false consciousness

false consciousness

English

Etymology

Calque of German falsches Bewusstsein, as used by Friedrich Engels in a letter to Franz Mehring (1893).

Noun

false consciousness (plural false consciousnesses)

1. (Marxism, including its brand of social sciences) A faulty understanding of the true character of social processes due to ideology.
   • 2007, Roy E. Allen, Human Ecology Economics‎, →ISBN, page 187:

     The author is less inclined than Jung to treat freedom as an ideological illusion or false consciousness.

   • 2016 January 29, Paul Krugman, “Plutocrats and Prejudice”, in The New York Times‎, ISSN 0362-4331:

     If the ugliness in American politics is all, or almost all, about the influence of big money, then working-class voters who support the right are victims of false consciousness.

Antonyms

• class consciousness

Translations

faulty understanding due to ideology

Arabic: وَعْي زَائِف‎ m (waʿy zāʾif) Chinese: Mandarin: 虛假意識／虚假意识 (xūjiǎ yìshi) Finnish: väärä tietoisuus French: please add this translation if you can German: falsches Bewusstsein Japanese: 虚偽意識 (きょぎいしき, kyogi-ishiki) Korean: 허위의식(虛僞意識) (heowiuisik) Portuguese: please add this translation if you can Russian: ло́жное созна́ние n (lóžnoje soznánije) Spanish: please add this translation if you can Turkish: yanlış bilinç

Further reading

• false consciousness on Wikipedia.Wikipedia