American Democracy

Selected Essays on Theory, Practice, and Critique

P. Green

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349480227
  9781137382870
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137381552
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book examines the problems that plague contemporary American democracy. Written from the standpoint of democratic theory, and from a progressive point of view, the book explores different facets of American democratic culture and its various deficits – deficits that can lead to the crippling of democratic politics.

Part I

American Democracy: Theory, Practice and Critique

Chapter 1

Introduction

(Adapted from “I Have a Philosophy, You Have an Ideology: Is Social Criticism Possible?” The Massachusetts Review, Summer 1991, pp. 199–217)

The essays I have collected in this volume, ranging in date of publication from 1968 to 2012, are all devoted to the development or exposition of a critical democratic theory. As such, they have a common problem, namely, that it is not clear how, or even whether, democratic theory can be in any sense critical: critical, that is, of the status quo in any national or sub-national community in which a majority of voters, over a substantial time period, have endorsed a status quo that, to the critical theorist, seems badly in need of reform or reconstruction.

The question I consequently ask in the adapted title of this chapter may strike some people as odd or even absurd, yet it is in fact a burning question of political thought today, and many contemporary political philosophers will deny that it deserves an affirmative answer. They will deny, that is, that anyone is in the position to utter the other part of that title, so that in fact while there is a multitude of individual or collective opinions about politics and the good life, none of them is privileged or disprivileged with respect to any other: None can be called “philosophical” in contrast to some other, inferior, viewpoint that is merely “ideological.” Furthermore, the collapse of the notion of political “truth,” which anyway is always of ambiguous status in a democratic culture, has accelerated with the world–historical disappearance of any defensible historicist alternative to the contemporary social order: any alternative about which one can say, as Marx said, it is not that we ought to believe in it, but that we must believe in it because it is historically progressive. It is not that people all over the world will not go right on making their own history anyhow—despite what neo-Hegelian intellectuals in the U.S. State Department might think¹—but, rather, that there exists no ready-to-hand guide as to which historical interventions are progressive and morally defensible, and which are regressive and morally indefensible.

In this situation ideological criticism—that is, the criticism of other people’s alleged ideologies—has once again been called into question, as it was during the 1950s, when a group of American intellectuals discussed what they called “the end of ideology.”² Thus what purports to be the critique of capitalism—that is, the tradition of Marxist thought—is discredited as itself being ideology. Fundamental social criticism is impossible, except as ideology (and the same approach would be applied to feminist critiques if triumphalist American commentators bothered with them). I want to challenge this current view, or at least to begin to challenge it, by arguing its opposite: that, for example, capitalist apologetics are, precisely, ideological; and that a nonideological critique of such apologetics is possible, even necessary. To do that, of course, I first have to explain what it is I mean, or do not mean, by the term “ideology,” and why I think it is so central to critical theory.

There are many conflicting usages of the word “ideology,” but I want to distinguish between two superficially similar variants, one I call “pejorative” and the other I call “structuralist” or, more properly, “Marxist-structuralist.” (This distinction may strike some as not precisely nonpejorative, a difficulty that turns up constantly in discussions of this subject.)

In pejorative discourse, ideology is a type of reasoning practiced by people who think incorrectly, or falsely, as opposed to those who think correctly, or truly. In one version of this stance, ideology is made equivalent to dogma, or fanaticism. This usage is really a product of the Cold War and was originally virtually a synonym for “Marxist,” when used by social scientists such as Daniel Bell in the essay that introduced the notion of “The End of Ideology” (by which, in fact, he meant the end of Marxism as a relevant set of political beliefs); the alternative mode of thought was moderate, practical, and tolerant and was presumably characteristic of all the non-Marxist societies of “the West.” This distinction became, and remains, a staple of established social science; some Marxists have their own version of it, according to which only Marxism enables its practitioner to tell the difference between truth and falsity; in the concept of false consciousness, the latter has been substituted for the former.

So it is, then, a different usage of the concept of ideology, which I call structural, that I wish to distinguish, defend, and apply here. By “structural,” I intend to suggest that ideology is not simply the irrational or dogmatic or unscientific thoughtways of particular individuals or groups, but at another level is rather a characteristic of the cognitive structure of an entire community or social order (or even an entire civilization). Thus, once grasped as such, ideology provides a basis for an independent understanding of social orders. It is the lived symbolic life of a people who at least occasionally think they have a life in common; what they think they have in common is the content of their ideology. An ideology is thus the response by human beings to the problems of living together in a social structure they have not chosen for themselves (this is true even of a ruling class, which would not choose to be opposed by subordinate classes if it could have its way). To the extent that people accept the validity of a system of symbolic representations and legitimations not of their own making (and perhaps only under absolute tyrannies do people live in a social order without accepting any of its binding myths whatsoever), this is the historical outcome of the (structural) constraints that their way of producing and reproducing their lives imposes on them, together with their human, intellectual limitations in trying to make sense of those constraints and of that way of life. In sum, my working definition of ideology in general is this: the ensemble of beliefs and practices that support a (partially) fictitious sense of community among the members of any organized human group.

This structuralist, critical conception of ideology, which is considered by most Western Marxists today to be the best Marxian intellectual heritage, is founded on the conviction that the conventional self-representations of social systems usually do not tell the whole truth about them; to find the unexamined ideological illusions on which they rest we must look behind or beneath them. We should then restrict the pejorative use of the term ideology to those instances in which we are presented with what, after careful consideration, we think to be not just an incomplete but a spurious picture of a harmony of the social whole, a picture created at the expense of a truthful account of the lives of its constituent parts: a picture in which, at least in our own civilization, most often the social relations of unequals are rationalized to pretend that in some way they are equals; or, alternatively, that in some way the inegalitarian relationships are by nature preferable to egalitarian relationships.

As for capitalist ideology specifically the truth that its illusions conceal among us, by inversion, is that capitalist society is founded on exploitation and oppression; the ideas, or ideals, of equality and freedom are treated as though they can exist independently of the material basis of unfreedom and inequality. Again, it is not a simple lie or an exhibition of false consciousness to say that freedom and equality also exist under capitalism. Rather, in the everyday understandings of that society, based upon a casual encounter with its workings unaccompanied by any attempt to uncover deeper levels of meaning, precarious and occasional moments of social unity in freedom are sometimes taken by some people to be eternal and natural, while the deeper reality of conflict and exploitation is concealed from this cursory view.

For example, capitalist ideology promotes a worldview of competitive individualism, but it also promises that a harmonious community emerges from competitive conflict. To the extent that the promise is false, persons taking it “too seriously” and recognizing that they are being exploited or misled, may tend to rebel, or at least to look for a better understanding of where things went wrong, or even to develop more consistent images of a new social system. In fact, from Marx’s standpoint, the real point of ideological critique is less to clear up the supposedly confused thinking of oppressed groups and classes than to dispel the mystifications of the people who control and staff the media of communication and education and monopolize the field of public discourse. In that respect, critique of a dominant ideology is not merely possible: It is an essential component of any struggle for social change.

Beyond all these considerations is a larger underlying issue. Implicit in the critical notion of ideology is the conclusion that the social world is actually in a state of self-contradiction; it is not just a matter of differing perceptions or opinions. Marx’s critique describes what he (and anyone following in his footsteps) takes to be a social reality, not a mere artifact of our language or values. This claim puts a new light on the frequently encountered accusation that the critic of other people’s ideology has not got a leg to stand on, an accusation that highlights what is often called the problem of the “Archimedean point”—Archimedes having allegedly remarked, “If I had a lever and a place to stand, I could move the world.” Is there, we obviously have to ask, an Archimedean point of objectively valid knowledge, a “place to stand,” to which the critic of ideology can repair, so that my apparently ironic quotation in the present chapter’s adapted title can actually be stated seriously without being itself abusively pejorative?

Certainly, there is no point from which we can say that, for example, Das Kapital contains “objectively valid knowledge” of capitalism, or The Dialectic of Sex objectively valid knowledge of patriarchy, and so forth. On the other hand, what ideological criticism in the structuralist vein does compel is an analysis of the system that we inhabit. What Das Kapital contains, for example, is not objectively valid but, rather, is validatable knowledge. Validatable how? By whatever standards we (whoever we are) ordinarily use to validate our knowledge. To the extent that considerations about a social order contain recognizably tendentious misstatements of what John Rawls called “the facts of life”—that global warming is not occurring; that immense economic inequality is not destructive of lives; that men are by nature intellectually superior to women or whites to blacks; that financial power does not need regulation—we know that we are in the presence either of ideological thinking or just plain ignorance, and we must be unafraid to say so. To that extent, then, yes, social criticism is indeed possible. However, the Archimedean point does indeed, in general, rest on an assumption: the assumption that in the nature of the phenomenal world there is in fact a level of discrepancy between reality and appearance.

Marx’s particular analysis of capitalism, therefore, only warrants an ideologically demystifying critique of capitalism in that there stands behind it a long philosophical tradition, stretching from Plato’s Republic to Hegel’s Phenomenology, a tradition that insists on the discrepancy between the apparent and the actual. If there is an Archimedean point, it is necessarily within that so-called rationalist tradition. This place to stand on may be shaky, but I would argue that it is hardly insubstantial. Plato, Hegel, and Marx are not repositories of objective truth, but neither are their analyses arbitrary, and whatever accusations ideological criticism in this rationalist tradition is susceptible to, being arbitrary is not one of them. Thus the failing of the Cold War school, or the Leninist version of Marxism, is not simply in their name-calling: Most of the people they called ideologues probably were. Their failing lay, rather, in their unwillingness to extend the critique of ideology to their own premises as well, to probe deeply enough into the world of appearances; this failing repeats itself today, even more egregiously. It is easy enough to find the “end of Communism” today; but anyone who could look back at the United States (let alone at the rest of the global capitalist world) in 1990 and see an “end of history” or of ideological critique, has clearly not yet engaged in either social science or philosophy, or in any kind of serious social analysis at all. In sum, the structuralist, critical conception of ideology enables us to probe beneath the fictions of power and hierarchy in our own societies in a manner and to an extent that no other methodology permits: It indeed makes social criticism possible.

We will only find this conception useless if, like various contemporary post-modernist philosophers, we finally give up entirely on the project of social self-criticism to say in effect that there is no “underlying” social reality: There are only shifting human perceptions of arbitrary and unjudgeable appearances.³ Everyone has his or her own story to tell, and any story is as good as any other. The critique of ideology is at best itself enwrapped in the same particular and limiting social determinations as that which it criticizes; it is just my story. It will be claimed—it has been claimed—that we are left with nothing but a pluralism of “discourses,” all equally authentic or inauthentic and all mutually estranged, so that I cannot in fact finally distinguish between, say, a philosophy of equal respect and an ideology that justifies privilege and oppression based on the existence of formal legal equality, without falling into the same rhetorical mode that I criticized as being “pejorative.” So we finally arrive, belatedly perhaps but necessarily only after this extended introduction, at the question I began with by posing: Even though negative social criticism is possible, neither I nor anyone else (the critic will insist) can make the further claim that “I have a philosophy, you have an ideology.”

This standpoint is certainly defensible and, perhaps, even “true” (if one can say of the statement, “there is no truth,” that it is true). But it has some serious costs. In the end, the rationale for a critical theory of ideology is practical, not philosophical. That rationale inheres in our desire, if we have such a desire, to be able to make meaningful moral or aesthetic or political distinctions: to distinguish, as specifically in the political case, between potentially progressive and regressive political movements, and thus to be able to justify coherent and organized (rather than random and fragmented) analysis, criticism, and opposition. To be outraged by injustice in general, more than merely by injustice to ourselves, we need a general conception of what injustice is not; that is, a philosophical, not merely ideological, conception of justice; a conception that does not rest on a misrepresentation of the facts of life.

This is in fact what I go on to argue in Chapters 3 and 4 of this collection. What we might call the liberal theories, the philosophies of justice and fairness of Rawls, Dworkin, Ackerman, and Walzer rest, as must all philosophies, on bedrock axioms, on unnoticed structural foundations (especially pertaining to gender) or untested and helpful assumptions, without which their reasoning could not proceed. But it is reasoning they engage in; they require no distortions of the social facts of life to get to where they are going. Unhappily, the same, as we shall see, cannot be said of Milton Friedman or Robert Nozick, whose reasoning is thus so permeated by ideology that it cannot be taken seriously as social theory.

I have still of course, used my own tendentious words: “oppression,” for example; “injustice,” for another. Can I make good on these choices? At one level, it is fatuous to think we can make no distinction between oppressed and oppressors merely because of the limits of philosophy. Of course we can; we do it all the time. Some people—for example, black Africans in South Africa—were jailed simply for violating rules designed to perpetuate their civic inequality; others—for example, American Nazis—though they may be personally aggrieved, have an analysis of the political system that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: American Democracy: Theory, Practice and Critique
• Part II: “Really Existing Democracy”
• Part III: “It Would Be a Good Idea”
• Notes