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MODERN POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
Modern Political Ideologies provides a broad overview of the origins, development, and core principles of the major political ideologies of the past two centuries. With an accessible, student-friendly format, this bestselling textbook helps students understand the values, beliefs, and social forces that shape today’s political messaging, public discourse, and legislative agendas. Concise and approachable chapters describe ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, fundamentalism, and nationalism.
Retaining the student-friendly format of previous editions, the fourth edition of Modern Political Ideologies is fully revised to reflect the social changes that inform today’s political views. An entirely new chapter offers insights into the growth of populism and its effects on contemporary political dialogue, while expanded material addresses anarchism, feminism, neoliberalism, environmentalism and “green” ideologies, identity politics, and other topics of current relevance.
Containing a useful glossary of key terms and extensive end notes for each chapter, Modern Political Ideologies, Fourth Edition is the ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate courses in political science, political ideology, political theory, comparative politics, and international relations. It is also an excellent supplement for courses in the social sciences and humanities that investigate the history of political ideas.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page 1
Dedication Page 2
Preface to Fourth Edition
1 The Nature of Ideology
Cautionary Points
The Text
2 Liberalism
The Origins of Liberal Thought
The Nature of Liberalism
Individualism
The Value of Liberty
Justice and Equality
Rights and Democracy
The Economy
Politics and the State
Conclusion
3 Conservatism
The Origins of Conservative Thought
The Nature of Conservatism
Human Nature
Reason and Action
Politics and the State
The Economy
Conclusion
4 Socialism
The Origins of Socialist Thought
The Nature of Socialism
Human Nature
Equality and Liberty
State and Democracy
Markets and the Economy
Conclusion
5 Anarchism
The Origins of Anarchist Thought
The Nature of Anarchism
Human Nature
Critique of the State
Liberty and Equality
Justice, Property and the Economy
The Problem of Political Organization
Conclusion
6 Fascism
The Origins of Fascist and National Socialist Thought
The Nature of Fascism
Human Nature
Nature, Race and
Volk
States and Leaders
The Economy
Conclusion
7 Feminism
Origins of Feminist Thought
The Nature of Feminism
Sex and Gender
The Nature of Oppression and Subordination
Equality and Difference
The Personal as the Political
Conclusion
8 Ecologism
The Origins of Ecological Thought
The Nature of Ecology
Nature and Human Nature
The Political Dimension of Ecologism
A New Economics?
Conclusion
9 Nationalism
The Origins of Nationalist Thought
The Nature of Nationalism
Human Nature
Languages and Nations
Nation States
The National Economy
Conclusion
10 Fundamentalism
The Origins of Fundamentalism
The Nature of Fundamentalism
Politics and Religion
Human Nature and Modernity
The Politics of Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism and Economics
Conclusion
11 Populism
The Origins of Populist Thought
The Nature of Populism
Politics and Ideology
Democracy and Populism
The People and Populism
Popular Sovereignty
Conclusion
12 Icons and Iconoclasm
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page 1
Dedication Page 2
Preface to Fourth Edition
Begin Reading
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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MODERN POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
FOURTH EDITION
Andrew Vincent
Cardiff University, UK
b
This fourth edition first published 2024© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Name: Vincent, Andrew, author.Title: Modern political ideologies / Andrew Vincent, Sheffield University, Elmfield, Sheffield, York, UK.Description: Fourth edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2024. | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2023049043 (print) | LCCN 2023049044 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119981640 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119981664 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119981657 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Political science. | Right and left (Political science) | Ideology.Classification: LCC JA71 .V55 2024 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.5–dc23/eng/20231018LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023049043LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023049044
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Il quarto stato (‘The Fourth Estate’) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, c. 1901, Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain
To students past and present who have argued and disagreed
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. (Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum)
Preface to Fourth Edition
Returning to this text again in 2023 has been an unsettling experience. After three decades, since its first publication in 1993, many ideological themes have markedly waned or mutated, whilst others have remained relatively inert. Some aspects of ideological debate, which were quite central to earlier political discussion, have faded, and newer ideological hybrids have arisen. However, if there is one thing that the student of ideologies can be sure, it is that ideology, as a field of study, remains innately unsettled and unpredictable.
One heartening aspect of the development of the academic study of ideologies is that it has expanded considerably in both range and sophistication. Anyone who taught the subject in earlier decades will remember the at times frustrating paucity of materials to work with. Now however the array of helpful resources for courses on ideologies has increased significantly. There is, for example, the Journal of Political Ideologies, which remains both an excellent academic teaching supplement and a rich resource for research. In addition, there are now several helpful Handbooks dealing with various ideologies. There has also been a great deal of scholarly work done on the concept of ideology itself and its role within political studies.
The basic outline structure of the chapters of the present book has been retained. I have worked carefully through the whole text again and made some stylistic changes. In some cases, content has been added, revised or redrafted. In all the chapters I have updated the bibliography within the limits of space. One new chapter on populism has been added to this fourth edition, something which is more a reflection of the past decade.
In working on this fourth edition, I have once again drawn upon the goodwill, advice and expertise of many academic friends and colleagues. I would like to thank particularly Michael Freeden for many years of friendship, collegiality and immensely fruitful conversations and critical insights into ideology and political theory. Further, thanks go to Howard Williams, Mathew Humphrey, Neil Carter, Rhianwen Daniel and Demin Duan for their kind advice and in some cases reading of material. Thanks also to the long‐suffering readers and editors from Wiley‐Blackwell. The usual proviso applies here: none bear any responsibility for this final text except myself.
Andrew Vincent
University of Cardiff
1The Nature of Ideology
This first chapter deals with three issues: first, a brief historical sketch of the concept of ideology will be presented; second, my own particular use of the concept of ideology is outlined; finally, and briefly, a synopsis of the structure of the book will be given.
This is not a book about the concept of ideology in its own right. It is a book about ideologies. However, it is impossible simply to leap into this task without saying something about the concept of ideology. The history of the concept of ideology is comparatively short – approximately two hundred years old – but complex. Like most substantive ‘ideologies’, the word ‘ideology’ dates from the French Revolution era of the 1790s. For the sake of brevity, the history will be broken down into a number of stages which have given rise to different senses. The discussion will begin with the inception of the word by the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy in the 1790s. It will move to Marx’s usage in the 1840s and the ambiguous Marxist legacy into the twentieth century, then turn to the uses of the term in the ‘end of ideology’ movement of the 1950s. Finally, some of the more recent debates will be summarized.
The term ‘ideology’ was first coined between 1796 and 1798 by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in papers read in instalments to the National Institute in Paris under the title Mémoire sur la faculté de penser. His book entitled The Elements of Ideology was published later (1800–15). To some extent it is true that Tracy would probably now be a fairly obscure figure but for his association with the word ‘ideology’. Oddly, there is no one unequivocal sense of the concept deriving from Tracy. In fact, four uses of the term can be discerned. First, there was Tracy’s original explicit use to designate a new empirical science of ideas; second, the term came to denote an affiliation to a form of secular liberal republicanism; third, it took on a pejorative connotation implying intellectual and practical sterility as well as dangerous radicalism; finally, and most tenuously, it came in a limited sphere to denote ‘political doctrine’ in general. All these four senses moved into political currency between 1800 and 1830.
The word ‘ideology’ was a neologism compounded from the Greek terms eidos and logos. It can be defined as a ‘science of ideas’. Tracy wanted a new term for a new science. He rejected the terms métaphysique and psychologie as inadequate. For Tracy, the discipline of ‘metaphysics’ was misleading and discredited; ‘psychology’ also implied a science or knowledge of the soul, which could give a false, almost religious, impression. Tracy was both deeply anti‐clerical and a materialist. Through the 1790s and early 1800s, he was involved in bitter infighting with the Catholic Church, particularly over the control of education. Thus any term to describe his science had to be distinct from the taint of religion. It is also worth noting that the term ‘ideology’ more or less coincides with the early use of the term ‘social science’ (la science sociale). The latter term assumed, like ideology, an Enlightenment optimism in grasping and controlling, by reason, the laws governing social life for the greater happiness and improvement of human life.
Like many of the French Enlightenment philosophes and Encyclopaedist thinkers, Tracy believed that all areas of human experience, many of which had previously been examined in terms of theology, should now be examined by reason. The science of ideas was to investigate the natural origin of ideas. It proposed a precise knowledge of the causes of the generation of ideas from sensations. Innate ideas were rejected: ideas were all modified sensations. Tracy described ideology as a branch of zoology, indicating that the human intellect had a physiological basis. In the same rigorous empiricist vein as Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Lavoisier and Condillac, he proposed that the contents of such analyses should be carefully tabulated and detailed in terms of scientific procedures. Newton was particularly esteemed by Tracy.1 Tracy’s examination of the way in which ideas were generated, conceived and related to each other (in sum the ‘science of ideas’) might now be described as empirical psychology. In fact, one Tracy scholar remarks that he was a ‘methodological precursor of behaviouralist approaches to the human sciences’ (Head 1985, 4; see also Kennedy 1979; Head 1980). For Tracy, ideology was la théorie des théories. It was the queen of the sciences since it necessarily preceded all other sciences, which of necessity utilized ‘ideas’.
Tracy, and those who admired his work, believed that such a science of ideas could have an immense impact, on education particularly. If the origin of ideas was understood, then it could be used with great benefit in enlightened education. It could diagnose the roots of human ignorance. It was potentially the foundation for a rational progressive society. Tracy and others thus advocated vigorously the social, political and educative uses of ideology. Between 1799 and 1800, under the Directory, Tracy was appointed Councillor of Public Instruction and issued circulars to schools stressing the role of ‘ideology’ in the curriculum. There was also the attempt, as in Bentham, to establish a ‘science of legislation’. In pursuing these objectives, Tracy and the other idéologues became associated with a secular republican liberalism, stressing representative government by an enlightened elite. In this sense, ideology became, in the public perception, not so much an ‘empirical science’ as the political doctrine of a group of propertied liberal intellectuals. Hence, subtly, a second sense of ideology became prevalent – ideology became associated with a political doctrine, although of a very specific form.
Another lasting sense of the term ‘ideology’ derived from the political associations of Tracy and his compatriots. One of the early and brief honorary members of the idéologues was Napoleon Bonaparte. He appears to have had a stormy and ultimately deeply hostile relation to the idéologues, later, when in power and pursuing his own autocratic ambitions, accusing them of fomenting political unrest. Bonaparte referred to them as individuals who wished to reform the world simply in their heads, armchair metaphysicians with little or no political acumen. He denounced them before the Council of State in February 1801 as ‘windbags’, who none the less were trying to undermine political authority. Once Bonaparte had re‐established his credibility with the Catholic Church in a Concordat of 1802, he also predictably denounced the idéologues as a ‘College of Atheists’. Madame de Staël remarked at this time that Bonaparte seemed to suffer from ‘ideophobia’. This pejorative use of ideology – indicating intellectual sterility, practical ineptitude and, more particularly, dangerous political sentiments – tended to stick. The conservative, restoration and royalist circles in France focused critically on the idéologues in the latter use, denouncing the republication of Tracy’s Elements in 1829 as part of the attempt to overthrow ‘the ancient confraternity of throne and altar’. One final sense of the term began to glimmer through here. If ideology was partially divorced from the ‘science of ideas’ of Tracy, Condillac and the sensationalist school, and became associated, more importantly, with a political doctrine (secular liberal republicanism initially), it was but a short step to identifying the royalist critics as espousing another political doctrine, which could equally be described as an ‘ideology’. Ideology thus became, in a limited sphere in France, equivalent to ‘a political doctrine’. The other senses of ideology co‐existed with this latter view.
It remains perennially puzzling as to why Marx chose to use the term ‘ideology’. In his early writings, he alluded to Tracy in two senses. First, he noted, as a simple historical observation, the existence of a group of thinkers, namely, the idéologues. Tracy, as a key member of this group, is mentioned as a minor vulgar bourgeois liberal political economist. In consequence, there are passing references to the fourth volume of Tracy’s Elements, the Traité d’économie politique. Second, Marx employed the concept in the title of his early work, The German Ideology (1845) – unpublished during his lifetime – as a more pejorative label referring to those (particularly the Young Hegelian group) who ‘interpret’ the world philosophically, but do not appear to be able to change it. Marx might also have found some parallels between the Young Hegelians and Tracy, given the emphasis in both on ‘ideas’. Put loosely, Tracy’s thinking contained some suggestions of ‘idealist’ philosophy.
Marx was obviously aware of something of the initial use of the term ‘ideology’, indicating a science of ideas. However, he paid scant attention to this. The only sense he utilized, at first, was Bonaparte’s pejorative use. Crudely, he too considered the Young Hegelians as ‘windbags’ and armchair metaphysicians. In addition, he regarded both the idéologues and Hegelians as vulgar bourgeois liberals. This idea moves quite definitely away from the initial French royalist sense where the liberalism of the idéologues was regarded as a dangerous reforming radicalism.
Marx adds, though, in an unsystematic way, further dimensions to the meaning of the term, which take it into a different realm (see Seliger 1979; Parekh 1983; Leopold 2013). In Marx’s work, ideology denotes not only practical ineffectiveness but also illusion and loss of reality. More importantly, it becomes associated with the division of labour in society, with collective groups called classes, and most significantly with the domination and power of certain classes. Some aspects of this extension, specifically the illusory aspect, were implicit in Bonaparte’s pejorative use of the term, but it was not made fully explicit until Marx. Paradoxically, something of the idéologues’ use remains in Marx, namely, the belief that societies can be rationally and scientifically interpreted and that humanity is progressing towards some form of rational social, economic and political enlightenment. To grasp Marx’s use, it is necessary to unpack briefly the materialist theory in which it is couched.
Although it is an ambiguous truism, Marx is essentially a materialist thinker of a particular type. What is of primary importance to humans is their need to subsist. To do so they need to labour and produce. Thought is involved in this process, but it is practice‐orientated and therefore of secondary import. The material human needs are primary: thought and consciousness in general enable them to be satisfied. When humans produce, they develop complex social and exchange relations with each other. Humans also produce more effectively in groups; tasks initially become separated to enable people to work more productively. Here we see the earliest forms of the division of labour.
Without outlining the whole theory, it is important to grasp that what is primary is our social and economic being. Marx has a materialist ontology. Our consciousness is by and large explained through that ontology. Thought can both reflect and misunderstand this process. Much of the problem of the earliest ‘division of labour’ is that mental labour, by priests and intellectuals, was distinguished from physical labour. Intellectuals and priests tended to serve their own interests by regarding their work as superior to physical labour. They also sought the protection and patronage of the major possessing classes, those who, at a particular stage in the development of society, dominate and control the means of production, distribution and exchange. Directly, or most often indirectly, in exchange for patronage, such mental labourers gave wide‐ranging intellectual justifications of an existing order, placing their intellectual benediction (in the nineteenth century) upon capitalism and the bourgeois state. They also provided solace for those who suffered from the social and economic arrangements. Such mental labourers are in essence the ideologists of a political and economic order. Yet much of their production is illusion and a distortion of reality.
It is important to realize that the original philosophical source of this materialist ontology (and Marx’s conception of ideology) was premised on a critique of religion. The German romantic and, particularly, Hegelian understanding is important to note here. The German tradition, from Kant, Fichte and Hegel, had placed considerable emphasis on the human capacity for self‐constitution. In simple terms, the human mind is involved in the structuring of the world and circumstances. It is not merely receiving sensations passively, as Tracy would have argued. In Hegel especially, this self‐moulding or self‐constituting activity is viewed within an historical framework. Consciousness not only constitutes much of what we call reality, it does so in a slowly changing historical process. Consciousness changes and constitutes reality differently over historical time. The Young Hegelians, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach, accused Hegel of dwelling too much upon mind in general, on consciousness or on some notion of spirit in history. It is not ‘general mind’ or spirit which constitutes itself, but rather it is the individual sensuous human being with physical needs who constitutes reality.
As Feuerbach noted in a famous phrase, ‘all theology is anthropology’. Humans create God, spirit or history in their own image. Marx adapted this argument to his own ends. It is labouring productive humans, in particular economic classes, at particular stages of history (determined by economic needs and modes of production), who constitute the world. However, this constitution can be a distorted image. Throughout history, intellectuals have produced a multitude of such distortions which obscure the basic domination and exploitation of one class by another. In one reading, given a particular stage of society, mode of production and configuration of classes, it might be the most accurate account that could be given, yet it is still a distortion. The centrality of economic activity to this process meant that Marx subtly combined Germanic philosophical concerns with both British political economy and French materialism.
Subsequently Marxism, almost before the end of the nineteenth century, came under certain pressures and diverse interpretations on the subject of ideology. A number of questions arose. In his early writings, Marx appeared to be contrasting ideology (as an illusion) to reality as practice – a form of philosophical materialist ontology. Liberal capitalism was in an equivalent position to religion as a distortion of the human essence. Later this contrast became ideology (as distortion) as against science (as truth or knowledge). Alienation in Marx’s early writings became, in the later writings, expropriation of surplus value and economic exploitation. However, it was not clear whether Marx was using science in the sense of ‘natural science’ or in the older German sense of Wissenschaft (a connected body of systematic knowledge). Some Marxists refer to the change that marked these two dimensions as the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx, differentiating the young philosophical from the mature scientific Marx. Even within these two dimensions, it is not clear as to what comes under the rubric of ideology. In some writings, Marx suggested that ‘consciousness in general’, including every aspect of human endeavour, namely art and natural science, is ideology. In others, it appears as though he was thinking only of social, political and economic ideas which uphold and distort a political and economic structure. In addition, the early reference that Marx made in The German Ideology to the camera obscura image was not particularly helpful. Marx writes of ideology’s view of human consciousness being like the camera obscura, where the world appears inverted. The image is deeply mechanistic, rigid, and presents a very misleading conception, which Marx himself did not really accept.
Marx also did not make clear the precise relation between ideas (often referred to as superstructure) and the economic base. At some point, this appears as a case of a clear ‘one‐way’ determinism, namely, the base determines the superstructure. Yet again, Marx never clarifies what he means by the word ‘determine’. For example, it is not obvious whether ‘determine’ means that A causes B, affects B, or sets parameters to B. At other points, this relation changes into symbiotic or mutually affective relations between ideology and the economic base. Many qualifying letters from Engels are usually discussed at this point to justify this latter view.
The subsequent fate of the Marxist notion of ideology breaks down into a number of contradictory components. The Second International, dominated by the German SPD and under the tutelage of Engels, took up the crude distinction between Marxist science and bourgeois ideology. Engels in particular coined the now notorious term ‘false consciousness’ for ideology, something that Marx did not do. The idea of true and false consciousness appears as too stark for Marx, at least in his more sensitive moments.
Lenin introduced another confusing dimension into ideology in works like What Is to Be Done? (1902). The pejorative connotations are suddenly stripped away. Lenin speaks confidently of socialism being an ideology, combating, in the general class struggle, bourgeois ideology. Lenin saw socialist ideology as a weapon of class struggle. This use comes close to that in France in the 1830s, and also to some contemporary usage, namely, in seeing all political doctrines per se as ideology. It certainly bears little resemblance to Engels’ notion of ‘false consciousness’ or the laboured distinction of Marxist science against ideology.
The problem of ideology in Marxism is further complicated when we move into the twentieth century. With writers like Georg Lukács, dialectical materialism was accepted as an ideology, though it was seen, casuistically, as more scientific than bourgeois ideology. Also, for Lukács, ideology was more deeply embedded in social, economic and political life than Lenin had appreciated. In Antonio Gramsci, we see the most sophisticated, if equivocal, treatment of ideology. For Gramsci, domination under capitalism is not achieved simply by coercion, but subtly through the hegemony of ideas. The ideology of the ruling class becomes vulgarized into the common sense of the average citizen. Power is not just crude legal or physical coercion but domination of language, morality, culture and common sense. The masses are quelled and co‐opted by their internalization of ideational domination. The hegemonic ideas become, in fact, the actual experiences of the subordinate classes. Traditional intellectuals construct this complex hegemonic apparatus. Bourgeois hegemony moulds the personal convictions, norms and aspirations of the proletariat. Gramsci thus called for a struggle at the level of ideology. Organic intellectuals situated within the proletariat should combat this by constructing a counter‐hegemony to traditional intellectuals upholding bourgeois hegemony.
In Gramsci, we find refinements and qualifications to the Marxist science and ideology thesis (a science which Gramsci dismissed with the curt term ‘economism’), dialectical materialism, simple‐minded determinism, the false‐consciousness thesis and, finally, the idea of socialist ideology. In Gramsci, ideology appears to be more generally applicable to political doctrine, although it is deeply embedded in all language and culture. Despite the subtlety of Gramsci’s approach, it still asserted, behind complex and elusive argumentation, the ‘truth’ of Marxism as against other approaches. In this sense, the old distinctions might be said to be reappearing, but in a transformed apparel. Subsequently these apparels have mutated. Some writers, such as Terry Eagleton, Stuart Hall or an early Edward Said, were more straight forward and imaginative expositors of Gramsci’s ideas. Gramsci’s arguments have, though, often been blended in unexpected and sometimes perplexing ways with discourse analysis, as in the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2006; see Norval 2013). In Althusser, ideology also developed a quasi‐autonomous life of its own as a symbolic controller and imaginary representation, which functioned semi‐autonomously from the material base, although in the final analysis it was still a dimension of the mode of production and an organic aspect of class struggle. Knowledge about ideology was therefore still, for Althusser, knowledge about the ‘condition of its necessity’ (Althusser 1969, 230). One prevailing theme has remained, however, with all these later Marxist and post‐Marxist theories, namely, the intricate connection between ideology, power and domination.
One of Lukács’ students, who utilized the Marxian terminology from within, but completely transformed its intellectual status, was Karl Mannheim. Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929) can be used to take the discussion on to later phases of the concept of ideology (see Breiner 2013). Mannheim’s theory will not be discussed here, but one important question in Mannheim needs consideration. Paul Ricoeur calls it ‘Mannheim’s paradox’. Ricoeur formulates this paradox in the following question: ‘What is the epistemological status of discourse about ideology if all discourse is ideological?’ (Ricoeur 1986, 8). The question is asking Marx to justify his own thought in relation to his suppositions concerning ideology. The effect of following through the logic of the question is devastating on one level.
In the course of attempting to extend Marx’s insights, Mannheim tried to formulate a comprehensive theory of ideology. There are six main components to it. The first element need not detain us, despite its intrinsic interest. Mannheim examined both ideologies and utopias. Ideologies, in the main, act to defend a particular established order, although they can in some circumstances be made subversive. Utopias (which, unlike Marx, Mannheim suggests are equally as important for social life as ideologies) tend to be forward‐looking and a challenge to existing social reality, suggesting wide‐scale change (see Geoghegan 2004; Kumar 2006).
Mannheim’s notion of ideology distinguished between particular and total conceptions. The particular conception approached an ‘individual’, examining their psychology and personal interests, often in a polemical manner, in order to show the weakness of an opponent’s position. The total idea approached ideology in terms of the assumptions of a complete ‘world‐view’ of a collective culture and, possibly, an historical epoch. In other words, it dealt with a total structure of thought. In Mannheim’s view, Marx had, comparative to much previous social theory, fused these two elements and shown that the expressions of individuals needed unmasking in order to unpack the total ideology of a culture. It was precisely at this point that Mannheim asked Marx to justify his own ideas in Marxist terms, something that Marx would have found difficult to do. As Mannheim remarked:
it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character. There is scarcely a single intellectual position, and Marxism furnishes no exception to this rule, which has not changed through history. … It should not be too difficult for a Marxist to recognize their social basis.
(Mannheim 1960, 69)
This question led Mannheim on to the third element of his theory. If Marxism imploded in this inquiry, then we still should not abandon its insights into ideology. Rather, we should become self‐conscious concerning our own ideological beliefs, life‐expressions and their historical situation, so preserving Marx’s insights within a disciplined academic frame. Mannheim called this new academic frame the ‘sociology of knowledge’ – examining knowledge and every ‘knower’ in a particular social and historical context. As he remarked on the Marxist notion of ideology: ‘What was once the intellectual armament of a party is transformed into a method of research in social and intellectual history’ (Mannheim 1960, 69).
Mannheim claimed, fourthly, that his theory was not relativistic. Relativism was drawn distinct from what he called relationism. Some commentators suggest that this distinction does not really work (Ricoeur 1986, 167; Williams 1988, 26–8; Breiner 2013). Mannheim suggested that whereas relativism was linked with a static, ahistorical notion of truth, relationism ‘takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge’ (Mannheim 1960, 70ff). In relationism, knowledge and epistemology were not separated from an historical or social context (as appears to be the suppressed premise of relativism). Fifth, Mannheim makes further elaborate additions to the above theory, distinguishing, under the rubric of a ‘relational total conception of ideology’, non‐evaluative and evaluative approaches. For Mannheim, the latter ‘evaluative’ approach took a full self‐conscious account of the situation of both the object studied and the observer, and was thus the most appropriate method for the sociology of knowledge. Finally, and probably most controversially, Mannheim suggested that this new discipline could only properly be studied by relatively classless individuals, who were both intelligent and capable of such self‐analysis. He calls these, following the terminology of Alfred Weber, the freischwebende Intelligenz (the socially unattached intelligentsia) (Mannheim 1960, 137ff).
Mannheim has met with a very mixed, usually very critical, response: some totally dismissive of him; others at least appreciating his courage in facing the problematic issues of historical thought. His separation of relativism and relationism is not really adequately explained. In addition, the role of the intelligentsia is presented in only a very sketchy format. Finally, there are unexplained elements in his theory: was he suggesting that all thought, including science and mathematics, was socially and historically relative? This remains unclear. Also, by using the highly academic title ‘sociology of knowledge’, was he trying, despite the general thrust of the theory, to smuggle in a more objectivist ‘social scientific’ account, with all its subtle implications of a neutral observation language? There is a sense in which this latter criticism is partially valid and appears to turn the circle fully on Mannheim. We find him paying court to the very paradigm of truth which he has gone out his way to reject.
In another, rather oblique sense, Mannheim paves the way for the next phase of the concept which appears in the post‐1945 era, often titled the ‘end of ideology’ (see McLellan 1986, 49; Brick 2013). The gradual assimilation of active political ideology into the sanitized academic discipline of sociology means not only the loss of earthy, emotive ideological debate, but also the potential loss of utopias or forward‐looking values. Political life becomes absorbed into a closely reasoned social science, conducted by expert intellectuals.
The ‘end of ideology’ school was a product and phase largely of the Cold War era, although the basic premises of the movement would still be upheld by many who regard themselves as social and political scientists. Some scholars, such as Francis Fukuyama, were hasty in anticipating liberal capitalism’s triumphant vindication in the turbulent late 1980s with the collapse of Eastern European communism and the turn to liberal market economies (Fukuyama 1989). The ‘end of ideology’ debate appeared first in the American social science establishment, although it was not without relation to certain developments in European thought. It has parallels not only with the ‘death of political theory’ movement but also with the more sinister McCarthyite anti‐communist purges in the USA.
It is worth noting that this argument coincided with several different but resonant intellectual positions of the time. Within movements such as ordinary language philosophy and logical positivism during the 1950s, both political philosophy and ideology were seen as lifeless. Ideology was equivalent, in some perceptions, to morality or aesthetics, premising itself on emotion, with little or no rational substance. In a different format the political theorist Michael Oakeshott, in books such as Rationalism in Politics (1962), drew a distinction between a traditionalist and ideological stance in politics. A similar idea appears in the contemporaneous writings of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt. The philosophical roots to this distinction need not concern us here (see Vincent 2004, 65–73). The basic point was that ideology represented a simplification, abstraction and what Oakeshott calls an ‘abridgement’ of social reality. Ideologists selected, and consequently distorted, a much more complex reality. Unsurprisingly this approach, which is portrayed as non‐ideological, philosophical and more academic, and which also appreciates the subtle complexity of the totality of social reality, is a form of conservatism. Oakeshott’s basic distinction appeared, with some qualifications, in the work of several writers in the 1980s (see Manning ed. 1980; Graham 1986; Williams 1988, especially ch. 3; Adams 1989).
Another important argument which resonated with the ‘end of ideology’ was the assertion that ‘politics’ was distinct from ideology. Ideology denoted a totalitarian mentality which prevented all political discussion other than on its own content. Ideology is distinct from a pluralist, free, tolerant and rational society, where ‘politics’ takes place. Writers as diverse as Ralf Dahrendorf, J. L. Talmon, Bernard Crick, Karl Popper and Raymond Aron, in their different ways, all spoke of ‘totalizing ideology’ and closed societies (fascism and communism), as distinct from tolerant civil politics and open societies. Ideology, in this reading, becomes an intolerant, unfree and limited perspective in comparison to forms of non‐ideological, open and tolerant politics.
The initial impetus to the mainly American form of the ‘end of ideology’ derived from three main sources. First, there was clear belief in the 1950s among a generation that had lived through the 1930s and 1940s – with the wars, Gulags, show trials, Nazism, Jewish pogroms, Stalinism – that ideological politics was a set of dangerous delusions. These apparent delusions focused on Marxism‐Leninism in the Cold War period. It was thus accepted that ideological politics was at the root of much of the mass of pain, misery and warfare of the mid‐twentieth century. Some of the writers of the 1950s were in fact Jewish intellectuals who reflected with deep uneasiness on the fate of the Jews under ideological dogmas in the 1930s and 1940s. Active ideology appeals to the Don Quixote of politics, tilting at imaginary evil giants.
Second, in spite of the fact that ideologies serve a function in developing immature societies, it was held that in industrialized democratic societies they no longer served anything more than a decorative role. Consensus on basic aims was agreed. Most of the major parties in industrialized societies had achieved, in the welfare, mixed economy structure, the majority of their reformist aims. The Left had accepted the dangers of excessive state power and the Right had accepted the necessity of the welfare state and the rights of working people. Consensus and convergence of political aims were seen in many industrialized countries. As Seymour Martin Lipset remarked, ‘This very triumph of the democratic social revolution of the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to motivate them to political action’ (Lipset 1969, 406; see also Bell 1965; Shils 1955 and 1968; Waxman 1968; Brick 2013). Basic agreement on political values had been achieved. Politics was about more peripheral pragmatic adjustment, gross national products, prices, wages, the public‐sector borrowing requirement and the like. All else was froth. As Lipset commented, ‘The democratic struggle will continue, but it will be a fight without ideologies, without red flags, without May Day parades’ (Lipset 1969, 408).
In addition to this, the 1950s saw sustained productivity and growth in the GNPs of many developed industrial economies. In one sense, the ‘end of ideology’ episode was a partial reflection of the improvements and growth of the Western economies during this period (Duncan 1987, 649). Living standards rose and greater affluence was experienced by a larger number of citizens in America, Britain and Europe. Economic and social divisions in society were no longer seen as so pivotal. Economic prosperity, combined with the growth of the welfare state, was diminishing social, economic and political differences (see Butler and Stokes 1974).
Third, the ‘end of ideology’ coincided with the heroic age of sociology. American sociology, in particular, ‘offered the world the prospect of freedom from ideology, for it offered a “science” of society, in place of superstition’ (see Goldie in Ball et al. eds 1989, 268). In some ways, this was a partial return to Tracy, although the terminology had changed. In Tracy, ideology was the science to unravel superstitions. In the social sciences of the 1950s, ideology was the superstition which needed unravelling. Despite the altered terminology, the impetus to both was remarkably similar, namely, contrasting an Enlightenment‐based rational scientific endeavour with superstition and intellectual flummery. The development of empirical social science demanded a value‐free rigour, scepticism and empirical verification, unsullied by the emotional appeals of ideological and normative political philosophy. A neo‐positivism rigidly separating facts and values lurked behind these judgements.
In this context, it was argued that ideology had literally ended in advanced industrialized democratic societies. Ideology was contrasted with empirically based social science. The latter was the path to political knowledge; the former connoted illusion. As Edward Shils commented: ‘Science is not and never has been part of an ideological culture. Indeed the spirit in which science works is alien to ideology’ (Shils 1968, 74).
There were several problems with the ‘end of ideology’ perspective. In many ways it was a temporary phase in industrialized societies reacting against the extremes of the war years. Populations identified themselves with material affluence, consumption and economic growth after the austerity of the preceding period. Ideology was linked in complex ways with the memories of austerity. However, on a more general theoretical level, as Alasdair MacIntyre commented, the ‘end of ideology’ theorists ‘failed to entertain one crucial alternative possibility: namely, that the end‐of‐ideology, far from marking the end‐of‐ideology, was itself a key expression of the ideology of the time and place where it arose’ (MacIntyre 1971, 5). The views propounded by the ‘end of ideology’ school contain certain evaluative assumptions about human nature, how rationality ought to function, the value of consensus and details on the characteristics of a tolerant, pragmatic civil society which ought to be cultivated. To try to claim that these views are premised simply on a social scientific perspective and that all else is ideology is intellectual chicanery. The ‘end of ideology’ was an ideological position committed to a form of pragmatic liberalism. There was a clear failure, which permeated the ‘end of ideology’ perspective, to analyse liberalism as ideology.
Despite the resurgence of interest in the thesis in the late 1980s, the ‘end of ideology’ movement is now regarded with more scepticism, as a phase in the development of the concept of ideology. Yet the assumptions behind the ‘end of ideology’ movement still, almost unconsciously, pervade discussion and writing in the social science establishment.
The present status of ideology is complex and reflects all the phases that have so far been discussed. The most pervasive theme is still the fierce contrast between ‘truth and ideology’. Many who discuss ideology would claim for themselves a non‐ideological neutrality. The usual claimants for such neutrality or impartiality are commonly the natural and social sciences, philosophy and political theory. The complexity is intensified when we realize that many liberals, conservatives, feminists, Marxists and so on would also claim to be on the side of truth as against ideology.
It has been particularly characteristic of the Anglo‐American approach to try to maintain a distinction between science and ideology. This is the deeply entrenched attitude which came to full self‐consciousness in the social sciences in the ‘end of ideology’ movement. As one commentator complains: if the notion of ideology is linked with ‘belief systems’ in general, then ‘such a definition simply fails to discriminate between different kinds of ideas. … It fails to discriminate between science and ideology’ (Hamilton 1987, 22). The basic position is that for social or natural science to work, there must be some ultimate, and persistent, and objective foundation to our knowledge. This foundation is the yardstick for truth. It can be confirmed and acts as a final court of appeal. It is unaffected by our values and beliefs. The truth of our beliefs – that which enables us to characterize them as knowledge – is that they correspond as nearly as possible to this objective foundation. Rationality is also usually seen as possessing agreed and consensual universal standards, enabling us to establish correspondences. In social science, particularly, this scientific foundationalism must be kept distinct from the more subjective, emotive values and beliefs characterizing ideology. There is no external foundation to which ideologies correspond. Ideologies remain tied to ‘theories’; their logic is therefore circular and cannot be tested against the world. Science, on the other hand, has a specific direction since the theory can be falsified by external foundational facts.
The problem with this view of science is that it is outdated and contested. The complex debates within the philosophy of science cannot be dealt with here. However, the work of philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave and Mary Hesse, among many others, moved the whole discussion of the nature of science beyond the above views.2 Science, for Kuhn, does not progress by accretion and empirical confirmation; rather, ‘dominant paradigms’ are seen to take over, via gestalt switches or quasi‐religious conversions. Paradigms determine the nature of the puzzles to be solved and what is, or is not, regarded as good or normal science. Once a paradigm is established, the scientific community works within it for a time. One paradigm does not ‘fit’ better than another; instead, a different paradigm creates different criteria and a different sense of reality. The history of science is not, therefore, a slow, progressive growth but rather a series of periodic paradigm changes which alter the whole nature of science and its perception of reality. Feyerabend, on the other hand, describes claims to the impartiality and independence of natural science as a ‘fairy tale’ promulgated by the scientific community, often for the social and economic benefits which accrue to such claims. He contends that every standard of scientific method, whether it be rationality, verification or falsification, has been violated in the course of major discoveries in science. There are therefore no necessary or sufficient conditions to authenticate scientific behaviour and theory choice. These arguments throw a critical light on the supposedly hard‐and‐fast distinctions still sometimes drawn between science and ideology, particularly in the social sciences.
The situation becomes more fraught in the relation between ideology and political philosophy. The question usually turns on the nature of philosophy itself. There is no space to deal with all of these philosophies, thus some selective examples will have to suffice.
It is hazardous to generalize on broad and intricate philosophical movements; however, early twentieth‐century analytic philosophy traditionally associated the path of political philosophy with a second‐order function of solving identifiable conceptual problems, usually arising out of the pre‐eminent areas of first‐order knowledge in the natural sciences (judged in more traditional sense). Philosophy works via ethically neutral, rigorous conceptual analysis. It analyses the nature of necessarily true propositions about the world. The key assumption here is that it is only in the pure natural sciences that we find such knowledge. Ideology, like morality, aesthetics or religion, is another non‐scientific, value‐orientated, often emotive mode of theorizing. It exhorts actions and persuades rather than critically analyses (see Adams 1989, xxiii, 3; also Corbett 1965; Plamenatz 1971).
This latter point is fortuitously connected to a pervasive view of political philosophy during the twentieth century, namely, to see it as a higher, more critical calling. The most characteristic conception of ideology (in this perspective) is that of a sullied product which lacks the merits of political philosophy. In this interpretation, political philosophy is generally marked out by a reflective openness, critical distance, a focus on following the argument regardless and an awareness of human experience which transcends political struggles. Ideology would be viewed as the opposite. It closes reflection, throws itself into partisan struggle; its ideas are designed instrumentally to manipulate actors, close argument and ultimately to achieve political power. It has no concern with truth. In this case ideology has to be separated from the real. It was this kind of distinction which formed the intellectual backdrop to the bulk of Anglo‐American political philosophy from the mid to the late twentieth century.3 This general conception of political philosophy remained a subtext in the arguments of late twentieth‐century normative philosophical liberalism, that is, the work of, for example, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin and Brian Barry.
This latter conception was subject to a number of counter‐pressures. First, linguistic philosophy, stemming particularly from the later writings of Wittgenstein, altered our perspective on the nature of language, truth and knowledge, reminding us of their social dimension. To formulate a concept implies having a speaker who knows how to use a language in a particular context. Languages are not discovered, but are socially constituted. The words embodied in languages do not hook on to things in the world but are subject to a prodigious diversity of uses within ‘language games’ or ‘forms of life’. Learning a concept is not grasping its essence or mastering a mental image, but understanding its various uses in a publicly available language. Concepts do not, therefore, correspond to precise things in the world. In fact, the character of most of the concepts we encounter is their essential contestability (see Vincent 2004, 95ff; also Newey 2001). Meaning becomes a matter of the rules governing use within particular language games. One effect of this is to bring ideologies back into circulation under the rubric of language games. Ideology is not necessarily a distorted image of the world but is rather part of the world of language and action. This conception has hampered a clear distinction between ideology and philosophy.
Second, intellectual movements such as postmodernism and hermeneutics have also raised doubts concerning any clear distinction of philosophy from ideology. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and Paul Ricoeur have all, in their different ways, cast doubts on the comfortable distinctions concerning ideology which have often pervaded the social sciences and mainstream analytical philosophy. Language is not viewed as a transparent conveyor of meaning. Ricoeur, for example, considered ‘The interpretative code of an ideology as something in which men live and think, rather than a conception that they pose. In other words, an ideology is operative and not thematic. It operates behind our backs, rather than appearing as a theme before our eyes’ (Ricoeur 1981, 227). Further, Foucault in developing his own unique poststructural critique even suggested abandoning the concepts of ideology and political philosophy altogether. They would be replaced by painstaking genealogical explanation, which examines how certain discourses and regimes of truth (epistemes) come about. For Foucault, all knowledge relates to power. As he stated:
what one seeks then is not to know what is true or false, justified or not justified, real or illusory. … One seeks to know what are the ties, what are the connections that can be marked between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what games of dismissal and support are developed from the one to the others, what it is that enables some element of knowledge to take up effects of power assigned in a similar system to a true or probable or uncertain or false element, and what it is that enables some process of coercion to acquire the form and the justification proper to a rational, calculated, technically efficient, and so forth, element.
(Foucault in Schmidt ed. 1996, 393)
Knowledge always conforms to restraints and rules; power also needs something approximating to knowledge.4 Thus neither political philosophy nor ideology represents any external objective reality. In a similar vein, Richard Rorty suggested the utter uselessness of ‘the distinction between “ideology” and a form of thought … which escapes being “ideology”’ (Rorty 1989, 59). In this context, there are no clear criteria to differentiate them. If political philosophy still claims a special insight into reality, as distinct from ideology, then it is simply mistaken and abstracts itself further from the realities of politics.
The most sophisticated treatment of this issue can be found in the work of Michael Freeden. For Freeden, ideologies are not the poor relation of political philosophy (see also Freeden 2003, 2013 and 2022). On the contrary, they provide equally valid insights. Ideologies are also far more subtle and pervasive than commonly understood. Freeden calls his approach to ideology ‘conceptual morphology’. This is semantically based, focusing on the question, ‘what are the implications and insights of a particular set of political views, in terms of the conceptual connections it forms?’5 Meaning is always dependent on frameworks of interpretation. An ideology is ‘thought behaviour’, embodied in ordinary spoken and written language.6
For Freeden ideologies, in effect, are conceptual maps for navigating the political realm; they contain core, adjacent and peripheral conceptual elements.7 Core concepts are the non‐negotiable aspects of all ideologies: for example, liberty for liberalism or equality for socialism. Other concepts are relegated to the periphery of an ideological scheme and will sometimes drop out of use or migrate to other ideologies. Adjacent concepts flesh out the core concepts and confine their ability for over‐interpretation. All concepts are essentially contested, although the majority do embody internal logical constraints on how far meanings can be stretched. However, each ideology (to use Freeden’s term) will try to ‘decontest’ the core and adjacent components. Meanings of core concepts will thus be fixed within each ideology.
Concepts are arranged in such a way as to form a unique ideology; this ideology is an historically contingent conceptual pattern, a pattern governed by the proximity and permeability of concepts. These patterns can be rearranged within alternative ideological schemes – almost like modular furniture. Concepts such as liberty or equality have manifold meanings; different aspects of these meanings will be fixed, then utilized and arranged within different ideological frameworks. We should not be surprised therefore to find what looks on the surface like the same concept functioning as either a core or adjacent term within dissimilar ideological structures. Liberty, for example, is not owned by liberalism; it can reappear legitimately within other ideologies. This gives rise, in turn, to protracted competition over concepts between ideologies. This last point underpins another aspect of ideologies for Freeden, namely, they will often be (due to the manifold meanings of concepts) subject to vagueness and ambiguity. This does not imply deception. On the contrary, ideologies are often masterful at integrating and accommodating ambiguity or vagueness. In fact, in ideological discussion, vagueness can be functional, allowing latitude for interpretation, which is often a crucial prerequisite for political activity.
For Freeden, ideology ‘includes, but is not identical with, the reflections and conjectures of political philosophers’ (Freeden 1996, 2). Political theory is seen as a capacious category containing political philosophy and ideology as sub‐categories. Freeden thus separates out the history of political theory, political philosophy and ideology. The easiest way of looking at the relation of these terms is to articulate, briefly, Freeden’s view of the advantages of morphological study of ideology. It combines a diachronic approach (which traces in effect the historical development of language and records the various changes) with a synchronic approach (which examines language as it actually is at a point in time with no reference to historical argument). Morphology balances both dimensions (Freeden 1996, 5 and 2013). This provides a handle for understanding both political philosophy and the history of political theory. Political philosophy has often tended to be overly focused on the synchronic dimension, whereas the history of political theory has been predominantly diachronic. Ideology, among other things, balances both dimensions. Ideologies also contain a mixture of emotion and reason and occasionally flawed logic and vagueness. They are focused on the need to attract the attention of larger groups, not to persuade a small group of intellectual colleagues. They stand in the midst of tense, often contingent political debates, both within and between groups. In addition, they are, strictly, neither true nor false. This conclusion obviously leads to a degree of relativism, which Freeden considers inevitable.8
One problem, though, for Freeden is that Anglo‐American liberal political philosophy (Rawls, Dworkin and so forth), since the mid‐twentieth century, has often tried to open up a chasm between itself and political ideology (see Freeden 1998). Freeden takes the primary functions of political philosophy as justifying, clarifying the consistency, truth and logicality of political theories and evaluating ethical prescriptions. However, this role should not be performed to the exclusion of ideological study. Ideology is not imperfect political philosophy. Further, an overemphasis on synchronic abstracted reason and logic can lead to a virtually semi‐private professional academic language, which bears little or no relation to politics. Overall, Freeden puts in a plea for theoretical ecumenism, mutual fertilization and tolerance between these realms. It is important, in all this welter of argument, to realize that studying ideologies, in this context, is not the same as producing them. We should not confuse these practices.
