On Voluntary Servitude and the Theory of Ideology

In 1996 I published On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology, a book on which I had been working for a number of years. The theory of ideology, as I understood it, seemed to me to be – or, at least, to have been until recently – the dominant response to what is a puzzling but frequently observed feature of political life: namely, that those who are maltreated – oppressed, exploited, even enslaved – do not always reject that treatment. As Wilhelm Reich puts it: “What has to be explained is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don’t steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don’t strike.” My argument is that, although the problem identified by Reich is a genuine one, the solution offered by the theory of ideology is fundamentally unsatisfactory. In this article, I propose to present briefly what I take to be On Voluntary Servitude’s main theses and to respond to some of the critical reactions that I have had from readers, either personally or in the form of reviews.