1. I am indebted to Bruce Ackerman for the insight as well as the term.

2. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 466; Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford Uni­versity Press, 1957); Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

3. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 460-61; Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 142.

4. Elster, Sour Grapes, 142.

5. Ibid., 141. Elster traces this distinction back to R. P. Abelson, "Computer Sim­ulation of Hot Cognition," in S. Tomkins and S. Messick, eds., Computer Simulation of Personality (New York: Wiley, 1963), 277-98.

6. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 466-67; Elster, Sour Grapes, 141.

7. See, e.g., Anthony Greenwald and David L. Ronis, "Twenty Years of Cognitive Dissonance: Case Study of the Evolution of a Theory," Psychological Review 85 (1978): 53-57.

8. See, e.g., Elliot Aronson, "The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 4 (1969): 1-34, at 16-17; J. Rich­ard Eiser, Social Psychology: Attitudes, Cognition, and Social Behavior (Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 1986), 93.

9. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," rpt. in Judgment Under Uncertainty, 1-20, at 1; R. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 6-7.

10. Elster, Sour Grapes, 164-65; Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 505.

11. Claude M. Steele and Thomas J. Liu, "Dissonance Processes as Self Affirma­tion," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (1983): 5-19; Ruth Thibodeau and Elliot Aronson, "Taking a Closer Look: Reasserting the Role of the Self-Concept in Dissonance Theory," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18 (1992): 591-601; Green­wald and Ronis, "Twenty Years of Cognitive Dissonance," 55; Aronson, "The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance," 27.

12. Elster, Sour Grapes, 148.

13. Ibid., 156.

14. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 510; the quotation is from Karl Marx, "Contri­bution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction," in The Marx­-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1972), 11-23, at 12.

15. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 482.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 466.

18. On sample bias and availability heuristics, see Nisbett and Ross, Human Inference, 77-89; Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty, 163-208.

19. See Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Rationality of Choice," Science 211 (1981): 543-58; Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 466.

20. Elster, Sour Grapes, 144.

21. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1936), 118-46.

22. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 490.

23. Ibid., 487. Nevertheless, Elster also notes that "the exploiting classes can be victims of similar illusions. Cognitively based ideologies do not always operate to the benefit of the ruling classes."

24. Ibid., 488. Elster draws here on Paul Veyne's work. The basic argument is that "since I would be worse off without a master, it follows on this logic that a society without masters would be intolerable, for who would then provide employment and protection?"

25. See ibid., 322.

26. See, e.g., ibid., 464-65, 468-72. Although his discussion focuses almost exclu­sively on effects of class interests and class positions, it is interesting to note that his actual definition of ideology does not specifically refer to economic class.

27. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, George H. Taylor, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 8-10, 156-58. Thus, according to Ricoeur, ideology distorts "praxis as something symbolically mediated" (157). This argument provides yet another reason to abandon the familiar base-superstructure model of ideology inherited from Marxism. What that metaphor places in the so-called superstructure (culture) is actually basic to human existence and meaningful human action. Moreover, the super­structure does not exist purely for the purpose of distortion; it is not exhausted by its distorting effects. For example, Ricoeur argues that capitalist understandings of wage labor involve a distortion of praxis because the juridical concept of contract is applied to a situation of domination. But this does not mean that the idea of a contract is merely a fantasy or wholly an element of distortion. Rather, this tool of understanding is more than its distorting effects; it has independent uses, functions, and consequences. Nev­ertheless, it has been applied to a situation to which it is not fully appropriate; hence it gives a social situation an air of legitimacy that it does not deserve (155-56).

28. Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 209-13. In Chapter 11 we will consider metaphor once again through the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who argue that these rhetorical devices arise through a process of evolutionary development originating in the move­ments of the human body.

29. Ibid., 211.

30. Ibid., 212.

31. See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

32. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 492-93. See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 436-525.

33. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 437.

34. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, George A. Kennedy, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

35. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, Charles W. Morris, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 154-56, 178-226.

36. Jerome A. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 138.