Any scientific treatment of the history of art must encompass not only the concepts of ‘social class’ and ‘class struggle, but also all the terms which describe particular social groups such as social category, autonomous fraction of a class, fraction of a class, and social stratum.
It should now be clear that ideology – the ideological level – is an organic part of every society. Human societies need these systems of ideas and beliefs in order to survive, and they secrete ideology as if it were an essential nourishment for their being and for their historical continuance.
It follows that if the function of ideology in general is to conceal contradictions, then the function of the dominant ideology, the ideology of the ruling classes, is a fortiori the same. This is bound to have serious consequences for all historical disciplines which are concerned with the various forms of ideology, including art history.