy precisely by rejecting the critical theory that impugns their rationality. The second major advantage is also practical. The vast majority of oppressive practices, I will argue, are not reproduced because people have false or irrational