Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (9 page)

Ideologies were accordingly presented from a perspective that illuminated them afresh. Just as sentences contain words in a particular pattern of interdependence, a pattern that enables us to make sense of the words, so it is with ideologies. Ideologies contain special words such as liberty, authority, equality, rights, and democracy. These words signify political concepts. Indeed, political concepts such as these are the basic units of political thought in general, of political philosophy as well as ideology. And ideologies assemble those political concepts in particular patterns. Liberalism, for example, always placed fundamental concepts such as liberty, individuality, rationality, and progress at its core. Other political concepts such as legitimacy and authority were made to be dependent on accommodating the core ones. The only
legitimate
government would then be one that respected individual
liberty
. Socialism had conceptual configurations surrounding the core concepts of group solidarity, equality, and labour. These fundamental concepts controlled the admission of other concepts into the socialist ideological family. Power had to further the ends of social equality; the individual was defined as a cooperative member of a group.

This perspective on ideology is the morphological approach. It is morphological because it sees the internal structure of ideologies as a vital aspect of their analysis. On this view, we can add another dimension to the previous characterizations of ideology in
Chapter 3
:

Ideologies are complex combinations and clusters of political concepts in sustainable patterns
.

The meanings conveyed by an ideology will therefore reflect the relationships among the concepts it hosts. Justice will possess a very different meaning if an ideology places it in close proximity to
equality rather than to property. In the first case justice will always conjure up some form of equality – equality before the law, economic equality, gender equality, and the like – while in the second it will always have to nod in the direction of property – protecting it through laws of inheritance or through banning invasive taxation. This may further refine the understandings of ideology at our disposal. The meanings an ideology conveys reflect not only the historical traditions of political discourse, nor only the cultural pluralism of the different contexts in which the ideology is shaped, but can be accessed through the particular patterns in which its constituent political concepts are ordered. We now need to extend our characterization of an ideology as follows.

An ideology is a wide-ranging structural arrangement that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts
.

An ideology is like a set of modular units of furniture that can be assembled in many ways (though some ways of arranging them would be too ridiculous to contemplate). Through diverse arrangements of the furniture we can create very different rooms, even by using the same units. That is why identical political concepts can serve as the building blocks of an entire series of disparate ideologies, for the same unit (concept) may have a different role (or meaning) in two separate rooms (or ideologies). In one room a table will be used for dining; and in another for writing. In one ideology rights may be used to protect human dignity from assault; in another to protect private property and wealth from having to contribute to the common good.

Another way of understanding this approach is to relate ideologies to a well-known problem in the study of political thought: the ‘essential contestability’ of concepts. It consists of two propositions. The first is that we can never agree on an absolutely correct evaluation of a political concept. It makes no more sense to state definitively that ‘liberty is better than equality’ than to maintain that
‘red is better than blue’. The first example may be an ethical judgement and the second an aesthetic one, but in neither case is there a universally accepted hierarchy of values that would permit a final assessment of the goods in question, nor can there ever be such a hierarchy, as we have no means of validating these preferences objectively.

The second proposition is that a political concept always contains more potential components than can be included in any actual definition or deployment of that concept. Consequently, one political
concept
will contain manifold
conceptions
. Take the concept of equality. If we think about it logically, in the abstract, it may refer to mathematical identity, to similarity, or to the moral equivalence of members of a specified group. It can be cashed out as equality of opportunity, or as equality of merit, or as equality of need. But no usage of the term ‘equality’ can convey all these meanings simultaneously, because some of them are mutually exclusive. A person cannot be identical to another and similar to her at the same time; nor can the notion of equality enjoin one to distribute a scarce good – say food – according to need (invoking criteria of hunger, fragility, or health requirements = all needs should be treated equally) while concurrently distributing it according to merit (invoking criteria of desert: ‘I earned this food through hard work and you didn’t’ = all effort should have an equal claim). The essential contestability here lies in the fact that we can never agree on which of these understandings of equality should be included in the concept and which excluded from it. It is
essential
rather than
contingent
contestability because the polysemy of language will never permit it to be reduced to a single agreed meaning. There exists no laboratory of philosophical boffins aiming to crack this problem by the year 2020!

Ideologies are consequently the systems of thought through which specific meaning is conferred upon every political concept in their domain. That is achieved by legitimating one meaning of each concept and delegitimating the others. On their own, political
concepts are too vague and too vacuous to carry intelligible meaning. If I get up and shout ‘I demand freedom!’ my cry remains incomprehensible. We immediately have to add detail that can only be supplied by answering further questions. Freedom from whom or what? How can we determine that I am free? What will I be doing or saying in exercising my freedom?
Do
I have to exercise anything when I am free? Consequently, adjacent concepts need to flesh out the concept of freedom. I may have to specify that I shall be free when no one interferes with me bodily, or when my rational desires and plans of life are not arbitrarily restricted but enabled through the cooperation of others. In the first case freedom is adjacent to a conception of the individual as occupying privileged private space, and to a conception of the state as limited in its interference in personal life. In the second case it is adjacent to a conception of the individual as a developing and purposive entity, and to the state as an enabling institution that reflects the mutual interdependence of individuals in a society.

An ideology specifies the meanings of the political concepts it contains by assembling them in a pattern that links them together with other specific concepts. This configuration teases out specific conceptions of each of the concepts involved. Its precision of meaning, while never conclusive, is gained by this specific and constricted interaction among the concepts it employs. An ideology attempts to end the inevitable contention over concepts by
decontesting
them, by removing their meanings from contest. ‘This is what justice means’, announces one ideology, ‘and that is what democracy entails’. By trying to convince us that they are right and that they speak the truth, ideologies become devices for coping with the indeterminacy of meaning. That is their semantic role. Hence a minor modification to the previous characterization:

An ideology is a wide-ranging structural arrangement that attributes
decontested
meanings to a range of mutually defining political concepts
.

Ideologies also need to decontest the concepts they use because they are instruments for fashioning collective decisions. That is their political role. Without the introduction of specificity into a debate, such decisions cannot be taken. A decision is an expression of finality (real or manufactured) signalling the closure of discussion, and ideologies strive to provide the certainty that underpins such finality. In that way the producers of ideologies claim to champion the ‘correct’ meanings of the political concepts to which they refer. We need therefore to append another rider to our characterization of ideologies:

Ideologies compete over the control of political language as well as competing over plans for public policy; indeed, their competition over plans for public policy is primarily conducted through their competition over the control of political language
.

One lesson we may derive from the study of semantics is that whoever exercises such control is in a strong position to determine the political practices that members of a society will consider, or at least be capable of imagining. Once again, that struggle over control places ideologies at the heart of the political process.

More needs to be said about the manner in which ideologies decontest the meanings of the political concepts at their disposal. Two types of constraint, logical and cultural, set the limits on the conscious or unconscious meanings that ideologies communicate. Logical constraints operate on all ideologies. It would be logically inconsistent for an ideology to defend individual choice and to deny people the vote, or to support greater social equality and to tax only low-income groups. Even ideologies conventionally deemed to be broadly irrational, such as fascism, possess a grim internal consistency once one passes through the looking-glass of their perverse worlds and proceeds to work from their fundamental assumptions.
If
Jews contaminate the Aryan race, and
if
such
‘contamination’ is detrimental to the good of the human race (two ‘ifs’ that do not stand serious rational scrutiny),
then
it makes sense to keep Jews apart from Aryans. As a matter of fact, all ideologies begin with non-negotiable assumptions from which logical conclusions can be drawn, but most of those assumptions – unlike fascist ones – are tolerable and can be given some rational or ethical justification. Thus, liberalism is not prepared to negotiate or to compromise over human rights allocated to individuals, or over the desirability of individual liberty. These can be justified through systems of morality that have also been seen to improve empirically people’s quality of life.

None the less, logical inconsistencies do creep into ideologies. It is then that their attempt to control political language comes into its own. An ideology may contend that it wishes to promote major environmental reforms that will reduce the risk of global warming, while concurrently advocating a policy of investment in polluting industries. Ideologies are adept at reconciling such tensions mainly because the polysemic manner in which each of these two policies is formulated allows for enough interpretative leeway to find an area of logical consistency among them. The ideology may insert a policy of taxing polluters and utilizing those funds for environmental research, arguing that zero pollution is always impossible. Or it may introduce a time-scale, maintaining that other ideological principles – gradualism, respect for current property rights – intervene and require protection as well. Or it may produce empirical evidence to the effect that the pollution created by national industries contributes quite insignificantly to global warming. The opportunities are legion, and not all of them are cynical manipulations of information sent out to the public.

In effect, vagueness and elusiveness are frequently necessary to, and functional in, the political arena. Politics consists not only of decision-making, which demands decontestation, but also of the mobilization of support. The latter requires the construction of
consensus, or at least the corralling of members of a society into overlapping positions in order to optimize backing for a political stance. In those situations, consumers of political language must be offered sentences that are sufficiently open in their meaning for different individuals and groups to read into them their own preferences and to gloss over distinctions. When a politician announces that he wishes to encourage the values of community, the moving of that concept to the centre of the ideological room will please many ideological consumers. It will please socialists, for whom the notion of community is associated with social solidarity and the importance of group activity. It will please conservatives, for whom the notion of community is associated with the collective wisdom of accumulative generations and the settled ways of existing concrete small communities. It will even please some environmentalists, for whom the interconnectedness of nature must be mirrored in the holistic interlocking of social life.

Hence ambiguity as well as certainty are two necessary features of any ideology. They extend its life expectancy, and are vital to the (imagined) harmony and stability normally sought through the political process. This may give a bad name to politics, but elusiveness is not simply dissimulation, trickery, or sloppy thinking – though it may be any of these – but the harnessing of political language in order to provide one of the most valuable scarce resources of politics: public political backing. In any case, the precision of language is never guaranteed, and even strong decontestation will be open to many interpretations. Some unanticipated, as well as anticipated, interpretations may of course reduce support rather than increasing it. The British Conservative Party’s decision to promote ‘family values’ backfired when it was decontested, inter alia, as marital fidelity (which not all conservative politicians exhibited) rather than, say, as altruism and care for others.