Ideology and Politics

Martin Seliger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367248611
• eBook ISBN: 9781000704846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1976. Ideology plays an important role in many fields of human activity and has therefore been dealt with directly and indirectly in a vast number of studies, but a generally accepted definition of the term is lacking even in the various branches of social and political science. This book - the first since Mannheim to elaborate a comprehensive theory of ideology - seeks to offer a generally applicable definition, a task which of necessity involves taking issue with the logical and political implications of the conceptions in current use and which touches on central problems of politics and political science.

Professor Seliger's theory is based on an approach and conceptualizations which will appeal both to 'traditionalists' and 'behaviourists' since he gives due weight to both kinds of literature. Indeed, this book reflects throughout a detachment and independence of thought which are refreshing and opens up the way for both theorists and practising politicians to re-examine ideological tenets in the light of actual and feasible policy orientations and embark upon ideological reconstruction.

Part One

THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE RESTRICTIVE CONCEPTION

Adherents of all major political belief systems who denounce all but their own as ideologcial do not necessarily use ‘ideology’ consistently in the restrictive sense. By and large, communists now subscribe to the ‘dual’ conception of ideology, that is, while not shunning the use of ‘ideology’ for their own doctrine, they regard all other political doctrines as ideologies in the original Marxian sense of distortions of reality. Actually, the problems arising from Lenin’s unacknowledged but obvious break with orthodoxy are still noticeable in the communist debate about the standing of communist theory itself in regard to ideology, science, philosophy and their relationships.¹ Similarly, in order to disqualify all other doctrines, Hitler proclaimed national socialism as anti-ideological, and in this sense as unideological, though this attitude seems not to have been maintained at all levels in his party.² The post-war tendency in the West to confine ‘ideology’ to belief systems of the extreme Left and Right was also a manifestation of political convictions. It was a concomitant of the latest theory, that of the end of ideology, whose major proponents did not disguise that what they claimed to be ending was that which they wished to be ending.

Of course, a mutual involvement of political convictions and scholarly concerns does not necessarily prejudge the validity of a theory, but lack of consistency and judgments not borne out by the facts they call to mind surely do. These are the major shortcomings which in the following chapters will be seen to characterize the elaborations of the differentia specifica of the restrictive conception of ideology. But one shortcoming underlies all others. Most adherents of the restrictive definition who equate ideology with doctrinaire extremism actually equate it with totalitarianism. They have failed to ask themselves the simple question: what advantage accrues from reserving for the analysis of the ideational foundations of totalitarianism the word ‘ideology’, which provides no verbal clue to the phenomenon at hand?

So far as I know, only Hannah Arendt has tried to align the literal meaning of ‘ideology’ with this new connotation.³ However, she immediately invested her literal explanation — ‘the logic of ideas’ — with the presuppositions of her conception of ideology, namely, that ‘the idea’ in ideology is ‘the idea by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process’; ‘that one idea is sufficient to explain everything ?? the development from the premise and that no experience can teach anything’,⁴ and ‘that not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of ideology discovered’.⁵ None of this is indicated by the word ‘ideology’ but rather derives from the presupposition that ideologies are inherently totalitarian and that this is fully brought out by racism and communism. By contrast, ‘totalitarianism’ itself, or in conjunction with it ‘communist dictatorship’ or ‘fascist dictatorship’, does give a verbal clue to what is under discussion. Those who use ideology in the modern restricted sense also do not seem to be concerned that since the word gained currency in politics, it has never been employed to denote political extremism. Both Napoleon and Marx called liberals ideologues. For Napoleon, they were opinionated radicals for wishing to set constitutional bounds to his rule, but as a radical innovator the Emperor could well hold his own. For Marx, liberals held on to an order that was doomed.

Of course, Napoleon and Marx themselves changed the meaning of the word, which at first denoted simply the science of ideas. Moreover, the inclusive no less than the twentieth-century restrictive definition involves a change of meaning. The change of the connotations of a term is arguable if the differentiating qualities that are attributed to it are consistent with each other and with the phenomena, in this case the political doctrines and attitudes on which the term is predicated. In this regard, mainly on the basis of ‘immanent criticism’, Chapter I reviews the emergence and consummation of the restrictive tendency and part of Chapter II the drift in recent years towards reconsideration. In Chapters III and IV, the case for the inclusive definition is set out. First the central criterion of the restrictive conception is divested of its differentiating character, and then the components that form the structure common to all political belief systems are identified. Chapter IV exposes the falseness of the notions adduced to support the distinction between pragmatic and ideological politics, the distinction on which the modern restrictive conception rests.

Chapter I

VICISSITUDES AND VACILLATIONS

1. PRONOUNCED CONTRASTS AND UNACCOUNTED CONTIGUITIES

a. The Emergence of the Pattern and its Background

The emergence of the latter-day restrictive conception of ideology did not affect a considerable number of scholars.¹ Indeed many, if not most, students and practitioners of politics in the wake of the developments in the Marxist camp either explicitly subscribed to an inclusive definition or implicitly proceeded on its basis. In the 1920s we have the example of Julien Benda who, like many Western scholars today, analysed and was opposed to the excess of passion in politics. But for him, the true intellectual, the ‘clerk’, betrays his mission not just when he embraces extremism but ‘when … [he] descends to the market place’ instead of remaining in the position of ‘the officiants of abstract justice’; true intellectuals must forego ‘passion for a worldly object’. Also, unlike later scholars who identified ideology with the extremism of the Left and Right, Benda allied ideology to whatever aims and positions incite political passions. Viewing all political passions as furnished with ‘an apparatus of ideology’, he explicitly included ‘bourgeoisism’ and insisted that ‘all political ideologies claim to be founded on science’.²

In the 1940s, we find the term ideology indiscriminately applied to all political belief systems in dictionaries such as Webster’s New International Dictionary, The Dictionary of Sociology and White’s Political Dictionary. R. M. McIver’s well-known textbook, The Web of Government, states that ‘the term “ideology” has become current to mean any scheme of thinking characteristic of a group or class’.³ During the fifties, the inclusive conception was exhibited in T. Parsons’s magisterial The Social System,⁴ in the pioneer study, The Authoritarian Personality, and in Karl Deutsch’s seminal Nationalism and Social Communication.⁵ Democracy in a World of Tension,⁶ which was the first instalment of a UNESCO project to assess the effect of current political ideologies on conceptions of liberty, democracy, law and equality, treated the major rival belief systems as ideologies as a matter of course. A preliminary analysis of answers to questionnaires bearing on concepts related to democracy was to be followed by a real ‘ideological analysis’. But its sequel,⁷ did not, as the authors themselves explained, fulfil the original purpose of shedding light on both agreement and disagreement in the congitive, normative and volitional arguments of the major belief systems of East and West. The authors had also planned to investigate the extent to which verbal disagreement between rival ideologies reflected cognitive incompatibility.⁸ Perhaps the failure to carry out this part of the project obscured the actual value and prevented the merited impact of the systematic survey and critique which Naess and his associates offered and in which they proceeded on the assumption that the term ‘ideology’ applied to all political belief systems. They also rejected the Marxian notion that objectivity and ideology were invariably incompatible.

These last two central points were not as much challenged, let alone disproved, as the opposite standpoints were espoused in conjunction with scholarly trends and in response to recent political experience. An attempt to isolate a ‘pure’ (Weberian) sociology of knowledge from a theory of ideology was made. Social determination was to be treated separately from ideology, which was to be relegated exclusively to the realm of falsification, and hence to psychology.⁹ While in this conception the causal interpretation of the phenomenon ‘ideology’ became un-Marxian in that it was restricted to psychology, and the term ‘ideology’ was applied to all political belief systems, the most distinctly Marxian connotation of ‘ideology’ was preserved, i.e. that the ideas men espouse and try to force on others as true actually constitute a distortion of reality. While, in modern restrictive conceptions, ideology is seen as an instrument for conditioning men to obedience, indirectly and directly, distortion remains the prime cognitive characteristic of ideology.¹⁰ Thus it was even suggested, though somewhat ambiguously, that ideology was not a doctrine or belief system but ‘consists only of those parts or aspects of a system of social ideas which are distorted or unduly selective’.¹¹

The tendency to set ideology apart not only from truth but from pragmatism and moderation, and hence to adopt the restrictive conception, was nourished by the ascendancy of American behavioural political science and British analytical philosophy. Phenomenology and existentialism, though not invariably requiring the restrictive definition, pointed in the same direction. The debunking attitude of American political science and British analytical philosophy towards grand speculation, focusing respectively on statistical methods and on language (‘What do [the mythical] ordinary people mean when they say X, Y etc. ?’), fitted in well with the bitter aftertaste from the mounting tides of fascist aggressiveness that led to World War II and with the disillusionment with extreme leftist ideals in the name of which, too, horrifying excesses had been committed. The cold war probably reinforced the tendency to erect a fence between ‘their’ and ‘our’ belief systems, with ideologies that paraded as science and secured dominance by terror placed on one side, and largely consensual and pragmatic meliorism and purportedly value-free social science and philosophy on the other.

In 1947, the conservative aspect of the restrictive tendency found incisive expression in Michael Oakeshot’s seminal essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’. His ‘Rationalist’ is actually the ideologist, for he claims the superiority of ‘technical knowledge’ over ‘practical knowledge’ which exists ‘only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) cannot be formulated in rules’.¹² All that can be set over and against traditional practices, any proposed remedy for a particular ill held to be universal in its application, and not necessarily the belief in one universal remedy for all political ills, attests the politics of rationalism, i.e. ideological politics. The confines of ideology, therefore, are widely drawn: from ‘the notion of founding a society, whether of individuals or of States, upon a Declaration of the Rights of Man’ ; via ‘ “national” or racial self-determination when elevated into universal principles’ or ‘a self-consciously planned society’ ; to projects like ‘a single tax’ or ‘the revival of Gaelic as the official language of Eire’.¹³ Underlying these multiple manifestations of the politics of rationalism is a single principle that eventually served as the central criterion of the restrictive conception of ideology. This is the aim of changing suddenly and fundamentally one or more of the institutions of an existing order. On these grounds, in 1952 Jacob Talmon presented in his searching historical analysis, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, the forms of thought and action out of which the totalitarianism of the Left developed. In this and in a later work,¹⁴ the notion emerges more specifically than in Oakeshot’s essay that the doctrines of left and right-wing extremism form a category apart. Increasingly, the term ‘ideology’ was programmatically reserved for them.

It is probably not accidental that in 1944 Hannah Arendt distinguished only between the ‘full fledged ideologies’ of race-thinking and class-thinking, and other ideologies which, not being based on a single opinion, had failed to gain majority support;¹⁵ having been ‘essentially’ defeated by race-thinking and class-thinking, other ideologies no longer qualified as ‘full-fledged’. Nine years later, ideology as the guide to behaviour under terror, the novel form of government, was seen by her only to be predicated on statements about constant change.¹⁶ Victorious racism and communism appear to have absorbed the totalitarian elements of all ideologies and as a result to have become the sole ideologies. For, if I read her correctly, she arrived at the view (or rather presupposed) that the nature of ideology is revealed only in its role in the apparatus of totalitarian domination. The elements of total explanation, imperviousness to tangible reality, its investment with a secret meaning and stringent self-generating logic, all attest that ‘it is in the nature of ideological politics … that the real content of the ideology … is devoured by the logic with which the “idea” is carried out’.¹⁷ Whatever one makes of the assumed annihilation of the logic of the idea by the logic of its realization, this much is clear: in the development of Hannah Arendt’s conception of ideology, totalitarianism became the full manifestation of that which characterizes ideology per se. This view eventually gained currency as the logical corollary of the idea of the end of ideology. For if ideologies in the West are assumed to be on the way out, yet political beliefs or ‘isms’ are assumed to remain in force, then these latter must be considered unideological.

In 1955 Raymond Aron raised the question: ‘Fin de l’âge idéologique?’ and answered it in the affirmative.¹⁸ He admitted that non-Marxist socialism and liberalism continued to inspire conviction and arouse controversy, but he claimed that it was becoming increasingly difficult, if not unreasonable, ‘to transfigure such preferences into doctrines’. The contemporary dialogue ‘does not assume the style of ideological debate because each of the opposed themes is no longer bound to a class or a party’. In line with over-stressing the class- and/or party-boundedness of themes in the past and the putative absence of such a connection in the present, Aron affirmed that the conditions for ideological debate had disappeared, in the West spontaneously and in the East through police oppression.¹⁹ This stance prevailed at the World Congress on ‘The Future of Freedom’ held in the same year in Milan.²⁰ The Western participants generally saw a convergence and likeness between liberal and socialist thought, like the meeting during the previous thirty years of the practices of the extreme Right and Left.²¹

It seemed that the controversy between the political camps in the West was no longer about the direction, but about the realization, of chang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Shortcomings of the Restrictive Conception
• Part Two: The Case for the Inclusive Conception
• Part Three: Ideologies in Action
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Appendix 1: A Bibliographical Sample
• Appendix 2: Rich and Poor Belief Systems—Fixed and Firm Beliefs
• Appendix 3: Ideology: Operative and Inoperative, by Purpose and Function, Manifest and Latent
• Appendix 4: The Co-ordination of Orientations with Numbers—a Caveat and a Justification
• Appendix 5: Spatial Overview of the Two-tier Multi-issue Left-Right Ranking
• Bibliography
• Index