Karl Marx's Theory of Ideas

A new look at Marx, showing how he provides a sociology of ideas which is still of value in explaining how social life shapes and distorts people's ideas and beliefs.

John Torrance (Author)

9780521066723, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 June 2008

456 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

"...Torrance operates in the analytical mode and aims to give the reader a plausible construal and defense of Marx's ideas -- at least in the area under discussion. And, in this aim, the book very largely succeeds." David McLellan, American Jounral of Sociology

Marx's undeveloped ideas about how society presents a misleading appearance which distorts its members' understanding of it have been the subject of many conflicting interpretations. In this book John Torrance takes a fresh, un-Marxist approach to Marx's texts and shows that a more precise, coherent and cogent sociology of ideas can be extracted from them than is generally allowed. The implications of this for twentieth-century capitalism and for recent debates about Marx's conceptions of justice, morality and the history of social science are explored. The author argues that Marx's theory of ideas is sufficiently independent of other parts of his thought to provide a critique and explanation of those defects in his own understanding of capitalism which allowed Marxism itself to become, by his own definition, an ideology.

1. Marxism versus Marx: what Marx's theory of ideology was not
2. Marx's theory of knowledge
3. The basis of false consciousness: theory
4. The basis of false consciousness: social being
5. Social consciousness
6. Ideology
7. Class struggle, consciousness and ideology
8. Justice
9. Morality
10. The sociology of political economy
11. Marx's science and Marxist ideology.

Subject Areas: Social theory [JHBA]