 The account of ideology contained in Marx’s writings is regularly portrayed as a crucial element of his intellectual legacy. It has been identified as among his “most influential” ideas (Elster 1986: 168), and acclaimed as “the most fertile” part of his social and political theory (Leiter 2004: 84). Not least, these views on ideology are said to constitute Marx’s claim to a place—alongside Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—as one of the “masters of suspicion”; that is, as an author whose work casts doubt on the transparency of our everyday understandings of both our own identity and the social world we inhabit (Ricouer 1970: 32–33).