Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (11 page)

That is not a derogatory conclusion: political systems cannot function without the middle-range magnification that ideologies supply. Political arguments cannot be directed solely at geniuses or experts if they are supposed – as are ideologies – to be tools for the mobilization of collective action. The vast majority of people will experience overload as a consequence of undue complexity: they need information that fits their absorption capabilities in a given field (though they are often led up the garden path by ideologues). Understanding and analysing are acutely reliant on selecting evidence, on establishing artificial order within the disjointed experience of reality that we have. These inevitable processes of selectivity are themselves related to the perceptual and conceptual frameworks we adopt. Ideologies are not exact representations of an ideational reality, but symbolic reconstructions of it. They are based on a collation of fragmented facts and competing values that themselves intervene in that reality. The map often becomes the reality itself.

We have come a long way from the end-of-ideology approach. Consider now how absurd it would be if we announced that concepts would no longer be contestable, that political conceptions cannot combine in myriad ways, that there is no possibility of allocating different levels of importance to a political value, in one scheme propelling it towards the core of our concerns, in another
marginalizing the same value. All these consequences would, however, ensue from the end of ideology! Conversely, we have moved away from mechanical and stationary models of ideology – those of pure domination, class interest, and obfuscation – to an appreciation of ideological flexibility. Precisely that flexibility, of which the early discussants of ideology knew little, makes ideologies vehicles of political thought that are particularly suited to accommodate, transmit, and adapt actual political thinking. It also enables students of ideologies to account for the centrality and ubiquity of ideology. Finally, it offers a tool of immense importance to social scientists – a scheme for the complex comparative analysis of ideologies. Ideologies can no longer be distinguished on the basis of the
presence
or
absence
of certain concepts or ideas; instead, the basis of comparison relates to their
location
and
morphology
, to the four Ps. True, that is not the sole basis of comparison, as we shall see below. But it is the one of principal interest to political theorists accustomed to dealing with political concepts, arguments, and texts.

Ideology is a mode of thinking about politics. But, saying that, we have to bear two things in mind. First, it is not the only mode. There is a great difference between declaring that
everything
is ideological (as a classical Marxist would have to say of an alienated society) and maintaining that all forms of political thinking have an ideological
dimension
(which is the claim here). Second, morphological analysis is only one means of accessing ideological meaning. The student of ideology needs to be equipped with more than one methodological tool in order to elicit optimal information from ideologies and project on to them a more refined understanding.

The great colonizer of the high ground of thinking about politics is political philosophy. Political philosophy brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with either or both of the following: the moral rightness of the prescriptions it contains, and the logical validity and argumentative coherence of the political philosophy in question. From its known beginnings in classical Greece, political philosophers have been preoccupied with constructing good answers – that is, morally proper and intellectually persuasive answers – to questions such as ‘What is justice?’ or ‘Why should one obey the state?’ Increasingly, over the
past 400 years or so, they have also concentrated on the minutiae of a good political argument: its rationality, its capacity to identify conceptual distinctions and logical paths of reasoning, whether deductive or inductive, and its internal consistency. Good or bad? Right or wrong? Valid or invalid? Those are the questions that political philosophers pose with respect to the issues they discuss. In so doing, they are expected to engage in reflexive and self-critical thought-processes.

Many philosophers are guided in their enterprise by a notion of truth, at least as an ultimate possibility to be extracted after a difficult process of critical searching and debating. And many of them tend therefore to scoff at the ‘truths’ of ideologies – as acts of decontestation and closure of debate that are frequently hasty, irresponsible, confused, or even perverted. Philosophers typically assert that ideological thinking is poor-quality thinking that does not merit serious scholarly examination. Whatever else they are, philosophers are professional thinkers whose aim it is to control the quality and subtlety of the arguments they pursue, and who value the argumentative expertise of the individual philosopher of high aptitude.

That is not to contend that philosophers aren’t also ideologists. They are. But they do not see themselves primarily as ideologists; their ideologies often accompany them as a surplus of meaning and intention. Thus, philosophers have produced theories of social contract designed to solve
ethical
issues of political trust (the protection of natural rights in return for obeying a government), to respect the natural
rationality
of all people (their preference for peace over war or anarchy), and to present such a contract as the only
logical
possibility for self-preservation. Yet, the ideological baggage they surreptitiously or unconsciously carry includes several features of the ideology known as classical liberalism: a preference for regarding individuals as the prime political actors, the belief that formal equality is sufficient for constructing just political arrangements, and an assumption that human relationships are
exchange relationships – because social contracts are modelled on rules of the market.

Ideologies, too, wish to offer arguments that are persuasive, but they go about their business rather differently. Some of them seek to emulate the techniques of political philosophers, but only up to the point where ideological messages will be comprehensible to intelligent citizens untrained in philosophical method. Liberalism and socialism are such ideologies, addressing the critically aware in a society, and proffering ideas meant to convince rationally. Other ideologies may be vaguer in what they offer, whether because their producers haven’t thought their arguments through properly, or because the elusiveness discussed above serves them well. ‘Watch my lips. No more taxes!’, uttered George Bush Senior famously in the 1988 US Presidential elections. This ideological position concerning the freezing of current patterns of redistribution was designed to appeal to almost all people of property in its sweeping generality; however, it proved impossible to sustain. Ideologies, to be sure, need to attract the interest of large political groups; philosophies do not. Philosophers need first and foremost to satisfy their professional colleagues. The test of their success is the rational persuasion of their targeted audience: other philosophers. If their theories find a wider audience, that is indeed a bonus, but the price will necessarily be the vulgarization of their ideas. Transmitters of ideologies need first and foremost to muster significant groups that will assist them in their endeavour to capture control over political language and collective decision-making. That is the test of
their
success.

The ideological promotion of debate depends on an elaborate mixture of rational and non-rational argument. Ideologies of the left and the right have always been especially good at that. They have underpinned their reasonable arguments by calling up emotional terms ranging from solidarity, fraternity, and visions of plenty, through patriotism, honour, and defence of the land, to fear, revenge, and hostility towards others. Invoking the emotions is a
highly useful short-cut for ideologies; it is an efficient and undemanding way of obtaining a response. The spread of passion through a group can be swift, and it may have a longer shelf-life. Witness the power of national struggles over language or land that invoke the strongest reactions. Witness also the power of religious fanaticism as a tool of ideological and political dispute. And witness the constant use of rhetoric, even among moderate politicians, as a means for whipping up support or denigrating opposing points of view. ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, ‘back to basics’, ‘workers of the world, unite’ are some examples. I shall return to this theme in
Chapter 9
.

In short, we need to appreciate that an ideology is a rather different intellectual venture than a political philosophy. It is, above all, a political tool situated firmly within the political domain. Its generators and publicizers have a far keener sense of the political than do most political philosophers. Ideologies are not models of what political thinking should be – a characteristic of political philosophies, especially of the Anglo-American variety – but embrace the patterns of political thinking actually produced by social groups for the consumption of social groups. Ideologies must therefore be judged on a host of criteria. Are they relevant to their temporal and spatial contexts? That must be measured by the degree to which they relate to the vital issues a society confronts and whether their solutions are regarded as workable by significant groups. Are they capable of having an impact on the direction a political system will take? That relates to the degree to which they command respect, wield authority, and permeate decision-making circles. Are they efficient in recruiting devotees and advocates? This relates to the language they employ and whether the messages they send and the manner in which they are conveyed and packaged elicit the desired responses. Are they attractive as doctrine and argument? Most ideologies are sensitive to moral standards, and entertain some aim of bettering social life or at least of protecting its existing values. There are of course exceptions to this among right-wing and totalitarian ideologies, though even they may contain
some warped notion of bettering the lives of a few by creating abject misery for others.

Finally, I wish to make an observation not about ideology, but about its students. Studying ideologies is not the same as producing them. It is an attempt to understand and analyse them, just as any student of social and political phenomena would do with respect to his or her area of interest. The first question the student of ideologies needs to pose does not relate to the qualitative substance of the ideology, to its ethical stance or its intellectual weight. It is rather:
‘What has to hold
in order for this utterance to make sense/be true/be right for its producers and consumers?’ We have to understand the assumptions contained in an ideology prior to appraising them. We need to put ourselves into the shoes of the ideological promoter, and that requires a sympathetic, or at least impartial, reading of their words and phrases. Were we to direct the full power of philosophical and logical analysis and of ethical evaluation at most ideological material, that material would collapse under the pressure. But instead of concluding that the ideological arguments were hopelessly flawed, we might more wisely decide that we were using the wrong investigative equipment and consequently missing the point.

Nationalism, for example, has been judged by some philosophers to be a mess of shallow and primitive arguments that does not bear serious philosophical scrutiny. This leads to a dead end for anyone who wishes to comprehend the political impact of nationalism as an ideology. Before we proceed any further, we need to know why so many people think it reasonable to privilege their own society above other societies, and why it is that the emotional bond of belonging to a nation acts as a prism through which much political thinking is filtered. More generally, we need to decode the conscious and unconscious presuppositions that enable people to interpret their social worlds and to make factual, or erroneous, statements about those worlds. Only then can we go on to position ideologies at the heart of the political realm, as a form of thought-behaviour that
penetrates all political practice. Only then can we ask what purposes ideology serves, and what additional purposes
specific
ideologies serve. And only then can we engage in functional explication.

Another tradition of studying political thought has recently emerged under the banner of conceptual history. Conceptual history is a method of investigating the meanings of key political concepts over time, exploring both their accumulative senses and their discontinuities. It is predicated on the assumption that those concepts always reflect their historical contexts, the external events and practices within which ideas take shape. The leading conceptual historian, Reinhart Koselleck, has contended that modern political concepts display increasing abstraction and generality while becoming irreplaceable parts of the political vocabulary. There is now a common acceptance of ‘equality’ as a desirable key concept, though not of its various conceptions. Conceptual historians emphasize the diachronic (over time) emergence of meaning and its interweaving with synchronic (at a point in time) constructions. To illustrate: our synchronic, current notion of rights as individual claims is nourished by a diachronic evolution of individualism leading to a greater insistence on respect for persons, and by a desire to obtain protection from tyranny (rather than, say, inspired by feudal hierarchies of rights). In turn it redefines our understandings of past rights, so that we no longer tend to explain them as natural and hence discoverable, but as social and hence invented or evolving.

Theories of conceptual history have borrowed insights from linguistics, and the end-result is the identification of a semantic field in which time and space both confer meaning on political language. That perspective differs sharply from the timeless universalization of concepts practised by some political philosophers and from the ahistoricity of many linguists, but it
draws heavily on the hermeneutic tradition which, like conceptual history, originated principally in Germany. Conceptual historians acknowledge the importance of social conflict involved in determining the ‘correct’ meaning of concepts. Political parties, groups, and interests ordinarily contest, or resist the contestation of, the basic concepts. To some, democracy may signal intensified popular participation and control, and to others the rhythmic accountability of political elites at election times. The public interest may conjure up clean air, a national health service, and the transparency of legislation, or it may be used to refer to defence, the governmental shielding of information, and the banning of strikes.