Louis Althusser's Ideology Summary

In the 1970s, Louis Althusser wrote Ideology and the State Apparatuses as a way to explain how social systems form people by using the idea of ideology. Althusser was a French Marxist who was interested in the idea of structuralism. Through this, Althusser attempts to answer his central thesis of how people are constructed by ideology by addressing two separate theses. The first is based on the idea that “the object… is represented in the imaginary form of ideology” while the second focuses on the “materiality of ideology” (152). For the purpose of this paper, the first thesis regarding an imaginary relationship will be studied and analyzed. Through this thesis, we can see that Althusser explains the imaginary relationship to be a way in which …show more content…
In order to answer this question, Althusser looks at two possible answers: Priests and material alienation. The first answer proposes the idea that Priests or Despots created these ideologies as a way to gain followers and get society to obey to their ideas. Althusser speculates that these men “base their domination and exploitation of ‘people’ on a falsified presentation of the world” (155). Thus, explaining that Priest or Despots tried to gain power and control the minds of the people by teaching them how to be, do, and feel a certain way. The second idea Althusser considers is the idea that “material alienation… reigns in the conditions of existence of men themselves” (154). Through this idea, Althusser attempts to explain that people have created these ideologies to avoid dealing with the reality of how the world is. For example, regarding capitalism, people don’t want to admit that the style in which production labor works is alienating. Therefore, they make up excuses to hide themselves from the real issues regarding production, therefore, alienating themselves