Expanded new edition with an introduction by Christoph Jünke. What is 'ideology' and what role does it play in modern, late-bourgeois forms of society? In this work, first published in 1975, the dialectical social theorist and social philosopher Leo Kofler takes a comprehensive yet concise look at the theoretical concept of ideology and the ideological currents of his time. He examines the processes of reification, alienation, and fetishization of human thought and action, highlighting the ideological character of social, intellectual, religious, and aesthetic forms of consciousness. He addresses the world of class-bound educational work as well as the technological rationality of late capitalism, which has become a 'second nature', the dialectic of enjoyment and asceticism, as well as the pervasive security ideology. Kofler argues that there can be no talk of a progressive de-ideologization; rather, the frequently proclaimed end of ideologies proves to be merely another ideology. And even though the 'old left' has fundamentally changed and is essentially in decline, there still exists a milieu of progressive humanists, a 'progressive elite', who take the old promises of the bourgeois and socialist emancipation movements seriously and form the politically-intellectual ferment of emancipatory change processes, as long as they see through and break the modern false consciousness.