Reassessing Political Ideologies

The Durability of Dissent

Michael Freeden, Michael Freeden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134521463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a high-level examination of each of the major ideologies that have shaped political thinking, action and conflict. Each chapter provides a critical overview of the current state of the major ideologies and a retrospective assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, developments and transformations of these ideologies over the past century.
The volume poses a strong challenge to those who have loudly proclaimed the "end of ideology", by demonstrating that it is impossible to understand current political developments without an appreciation of their ideological context. It features internationally respected contributors who are authorities in their fields, and will be an invaluable resource for both students and specialists in areas including Politics and International Relations.

1 Political ideologies in substance and method

Appraising a transformation

Michael Freeden

Developments and disputes

The advent of a new millennium has been a good excuse for much taking of stock, and this volume takes advantage of that opportunity to direct a retrospective, and a tentatively prospective, eye at some of the major ideological currents of the past century, and to assess them in line with current scholarly understandings. In this introduction I have not followed the conventional practice of commenting on the subsequent chapters. That commentary is proffered at the end of the book, in the form of several second-order thoughts. Readers may quite properly prefer to permit the various contributors to speak first for themselves, savouring their multifarious and reflective arguments to which no commentary can do justice. The basic approach shared by all of the contributors is to locate ideologies at the heart of the political process, constituting as they do a mainstay of the art of politics, and to recognize that their colossal impact on the course of past and present events requires their detailed analysis from a viewpoint that is fundamentally sympathetic rather than hostile to their natures and roles. As vehicles of dissent ideologies are an indispensable resource for the intelligent conducting and re-inventing of politics in its variegated forms. As families of political thought displaying clear consensual patterns and continuities, ideologies are a vital and energizing ingredient in the fashioning of group identities and policies. In both these forms they are scarcely a flash in the pan but a durable and ineliminable facet of social life, at once creative and consolidating.

Some years ago, Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote a book about twentieth-century political thought entitled The Age of Ideologies.¹ That title summons up a couple of diverse questions: to what extent has that been the case and, alternatively, can we now imagine an age without ideologies? Bracher had a particular conception of ideologies in mind: grandiose, abstract and threatening. Undoubtedly, the century has experienced clashes of such titans, with the emergence of mass politics and sophisticated modes of recruiting popular support and activism. Undoubtedly, it has also seen the rapid rise and fall of an ideology such as fascism and a rather more protracted process with regard to communism, though to proclaim their death would still be premature. It has been fascinated by the power of totalitarian ideologies, sweeping all impediments and opposition in their paths like an avalanche. But these very ideologies have provoked enormous resistance and abhorrence. Those reactions have created in the Western world a coalition of convenience with Marxist critics of ideology – a coalition eager to assume a world immune to, and transcending, the noxious distortions of ideology. But take away the menace of ideology, both as practice and as word, and you no longer require the protection, either. If ideologies are normal and extensive forms of thought rather than aberrations, and if they occur in more modest – though by no means less influential – forms, we might as well begin to search for some of the benefits they bestow on their host societies. We need to take them seriously; we may even have to treat them with respect.

So where do we stand in the new century? That question needs to run on two parallel, though interrelated, axes: what is the state of concrete ideologies, and what is the state of the study of ideologies? Twice, in the mid-twentieth century and towards its end, we have been informed that the age of ideologies is over. Twice this has proved to be incorrect. But here the students of ideology have been at fault, for failing to identify as ideologies certain phenomena placed right under their eyes, and for mistaking ideological convergence for ideological invisibility, while concurrently predicting with confidence the end of radical ideational dissent. However, the end of ideology would be – to put it simply – no less than the end of politics, a cause to which Saint-Simon and Engels were deeply committed, and to which some contemporary philosophical liberals seem curiously attracted. Yet we may dismiss that option and still argue that politics has changed significantly over the century, and that such change is reflected in its symbiotic relationship with ideology. Conversely, we cannot ignore the truism that, although the forms of structuring, presenting and disseminating ideologies may have varied over time, some of those variations do not reflect an altered reality. They are rather a function of different questions, and novel perspectives, focused on by students of ideologies.

Looking back, what can we say of twentieth-century ideologies? Did they creep up on us, from their misty and sometimes mystical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins in central Europe, all those populist, even vulgar, socialisms, fascisms and religious conservatisms, to be met by a proud English (and later American) liberalism, whose banner was held high by the wise guardians of a moderate civilization? Were those older ideological families further adopted by third-world movements, whose added local flavour transformed them into tools both of modernization and of oppression? Were all these ructions the temporary price of introducing ‘the people’ into positions of power and authority, of the gradual percolation of democracy from centre to periphery inside each society and across the globe? Certainly, there have been vocal advocates for all these views, but those narratives are culpable in their simplifications and misconceptions.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the major ideologies – conservatism, liberalism and socialism – were all at a point of transformation. Conservatism was adapting, with considerable success, to the rise of powerful forces to its left, while at the same time it was collecting the disaffected from among the liberal camp and reaching beyond its traditional class and religious bases. Liberalism and socialism were experiencing dramatic growth, but of different kinds. As a political movement, liberalism was under pressure; while as an ideology it was innovative and dynamic, unearthing its communal principles and embarking upon the project of reformulating utilitarianism that culminated in the welfare state. Socialism, to the contrary, was fast expanding as a political movement, but was beset from its infancy with centrifugal tendencies and ideological factionalism – Marxist, evolutionary, syndicalist, as well as contention within each of these categories – which weakened its effectiveness and attraction. Nevertheless, it was an era that witnessed strong public competition of these ideological groupings over the formation of public policy, and in which political argument and debate were markedly salient; indeed, comprising a significant part of the intellectual pursuits of the educated and the socially aware. It is no accident that the prestigious Home University Library commissioned three books, published in 1911–12, titled Liberalism, Conservatism, and The Socialist Movement – the first penned by L.T. Hobhouse becoming a highly influential twentieth-century classic, while the last illustrated the amalgamation of theory and practice, typical of ideological thinking,² through the person of its author, J. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain's first Labour prime minister. The preferred words to describe those sets of ideas may have been doctrines, programmes or simply ideas but, at least on the progressive side of the spectrum, few might have objected to their designation as ideologies, had that term in its non-Marxist sense been in common circulation.

The interwar years saw the advent of the totalitarianisms of left and right, a ferocious new political weapon as yet unknown on such a scale, in which rigid and binding dogmas, promulgated by authoritarian dictatorships, were employed as mobilizing instruments not only to coerce but to enthuse mass publics to conduct unbecoming of people in full command of their rational and moral properties. Their political opponents were quick to excoriate these phenomena as ideologies qua manipulative and pervasive ideas, purveyors of cataclysmic change, more powerful and efficient than guns or tanks, that overruled the natural divergence of human thought. In their anxiety to curb this epidemic of thought-control, its detractors confused the power of superimposed idea-systems with the necessary production of political ideas as a communal resource, and even resisted the efforts made by reforming democratic states to ally themselves to alternative visions of collectively beneficial futures. Ideologies were firmly put beyond the pale of acceptable politics.

But of course ideologies had been there all the time, and not just in abstract and systemic garb. Karl Mannheim had taken an important step in that direction when he identified ideologies as systems that endorsed the status quo, in the face of status quo defenders who objected to the labelling of what they alleged was a pragmatic and ad hoc approach as an ideology.³ In so doing, Mannheim had adapted the Marxist understanding of ideology as reflecting the social and class bases of particular groups, and had designated all such known constructs as ideologies. However, Mannheim continued to endorse the Marxian-Engelsian notion of ideology as falsehood, deliberate or not, in his category of the partial concept of ideology. He accompanied that with a total concept that was akin to a Weltanschauung, but which suffered from the stigma of relativism – a label which certain philosophical purists have habitually used to denigrate contextual analysis. In his haste to escape the relativist constrictions of ideology, Mannheim endowed intellectuals with the supra-social capacity to transcend its group-perspectives, thus perpetuating the Marxist relegation of ideologies to temporal ephemerality, to rational inferiority, and to interest-serving group-egoism.

Mannheim nevertheless left the road to overcoming ideologies open, but already their presentation to the world of social understanding was of a peculiar kind. Ideologies continued to be seen as dissimulations, at worst patently false and at best the indispensable accoutrement of political ambition in the shape of a non-binding rhetoric, increasingly necessary to pick up new voters as fast as the political system could endow them with full citizenship. Ideologies were also assumed to be block edifices, massive and encompassing in their range, markedly monolithic in their internal structure (with the above-noted exception of socialism, split into socialism-cum-social-democracy and communism), and perceived as few in number: the big three at century's advent plus the two interwar totalitarianisms, despite lesser instances such as anarchism. Implicit was a view of plugging into an entire package, and of clearly defined and sealed boundaries that separated all five. Implicit, too, was a view that liberalism and conservatism were rather different kinds of packages, accompanied by their own resistance to be termed ideologies. The former appeared to be too flexible and open-ended to insist on rigid and total ideational solutions to political problems; while the latter deftly side-stepped the issue by claiming to purge its contents of political ideas altogether and to engage instead in piecemeal and unplanned institutional reactions to historical contingencies. If liberalism was not an ideology, it was through the definitional fiat of ideology as closed and doctrinaire; if conservatism was not one, it was through the definitional fiat of ideology as abstract and non-empirical. No wonder that the end of ideology could become a message of hope, if not of scholarly accuracy.

In the meantime, however, American political scientists were directing the cold eye of empiricism at a recently discovered, or recently appreciated, social phenomenon and employing the term ‘ideology’ to denote it. Political attitudes, opinions and evaluations were what constituted ideology and, crucially, they were not dissimulative. No attempt was made to argue for their underlying truth in the sense of being morally right or rationally valid. Rather, their truth was deemed to lie in their being a reliable vehicle and representation of what their bearers actually thought and preferred. Truth became a question of empirical accuracy. Robert Lane and Philip Converse were among the pioneers who applied behavioural positivism to these ‘grassroots’ positions of individuals and attempted to aggregate them into functional instruments of political participation, support or disapproval. Lane wished to expand ideology to signify not only articulated political arguments but also ‘loosely structured, unreflective statements’ of the common people,⁴ breaking away from the cohesion many philosophers expect of political thinking, as well as from the association of ideology with the interests of a ruling class. Converse refined the study of mass publics by seeking regularities, compatibilities and constraints in their ideologies, and exploring their relationship to élite belief systems.⁵ Thus began the process of unpacking ideologies and looking at their internal components, often in a way that illmatched the parts with the wholes they purportedly constituted.

One major outcome of these approaches was to present ideologies as democratically produced, a process whose embryonic origins emanated from the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci had repositioned ideology within the normal thought processes of individuals located in social groups. But these popular faiths, he argued, were still rudimentary and inchoate and had to be led by élites offering cohesion, direction and refinement to a thought-structure that was ultimately a homogeneous tool for revolution. Ideology, he held, could then transmogrify into truth.⁶ By contrast, the individualist conception of ideology offered by mid-century American political scientists exalted ideological fragmentation by permeating ideology with an atomized, person-centred, and pluralist value system. This was only one facet of changes in concrete Western ideologies which, through their formative fashioning by political parties or crucial interest groups, including the press and television, still presented hegemonic features of the kind identified by Gramsci. But political discourse, and the production and dissemination of ideologies, were certainly broadening out, with the major ideological families becoming more internally complex and variable due to the more diverse input upon which they could draw.

As a consequence, ideology was consciously reintroduced into liberalism, but only by renaming ideology – not as a total system of ideas installed from an unassailable ‘rationalist’ or political stratosphere, but as a manifestation of a pluralist multitude of views acting on a replaceable élite, emerging out of methodological individualism and subsumed within the insights of cognitive psychology. A counter-strategy was necessary in order to reinject theoretical cohesion and analytical power into a branch of political studies no longer able to rely on the Marxisant usages of ideology, irrelevant as they appeared to the understanding of Western political thought manifestations. Here anthropology and linguistics came to the rescue, with their notions of mapping, myths and symbols, all heavily dependent on interpretative frameworks through which to decode forms of thought-behaviour that were to a considerable degree nontransparent. Through a transition, mediated also via hermeneutics, to a focus on constructed and invented realities as necessary forms of reproducing knowledge and understanding, the concept of ideology regained both scholarly purchase and intellectual gravitas. In particular, the permanence of ideology could be asserted as against its evanescence in the Marxist approaches.

Rediscovering commonalities

Surely, though, people were not talking about the same thing? Surely the end of total and false systems was entirely separate from the semantic and cultural recapturing of diverse patterns of social meaning and communication across societies? This ‘two concepts of ideology’ view is to a large extent misleading. What has taken place, rather, is a refinement and cross-fertilization of a subdiscipline which still shares in the broadest sense the common objective of accounting for and assessing the political thinking that aims to direct – or simply directs – the public activities of a society.

Far from witnessing the end of ideology, a plethora of new ideologies has continued to emerge (green ideology is one such instance), while older ideologies have been undergoing continuous processes of breaking-up and regrouping (as attested to by developments on the radical right, for example). Our sensitivity to these ideational births and rebirths has been considerably enhanced not only because of the vocal presence of political movements acting in the name of these ideologies, but because we are seeing a veritable explosion in the usages of ideology, which at the same time involves si...