Exegesis and evidence

In order to buttress the analysis of Marx and Engels's conception of ideology, I turn to Lukács and not to the founders' immediate successors, because he produced an entirely uncritical (and none too polished) synthesis of Marx and Engels's scattered pronouncements on the subject. He did not regard the lack of a concentrated treatment of ideology in their works as a reason for correcting Marxist theory. While Lukács would not condone any ‘deviation, improvement or correction’ of Marx himself, he was prepared to engage in polemics with Engels over some of the latter's utterances and thereby even to defend orthodox Marxism against Engels, though on the issues connected with ideology he expressed only agreement. But since for many recent interpreters of Marx the relinkage of Marx to Hegel is accompanied by moving Marx away from Engels, it is also of interest to note that in the book often taken to reflect Lukács's most Hegelian phase, the general accusation he levels against Engels is that he sometimes followed ‘the false example of Hegel’.

For our purpose it is of particular importance that in his retrospective criticism of History and Class Consciousness Lukács should have excluded from his account of the errors of the book not only its definition of orthodox Marxism as a method (‘dialectical Marxism is the road to truth’), but also what that method implies, the explanation of ‘all ideological phenomena by reference to their basis in economics’. He thus reconfirmed the correctness of Marx and Engels's theory of ideology and the adequacy of his presentation of that theory.