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PARTISAN REVIEW
MORE IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA
LECTURES ON IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA.
By
Paul Ricoeur.
Columbia University Press. $35 .00.
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
presents the transcribed
notes for a course Paul Ricoeur taught in 1975. He has not reworked
them, so the lectures are somewhat less polished and more redun–
dant than a book would be . But the issue of the infection of
knowledge by ideology is so important and the clarity Ricoeur brings
to the subject so welcome that the rough spots are easily overlooked .
Marx, Mannheim, Weber, Althusser, Habermas, Geertz, Saint–
Simon, and Fourier are all considered here as Ricoeur retraces a
debate to which he intends to make a contribution.
Ricoeur, of course, identifies ' himself as a practitioner of the
hermeneutics adumbrated by Heidegger and spelled out by
Gadamer. "Ideology" has been a key term for the suspicious reader ,
and Ricoeur sets out here to establish the term's positive meanings .
The stakes are high: the preservation of a humanist core within
political thought. Ricoeur's real target is Althusser; he wants to
refute both Althusser's contention that the humanist Marx of the
1844 Manuscripts
is not the "real" Marx and his rejection of all Ideology
as "distortion" which can be dispelled only by a rigorous adherence
to the "science" of the mature Marx . Althusser no longer is as impor–
tant as he was in 1975, but the radical attack on humanism that he
represents continues, albeit more often now on terrain defined by
Nietzsche and Foucault. Ricoeur's revitalization of the humanist
tradition speaks directly to current debates, while his attention to
political issues is welcome because the political consequences of
debates in aesthetics and interpretation are often taken for
granted-in silly ways that quickly become cliches. (For example ,
"the death of the author" is hailed as a liberation from bourgeois
possessive individualism without considering the consequences of
the individual's disappearance.)
Ricoeur begins by stating the antihumanist position. A nega–
tive understanding of ideology considers intellectual or cultural ac–
tivities as untrue because they distort or disguise the material condi–
tions governing men's lives and cover up the interests that motivate
cultural stands. The ideological must always be interpreted (reduced
