Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (18 page)

The intensity of emotional attachment to an ideology is another explanation for potentially totalitarian structures. As we have seen, totalitarian ideology is often the result of imposing and locking into place the meaning of political concepts by linguistic and political fiat. But harnessing the passions can have the same effect. The more intensely emotional is one’s commitment to an ideology, the more does that emotional intensity replace the need for external linguistic control. And as with totalitarian superimposition of meaning, intense emotional support for an ideology introduces inflexibility, brittleness, and unwillingness to compromise. These in turn make change unlikely and, when change does come, the entire ideological package is liable to disintegrate. Strong, perhaps violent, emotion acts as the cement that prevents the internal mutation of conceptual meaning within a given ideology. We may again call to mind the character of excessive religious faith. But no ideology can hope to succeed if it aims to be purged of emotion, nor can it relate to the complex realities of human behaviour. And no scholarly analysis of political thought can be complete if it does not respect and investigate the emotional life of the members of a society, rather than ignore it.

If discourse, emotion, criticism, culture all intersect with the concept of ideology and claim it for their own, can politics still declare a prior vested interest in the term; in effect, can ‘ideology’ be employed as shorthand for ‘political ideology’? Does it make sense for the concept to be expanded to the extent that its distinguishing marks become blurred as it serves too many masters? The concept of ideology has had a chequered history, and it is still torn between its negative and positive connotations, and between its critical and interpretative analysis. Does it matter, then, if its ambiguity is further increased by dispersing it among a variety of disciplines? We know of course that words have many meanings – that is an insight central to the study of ideology itself. And it is undeniable that ideology is a term borrowed and occasionally annexed by other disciplines. Apart from its critical Marxist and post-Marxist connotations, it is used loosely by historians as synonymous with a system of ideas or an organizing idea, and by literary and cultural students as a critical concept referring to the structures of dominance around almost any idea or theme. Many of these references to the concept of ideology have contributed to its drift away from politics, especially from the type of micro-political analysis explored in
Chapters 4
and
5
. Only students of politics have so far tapped into most of the facets of ideology. This is certainly not a case of ‘to the victor the spoils’ but rather, to the highest bidder for the utility of the concept, the
privilege of setting the pace of its development and investigating its further potential.

In this book I have endeavoured to reclaim ideology for politics, not only because – inasmuch as ideologies exercise power – they necessarily exist on a political dimension, but because political studies have assigned ideology centrality and have appropriated the term in a particularly revealing manner. The deep complexity of ideology, and the identification of its core characteristics, all direct us to the discipline of politics as its most congenial stamping ground, as the site where it is comprehensively revealed and where its total range of features is engaged. Such methods for identifying its features, however, must remain merely proposals for using the word ‘ideology’, not the ultimate statement on a concept that is itself essentially contested.

In effect, the study of ideology is most profitably recognized as the study of actual political thought – the concrete thinking
of
political communities and
within
political communities. For anyone interested in the sphere of politics that study is not an optional extra; it focuses on the world of ideas and symbols through which political actors find their way and comprehend their social surroundings. It informs their practices and institutions and it establishes the parameters of their moral prescriptions and expectations. It may or may not be illusory; it may or may not represent something else outside it – but
initially
it doesn’t really matter that much if what we want to do is to understand what political thinking is, long before we deconstruct it critically or expose its pretensions. To explore ideologies is to penetrate the heart of politics, and it requires a sympathetic student, not a dismissive or a disillusioned one. Politics is principally concerned with making collective decisions and with the regulation of conflict that both precedes and follows such decisions. Thinking about politics is always thinking defined by, and channelled in, those directions.

Decontestative thinking, and its study – the attempts to forestall argument, and the methods by which that is achieved – are therefore pivotal to
political
theory. Furthermore, because politics is a social activity, so is thinking about politics. It is not an activity external to politics that can
then
be applied to it – an impression given by many philosophers – but is itself
political
thought-behaviour. Nor are ideologies the kind of externalities that some comparative political scientists identify, externalities that intervene from time to time in a world of interests, contingencies, and leadership skills. Rather, ideologies are an inescapable dimension of these components that bestows on them political presence, and without which they cannot be expressed and embodied.

But even if ideology is comfortably located in the realm of the political, how does one respond to the implication of negatively critical theories of ideology that all discourse is ideological? What then isn’t ideology? The lack of a differentiated notion of ideology transforms it into an undiscriminating tool. That would be yet another reason to be sceptical about its merits. It is both more fruitful and more accurate to suggest that human discourse has an ideological
dimension
to it, but that it cannot be reduced to that dimension alone. We abide by the hermeneutical insight that there is more than one way of making sense of a text – it may have literary, aesthetic, or ethical worth as well, for example. We must also acknowledge that not all its ideological dimensions are equally significant or intellectually attractive.

By maintaining that ideology relates to politics and to the collective decisions that characterize it, we are not implying that these decisions are unitary. Nor are we suggesting that the poststructural concern with ideological fragmentation necessarily entails ideological disintegration. One of the striking features of modern (and postmodern) social life is its increased differentiation – the thousands of diverse tasks, roles, and developmental paths that people undertake. In ideological terms we are confronted with individuation: the ability of people to choose among sets of ideas is
now publicly legitimated by cultures and political organizations sympathetic to personal choice. While we have categorically maintained that it is premature to portray liberalism as the victorious ideology (and it may well be permanently premature, judging by the nature of ideological contestation), we may note a particular feature of liberalism that is amenable to such individuation.

By encouraging variety and originality, liberalism is better suited than other ideologies to hold together a large degree of structural differences and centrifugality. This always takes place within its non-negotiable core premisses but these, fortunately for individuated societies, include reasonable tolerance and hence reasonable pluralism. The very liberalism that sustains the possibility of fragmentation also constrains its nihilistic excesses. If ideological dissent is durable, it is so precisely due to a willingness to accept diversity as desirable, and as enriching all the parties to such pluralism. It is also highly probable that the rise of liberalism itself permitted the growth of individuation, so that we are once again presented with the familiar two-way street, or integration, of theory and practice. Our knowledge of the history of liberalism cautiously projects a pattern of similar expectations on to the future. All this is not to extol liberalism but to point out its compatibilities with modernity and postmodernity. By contrast, the liberal-capitalism currently making a bid for ‘globalism’ is not really an individuated ideology. It allows for consumer choice, but controls it carefully through marketing and thorough entrepreneurial forms of leadership. The result is new types of uniformity, not diversity. It safeguards an ideological position that, in common with so many other non-liberal ideologies, undervalues the maturity of individual citizens, in this case downgraded to the treasured capacity to shop till they drop. Nor does it augment the genuine liberal struggle against the tendency of rulers (political and economic) to direct and manipulate.

What, one may ask, does the study of ideology do for those who
insist, as do the normative political philosophers, that political thought is about creating a better society? The posing of such a question is itself telling. Would we ask such a question of anthropology, concerned as it is with observing the behaviour of human beings in cultural contexts? Is
its
aim to create a better society? Possibly indirectly, as is the case with the analysis of ideologies. Good evaluation and the prescription of valuable solutions are conditional upon good observation and, no less, good interpretation. That is why the critical edge of the Marxist approach to ideology is important. On the whole, however, professional languages such as philosophy are not designed to be good transmitters of ideologies, just as ideologies are inadequate transmitters of philosophical arguments. What makes political thinking
ideological
relates to the linguistic need and interpretative imperative to choose among contested meanings of concepts, in order to attain the control over language that renders collective political action possible. That, of course, is a scholarly and technical reason for the inevitability of ideological dissent, and for the parallel artificiality and contingency of ideological decontestation, and it may be defended by analysts of ideology. What is artificial may still be necessary, even if fragile. Contingency itself becomes inescapable. Decontestation, it is true, can elevate one ideology to hegemonic status, and thus run counter to the unavoidable multiplicity of ideological standpoints. But ideological dissent will exist at the very least below the surface, if not in full view of a society. So in order for dissent to be legitimated, and in order for debate to be pluralist, reasonable ideological disagreement has to be accepted as normal and permissible by the public at large.

If there is necessarily a dimension of political thought that is ideological, why is ideology
central
to the domain of politics? Its central position is a consequence of four of its features, all of which offer further bases for comparing ideologies. First, ideologies are
typical
forms in which political thought is expressed. Politics is all
about the attainment of collective goals, the regulation of conflict within a society and among societies. Ideologies are the arrangements of political thought that illuminate the central ideas, overt assumptions, and unstated biases that in turn drive political conduct. And until we respect and comprehend the ubiquitous, important, and everyday political thinking of a society, we will be unable to explain the nature of politics adequately. The typical can never encompass all we need to know, nor must we confuse it with the conventional or allow it to stifle the exceptional, but it offers an indispensable basis for taking the political pulse of a society.

Second, ideologies are
influential
kinds of political thought. They offer decision-making frameworks without which political action cannot occur. We assume, not without justification, that ideologies are instruments of power, from the viewpoint of the rulers; and instruments of enabling and empowering choice, from the viewpoint of members of an open society. Ideologies are, after all, designed to wield influence on mass publics, or at least on key political groupings, in the quest of those publics and groups to steer public policy-making. Influence obviously cannot be confined to the question of who has won the
semantic
battle of decontestation. We also need to take into account the actual take-up of an ideological argument in a society. That means choosing a point in time carefully: sometimes ideologies take decades and even longer, to emerge in force – the 20th-century genre of neo-liberalism, for instance, germinated from the 1940s until it flowered in the 1980s. Ideologies are assumed to have influence because they have practical import, because they are adopted by significant numbers of adherents, and because their ideas have hit a sensitive spot in national and subnational consciousnesses. For similar reasons they are feared and loathed by some as power constructs, as if ideas were too refined to be sullied with the grime of opportunism, graft, and ambition characteristic of the world of politics.

Third, ideologies are instances of
imaginative creativity
and in that role provide the ideational resources and opportunities from which
political systems draw. Clearly, ideologies require some modicum of coherence and consistency, and they may gain considerable effectiveness if they also assume moral force. But their shortcomings on all these accounts, while probably vexing logicians and moral philosophers, cannot detract from the input of ideologies as raw, visionary, constructive, experimental, and, yes, occasionally volatile or dangerous, products of the human mind. Ideologies are instances of the vitality achieved by blending intellectual judgement, emotional satisfaction, and even aesthetic appeal, offering a variety of potential options and social futures from which a society can choose. Not least, the configurative capacity of their morphology serves well the power of the imagination ceaselessly to recombine experience and understanding in new shapes.