Trapped in the Cave: Toward a Platonic Theory of Ideology

This paper is about showing that Plato has a theory of ideology in the broadly Marxist sense of distorted self‐consciousness of social life. Focusing on the Allegory of the Cave and related passages in the Republic , the paper argues that in the Cave, Plato illustrates the social mediation of human psychology, which contributes to the soul's orientation to sensible reality. Orientation to sensible reality is by itself a condition of psychological bondage, but it becomes specifically ideological when its social mediation meets certain conditions. I argue that social structures are ideological when they distort social reality so as to enclose the soul in its orientation to sensible reality with little ability to escape. The paper argues that Plato develops this framework to critique Athenian cultural and political institutions. Seeing this allows us to separate Plato's critical from his constructive political thought, and we learn about the nature of both by seeing where ideology ends and Plato's ideas about beneficial social arrangements begin. By contrast, previous interpretations have tended to crowd out Plato's theory of ideology by focusing either on the role of ontology or desire in Plato's conception of psychological bondage or on his positive political ideas.