Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: William Clare Robert, McGill University

Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory welcomes William Clare Roberts, McGill University, who will be discussing his paper “Ideology and Social Opacity: Tracy, Marx, and the Fate of Enlightenment.”

William Clare Roberts is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University, in Montreal. He is the author of Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (2107). Recently, his essays have appeared in Jacobin, Radical Philosophy, Specter, Analyse und Kritik, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, The CLR James Journal, Contemporary Political Theory, and European Journal of Political Theory. He is currently at work on two book manuscripts: A Radical Politics of Freedom: Domination, Ideology, and Self-Emancipation, and Universal Emancipation and History: The Making and Unmaking of ‘History From Below.’

Paper Abstract:

In 1979, Emmet Kennedy pointed out that “it has not been fully explained how ‘ideology,’” coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796 to name the “science of ideas,” “could come to mean ‘false class consciousness’ less than fifty years later.” Today, the semantic shift that “ideology” underwent from Tracy to Marx and Engels has not yet been adequately explained. One candidate explanation for this transition posits that Marx and Engels adopted Napoleon’s pejorative use of the term, to denote a sphere of disconnected and abstract ideas propagated by liberal intellectuals. This paper argues that this explanation is incorrect. Marx and Engels do not use the term ideology to refer to “abstract and disconnected ideas” or “false consciousness.” Rather, they used the term to refer to the type of project Tracy was engaged in: Enlightenment pedagogy that sought to free people from “false consciousness.” Ideology, for Marx and Engels, refers to a practical project guided by an historical idealism that arises from the social location of its practitioners. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I reconstruct the basic project of ideology in Tracy’s Elémens d’idéologie, a text with which Marx was familiar. Second, I turn to the argument of Marx and Engels’s manuscripts on “the German ideology” and, briefly, in Capital. Finally, I extract some lessons from Marx and Engels’s reading of Tracy that I think are relevant for contemporary critics of “ideology.” 

About the Workshop:

This course is a workshop for discussing works in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The workshop creates a space for students to engage directly with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions toward the goal of fostering critical thinking about concepts of value and developing analytical thinking and writing skills. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines and perspectives who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues philosophers and theorists should know something about.

The theme for the Fall 2023 workshop is “Current Work on the History of Political, Legal, and Moral Philosophy.”