Abstract

The issue of ideology is a very important proposition in Marxist theory. In the course of their scientific exploration to establish historical materialism and in their critique of the whole of capitalist society and culture, as represented by Germany, Marx and Engels always treated materialist inquiries into ideological issues as the focus of their struggle with idealism. By adhering to the fundamental intellectual principle that man’s social being determines his social consciousness, they defined ideology’s reactive mechanism and social function in terms of the interrelationship of economic, political and mental life; defined its subjective mechanism and class attributes in terms of the mutually generative and prescriptive relations between social consciousness and social entities; and defined its cognitive features and its character of practicality in terms of the forms of existence of social consciousness and the relationship of knowing and doing. From this they constructed three dimensions and nine perspectives for interpreting ideological phenomena and clarified intellectual tenets and a scientific methodology for understanding ideology.