Here, "ideology" is equated with religion, metaphysics, moral theory, and similar products of pure consciousness and is given roughly the same highly pejorative valence, though affixed to an entirely different object, as that formerly given by Napoleon to the objects of his wrath.
But, unlike some of Marx's criticisms of the idealist philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel himself, which were printed during Marx's lifetime, The German Ideology was not actually published, and hence its textual details were not generally known, until 1932. Marx does, however, mention it, in a brief autobiographical sketch that appeared in 1859, as having been the early outcome—one left to the "gnawing criticism of the mice" when the original arrangement to have it published fell through—of his and Engels's newly elaborated systematic opposition to the "ideological" standpoint of German philosophy. At the same time, in their widely circulated Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 they at one point allude to the anticipated defection from class solidarity of a section of the bourgeois class, notably some (though by implication just a few) of the bourgeois ideologists, by virtue of the latter's having achieved a comprehensive overview of the process of history.
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