The Pre-Marxist Origins of Functional Ideology Critique

Some ninety years before Marx adopted and then deployed the term “ideology,” the dominant suspicions and assumptions that inform the functional critique of ideology had already emerged in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In fact, the problem of functional ideology constitutes the official theme of the Second Discourse, though the presence of this theme has been frequently overlooked by the histories of ideology and the scholarship on Rousseau. In the “Introduction,” to the Second Discourse, Rousseau asks: “Precisely what, then is at issue in this Discourse?” He responds:

The Second Discourse thus seeks to explain how the few dominate the many, how the rulers control and oppress the people, despite the people's command of superior force. It seeks to catalogue the “sequence of marvels” that makes this inversion of natural strength possible. Amongst these wonders, it emphasizes “the moment when, Right taking the place of Violence, Nature was subjected to Law.” In other words, it assumes that right and law, at least in their current form, if not intrinsically and in all forms, serve to invert the more natural relations of direct force. Right and law obscure the superior physical force of the strong, allowing the few to control the many.

Before turning to consider the details of Rousseau's account, we should note the basic template that frames this project, a template that repeatedly emerges and plays a prominent role in the centuries that followed, appearing, though variously filled with conflicting content, in the political visions of Stirner, Nietzsche, Sorel, and Jünger, not to mention the anti-Semitic and conspiratorial visions of Adolf Hitler. Four basic features characterize this template. First, it presents society in terms of a fundamental, hostile, and perhaps irreconcilable bifurcation between two opposed groups or types of people. Second, the template posits a significant asymmetry between the physical forces potentially commanded by these two groups.