of the capitalist social order, and often enough makes true claims about this condition; it is 'false' in so far as it cannot penetrate this world of frozen appearances to lay bare the totality of tendencies and connections which underlies it. In the breathtaking central section of History and Class Consciousness, 'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat', Lukács boldly rewrites the whole of post-Kantian philosophy as a secret history of the commodity-form, of the schism between empty subjects and petrified objects; and in this sense such thought is accurate to the dominant social categories of capitalist society, structured by them to its roots. Bourgeois ideology is false less because it distorts, inverts or denies the material world than because it is unable to press beyond certain limits structural to bourgeois society as such. As Lukács writes: 'Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into "false" consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological.' ¹⁵ We have here, then, yet another definition of ideology, as 'structurally constrained thought', which runs back at least as far as Marx's "'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'". In a discussion in that text of what makes certain French politicians representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, Marx comments that it is 'the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the [petty bourgeoisie] does not get beyond in life'. False consciousness is thus a kind of thought which finds itself baffled and thwarted by certain barriers in society rather than in the mind; and only by transforming society itself could it therefore be dissolved.

One can put this point in another way. There are certain kinds of error which result simply from lapses of intelligence or information, and which can be resolved by a further refinement of thought. But when we keep running up against a limit to our conceptions which stubbornly refuses to give way, then this obstruction may be symptomatic of some 'limit' built into our social life. In this situation, no amount of intelligence or ingenuity, no mere 'evolution of ideas', will serve to get us further forward, for what is awry here is the whole cast and frame of our consciousness, conditioned as it is by certain material constraints. Our social practices pose the obstacle to the very ideas which seek to explain them; and if we want to advance those ideas, we will have to change our forms of life. It is precisely this which Marx argues of the bourgeois political economists, whose searching theoretical inquiries find themselves continually rebuffed by problems which mark the inscription on the interior of their discourse of the social conditions surrounding it.

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