The Ideas of the Ruling Class
Marx and Engels put the founding claim bluntly in The German Ideology (1846): the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. Ideology, in this first sense, is a set of beliefs that presents the interests of one group as the natural order of things, and its power lies in not being noticed as a position at all.
The literary question follows immediately. If ideas are socially conditioned, what is a novel doing? Four answers, increasingly sophisticated:
1. Reflection (Lukács)
The work reflects social reality. Lukács's realism prizes typicality: a character who is individual and simultaneously embodies a real social force, and a narrative that renders the totality of relations rather than a fragment. His hostility to modernism follows from this, he read its fragmentation as a symptom rather than a diagnosis.
The weakness is mechanical causation. If literature merely reflects, it explains nothing and the base/superstructure metaphor does all the work.
2. Homology (Goldmann)
Lucien Goldmann's genetic structuralism looks for a homology of structures: the structure of a work corresponds to the world vision of a social group, not to particular events. His study of Racine and Pascal links their tragic vision to the situation of the noblesse de robe. The gain is that the correspondence is structural, so it can be argued about.
3. Making ideology visible (Althusser, Macherey)
Althusser distinguishes the Repressive State Apparatus — army, police, courts, which work primarily by force — from the Ideological State Apparatuses: school, church, family, media, which work primarily by ideology. Ideology for him is not false belief but a lived relation: it "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence", and it works by interpellation, hailing you into a position you then occupy as if it were simply who you are.
Art, in his "Letter on Art", is neither ideology nor science. It does not give knowledge in the strict sense, but it makes us see the ideology from which it is born, by holding it at an internal distance. Pierre Macherey pushes this further: what a text does not say is structured and analysable, and the critic's object is the work's silences, the questions its form makes it unable to pose.
4. Ideology as lived and contested (Williams, Bakhtin)
Raymond Williams objects that the base/superstructure model freezes a process. His alternative describes any moment as containing three simultaneous forces: the dominant, the residual (still active elements of an earlier formation), and the emergent (new meanings genuinely being made). Add structures of feeling: social experience in solution, felt before it is articulated, which is often what literature registers first, and culture stops being a reflection and becomes a site where meanings are actually produced.
Voloshinov and Bakhtin arrive from language: the sign is multiaccentual, capable of carrying opposed evaluations, and therefore an arena of the class struggle. A word like freedom is contested rather than owned, which is why the same vocabulary appears on both sides of every argument.
Common pitfall: treating an ideological reading as the discovery of the author's opinions. The interesting claim is about what the work's form takes for granted, whose point of view the narration adopts without argument, which questions the genre cannot pose. A novelist's stated politics can be flatly at odds with the politics of their form, which is precisely why the analysis is worth doing.