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False Consciousness Reconsidered: A Theory of Defective Social Cognition

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DOI: 10.1177/0896920514528817

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CRS0010.1177/0896920514528817Critical SociologyThompson

Article

Critical Sociology

False Consciousness
2015, Vol. 41(3) 449­–461
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0896920514528817
Defective Social Cognition crs.sagepub.com

Michael J. Thompson
William Paterson University, USA

Abstract
This article provides a reconstruction of the concept of false consciousness seen as defective
forms of reasoning that derive from particular forms of socialization. In contrast to the traditional
understanding of the concept, I suggest that it is a state of accepting the value patterns and
cognitive styles of thinking generated by others, particularly by forms of institutional norms
and cultural patterns of activity that can deform critical-cognitive capacities. As a result, false
consciousness is a phenomenon linked to questions of power since it is the very means by which
groups come to submit themselves to the interests of others, in particular the ability of an elite to
be able to actively distract subordinates from questioning the basis of their social relations with
one another. False consciousness is therefore recast here as a pathology of subjective cognitive
and moral reasoning faculties brought on by particular social-cultural forces within administrative-
capitalist society.

Keywords
false consciousness, moral cognition, ideology, alienation, reification

Introduction
When we think of the term ‘false consciousness’ there is a tendency to dismiss it as crude, unsophis-
ticated, and simply an incorrect way of understanding the nature of ideology in modern societies.
This view may at first seem to deserve some merit, considering the way the term has been employed
politically by vulgar Marxists. But I would like to suggest that it is in fact a concept that deserves to
be reconsidered and one that needs to be reconstructed. My basic proposition here is that false con-
sciousness is a deeper, more complex phenomenon, one that can help clarify many of the problem-
atic, irrational tendencies that persist in modern societies, in particular the various mechanisms of
ideological consciousness itself. By focusing on a new or reconstructed understanding of false

Corresponding author:
Michael J. Thompson, Dept. Political Science, William Paterson University, Raubinger Hall, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne,
NJ 07470, USA.
Email: thompsonmi@wpunj.edu

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450 Critical Sociology 41(3)

consciousness, I am suggesting that attention be paid to the actual structures of consciousness,

thought, and mental processes of reasoning that individual subjects perform in order to understand
the ways in which dominant ideas, value patterns, and forms of legitimation come to neutralize criti-
cal attitudes and forms of consciousness. These structures of consciousness should be seen as both
products of the ideological environment one inhabits and into which one is socialized and as actively
constituting the power relations that pervade the social order. What makes consciousness ‘false’, in
my sense, is that it is locked into a routinized pattern of cognition that disables critical cognitive and
epistemic capacities and naturalizes the dominant ideas and values that legitimate prevailing power
relations and interests. Hence, my focus in this article is on the very mechanisms that produce and
constitute those mental processes that produce false conceptions of the world and allow hierarchi-
cally organized elites to exert dominance over others.
To begin, consider what Friedrich Engels wrote concerning the problem of ideology: ‘Ideology
is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false conscious-
ness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not
be an ideological process’ (Engels, 1968). Intrinsic to Engels’s thesis is the notion that there exists
a split, a kind of bifurcation of consciousness: that one adopts not only ideas that are not one’s own,
but also, and perhaps more importantly, thinks in styles and ‘logics’ that are not one’s own either.
What is at the center of the theory if ideology in this sense is the notion that one thinks in the form
of another; that one becomes heteronomous in terms of adopting the thought patterns, value orien-
tations, and ideational positions of ‘others’? At the heart of false consciousness lies the idea that we
are not simply adopting the ideological structures of the specific social order we inhabit, but that
we think within its thought categories as well. False consciousness, it appears, is a problem of the
form as much if not more than a problem of the content of thought. This means that breaking out
from the powers of false consciousness may be more complex than simply adopting another ideo-
logical set of political ideas. Rather, it is more likely that the effects of false consciousness run far
deeper than generally assumed.
When I say that false consciousness concerns the form of thought that a given subject may uti-
lize or think within, I mean that forms of socialization have been able to routinize within one’s
mental life a pervasive distortion of their cognitive and epistemic faculties. These forms of sociali-
zation are themselves deeply embedded in the structural and functional logics of capitalist
institutions – institutions that place emphasis on capital accumulation as well as on specific pro-
duction-consumption patterns needed for its maximization. But it can also sustain other forms of
traditional beliefs about gender, ethnicity, or other values that reflect current power relations within
the society. This means that cultural forms of life deeply shape the mental powers and capacities of
individuals. But they do so not simply by having individuals adopt certain ideas or specific beliefs;
rather, my thesis is that the functions and logics of institutions dominated by any elite group will
come to shape the rules and structures of thought itself. False consciousness is not simply a matter
of the ideas that people possess, it is a matter of the cognitive styles that are shaped by socialization
and the ways that these cognitive styles come to limit and shape the powers of thought itself. If I
am right, then this approach to false consciousness will not only help to rehabilitate it as an empiri-
cal and theoretical concept in the social sciences, but also serve as a challenge to many of the cur-
rent trends in contemporary political and democratic theory, particularly advocates of deliberative
democracy and intersubjective approaches to critical theory.
At the heart of my approach is the thesis that false consciousness is a product of irrationalism:
a fundamental inability on the part of the subject properly to be able to conceptualize the world in
any objectively valid sense. By irrationality I mean the following: the specific ways that value
orientations, acquired through socialization, come to distort the cognitive and epistemic structures
of thinking. Individuals come to ‘think’ certain ideas about the world (in factual as well as

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Thompson 451

normative terms) due to the ways that the dominant value patterns shape consciousness. This is
irrational in a double sense: first because the values that are internalized are heteronomous in that
they legitimate external ideas and values, and also in that subjects are generally unable to defend
rationally the ideas and values that they possess. Put another way, the cognitive and the moral
capacities of individuals are intimately connected and are both shaped by forms of socialization
and institutions that pervade contemporary capitalist society and culture. Irrationalism, seen in this
way, is the inability to be able to know the objective processes of the world one inhabits as well as
assess it with any degree of scrutiny. Irrationalism is the term I use to identify a broad group of
defective thought processes and habits that tend toward an acritical compliance with the dominant
structure of social relations.

Irrationalism and False Consciousness

If irrationalism is understood as the inability to be able to track cognitively the real, actual, or
objective processes of the social relations and mechanisms that constitute one’s life, then we must
consider the actual processes that produce such a pathology. The concepts or categories of thought
that an individual possesses and uses to make some kind of sense of the world produce false con-
sciousness when they are unable to capture the objective reality of the processes and reality of the
social world around them. Rationality is therefore the relative accuracy of the correspondence of
the ideas one possesses and the objective processes and phenomena that shape and affect one’s life.
The problem with the irrational, on this view, is that it is a result of pathological forms of socializa-
tion. According to this view, socialization patterns and norms come to subjectivize agents into a
matrix of value orientations and practices that shape the capacities of thought and reflection of
individuals.
In this way, we can see a means to overcome the way that false consciousness has been con-
ceived in more recent literature. On the one hand, it is seen as a pathology of the subject, as a defect
in the cognitive powers of the individual and not dependent on the systems of socialization and
their powers to develop and shape consciousness (cf. Jost, 1995; Runciman, 1969). On the other
hand, there are the overly structural accounts that come from placing undue emphasis on the coer-
cive powers of social institutions rooted in capitalist imperatives (Althusser, 1971). As I see it, false
consciousness is a dialectic between both approaches: those that emphasize cognitive defects as
well as the ways that these defects are the products of specific structural-functional logics of capi-
talist institutions (cf. Agoustinos, 1999; Rosen, 1996).
Irrationalism comes into play as a means of understanding the former, and which I will focus on
here: the actual defects of cognitive and epistemic powers of the subject. Irrationalism is not sim-
ply a fault of the thinking subject, it is a particular way of thinking, of (mis)conceiving the world.
It occurs when the thought categories employed by the subject are not able to either perceive or
adequately comprehend any object of consciousness. In this sense, irrationalism is not simply the
fault of the subject, but of the structures of thought that are employed throughout society and which
therefore have some kind of hegemonic force over the subject (i.e. as when someone thinks about
the world in ways that everyone else does without reflecting that the mode of thinking may be
defective or inadequate).
Simply put, the concept of irrationality that I am working from stems from the Hegelian-Marxist
tradition which sees it as the incapacity to distinguish essence from appearance, or process from
isolated static elements.1 In this sense, the irrationalism affects the capacity to judge and to know
the world with any degree of objective accuracy. The irrational mind is therefore unable to grasp
the broader complexity of reality, unable to link – in any causal-rational sense – the disparate ele-
ments of experience and perception.2 This results in a way of viewing the world that is

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452 Critical Sociology 41(3)

unaccustomed to those frames of understanding, beliefs, values, and so on that are the result of
administered forms of socialization (i.e. schools, work, and so on) or the disruptive powers of the
culture industry (i.e. popular forms of art, culture, mass technology, and so on). The irrational is
therefore a social product: it is the result of progressive forms of socialization that result from both
the need in modern societies to secure hierarchical and administered forms of production as well
as the kind of subjectivity that is the product of a culture saturated with excessive consumption
drives and imperatives. The irrational is, on my account, the nucleus of false consciousness in that
these cognitive styles of thinking come to prevent people from grasping the core power relations
that operate in shaping their world, thereby eroding not only the cognitive-epistemic powers of the
individual, but also their moral-evaluative powers as well (cf. Thompson, 2013a).
In this respect, I disagree with the argument put forth by Rosen (1996) that not all false con-
sciousness is irrational. Rosen claims that:

Irrationality in general represents a failure of competence on the part of the individual: to say of someone
that they formed a belief for bad reasons is to suggest that it was – or ought to have been – within their
power to form it for better reasons. But there are defects of consciousness that do not consist in failures of
rationality in this sense. For example, if someone is deceived then the fact that they believe something that
is untrue … is nevertheless not a failure of rationality on their part. (Rosen, 1996: 48)

It seems wrong to argue that temporary mistakes of reasoning be described as ‘irrational’. Rather,
the basic premise of irrationalism is the inability to utilize reason to justify the ideas, beliefs,
‘facts’, norms, and so on to which one subscribes. In this basic sense, all false consciousness must
be irrational since it is the condition of having beliefs or ideas about the world that one cannot
justify rationally (even though one most likely is able to rationalize those beliefs, ideas, etc.). As I
am arguing, irrationalism is a defect in ways of thinking that produces false consciousness. There
are different levels of deception, but if I am cognitively unable to understand or question the prem-
ises that are put to me, then I necessarily fall into an irrational (rather than rationally impaired)
mode of thinking and acting. Irrationalism in the sense I am employing it here is not simply being
deceived, it is the result of defective forms of reasoning that therefore conceal from the subject the
true, or objectively verifiable knowledge of the world they live in. It does not refer to the level of
knowledge one may possess, but rather the extent to which one is able to engage critically the
mechanisms that constitute one’s social world. In this sense, irrationalism means a defect in the
ways I am able to process knowledge about the world. It indicates a basic failure in the correspond-
ence between the ideas I possess and the actual, true nature of the ideas to which those ideas refer.
As I noted above, the source for this understanding of false consciousness as irrationality is
rooted in the basic postulates of critical theory (cf. Eyerman, 1981). For Lukács, irrationalism
resulted from ‘the limitations and contradictions of thinking governed by understanding’ (Lukács,
1980: 97). By ‘understanding’ Lukács means the Hegelian category of thought where the subject
perceives the appearance of an object without grasping the rational reasons that comprise the
essence of that object.3 When thought is unable to pierce through the mere appearance of any
object or phenomenon and also fails to see that this encounter with the object is self-sufficient,
requiring no further development of thinking, it becomes ‘irrational’ because it (thought or the
thinking subject) ‘stops at precisely this point, absolutizes the problem, hardens the limitations of
perception governed by understanding into perceptual limitations as a whole, and indeed mysti-
cizes into a ‘supra-rational’ answer the problem, thus rendered artificially insoluble’ (Lukács,
1980: 97–98).4
Gramsci adds to this understanding of irrationalism as the root of false consciousness by point-
ing to defective ways of acquiring one’s conception of the world. For Gramsci, awareness and

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Thompson 453

criticism can only begin once individuals have abandoned ways of thinking that disable them from
properly grasping the objective world around them. ‘[I]s it better to “think”, without having a criti-
cal awareness, in a disjointed and episodic way? In other words, is it better to take part in a concep-
tion of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social
groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the con-
scious world … Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own
conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labors of one’s own guide, refusing to
accept passively and supinely from outside the molding of one’s personality?’ (Gramsci, 1971:
323–324) Gramsci adds to Lukács’s thesis of the failure adequately to grasp the essence of phe-
nomena the psychological consequences of subordinate groups accepting not only the ideas, but
also the flawed forms of cognition (i.e. ‘episodic’ ways of thinking) from hegemonic groups and
classes.5 False consciousness is not the result of an individual’s failure at cognizing the world; it is
a social, a group phenomenon instigated by the power structures of hierarchical social dynamics.
Subordinate groups adopt ‘a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group;
and it affirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be following it, because this is the
conception which it follows in “normal times” – that is when its conduct is not independent and
autonomous, but submissive and subordinate’ (Gramsci, 1971: 327).
Irrationalism is therefore a pathology of cognitive capacities that results from the imposition
of values, ideas, and belief systems that actively interfere with the autonomous power of reason
of any subject. But this occurs through the shaping of cognition and, as I have been emphasizing,
the structuring of consciousness and the capacities for thought itself. The specific mechanism for
this lies in the socialization process where the subject acquires the values, beliefs, and ideas that
form the basis for the legitimation of the various institutions that comprise the social order. These
values, ideas, and beliefs are instilled through socialization and come to form a consensus of
legitimation and conformity, resulting in a correspondence between the values and ideas of the
subject and those needed by institutional logics and functions. The extent to which a society is
able isomorphically to harmonize its various institutional functions and goals with the subjects
that inhabit them, the more it is able to secure an efficiency of domination and the more the con-
sciousness of subjects becomes false in the sense that it is heteronomic and externally imposed.
We can therefore point to three different conduits of false consciousness: emotions, imposed
interests, and tradition. Each of these is a means by which structures of cognition can be shaped
by the inculcation of values that come to underwrite reasoning habits. Emotions can be used to
confuse the rational process of inquiry, imposed interests (as opposed to spontaneous or authentic
interests) are able to orient actions and behaviors toward goals imposed by the imperatives of the
system, and traditions are able to orient actions and behaviors toward goals imposed by the imper-
atives of the system, and tradition, habit and custom become the root of legitimacy for values and
world-views. In any event, these can be seen as the causes of false consciousness; my purpose
moving forward will be to dissect and to analyze the actual processes that make up defective
cognition, to map false consciousness.
From this discussion of irrationalism – whether seen as the lack of rational reasons to account
for our perception of the world or the kinds of ‘episodic’ thinking that Gramsci emphasizes and its
inability to comprehend the totality of any thing – we are dealing with an inability to cognize the
causal processes that constitute the essential characteristics of any given phenomenon. When we
are dealing with the social world, this means an inability to cognize the social forces that govern
one’s life and the imperatives behind the norms and values that one comes to follow. This means
we are dealing with two separate, but interrelated processes of thought: on the one hand, the capac-
ity to process information rationally (a cognitive dimension) and, on the other, the problem of
whose norms and values come to orient and legitimate our world-views and beliefs about the world

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454 Critical Sociology 41(3)

(a moral-evaluative dimension). Taken together, these two dimensions constitute social cognition,
and false consciousness is to be seen as deformed modes of social cognition.

Mapping False Consciousness: An Anatomy of Defective Social

Cognition
Thus far, I have been arguing that false consciousness needs to be seen as a defective form of rea-
soning about the world: one where an individual is unable correctly to understand the mechanisms
of the social relations that make up his world, particularly the relations between himself and the
elites that possess unequal power over social resources. To go a step further, I will now consider
the styles of social cognition that can arise from the different ways defective reasoning can mani-
fest itself. The basic thesis here is that false consciousness can take a variety of forms, but it is
essentially opposed to a critical form of cognition that is able to conceptualize and analyze social
phenomena as well as the normative reasons that orient actions and beliefs. My intention here is
not to dwell on the philosophical categories behind irrationality and false consciousness, but to
move toward an operationalizable set of concepts that can be useful for empirical research and
theory construction. To this end, let me sketch several concepts and actual mechanisms of the kinds
of cognitive processes that are involved in the production and maintenance of false consciousness.6
As a starting point to this approach, I will point to two crucial mechanisms that affect the cognitive-
epistemic and also infect the moral-evaluative capacities of the individual. Hence, I see false con-
sciousness arising from defects in cognitive-epistemic competence that then come to shape
moral-evaluative powers and then on to certain attitudinal dimensions of the personality, all brought
about not by endogenous defects of the subject, but through their socialization by specific kinds of
institutional structures.
Irrationality must therefore affect epistemic and cognitive capacities as well as the capacities
for and powers of moral reasoning. Again, this irrationality must essentially be defined by the
extent to which individuals are unable to perceive and cognize the objectively valid nature of the
social processes, relations and mechanisms that surround them. To operate with false conscious-
ness therefore means, following Lukács and Gramsci, that the cognitive and epistemic deficits
from which the individual suffers lead to a reliance on external schemas and concepts of the
world, usually generated by other institutions which seek to legitimate, in some sense, their opera-
tional logics. Individuals are therefore conscious of the world around them, but their knowledge
of the world is defective and is supplemented by the dominant ideas of the society around them.7
The false consciousness of any agent can therefore, in its simplest form, be outlined along two
different but interdependent dimensions. First, there is what I call the integrative-diffusive dimen-
sion and second, the critical-heteronomic dimension. The first registers the cognitive and epis-
temic style of thought whereas the second registers the capacities for autonomous or critical moral
reasoning and the extent to which one comes to rely on external thought schemes and models of
explanation as opposed to one’s own understanding of the norms and values that underwrite their
activities and beliefs.

The Integrative-Diffusive Dimension

The integrative-diffusive dimension registers an individual’s capacity to integrate concepts or mat-
ters of fact in their interpretation of reality. The chasm between the phenomenological experience
of the world on the one hand, and the actual, empirical realities of the world on the other results
from the incapacity of any given subject to provide accurate reasons or explanations for the reali-
ties he experiences. Indeed, an individual may in fact be able to give ‘reasons’ for why a specific

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Thompson 455

ethnic group is economically marginalized, why unemployment rates are rising, or some other
aspect of their social world, but these ‘reasons’ need not be fully rational in the sense that they are
objectively verifiable by facts. The individual may adopt pre-scripted narratives to explain these
phenomena, but may be unaware of the contradictions or lack of coherence for the explanations
adopted. Integrating different elements of any coherent system or totality is the essentially dialecti-
cal ability to grasp the causal links and relations between the elements of that system. The com-
plete, objectively valid knowledge of any object therefore requires that I know the ways that its
complex internal relations are arranged and therefore can integrate different aspects, facts, princi-
ples, and so on, of any thing. If an individual suffers from diffused forms of cognition, he is unable
to accomplish this and ends up mis-perceiving and not properly knowing or understanding that
object.
This is what Gramsci seems to be alluding to in his discussion of ‘episodic consciousness’
where individuals fail to be able to grasp in any coherent sense the coherence of the world, its
mechanisms, and the actual, true nature of the social relations that they live within. Diffusive cog-
nition leads therefore to a host of defective forms of reasoning such as a weakness in or lack of
causal reasoning capacities, illusory correlations between phenomena, naive realism, the false con-
sensus effect, the fundamental attribution error, and other problems of reasoning that can serve to
mystify and reify the world. But this occurs, as I suggested in the previous section, because of the
ability of value orientations to distort reasoning processes. Since socialization processes are organ-
ized around specific norms and values that are imposed on individuals and which they must come
to internalize, these value orientations can also condition the ways one comes to think about what
is right and wrong about the world; what ideas should be accepted, and what ideas should be
rejected, and so on.
The cognitive defects that result from diffuse consciousness therefore contribute to the means
by which individuals come to reify their world and help sustain relations of domination and con-
trol. This occurs because the ideas that they come to adopt are those that are convenient based on
their own ideological predispositions, or simply the ones ambient in their environment. Diffusive
cognition styles affect the ways individuals receive information, the ways they process stimuli, and
come to formulate world-views and legitimate their ideas about the world as well as the institutions
that constitute it. Integrative style of thought forces individuals to render a more objective formula-
tion of the world and to integrate what seem otherwise diffuse aspects of the world into a more
coherent totality. The less of this kind of thinking I possess, the more prone I will be to adopting
what seem to be workable and plausible explanations of the world from other sources. It is here that
a connection exists between the cognitive and the moral-evaluative dimensions of false
consciousness.

The Critical-Heteronomic Dimension

Information and knowledge about the world, when they cannot be generated adequately of satis-
factorily by the subject himself, therefore have to come from some external source. The extent to
which I rely upon these external understandings of the world and come to justify them is a condi-
tion of ‘heteronomy’, or that condition of taking truths and principles about the world from an other
rather than from one’s own understanding.8 More crucially, it means lacking an understanding of
the world that is one’s own, arrived at through the powers of the agent’s own cognitive powers, and
therefore internalizing the concepts, schemas, and ideas about the world from others – usually
opinion structures that are highly doxic and generally uncritical of the forms of power that pervade
one’s society. This can affect the ways that individuals come to bypass attempts at rational thinking
and instead rely automatically upon the normative concepts that they have internalized.9 The more

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456 Critical Sociology 41(3)

one turns toward a moral-evaluative condition that is heteronomic, the more one will manifest the
various attitudes that are typical of false consciousness in contemporary societies: belief that the
world one lives in is inherently just (Lerner, 1980); the tendency of oppressed groups not to per-
ceive their subordinate status (Elster, 1982); behavioral compliance with prevailing institutional
norms (Greenwald, 1980); as well as the justification of their social roles (Lane, 1959).
Individuals come to possess heteronomic forms of moral consciousness when they internalize
– through processes of routinization and rationalization – the value patterns and norms that are
themselves needed for the reproduction of hierarchical forms of social relations (Thompson,
2013b). In this sense, processes of socialization perform the function of producing false conscious-
ness by actively dissuading and suppressing critical forms of thought that will undermine the value
consensus of consumer culture and market society. False consciousness is therefore primarily the
result of the various ways in which thought processes and value orientations are subsumed by the
dominant institutions of the community. This subsumption is an active process of the imposition of
values and ideas – an imposition that occurs through cultural norms, educational forms, and the
pressure of peer groups and so on. The effectiveness of false consciousness is therefore dependent
on the extent to which the dominant ideas and values of those institutions come to be internalized
by social agents.
This point is important to discuss. The mechanism of value acquisition is central because it
shows how ideas and values are internalized not in some abstract sense, but through the ways in
which norms are enforced within any social group. This is because ideas and values develop an
active force in socialization once they are seen as part of a broader social consensus. Nascent egos
come to identify with the individuals and the basic values that underwrite the institutions to which
they belong. This is not simply the product of simple hierarchical authority figures since mass
culture has become a predominant means of communicating and disseminating the values of a
consumer culture and the social order more broadly. The intersubjective process of value commu-
nication is one that initially occurs as the result of authority figures imposing and socializing the
ego, but also of cultural and technical means of dissemination (popular culture, television, internet,
and so on) as well as the peers within the community. Attitudinal congruence comes to solidify
certain ways of thinking and judging; certain ideas and beliefs about how the world works, how it
ought to work, not only become deeply embedded in the content of thought; they also come to stunt
the autonomous, critical capacities of the subject as well (think reification, episodic thinking, and
so on). In this sense, Marcuse was correct when he argued that ‘[i]n the social structure, the indi-
vidual becomes the conscious and unconscious object of administration and obtains his freedom
and satisfaction in his role as such an object in the mental structure, the ego shrinks to such an
extent that it seems no longer capable of sustaining itself, as a self, in distinction from id and super-
ego’ (Marcuse, 1970: 47). What needs to be added to this is that the genesis of false consciousness
is the way this process of self- and ego-development is able to shape and to structure cognition, the
very mechanics of thought itself. It is my thesis that false consciousness is much more than the
force of ideas and values penetrating subjective thought, it is the power of socialization and con-
sistent adoption of certain ideas and value orientations that establish a defective style of thinking
that makes it difficult for individuals to obtain critical cognition of their social world.

Categories of False Consciousness

In this sense, we can summarize the relation between the two dimensions I have described above
as a kind of cognitive map where the extensiveness and intensity of false consciousness can be
registered. If we see the relationship between the dimensions dynamically, we can see how differ-
ent thought styles can be derived. I summarize these in Figure 1 where I present a grid of four

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Thompson 457

Figure 1. Grid of Social Cognition Styles.

distinct styles of social cognition that emerge from the different combinations of the critical-
heteronomic and integrative-diffusive dimensions discussed above. If we consider individuals with
a high degree of heteronomy and diffusive epistemic and cognitive patterns of thought, we see a
condition of extreme false consciousness, or reification where the individual is unable to concep-
tualize properly the causal structure of the world they live in and therefore uncritically adopts the
world-views, concepts, and ideas of ‘others’ around him. Similarly, there are those that have a
highly integrative form of epistemic and cognitive patterns of thought, but lack a critical con-
sciousness, instead internalizing the normative values of their social world. This presents us with a
situation where the individual will be highly conformable to dominant social norms and values,
even perhaps going to the extent that he will actively support and legitimate the norms of his social
world, refusing to call into question the value orientations he has internalized. A situation of what
Fromm (1941) terms ‘automaton conformity’ results. Next, consider an individual who is highly
critical of the norms and values of his social world, but lacks a coherent or integrated pattern of
cognition. This instance, still a category of false consciousness as the other two I have pointed to
above, is one of transgressive deviance where one rejects the values of the community, but does so
in a way that is not realistically constructive in terms of providing legitimate alternatives to the
things one rejects. Lastly, a style of critical cognition results only when one is able to be critical of
the value patterns of one’s social world and able to understand the actual mechanisms that create
or produce the social phenomena of that world.
In this sense, the categories of false consciousness come to cover a variety of social cognition
styles, but they have coherence as a concept because each of them is able to direct the thought
processes of the individual away from the sources of social power. The basic premise here is that

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458 Critical Sociology 41(3)

false consciousness allows a society made up of unequal relations to social power to be seam-
lessly recreated by creating a culture of compliance to rational forms of authority. Legitimacy for
the system therefore comes to be the result of a false consciousness of the pathological nature of
the social relations that pervade the social world and, as a result, false consciousness retains its
centrality as a category of social power in that it is an active component of any relation of domina-
tion. Consider the thesis that any relation of domination should be seen not simply as agent A
interfering arbitrarily with the choices of agent B (Pettit, 1997, 2013). According to this view,
domination is the result of some kind of force where one is able to have power over the choices
of another. But this is empirically weak since it is much more accurate to assert that domination
is the result of the acceptance on the part of agent B of the power or authority of agent A and that
this acceptance or legitimacy is the result of a set of beliefs, ideas, and/or values that orient agent
B to accept that power relation. On this view, the basis of any hierarchical system of power
obtains its stability, efficiency and security through the manipulation of consciousness itself. And
consciousness can be manipulated – indeed, more than manipulated, shaped and organized – to
cognize the world in specific, pre-coded and patterned ways to such an extent that they will legiti-
mize from the bottom up the social order of power. For without false consciousness, modern,
post-conventional societies would almost certainly witness more manifestations of social conflict
and struggle between unequal social groups than they do currently.

The Social and Cultural Reproduction of False Consciousness

The production of false consciousness is complex, but it does not result from problems of the iso-
lated individual. Here the insights of critical theory are once again important in that the predomi-
nant social and cultural institutions and forms of experience that characterize late capitalism are
particularly effective in generating the kinds of irrationalism necessary for a pervasive form of
false consciousness. Firstly, educational institutions are increasingly being oriented away from
integrative forms of knowledge and learning and are oriented more toward instrumental ends. The
colonization of social institutions by the logic of economic elites and the values of the capitalist
economic system therefore presents us with an ambience of instrumental forms of rationality that
are seen as universal and basic to the kind of world we live in. In addition, technological change
can also have an effect on the kinds of consciousness being produced. The explosion of consumer
forms of technology (iPhones, iPads, and so on) have enabled a new level of distractedness that
enhances diffuse cognitive styles and severely inhibits the formation of more critical forms of rea-
soning that can move toward calling into question the norms and forms of obligation that we have
toward social institutions. Media outlets have also been absorbed by a competition for viewers and
increasingly unsophisticated forms of journalism as the commodification of news becomes ram-
pant. And lastly, the culture industry’s ability to drain the cognitive resources of individuals through
increasingly trite forms of aesthetic experience, all point toward the institutionalization of false
consciousness.
The reproduction of false consciousness needs therefore to be seen as a multi-causal process, but
its basic function remains the same: to secure compliance to the various institutions that produce
hierarchical social relations. One way of explaining this phenomenon is that it results from defective
forms of intersubjectivity, and that false consciousness and reification should be seen as the expres-
sion of a lack of reflexivity within intersubjective relations and socialization processes (Stahl, 2011,
2013). But this seems more of a necessary but insufficient condition since intersubjective relations
and practices are themselves deeply shaped by social institutions. The power of social structure to
impose rules, logics, and functions on institutions and on consciousness is the real source of false
consciousness, and it is only perpetuated by defective (i.e. non-reflexive) forms of intersubjectivity.

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Thompson 459

We miss the real causal story if we eliminate the power of economic elites to redirect the functions
of the community to fit their purposes and interests. To be sure, it is not the case that there is a uni-
fied ruling class, but rather that elites must, in order to retain that status, be able, as Mosca (1923)
points out, actively to disorganize the majority of the population in order to prevent threats to their
sources of power. False consciousness in modern societies becomes more difficult to combat once
we see that its vehicle of propagation is the increasing commodification of every sphere of social
life, from education, aesthetic experience, journalism, and so on. As the commodification process
increases its reach, so does the phenomenon of false consciousness, since the processes of socializa-
tion come to be marked increasingly by the imperatives of economic elites and the particular forms
of production and consumption that characterize post-Fordist capitalism.
The basis of my thesis has been that the processes of socialization under the conditions of highly
rationalized institutional life dominated by elites coordinating a complex market system based on
mass production and consumption require the distortion of ideational patterns, but also that they
result in a pathology of cognitive functions as well. This means that the ideas that dominate con-
temporary critical theory which place emphasis on intersubjective theories of communication, dis-
course, recognition, and so on, cannot be adequate to combat the deep effects of socialization that
shape false consciousness. Indeed, false consciousness – at least in the form that I am suggesting it
takes, as a defect of social cognition and epistemic competence – should be seen as blocking and
disabling the critical and emancipatory promises of these theories. Instead, we need to turn our
attention back to the ways in which social power is inherent in institutional logics and ideational
forms; to look again at a critical analysis of mass culture and its impact on subject formation; and
once again at the ways that reification is not a pathology of recognitive social relations, but a dis-
torted form of thought, of cognition itself. Indeed, in the end, it is a category that should be seen as
central to any genuine reconstruction of critical theory.

Conclusion
In the end, false consciousness remains a major problem in modern societies. The Enlightenment
project of producing autonomous, rationally competent citizens still should be a standard by which
to judge the intensity of defective social cognition. We are still plagued by the pernicious reality of
elites able to direct the attention of the remainder of the community away from their unequal con-
trol over resources and their unequal control over institutions, forms of culture, and, most impor-
tantly, the forms of consciousness that prevent critical scrutiny of their powers of direction and
control. If we turn our attention to the dialectic of subjective forms of cognition and the institu-
tional forms of reproduction of cognitive styles, we can perhaps begin to see ways of resistance.
Even more, by viewing false consciousness as rooted in irrationalism, as I have sought to argue it
here, we will also see a lasting legitimacy to the foundational concepts of critical theory and their
continued relevance for understanding the pathologies of the present social order as well as the
eroded forms of citizenship that pervade contemporary society.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. As Lichtheim summarizes this viewpoint: “Alienated social activity is to Marx what alienated mental
activity is for Hegel. For both, the distinction between Reality and Appearance is involved in the manner
in which real processes are transformed into apparently fixed and stable characters. Reality is process,

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460 Critical Sociology 41(3)

appearance has the form of isolated objects. The task of critical thinking is to grasp the relations which
constitute these apparent objects” (Lichtheim, 1967: 19).
2. Gabel argues on this point: ‘False consciousness and ideology are two forms of non-dialectical (reified)
perception of dialectical realities, in other words, two aspects (or better: two degrees) of the rejection of
the dialectic … False consciousness is a diffused state of mind; ideology is a theoretical crystallization’
(Gabel, 1975: 11, emphases in the original). I will come back to this formulation of false consciousness
as ‘diffused thinking’ later in the article.
3. Lukács claims that ‘irrationalism … begins with this (necessary, irrevocable, but always relative) dis-
crepancy [whose source] lies in the fact that the tasks directly presented to thought in a given instance,
as long as they are still tasks, still unresolved problems, appear in a form which at first gives the impres-
sion that thought, the forming of concepts, breaks down in the face of reality, that the reality confronting
thought represents an area beyond reason’ (Lukács, 1980: 99).
4. By ‘supra-rational’ Lukács means intuition or some other non-rational mode of thinking.
5. Gramsci sees that there is a kind of dual consciousness on the part of subordinate groups where they
work under the dominant concepts and ways of thought of the dominating group but also work through
the subordinate status in the real world in everyday life. For an extension of this idea into ideology, see
Cheal (1979).
6. By focusing on cognitive mechanisms and defective epistemic frames, I am distinguishing my approach
from the empirically based research that places emphasis on attitudes to identify and define the features
of false consciousness. See Jost (1995) as well as Jost and Banaji (1994). This is not to say that attitudes
are not also crucial in mapping the structures of false consciousness, but that, in my view, the defective
cognitive mechanisms are in fact responsible for the production and maintenance of these attitudes and
opinion structures.
7. It is interesting to note Adorno’s critique of Durkheim in this regard, where the notion of the conscience
collective is seen as little more than the reproduction of the broader dominant ideas of society at large
and, as a result, as essentially false consciousness. See Adorno (1995) as well as Hagens (2006) for a
discussion.
8. The distinction obviously stems from Kant, but it is one that can be seen through both Hegel and Marx.
In Hegel, it comes through in the exploration of the defective forms of consciousness that make up the
first five chapters of the Phenomenology of Mind and in Marx, it is at the center of his conception of
‘commodity fetishism’ in Capital.
9. This concept of ‘automaticity’ can be integrated into my discussion of false consciousness. See John A.
Bargh et al. (1996).

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