Chapter 3 From the Enlightenment to the Second International

This is my progress so far reading T. Eagleton's ``Ideology: An introduction''. I must say the concept ideology is one of those that you use from time to time but never really understand what they mean. It is complicated, and especially confusing in this chapter.

Marx's work The German Ideology provided a good source of concepts and discourses about ideology.  However, it also proved to be a source of confusion in Eagleton's book.  In a modern language context (so it is not anymore a discipline studying human thinking activity), an ideology may be false perception of reality, or it may be a reality of falsification itself, or reflection of commodity relationships; it may be endemic paradigm of capitalist, or weapon of socialist.... The last point was not explicitly mentioned in The German Ideology,  but according to Eagleton has been hinted.

Thus this chapter becomes a confusion over the existence and ``materialiness'' of ideology.  My slow reading at a speed of 3 pp per day only increased such confusion.  However I think the author is only trying to illustrate the complexity of the ideology concept and drawing his readers to deeper discussions.