Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (19 page)
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Authors: Michael Freeden
Fourth, ideologies need to be
communicable
. They must be easily and attractively embraced by mass publics; they must be couched in non-specialist terms; and in open, participatory systems they need to contribute to general debates on political ends. We should also recall that they are to be found in different textual and visual forms. For the scholar of ideology the challenge is to persuade other scholars that non-complex discourse does not rule out complex analysis, and to remind them that even the great books of political philosophy have to await popular ‘translation’ if they wish to optimize their ideological potential.
Older theories of ideological dogmatism and stasis are now giving way to newer ones of ideological malleability. Not only does that decisive attribute of ideologies shape the present political world, it will mould its future. Coming social and political developments, even taking on board the inevitable unexpected contingencies that catapult it in
this
rather than
that
direction, are overwhelmingly the product of the current technical and intellectual means at a society’s disposal. If we want palatable futures, we need to cultivate the possibilities, and curb the perils, contained in the ideologies of the present.
Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s
Éléments d’Idéologie
(Paris, 1804-15) has not been translated into English. On Destutt de Tracy see E. Kennedy,
Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology”
(American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1978).
A useful abbreviated edition is Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
The German Ideology
, ed. C. J. Arthur (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1974). For selections from Marx’s
Capital
(vols. I and III) see D. McLellan,
Karl Marx: Selected Writings
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000).
Karl Mannheim,
Ideology and Utopia
(Kegan Paul & Co, London, 1936); Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from Prison Notebooks
, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Newell-Smith (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971); Louis Althusser,
Essays on Ideology
(Verso, London, 1984).
The end of ideology thesis appears in D. Bell,
The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
(Collier Books, New York, 1962) and in Edward Shils, ‘The End of Ideology?’,
Encounter
, vol. 5 (1955), pp. 52-8.
For R. E. Lane’s empiricist treatment of ideology see his
Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What he Does
(The Free Press, New York, 1962).
Clifford Geertz’s path-breaking article is reprinted in his
The Interpretation of Cultures
(Fontana, London, 1993). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language games and family resemblances are in his
Philosophical Investigations
, 2nd edn (Blackwell, Oxford, 1958).
For Paul Ricoeur see his
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
(Columbia University Press, New York, 1986) and
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning
(Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth, 1976).
The references to 1940s and 1950s views on liberty relate to Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in his
Four Essays on Liberty
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1969); Karl Popper,
The Open Society and its Enemies
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1945); and Jacob Talmon,
The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
(Secker and Warburg, London, 1952).
A central hermeneutic text is by Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method
(Sheed and Ward, London, 1979).
The morphological analysis of ideology is developed in M. Freeden,
Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996).
For essential contestability see W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
, 56 (1955-6), pp. 167-98.
For the foremost authority on conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, see his
Futures Past
(MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1985). The
quotation from Marx is from ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ in McLellan,
Karl Marx: Selected Writings
, p. 329.
For a more detailed investigation of the core, adjacent and peripheral concepts of liberalism, socialism and conservatism, see Freeden,
Ideologies and Political Theory
. For separate studies of liberalism see G. de Ruggiero,
The History of European Liberalism
(Beacon Press, Boston, 1959) and R. Bellamy,
Liberalism and Modern Society
(Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992); of socialism see A. Wright,
Socialisms
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987) and D. Sassoon,
One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century
(Tauris, London, 1996); and of conservatism see K. Mannheim,
Conservatism
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986) and N. O’Sullivan,
Conservatism
(Dent, London, 1975). For fascism see R. Griffin,
The Nature of Fascism
(Routledge, London, 1991) and R. Eatwell,
Fascism: A History
(Vintage, London, 1996). For totalitarianism see H. Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(Meridian Books, Cleveland and New York, 1958). For Marxism and communism see L. Kolakowski,
Main Currents of Marxism
, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981).
On the Third Way see S. White, ed.,
New Labour: The Progressive Future?
(Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001), and M. Freeden, ‘The Ideology of New Labour’,
Political Quarterly
, vol. 70 (1999), 42-51.
On nationalism see M. Guibernau,
Nationalisms
(Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996) and A. Vincent,
Nationalism and Particularity
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002).
On feminism see V. Bryson,
Feminist Political Theory: An Introduction
(Macmillan, London, 1992) and A. Jaggar,
Feminist Politics and Human Nature
(Rowman & Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1988).
For political Islam see D. Eickelman and J. Piscatori,
Muslim Politics
(Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1996). On a secular ‘religion’ see R. Crossman, ed.,
The God that Failed
(Bantam Books, New York, 1954).
For discourse analysis see T.A. van Dijk, ed.,
Discourse as Structure and Process
and
Discourse as Social Interaction
(Sage Publications, London, 1997) and for a concrete example of critical discourse theory see Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge
, ed. C. Gordon (Prentice Hall, New York, 1980).
For a valuable collection of articles on the linguistic turn see R. Rorty, ed.,
The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967).
E. Laclau and C. Mouffe,
Hegemony and Social Strategy
(Verso, London, 1985) have produced a central statement of post-Marxist critical discourse theory. S. Žižek’s Lacanian approach is represented in his
The Sublime Object of Ideology
(Verso, London, 1989) and in the introduction to his edited
Mapping Ideology
(Verso, London, 1994).
On the visual impact of ideological propaganda see for example T. Clark,
Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1997). For Max Weber’s distinction between types of rationality see his
Economy and Society
, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, vol. I (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978), pp. 85-6.
* * *
There is now an extensive literature on ideology and its study. D.A. Apter’s edited collection,
Ideology and Discontent
(Free Press, New York, 1964) contains many important articles. Explorations of the Marxist approach to ideology include B. Parekh,
Marx’s Theory of Ideology
(Croom Helm, London, 1982); J. Torrance,
Karl Marx’s Theory
of Ideas
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995); and G. Therborn,
The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology
(Verso, London, 1980). J. B. Thompson has written importantly on European continental perspectives on ideology in his
Studies in the Theory of Ideology
(Polity Press, Oxford, 1984). J. M. Balkin’s
Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology
(Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998) is an intriguing attempt to draw parallels between ideology and the formal evolution and dissemination of culture. M. Freeden’s
Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996) has been followed by an edited book,
Reassessing Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent
(Routledge, London, 2001), that looks back at the 20th century. Other critical examinations of ideology include J. Larrain,
The Concept of Ideology
(Hutchinson, London, 1979); L. S. Feuer,
Ideology and the Ideologists
(Harper & Row, New York, 1975); R. Boudon,
The Analysis of Ideology
(Polity Press, Oxford, 1989), and T. Eagleton,
Ideology: An Introduction
(Verso, London, 1991).
Introductory treatments of specific ideologies include T. Ball and R. Dagger,
Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal
, 3rd edn. (Longman, New York, 1999); A. Vincent,
Modern Political Ideologies
, 2nd edn. (Blackwell, Oxford, 1995); R. Eatwell and A. Wright, eds.,
Contemporary Political Ideologies
, 2nd edn. (Pinter, London, 1999); R. Eccleshall et al.,
Political Ideologies: An Introduction
, 3rd edn., (Routledge, London, 2003); A. Heywood,
Political Ideologies: An Introduction
, 3rd edn. (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2003).
There is also a specialist periodical, the
Journal of Political Ideologies
, published by Taylor and Francis.
A
Africa, socialism in
37
American Constitution
47
American Declaration of Independence
106
–8
anti-social symbols
41
Arendt, Hannah
91
Austen, Jane
4
‘authorless text’
49
behaviourism
39
mass public
39
–40
surplus of meaning
48
Bell, Daniel
38
Berlin, Isaiah
48
Bernstein, Eduard
86
bill of rights
82
biology
88
Bush, George H. W.
69
centralization
96
China
92
Christianity
104
civil society
20
classical liberalism
68
cold war
93
collective memory
73
collective national identity
42
communicable ideologies
128
pictorial representation
115
as secular religion
101
community
95
conceptual history
72
–7
consensus
57
consent
20
conservatism
31
,
35
,
37
,
42
,
48
,
50
,
87
–90
as consumers of political language
57
interpretation of welfarism
47
and libertarianism
95
nationalism and
99
permeability of
64
time and
75
consumerism
18
,
21
,
35
,
86
,
89
,
95
,
125
contestability
52
–4
contingency
110
control
13
converging societies
18
cultural:
enlightenment
32
heritage
119
