Knowledge and Ideology : The Epistemology of Social and Political Critique

Drawing upon a range of German and French thinkers, including Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mannheim, Lukács, Habermas, Althusser, and Foucault, Michael Morris provides an epistemology that integrates social interests within a normative account of knowledge. His study will interest readers in political philosophy and political theory.

Ideology critique generally seeks to undermine selected theories and beliefs by demonstrating their partisan origins and their insidious social functions. This approach rightly reveals the socially implicated nature of much purported knowledge, but also brackets or bypasses its cognitive properties. In contrast, Michael Morris argues that it is possible to integrate the social and epistemic dimensions of belief in a way that preserves the cognitive and adjudicatory capacities of reason, while acknowledging that reason itself is inevitably social, historical, and interested. Drawing upon insights from Hegel, Lukacs, Mannheim, and Habermas, he interprets and reconstructs Marx's critique of ideology as a positive theory of knowledge, one that reconciles the inherently interested and inextricably situated nature of thought with more traditional conceptions of rational adjudication, normativity, and truth. His wide-ranging examination of the social and epistemic dimensions of ideology will interest readers in political philosophy and political theory.