Etymology

false consciousness

Today it means: A faulty understanding of the true character of social processes due to ideology. Full definition →

German falsches Bewusstsein
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The story

  1. German · calque offalsches Bewusstsein
  2. English todayfalse consciousness

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

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.