As well as revealing how ideology may conceal contradictions and
inadequacies inherent in ideas and beliefs, ideology critique also
attempts to show how these same ideas and beliefs contain some
indication of the real interests of individuals and thereby imply some
alternative self-conception based on their true meaning. In this sense,
ideology critique attempts to show individuals how their erroneous
self-understandings nevertheless intimate, in a disguised form, their
real needs and purposes. A task of critical social science is to make
the genuine self-conceptions implicit in the distorted ideas of individuals
explicit, and to suggest how the contradictions and inadequacies in
present self-understandings can be overcome. The essential features
of a critical social science are, then, that it: