Ideology Studies

New Advances and Interpretations

Michael Freeden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032029863
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000469479
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book comprehensively collects the thinking - over the last 25 years - of one the most important contemporary scholars in the field of ideology studies.

Clearly organised, it expounds on the changing nature of the sub-discipline, its components and methods of investigation. As such, it serves the need for a general, well-informed identification and elaboration of thematic possibilities in current ideology studies and represents the most developed and productive methodological approach to the study of ideologies in the last three decades. Freeden presents ideology studies as an evolving and vibrant field, encountering and surmounting a series of challenges in its successful path towards recognition as a fully legitimate and respected branch of political theory.

This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of political ideologies, political theory, political philosophy and more broadly to sociology, political science, anthropology, human geography, international studies and the humanities.

PART IStaking out the macro-agenda

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186151-2

Prelude

‘Ideology and political theory’ is a fully-fledged article written in lieu of the standard-length JPI editorials in its publication year, 2006. It identified a watershed in ideology studies in which the suspicion both of ideologies and their scholarly study was increasingly questioned. But those challenges were disjointed, relating to diverse interpretations of ideology. They indicated the need for a more integrated resting point from which new sense could be impressed on the many perspectives on ideology that were pulling in different and often unhelpful directions. They also required an empirical decoupling of what counted as ideological discourse, looking beyond its still overbearing association with grand systemic conflict, and introducing instead the indeterminate and unpredictable flow of group-anchored thinking. I reflect here on the slow—and still unfinished—journey of ideology studies as it gradually broke loose from prejudice and ignorance, from confusion over its identifying features and its centrality as a genre of political thought. Insights derived from philosophy, history and the social sciences were drawn together to spark new intellectual curiosity, beginning the crystallization of an illuminating and elucidating branch of political know-how. Content analysis pricked the pretensions of political philosophers to be supra-political—to the contrary, they were often revealed as high-class ideologists capable of making their own valuable contributions to the multiple ideological families that had sustained, or were enveloping, them.

‘What's special about ideologies’ (2001) examines in beefed-up detail four traits of ideologies—typicality, influence, contextual creativity and communicability—to which only a brief allusion has been made in the introduction to this book and in other writings of mine. It argues that ideology theorists need radically to alter the assessment criteria of ideological success and break away—at least partly—from the substantive value-oriented standards political theorists have habitually applied to gauge their ideational produce. The four characteristics operate in concert to deliver a political thought-practice distinct from those that political theorists have been trained to recognize and expect.

‘Fundaments and foundations in ideology’ (2005) reflects on two separate issues: whether ideologies are the embodiment of a single idea, and whether—as political philosophers frequently claim for their subject matter—they are examples of free-standing or first principles from which consequent beliefs can be derived. It is contended that ideologies are more pertinently explored for core - not first - principles, values and concepts. Those cores are durable but not essentialist. Nor are they immutably wired into the underpinning of an ideological argument; their position in the ideational structure may flexibly and contingently be subject to temporal and cultural reinscribing. Cores are multiple assemblages that together plot the many paths an ideology can take; their force may combine both rational and emotional commitment.

1IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL THEORY

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186151-3

Ideology: The problem-child of political analysis

We are saddled with a difficult word, ‘ideology’. Here is a term once designed to signify the study of ideas, even the science of ideas, yet it has come to denote one area of the domain it is supposed to study (the word ‘politics’ has, at many UK departments of politics, curiously travelled in the opposite trajectory). Moreover, as a term invoking a subject matter, the word ‘ideology’ has proved to be very off-putting for the general public—the combination of ideas and ‘logies’ seems to indicate the kind of high abstraction that is remote from the experience and the language of regular people, even though it is the latter on which ideology studies have come to be chiefly focused. In the Anglo-American world, with its naïve myths of political pragmatism, ideology is all too often an alien implant, something concocted by spinners of dreams, otherworldly intellectuals or machinators with totalitarian designs. In the European mainland, with its far greater familiarity with abstract theorizing, ideology is an obnoxious kind of grand theory attached particularly to its tempestuous early- and mid-20th century history in which fascists faced communists in a bid to dominate the world. Intellectually, the reception of ideology has been inspired by the theoreticians who, following Marx and Engels, became its sworn enemies.

Nevertheless, the term is very common, though not beloved, among scholars, writers and academics, and it has an illustrious pedigree, although regrettably also a notorious one. If, as Max Lerner stated, ideas are weapons,¹ ideology (in the singular) is a loose cannon when used professionally. We find it in the ‘slash and destroy’ mode when used to rubbish another point of view. Daniel Bell referred to the ‘trap of ideology’, to ‘apocalyptic fervour’ and ‘dreadful results’ and to ideologists as ‘terrible simplifiers’.² We encounter it as if behind a magic screen, whose removal suddenly enables the initially hidden and pernicious attributes of a doctrine, Weltanschauung, or set of social practices to become hideously exposed by the knowledgeable ideology-critic, much as the Emperor's new clothes dissolved through the eyes of a child. Marx and Engels wrote of ideology as an upside-down sublimation, a set of ‘reflexes and echoes of [the] life process’, of ‘phantoms formed in the human brain’ detached from the world. Describing the ruling class as ‘conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood’, they saw the demystification and consequent elimination of ideology as dependent not only on the actual ending of class rule, but on the intellectual process of ‘outing’ ideology: ‘One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from these actual rulers, and thus recognize the rule of ideas or illusions in history’.³

We meet ideology as an instrument of ‘totalitarian seduction’, an all-encompassing system of ideas based on a ‘single truth’ and a drive for self-justification, primarily representative of the 20th century.⁴ We also come across it as a lazy synonym for any set of ideas (historians are occasionally guilty of that). We encounter it in endless textbooks as a simple descriptor for a discrete set of major political belief systems, invariably including liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism and the rest of the pack. And, of course, we discover it as a fundamental and variegated feature of social life, opened up to sophisticated scrutiny through increasingly refined tools of analysis that are employed by different disciplines to further their understanding of the areas they investigate.

Among political theorists, ideology is buffeted by the winds of academic fashion, reflecting not only substantive foci of interest but reigning methodologies—indeed, almost a justification of the dominant ideology thesis itself, in the shape of ‘dominant methodologies’ concealed from many of their users. At one point in time, we find it caught in the debate over whether the study of politics is a science or an art. At another, it appears against the backdrop of a liberalism fighting to retrieve ground against the twin onslaughts of communism and fascism. At a third point, it falls prey to the methodological individualism that has typified much Western—and especially American—social science. At a fourth point, it is appropriated by a convergence of new developments in linguistics, philosophy and psychology to recover its Marxist critical edge—critical, however, in the sense that it is once again exposed as a dissimulative device. But those developments also encourage a critical stance in a non-Marxist sense, as a reflective exploration of the features of ideology. And at a fifth point, it is reconstructed as the most typical and accessible form of political thinking. In between it has been pronounced dead—twice!—and resurrected—twice!—thus outclassing one central creed of a well-established religion, religion, of course, being a set of beliefs and practices with which ideology is sometimes thought to be in competition.

No wonder then that political theorists, chiefly political philosophers, are baffled. For political philosophers who have been trained to identify, explore and prescribe enduring truths, sustained by reason or by logic, such vacillation is difficult to tolerate. The fact of two-pronged change—in the nature of the substantive content of ideologies and in the nature of the methodologies to which the term ‘ideology’ is harnessed—is unpalatable for universalizers and purveyors of eternal truths, but quite common among social scientists possessing an historical or comparative sense. For universalizers, change is either deviant or the teleological unfolding of an emerging constant. Moreover, the vital dual distinction between an ideology on one hand and its students on the other hand also explains another perennial confusion reigning among philosophical critics of ideology. They fail to distinguish between a condemnation of the ideas conveyed by ideologies (because, in the opinion of such critics, they are sloppy, simplistic, malign or emotional) and a disavowal of the scholarly practice of studying ideologies that runs something like this: ‘How can serious scholars bother to investigate such inferior forms of thinking, let alone learn something from them? Surely the results of such research cannot rise above the paucity of the material!’. Analytical and ethical philosophers are not used to detaching themselves from the object of their study, having sought out a priori only its most superior instances with which they can in principle empathize, and believing to have included their own cogitations seamlessly within the compass of their subject matter.⁵ Within their discipline, the detachment that distinguishes between participants and observers, if present, is the province of historians of philosophy, a minority taste.

Nor can it be denied that the concept of ideology as the wielding of pernicious power still has a hold on political theorists. They require a term to express and denounce systemic abuse and obfuscation through the force of superimposed ideas, at some remove from what ‘actually is’. For that reason, ‘ideology’ has served them well as a word, even though abuse and obfuscation are merely contingent features of power. However, while the substantive concreteness of ideology mutates and the quality of its products fluctuates, it is—notwithstanding the Marxists or the analytical and ethical philosophers—a universal phenomenon of immeasurable significance to the study of politics. That is an immense challenge to political theorists, among which students of ideology are to be counted as full and core members: to reclaim the high ground of first-rate analysis when it comes to ideology while insisting on its crucial centrality to understanding politics and thinking about politics, without being contaminated either by scholarly prejudices or by the rather slippery nature of the concept, and ephemerality of some of the phenomena, that ideology signifies.

Studying ideology: A scientific endeavour?

The above settings to ideology merit scrutiny in greater detail. If Destutt de Tracy aspired to create a science of ideology, of judging and reasoning, of knowing how our ideas were formulated and then directing them to produce happiness,⁶ more recent views have contrasted ideology with science or, more specifically, with the empiricism at the heart of science. When positioning ideology on an epistemological dimension, its antecedents reflect the 19th-century positivist legacy concerning the status of the social sciences that was still debated animatedly until the 1970s and the arrival of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. A typical case in point is Giovanni Sartori, locating ideology—as did Marx from a very different perspective—on a truth-error dichotomy, and contrasting it specifically with ‘science and valid knowledge’, questioning its applicability to ‘the real world’ because it did not ‘fall under the jurisdiction of logic and verification’.⁷ That perspective related to predominant mid-century views about the closed totality of ideology—deductive, rationalistic and non-empirical, a state of ‘dogmatic impermeability both to evidence and to argument’.⁸ Recall also the approach of Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies, for whom the scientific method and its objectivity, attained through public critique, testing and replicability, offered the only protection from Mannheimian ‘total ideologies’, under which Popper included ‘our own system of prejudices’ and ‘ideological follies’.⁹ Mere knowledge of our ideological biases, as exposed by Marx and Karl Mannheim, seemed to Popper to proffer no hope of getting rid of them. But getting rid of them was still the crux of the matter.

For political theorists following that route, ideology signalled dalliance with illiberal, unsubstantiated and flawed ways of thinking, and the clear message was yet again: ‘keep away if you have any claims to scholarship’, now understood as the striving for empirically falsifiable knowledge rather than the philosophers’ insistence on the deductive nature of analysis. In the words of one such representative of the positivist approach, ‘We sceptics, therefore, offer the world not an ideology but an anti-ideology. We really do believe in reason, to which the ideologists pay lip-service only; we believe, that is, in the reason that proves its worth in science; we believe in empirical reason, pragmatic reason … In that specific sense, it sets men free’.¹⁰

On the other side of the debate was a growing tendency to accord ideology serious standing, but only through narrowing its domain to that of observable representations of social reality. Instead of shying away from a phenomenon pronounced too unscientific to matter, or too unpleasant to approach, many scholars now agreed that whatever its inchoate nature, and whatever the messages it conveyed, ideology could be studied scientifically or, rather, its external and visible symptoms could. In a little-known but remarkable trend report, accompanied by an extensive bibliography and published by Norman Birnbaum in 1960,¹¹ a case was made for the sociological study of ideology, though it also referred more broadly to its psychological bases through Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson. Noting the ‘evolution of ideology into science’ and the ‘bracketing’ of theoretical issues of ideology in the mid-20th century,¹² Birnbaum emphasized the empirical and behaviourist facets of ideology: mass communications and mass society (David Riesman); anthropology, in particular myths, symbols and language (Claude Lévi-Strauss); attitude studies and political behaviour surveys, employing aggregating and disaggregating quantitative findings (Robert E. Lane).

That kind of science was also outside the orbit of political theory—at the time still largely focused on the historical study of individuals or on perennial and decontextualized conceptual and philosophical issues—because it abandoned the grand theorizing to which political theorists had become habituated, and because much of it relied on the budding quantitative approaches developing in political science that were seen as increasingly impenetrable by, or irrelevant for, political theorists. The ‘empiricism’ of political theorists, for what it was worth, related rather to the study of past iconic individuals and their texts. Alternatively, empiricism was eschewed altogether in favour of theories of the good life and exercises in utopia. Political theorists knew that ideologies existed but could not find a way to incorporate them into their scholarship—after all, they were produced by ideologues, a perverted and mischievous form of intellectual lowlife. And they had nothing to say about ideology as a concept, because it appeared to fail both tests of normative significance and of academic relevance. The epistemology of political theory and its status were not an issue for most theorists; they were simply participating in a proud practice in which distinguished thinkers had engaged from the times of the ancient Greeks. Moreover, any recognition that ideologies were phenomena worthy of investigation by political theorists was partly blocked by the contentions of scholars inspired by the social criticism of the Frankfurt School. They displayed the misguided suspicion that to be interested in the here and now betrayed an innate conservatism. In Birnbaum's apt words, it was a ‘disdain for that sort of sociological description which legitimates what it describes, by refusing to acknowledge that things could be otherwise’.¹³ Exploring the present does not, however, rule out exploring a different present at any future point and asking what has changed and why.

The battle of ideologies and their competing epistemologies

There was another setting to the standing of ideology in political theory. The immediate pre- and post-war periods were times of unusually intense ideational battles revolving around a kind of Gramscian hegemony over the world. Those conflicts did not evolve around civilization and its discontents, but around civilization and its annihilators. Fascism, communism and what was variably called democracy or liberalism locked horns in a pattern far more symmetrical than was recognized by the latter's adherents in the allegedly free world: All were promoters of non-negotiable principles that sought the status of universal truths, and all became hardened in that battle of the absolutes. It may be a truism that a potent enemy imposes its contours on those who attempt to defend themselves against it. Western political theory, especially its strong American component, had always toyed with a sense of mission: educating, inspiring, directing, converting—indeed to some extent this is still regarded as a central pedagogical responsibility of US political philosophers. While vehemently opposed to the ideas and doctrines emanating from Germany, Russia and to a lesser extent, Italy, they were dazzled by the power and sweep of what Bell called ‘the conversion of ideas into social levers’.¹⁴ This is where the action-orientation of ideology suddenly became evident: Ideas were clearly seen to have dramatic outcomes in terms of world events, and the sheer efficiency of ideological dissemination, particularly in the case of Nazism, was some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Staking out the macro-agenda
• PART II Unfolding vistas and paradigms
• PART III Boundaries and intersections
• PART IV Lived ideology
• Index