Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (4 page)

The story of the emergence of the concept of ideology from under the Marxist wing is a complex one that still hasn’t reached its conclusion. But we can identify three 20th-century individuals – Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser – whose contributions to the range of meanings that the notion of ideology carried were of major consequence. It is true, also, that the study of ideology has made further strides since those three thinkers refocused our understanding. But perhaps the most significant outcome of their interventions – each in their own singular way operating from Marxist premisses – was that they transformed our conception of ideology from the transient epiphenomenon Marx and Engels had made it out to be into a permanent feature of the political and opened the way to removing some of its pejorative connotations.

The intellectual achievement of Karl Mannheim, the sociologist and social philosopher (1893-1947), was to extract from the Marxist approach a key insight: ideology was a reflection of
all
historical and social environments. While Marx condemned the social conditions under capitalism as the source of ideological illusion, Mannheim realized that it was a feature of any social environment to influence the thought processes of human beings and, moreover,
that knowledge was ‘a co-operative process of group life’. In those acute senses, ideology was not a passing chimera. Moreover, the first indications of analytical pluralism entered the fray: societies had many different social groups and class environments; therefore, such ‘multiplicity of ways of thinking’ could produce more than one ideology. This pluralist potential of ideologies became highly significant in later theories of ideology, as we shall see. In laying the groundwork for the scholarly study of ideology, Mannheim implicitly resurrected the agenda of Destutt de Tracy that Marx and Engels had largely ignored.

For Mannheim, ideology had both social and psychological manifestations. Ideology was not only employed to manipulate deliberately those under its control. He also emphasized the unconscious presuppositions that guided human thinking, as well as the irrational foundations of knowledge. After all, social groups operate on the basis of shared rituals, prejudices, stories, and histories – elements that ideologies incorporate. For most of us it is quite difficult to see ourselves from a different perspective and note the customs and habits that we internalize unthinkingly and uncritically. The unconscious and the irrational could only be unmasked at a more advanced stage of social development, when attempts would be made to justify them rationally. The effectiveness of that unmasking was often limited, for Mannheim began by adopting the Marxist view of ideology as the obscuring of the real condition of society by the interests of a ruling class. But to this static view of ideology he added the parallel notion of utopia. Utopia was a vision of a future or perfect society held by oppressed groups who, bent on changing and destroying existing society, saw only its negative aspects and were blind to the situation as it really was. We may quibble about that distinction. What Mannheim termed utopia we would now call a progressive or transformative ideology, as distinct from a traditional or conservative one. That aside, Mannheim held that new explanatory theories, spread by analysts such as himself, would enlighten the less aware producers and consumers of ideology, who were much too caught up in its web.
The psychological features of ideology were for Mannheim, as for Marx, conscious distortions, calculated lies, or forms of self-deception. This was the particular conception of ideology. Mannheim related it to specific arguments, more or less deliberately misrepresented by individuals. But the total conception of ideology was a
Weltanschauung
, an all-encompassing view of the world adopted by a given group, always reflecting the general ideas and thought-systems of an historical epoch. Here was a dual challenge: first, to the Marxist blindness to competing ideological systems that emerged from different modes of existence; and second, to the political philosopher’s search for universal and timeless truths about the social life and conduct of individuals. In acknowledging the holistic nature of the total conception of ideology, Mannheim was working his way towards understanding it in an ordered and systemic way. An ideology was an interdependent structure of thinking, typical of social systems, that could not be reduced to the aggregated and psychologically comprehensible views of concrete individuals.

Mannheim also alighted on an issue that still divides students of ideology. Marxists, as we have seen, defied the populist implications of their own logic by singling out the abstracted and alienated fabricators of false knowledge, the philosophers and priests. But a total conception of ideology indicated the broad origins of ideology in group and even mass attitudes and views. This, Mannheim believed, was a gradual process. An intelligentsia was a group ‘whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world’ for their society. As societies evolved and social mobility increased, the members of an intelligentsia began to be recruited from a more varied social background. They were no longer associated with a determinate and closed body. Nevertheless, the intelligentsia were still allotted a special role in Mannheim’s scheme of things. They provided an increasingly independent, non-subjective, interpretation of the world. For Mannheim, an intellectual was not necessarily a person of education or culture, but one who could detach her- or himself
from their conditioning social background and ‘free-float’ among the different social and historical perspectives available in their society.

Here, though, Mannheim revealed his Marxist-inspired roots, for he believed in the possibility of a unified sociology of knowledge, produced by these free-floaters, and transcending the partial viewpoints of ideology and utopia alike – a reversion to the possibility of social truths. The key to this process lay in Mannheim’s distinction between relativism and relationism. Relativism was the recognition that all thought was linked to the concrete, historical situation of the thinker and that it had no objective, universal, standing. But it led to an unwelcome reaction: if that was true, all thought could be dismissed as subjective. In that case oppressors and warmongers could know no better: they were merely the products of their environments. That, obviously, was an unreliable method of assessing social motives and action, and Mannheim replaced it with relationism. Relationism, like relativism, acknowledged the contextual location of thought and the absence of absolute truth in social and historical matters – even Marxism itself, that ostensible anti-ideology, was exposed by Mannheim as an ideology. Some now refer to this problem as ‘Mannheim’s paradox’, namely, that we cannot expose a viewpoint as ideological without ourselves adopting an ideological viewpoint.

But relationism mooted three things. First, it affirmed that ideas were only comprehensible if we appreciated their mutual interdependence. It was impossible to understand one element of thought without ascertaining its relation to other, sustaining, and interacting ideas. Second, that holistic framework offered the possibility of a social standpoint from which different relationist understandings are assessed, and from which ‘truths’ and knowledge of the real world could be extracted. This enabled the analyst to distinguish among the quality of different ideological arguments. It was possible to explore diverse ideas circulating in a society, to weigh them up one against the other, and to decide what
features of those ideas might both be valid and mutually supportive. Mannheim was unclear on whether these historically extracted truths had a more permanent life. But, third, it was only with the development of the total conception of ideology that the
sociology
of knowledge could surface. That allowed the term ideology to shift in its meaning from being ‘simply’ designated as a means of exercising, or resisting, political domination to being a critical analytical tool
that made sense of ideological arguments themselves. The question was no longer merely what ideology
did
, but what kind of thinking ideology
was
. Mannheim’s contribution lay not only in recognizing the importance of the latter question. He re-tuned the former question so that it forsook its negative resonance in favour of an engagement with the positive functions of ideology as well.

3. Karl Mannheim
.

The outcome of Mannheim’s approach was to be a ‘science of politics’ and it was in surveying and assessing the partial truths of a society that the intelligentsia found its mission. In identifying the inherent limitations of existing relativist views, Mannheim thought to take an important stride in the direction of value-free knowledge, though he was loath to take any final step towards absolute and conclusive knowledge. Ideologies, he observed, were always changing and dynamic, and so was knowledge. Yet the positivist streak that began with Destutt de Tracy and had worked its way through Marx and Engels was retained. Ideas could be studied objectively; more significantly, they could be
generated
objectively – as knowledge of social reality. Although Mannheim had detected, through his notion of relativism, an irreconcilable plurality of political ideas, he did not regard that pluralism in itself as a rich resource for social life. If each of the plural viewpoints was held absolutely by its proponents, they could be destabilizing factors that had to be overcome.

The shortcomings of Mannheim’s approach are evident. He believed that a group of individuals capable of rising above their class and historical context would break the hold of the ideologies emanating from that context. He assumed that the intelligentsia would all arrive at a single point of agreement, and that such a point would be non-ideological. We now tend to be more sceptical of the possibility of scholarly consensus. We accept that for many social and historical issues there may be more than one convincing explanation or interpretation, and that scholars cannot entirely rid themselves of their values and preferences. Mannheim clearly wanted to avoid a situation in which all ideological positions assert
their exclusive worth, and he anticipated instead ‘a new type of objectivity’. But there was no need to drop ideology, for holding on to some form of relativism does not lead to the condoning of all viewpoints as
equally
valuable.

We might put this as follows. The objectivist claims that only one road leads to Rome. The extreme relativist claims that all roads lead to Rome (though they may lead elsewhere as well), and that we cannot know whether one route is better than another – it’s entirely up to the traveller’s opinion. The sensible constrained relativist claims that many, but far from all, roads lead to Rome, and that they vary in quality, speed, and safety. Different routes may be recommended depending on which of the road’s attributes the traveller values most, but the appraisal of these attributes is based on comparing the traveller’s private judgement with accepted standards of assessing road surfaces, traffic density, distance, and construction. At most, Mannheim could have talked of a form of intersubjectivity, that is, overlapping but still relativist understandings.

We might also query the capacity of individuals to rid themselves so neatly of their ideologies (and shall do so in
Chapter 3
). Mannheim’s approach foreshadowed some of the ‘end of ideology’ debates of the mid-20th century. They maintained that modern societies were converging on agreed principles and policies, such as the welfare state or the consumer society. Consequently fundamental divergences of opinion would disappear. That overlooked the fact that, even when all agree on a viewpoint, you still end up with
one
ideology rather than none. We still need
a
map.

Finally, there remains the question of the critical role of ideology. For Marx, the very notion of ideology served the one critical purpose of alerting us to its insidious nature and the need to unmask it. Mannheim appears to vacillate between that approach and the acknowledgement that ideology is a worthwhile object of study. He both wished to distil the approximate truths from within
contending ideologies and to explore their varied forms. He recognized the ephemeral and dynamically unfolding nature of human thought, but also the permanence of some of its regularities that could reveal human destiny. This was sociology with a normative twist, in which the scholar would ultimately value certain historical developments and certain ideologies more than others, and do so through understanding the totality of history. That constitutes a comprehensive view, but not a final one. Rather it is a ‘relative optimum’ for our time and our place.

Mannheim’s subtlety of approach puts him in the very forefront of theorists of ideology, but he was still suspended in a no man’s land between old and new understandings. He undoubtedly left to posterity a cardinal imperative for political theory: it needed to be made aware of its own assumptions and categories. A naive view of thinking about politics – one that saw it as a pure form, elevated above the contingencies and imperfections of everyday life – would no longer be possible. In order to understand political thought, much of it had to be approached and deciphered as ideology, as a product of historical and social circumstances. Marx had applied the critical kernel of his notion of ideology to eliminating its distortions of reality. Mannheim applied the critical kernel of his notion of ideology to highlighting the impermanent and malleable nature of all human thought. Whether that impermanence was the consequence of a special historical context or itself a permanent feature of ideology was a question Mannheim left open for others to address. But he kept one vital issue, that bedevilled even later Marxists, hovering in the air: is it possible, and is it useful, to detach ideology from the Marxist notion of class?