Truth and Ideology

Truth and Ideology, by Swiss philosopher Hans Barth and translated into English by Frederic Lilge, is a landmark work in the history of ideas. First published in 1945, the book traces the transformation of the concept of ideology from its eighteenth-century origins to its radical formulations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Barth shows how a term once meant to designate systematic inquiry into human thought came to carry the pejorative sense of false consciousness and partisan distortion. At the heart of the book lies a paradox: even theories that reduce all ideas to instruments of interest or power must themselves lay claim to truth, and in doing so reveal tensions they cannot resolve.

The study unfolds as an intellectual genealogy. Beginning with Francis Bacon’s “idols” as a typology of error, Barth then turns to Enlightenment figures such as Helvétius, Holbach, and Destutt de Tracy, who recast error as prejudice deliberately cultivated by church and state, and promoted education as the route to emancipation. He then considers Marx’s materialist reduction of thought to class interest and Nietzsche’s suspicion that knowledge itself masks the will to power. Schopenhauer figures as an important precursor to Nietzsche, while a later appendix adds Rousseau’s theory of alienation as a foundation for Hegel and Marx. Across these case studies, Barth demonstrates how skepticism about the possibility of truth intensified from Bacon’s correctable fallibility to Marx and Nietzsche’s radical suspicion. Yet he also highlights the self-contradictions that appear when such thinkers assert the truth of their own theories.

By combining meticulous textual analysis with an immanent mode of critique, Truth and Ideology illuminates the stakes of modern philosophy’s struggle with skepticism. Barth’s central claim is that human association itself depends on the presupposition of truth: agreement, whether in science, politics, or everyday life, would be impossible without it. The book thus defends the value of truth at a moment of historical crisis, written in the aftermath of totalitarian propaganda and global war. Both a work of scholarship and a passionate argument for intellectual responsibility, it remains a vital resource for philosophers, historians, and political theorists seeking to understand how ideology and truth are bound together in modern thought.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.