Taking Ideology Seriously

21st Century Reconfigurations

Gayil Talshir, Mathew Humphrey, Michael Freeden, Gayil Talshir, Mathew Humphrey, Michael Freeden

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317850939
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of the 'end of ideology' thesis, not as a theoretical stance but as a reaction to what appears to have been the decline of major ideological families, such as socialism, in a changing world order. Globalization, as well as internal national fragmentation of belief systems, have made it difficult to identify ideology in its conventional formats.

Previously published as a special issue of The Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, this volume challenges the notion that we are living in a post-ideological age. It offers a theoretical framework for exploring some of the new manifestations of ideologies, and combines this with a series of case studies relating to recent ideational phenomena, such as populism, environmentalism and Islamic fundamentalism. The contributors reassess some typologies, such as the left-right axis, as an explanatory device and use ideology research to bring together different scholarly perspectives including party-political analysis, the history of ideas, post-Marxism, and movement politics.

The Phoenix of Ideology

GAYIL TALSHIR

Karl Dietrich Bracher (1984) titled his book The Age of Ideology: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century. Ideology, he contended, is the most distinctive feature of politics since the turn of the last century, characterized by the attempt of groups – nations, states, organizations – to simplify complex realities into one, all-embracing truth in a bipolar framework of foe/friend (Bracher 1984: 5). Yet the major processes of the second half of the twentieth century seem to mark the very demise of the era of ideology. Ideology is at the heart of three different crises that have dramatically changed the way we think about society today: the end of ideology, the end of politics and the end of history. Each concerns a different set of presuppositions, contexts, objects of investigation and ‘big questions’, yet ‘ideology’ plays a key role in them all. Thus, the end of ideology mainly addresses the rivalry between totalitarian regimes and democracy. Ideology in this context symbolizes the dominant feature of dictatorships – be they Fascism, Nazism or Communism – in all of which terror and coercion were used alongside means of persuasion and justification to enforce the worldview of the ruling elite. The end of politics refers rather to the diminishing difference between the traditional left and right as constitutive poles of the political axis in democracies. Here again ideology plays a central role by moulding the very matrix on which the major political powers are deciphered. The race to the center – the median voter, media attention, mainstream opinion – has resulted in the transformation of the major competing sides into catch-all and cartel parties, with direct dependency on the state and less and less connection to civil society, or to the people (Kirchheimer 1990; Mair & Katz 1995). The end of history features yet another dimension, which goes beyond Fukuyama’s celebration of liberalism: the end of history is in fact the end of progressive history, the sense of purposefulness and improvement in human society that is captured through the rise of cultural relativism, moral scepticism and postmodernism. Here again ideology, as the rational, all-embracing long-term program aimed at changing the world to conform to a master plan, symbolizes the collapse of the project of modernism. Yet at the very moment that the decline of ideology – on all three fronts – becomes apparent, ideology also regains its poignancy. Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand and anti-globalization on the other (or maybe the same?) hand, offer but two examples. The rise of New Politics provides another interesting case in point.

In Challenging the Political Order the authors explore the rise of the new social movements, collective actors of civil society in advanced democracies. They argue that, in contrast to other approaches which emphasize the political style, collective action or motivation of extra-parliamentary politics, ‘the defining characteristic of new social movements is their advocacy of a new social paradigm which contrasts with the dominant goal structure of Western industrial societies … The ideology of these movements is the major factor distinguishing them from other traditional European leftists movements and their own historical predecessors’ (Dalton & Kuechler, 1990: 10–11). Thus, ideology is being identified as the most distinctive feature of the new collective actors since the 1960s. Curiously, while perceiving ideology to be the key feature of New Politics, they term the worldview of the new social movements ‘post-ideological’ for they lack a strict doctrine (ibid., p. 281). How can a political phenomenon be at the same time identified primarily as ideological and defined as post-ideological? The centrality of ideological phenomena at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the difficulty of exploring such ideologies in a seemingly ‘post-ideological age’, is at the heart of this study. We contend that ideology is at once an immanent part of political life and a phenomenon that needs to be rethought in terms of the concepts, objects and methodologies used to analyze it. The article first examines the three crises of contemporary politics, the role of ideology in each of them and the survival prospects of the concept of ‘ideology’ in the aftermath of these crises. It then explores five challenges for studying ideology in the twenty-first century. Finally, it introduces the authors of the volume and positions their contributions in light of the challenges of studying ideology in today’s world.

The Three 'Ends' of Ideology

Rarely does one phenomenon come to symbolize such distinct areas of study as international relations, democratic politics and grand theory. The role of ‘ideology’ in all three realms, areas that have undergone major transformations over the last generation, reifies Bracher’s thesis concerning the age of ideology. However, in this section I hope to go beyond considering ideology as a thing of the past, as the icon of the previous century. I argue that even with the collapse of totalitarian regimes, the changing role of the political realm vis-à-vis civil society, and the critique of the enlightenment project of human progress, the study of ideology remains vital. In fact, analyzing ideology within these theoretical corpuses and beyond them becomes even more crucial for grasping the nature of politics in a changing world. Ultimately, I contend that ideology is itself part and parcel of politics, and that people, as political animals, always construct their shared identity in terms of a certain historical analysis, a common social vision and a possible political course for materializing this vision, be it within the community, the region, the state or the global village. The nexus of ideas and political action is constitutive to the way we are in this world, to the way we make sense, understand and act in society.

The End of Ideology

Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology came out in three editions, each of which was received as the most timely addition to contemporary public discourse. The 1960 book captured the aftermath of the Second World War, with the horrors of the most ideological of wars in full view, but with processes of de-Nazification and democratization of Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain well on their way. Moreover, the manuscript was published when the almost-official ideology of anti-communism in the United States was on the wane, after a long decade of McCarthyism; the End of Ideology thesis thus encapsulated a defining moment in American history. However, the book failed to anticipate one of the most significant ideological developments of the twentieth century – the students’ revolt, the rise of the civil rights and Black movements, and the emergence of the extra-parliamentary opposition in the West. The withdrawal from Vietnam, the critique of cultural imperialism, and the call for alternative politics escaped the social thinker. Curiously, for the 1988 edition all this was almost forgotten: the students of the 1960s were now well positioned in the knowledge society, and social movements were institutionalized. Bell himself explained this in his 1988 epilogue: ‘The event that seemed to contradict the end-of-ideology thesis was the upsurge of radicalism in the mid-sixties and seventies. Its intensity, its anger, its rhetoric, its calls for radical change, all seemed to bespeak a new phase of ideology’ (Bell 1988: 425). Nonetheless, Bell argued that these events and social forces may have channeled enthusiastic youth and passions, but they lacked the economic and political dimension which could have made them ideological:

Did the upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s ‘disprove’ the thesis of the end of ideology? I think not. What one saw was not a political but cultural (and generational) phenomenon … It was a utopian dream. But from a dream one awakens, or one continues into a nightmare. In all this turbulence there were no new socialist ideas, no ideologies, no programs.

(Bell 1988: 432)

Wait long enough, and the major ideological phenomena will be transformed beyond recognition. Thus, Bell’s second edition came out with perfect timing, a year before the Berlin wall fell. The writing on the wall was once again loud and clear: the end of ideology is here. Indeed, on the eastern front history seemed to have joined the global village which was now racing towards democratization under the free market. The fact that one of the most crucial ideological moments of all – the upsurge of neoliberalism and its adoption by the conservative and republican political camps – beset the political scene in the 1980s, and completely contradicted the original thesis of the convergence of the left and right on the welfare state model, advocated by Bell in 1960, was not reflected in any changes in the chapter. And for a good reason: the Clinton administration in the United States, and the Third Way in Europe, swung the pendulum back in the mid-1990s against the harsh individualism of the market place, in time for the third edition of the book. The 2000 edition became one of a genre, joining Fukuyama’s End of History thesis and the overall acknowledgement of the globalization thesis.

However, once again the book seemed to miss one of the most important developments of the year following 9/11 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Does al Qaeda represent an ideology? Was Bell’s thesis decisively wrong? Following Bell’s own definition, seeing ideology as part of the trade of the intellectuals, as a secular worldview which puts ideas into a political action plan in order to rule a state, the thesis may hold water. Fundamentalism – Islamic, Christian or of any other cult – is very different from the classic ideologies. First of all, it is based on a religion. In that respect it violates one of the main features we usually identify with ideology as a secular phenomenon. Second, Islamic fundamentalism has no state it seeks to take over, has no unified political or economic vision, has no one people united behind it, has no geographical center. Rather, it is decentralized and spontaneous. It involves local cells in Muslim, Arab and ethnic diaspora in Western societies organized in a loose network of Internet connections, using the big money of some of the prominent capitalistic families and high technology to fund terror and training camps for its activists and to spread their teaching to new recruits and followers. That is rarely the way we traditionally think about ideology. Still, it is a distinctive ideological phenomenon from a new brand.

Thus, the definition of ideology may change, the type of collective body, the causes, the ends, the means – but ideology is part and parcel of the way people act in the world. Ideology does not end – it transforms itself. And one of the main causes for the transformation of the phenomenon is the transition of post-industrial democracies.

The End of Politics

The second process of change of which ideology is a key player is representative democracy. On the face of it, the institutionalization of liberal democracy in the twentieth century became identified with a procedural mechanism: the competitive struggle among parties for people’s votes (Schumpeter 1942: 269). Political parties thus developed as the central actor of the political system; as Schattschneider explained: ‘modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties’ (Schattschneider 1942: 1). However, lurking behind this procedure of election among representative bodies is a question about what distinguishes each party, what each party stands for. In party-democracy, the distinctive feature of each party is its political ideology; there is a worldview, a set of values, principles and policies on the basis of which members, activists and voters choose to align themselves with political actors. The party ideology is manifested in election platforms, party programs and policy documents; the party manifesto ‘is probably the single most important indicator of party policy, and a pointer to underlying ideology which meshes with membership of a generic “family” and other distinguishing party characteristics’ (Budge and Klingemann, 2001: 19). Thus, ideology is a centerpiece of contemporary politics in institutionalized democracies.

The constitutive axis on which the parties are being positioned and compared is the left/right ideological continuum, which gradually evolved since the late seventeenth century, when the distinction between the individual and the state, the private and the public, became central to liberalism. In the eighteenth century, the economic realm became identified with the private sphere, whereas the political realm with the public sphere; the private (economic) and the public (political) were thus separated. This demarcation was strengthened after the French revolution and during the nineteenth century, with the advent of the nation-state and the development of parliamentary democracies. It was crystallized in the structuring of the ideological spectrum around the relations between the state and the individual; put crudely-pro-interventionists to the left, anti-interventionists to the right. In a more sophisticated framework – social cleavages were represented in the major political parties (Lipset and Rokkan 1990). True, over the years the left and right came to represent different issues and policies; however, as a comparative tool the ideological axis remained a good indicator of the political poles. As Gordon Smith observed: ‘it is precisely the “plasticity” of left and right which enables them to combine coherence with flexibility, to absorb new issues and ward off challenges, besides maintaining a clear demarcation from other parties on the opposite side of the left/right divide’ (Smith 1990: 159). The left/right continuum thus shapes the public realm and makes sense of the main political forces within the public domain.

While the patterns of political alignments persisted throughout much of the twentieth century, over the last generation the party system as the manifestation of collective interests, as well as the legitimacy of the institutional political processes, came under question. Evidence of dealignment – electoral volatility, declining party affiliation, decreasing trust in politicians and the rise of alternative political actors – has been largely persistent in advanced industrial democracies since the 1970s (Dalton & Wattenberg 2000). On the party system level, two concomitant trends were observed. On the one hand, political realignment, the decline of party membership, the rise of new, often anti-party parties and issue-based politics characterize contemporary European polities. On the other hand, these countries have witnessed the institutionalization of parties – the emergence of the cartel party as part of the state apparatus itself (Mair & Katz 1997). Both suggest the weakening of the structural ties between the citizenry and the traditional parties. All accounts point to the apparent crisis of the parties as the key players within representative democracy, a growing threat to party democracy itself. Consequently, persistent trends concerning the key political player in parliamentary systems began to change rapidly. Parties altered their electoral bases and saw an overall decline of their power and weakening relation with their traditional voters. The search for alternative bases of support generated more flexible agenda and ideological change. Moreover, the ‘Americanization’ of European politics – the growing emphasis on the personality of the leader, on media performance, on themes and issues rather than coherent worldviews, and the need to accommodate diverging audiences and compete not just for votes, but for mobilizing people even to consider voting – allegedly symbolized a decline of ideology. The transition from elite to mass parties, to catch-all and to cartel parties, symbolized the race to the center and the blurring of political ideologies.

Crucially, part of the problem with analyzing ideologies lies in the methodological toolkit of political scientists. Just as survey data and opinion polls opened a new methodological niche to the study of electoral fluctuations, so did the quantitative analysis of policy preferences lend itself to issue analysis much more than to the study of comprehensive ideologies. Thus, Peter Mair argues that the electoral bias in studying party system change amounts to ‘the neglect of assessments of change with regard to other aspects, such as, for example, party ideology, organization, or strategy’ (Mair & Katz 1997: 71). Indeed, three of the most intriguing ideological developments have taken place since the 1970s: first, the emergence of neoliberalism as the hegemonic paradigm of political economy; second, the emergence of the New Left and identity politics as an alternative; third, and against these two renewed ideological poles, the Third Way positioned itself as the program of social democratic parties.

If Bell’s analysis regarding the end of ideology relied on the endorsement of the welfare state by both left and right parties (Bell 1988: 402), the attack launched by the neoliberals on the planned economy and their call to roll back the state and free the market again to act on principles of supply and demand swayed public discourse. Aided by trends of globalization, it became the new hegemony of the 1980s and 1990s. This radical transformation of the conservative right justified its individualistic, interest-based politics by appealing to Christian roots and the work-ethic, as Thatcher passionately argued: ‘Our religion teaches us that every human being is unique and must play his part in working out his own salvation.’ (Thatcher 1989: 52). That radical transformation of republicans and conservatives led to the erosion of the welfare state and to the diminishing role of the trade unions and was crystallized through the passage from industrial to post-industrial societies. T...