Word.ws English Dictionary

false consciousness

false consciousness noun: a faulty understanding of the true character of social processes due to ideology.

Noun

false consciousness (plural false consciousnesses)

  1. (Marxism, including its brand of social sciences) A faulty understanding of the true character of social processes due to ideology.
    • The author is less inclined than Jung to treat freedom as an ideological illusion or false consciousness.2007, Roy E. Allen, Human Ecology Economics, →ISBN, page 187
    • If the ugliness in American politics is all, or almost all, about the influence of big money, then working-class voters who support the right are victims of false consciousness.2016 January 29, Paul Krugman, “Plutocrats and Prejudice”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

false consciousness meaning in Bengali, Arabic and Malay

false consciousness in Bengali

ভ্রান্ত চেতনা, মিথ্যা চেতনা

false consciousness in Arabic

faulty understanding due to ideology
وَعْي زَائِف waʕy zāʔif

false consciousness in Malay

faulty understanding due to ideology
kesedaran palsu

Antonyms of false consciousness

Forms of false consciousness

pluralfalse consciousnesses

Origin of false consciousness

Calque of German falsches Bewusstsein, as used by Friedrich Engels in a letter to Franz Mehring (1893).

Questions about false consciousness

What does false consciousness mean?
False consciousness means a faulty understanding of the true character of social processes due to ideology.
What is false consciousness in Bengali?
False consciousness in Bengali is ভ্রান্ত চেতনা, মিথ্যা চেতনা. See False consciousness meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is false consciousness?
False consciousness is a noun.
What is the plural of false consciousness?
The plural of false consciousness is false consciousnesses.

Words near false consciousness in the dictionary

  1. false cognates
  2. false colour
  3. false colours
  4. false conception
  5. false conceptions
  6. false consciousness
  7. false consciousnesses
  8. false cousin
  9. false cousins
  10. false crab
  11. false crabs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: false consciousness (page history and authors); false consciousness (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “false consciousness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/false_consciousness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.