Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that they might find some way of mobilizing their theoretical and empirical knowled… - Raymond Geuss

If the basic assumption of the theory of ideology is at all tenable, namely, that the general power relations embodied in our social structures can exert a distorting influence on the formation of our beliefs and preferences without our being aware of it, then we are definitely not going to put that kind of influence out of action by asking the agents in the society to imagine that they didn’t know their position. To think otherwise is to believe in magic: imagine you are “impartial” and you will be. In fact, doing that will be more likely to reinforce the power of these entrenched prejudices because it will explicitly present them as universal, warranted by reason, etc.

In many of the cases of conceptual innovation, … creating the conceptual tools is a precondition to coming to a clear understanding of what the problem was in the first place. It is very difficult to describe the transition after it has taken place because it is difficult for us to put ourselves back into the situation of confusion, indeterminacy, and perplexity that existed before the new “tool” brought clarity and this means it is difficult for us to retain a vivid sense of what a difference having the concept made. We can just barely imagine ourselves in a world in which there are no states, as opposed to local barons, warlords, clans, primitive communal forms of village organisation, etc.

The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of such a theocratic ethics, with “Reason” in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a change of names.