Karl Marxs reinvention of the materialist Science of Ideas as false consciousness, gave rise to the Marxist negative conception of ideology. Smithers argues that Marxs treatment of ideas and ideology was unjustified and that his negative conception limited the understanding of ideology and stifled our comprehension of the nature and function of ideas. Marx was not alone in his failure to understand the relationship between ideas and all physical things but, his theory has had a far more dramatic affect upon later materialist thinkers than other theorists. The detailed analysis undertaken in...