Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (8 page)

A second significant argument of Wittgenstein’s was that sets of features may be broadly similar without being identical in all respects. To explain that he used the phrase ‘family resemblances’. It indicated that there were overlapping characteristics of a special kind among members of the same set. Say that the family resemblances included a wide forehead, thin lips, brown eyes, and fair hair. Family members would not necessarily have
all
these features, but in a large family any member would share something in common with some other members (if I had fair hair, another would too). However, there could still be two members who shared nothing in common (the one having a wide forehead, thin lips, blue eyes and ginger hair, the other having a narrow forehead, thick lips, brown eyes, and fair hair). This idea allowed analysts of ideology to develop a greater subtlety in investigating an ideological tradition. They could maintain that liberalism, for example, contained a
number of internal variants that shared a range of overlapping as well as distinct properties. Far from being monolithic, the standard structure of an ideology was a jigsaw of components that furnished it with considerable flexibility. Different liberalisms shared several features while simultaneously playing host to separate elements. All liberalisms could promote individuality but some could be divided over the relative merits of private versus public ownership.

Wittgenstein also employed the analogy of a thread to illustrate that tradition changed over time in such a way that its continuity was more illusory than real. Just as a thread isn’t an unbroken strand, but a series of overlapping fibres, so a tradition may have short-term continuities that vary so slowly and delicately that – unless we scrutinize their history – we fail to notice them.

Together, the two ideas allowed analysts to conceive of specific ideologies as relatively fluid arrangements that bunched together under a common name. Hence most changes in the detailed components of an ideology did not necessitate its renaming. Quite the opposite: such changes were normal and to be expected in any ideological family. No less importantly, the discovery of the internal fluidity of ideologies allowed them to be recast as engines of change and renewal, not just as unbending instruments of dominance. That was reinforced by some of the developments to which we now turn.

Developments in linguistics provided another external source of inspiration for students of ideology. The emphasis on grammar and on semantics (the study of meaning) opened new doors through which students of ideology began to rush in increasing numbers. Grammar was presented as the structural rules that linked words together in a particular sequence. Words, as we know, are not pieced together randomly (as in ‘political all the free government should prisoners’) but only ‘made sense’ in particular arrangements (‘the government should free all political prisoners’).

Similarly ideologies, which were expressed primarily through language, were seen as displaying their own grammatical peculiarities. Moreover, words – and combinations of words – carried specific meaning: their sounds and letters (the signs) indicated something else that was being represented, or signified. The word ‘authority’ might signify a series of acts of deference to a person or institution. But the meanings of words were also interdependent; they were located in a network of relationships with other words and were only intelligible in that context. The word ‘free’ meant something quite different in the sentence ‘The government should free all political prisoners’ and in the sentence ‘Pop over and see me if you have some free time’. Not only did the
rules of grammar establish that in the first case ‘free’ was a verb and in the second an adjective but, more importantly for our purposes, the relationships between the words in the two sentences established that what was being discussed was (
a
) an act of liberation, and (
b
) the absence of other commitments.

Students of ideology, who discovered rather late in the day that it was profitable to treat ideologies as linguistic and semantic products, turned their new knowledge to good use. The internal complexity of ideologies was perceived more clearly; especially the possibility that ideologies could carry a multiplicity of meanings through a minor tweaking of the words and phrases they utilized. Moreover, liaising with psychological insights, the impact of the unconscious was beginning to be felt. Grammar, after all, existed at an unconscious level for native users of a language. Likewise, ideological assumptions – concerning the meanings of the words and ideas to which we have recourse – could be held unknowingly. This was a major departure in the investigation of political thought. Political philosophers, particularly of the Anglo-American variety, have insisted on the reflective and purposive nature of political theory. Empirical students of ideology, as observed above, assumed it to be a cognitive activity, known to the bearers of an ideology. Unintentional messages had not seemed to be of scholarly significance because they were not subject to the rational control of the users of political language.

The unconscious became an important object of ideological exploration, aided by several developments in post-war continental theorizing. One instance was the impact of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose extensive studies of ideology emphasized its positive as well as its negative sides. Ricoeur singled out one unconscious aspect of ideology that he termed a ‘surplus of meaning’. By that he meant that ideologies (as indeed many forms of human expression) conveyed more information than their
authors were aware of, or had intended. For example, when Machiavelli famously likened fortune to a woman who, in order to be submissive, had to be beaten and coerced, he intended that as a warning to princes to control the vicissitudes of fortune if they wanted to succeed. In so doing he employed a metaphor that would not have been unfamiliar to his readers. However, we now interpret that passage as reflecting an extremely unpleasant attitude to women, though this meaning is surplus to the points Machiavelli wished to make.

One lesson to be learnt from that is that ideologies are not only produced but consumed, and that their consumption is not identical from instance to instance. Ideologies are interpreted and understood by the populations to whom they are directed in many different ways. We know that the readings of the American Constitution with reference to the equal protection of the laws – in the abstract, a bedrock of the liberal notion of the rule of law – have varied considerably over time. One reading legitimated the principle of ‘separate but equal’ that justified the segregation of black and white populations. A later reading demanded the integration of those populations. These unlimited readings can occur contemporaneously: the ideology of welfarism was understood by conservatives to support industrial peace and productivity, and by socialists to hold out the promise of social solidarity and the fairer redistribution of scarce goods. The study of such variable readings is known as reception theory.

At the same time, the producers of ideology are not alone in being unaware of the surplus of meaning they produce. Crucially, its consumers may absorb frameworks of understanding, whose messages and consequences are undetectable to
them
. One such process is the socialization of the very young. When the awareness of an infant is crystallizing, it perceives the world as authoritarian, unequal, and hierarchical. That is not because adults behave improperly to babies and toddlers, but results from the physical size of adults, and from the necessary imposition of order and
decision-making on those not yet capable of running their own lives. Views of the political we normally associate with totalitarianism and with many types of conservatism – the naturalness of accepting orders and direction from an external source, the inevitability of leadership, the relative insignificance of the individual in relation to society – constitute the initial
political
impressions in all societies. Most societies prefer to leave their members in that state of political infantilism by refusing to re-educate them in alternative modes of conduct. A particular ideological view of the world becomes ingrained and hence invisible. The divine right of kings, the supremacy of a sacred religious text, the benevolent wisdom of the rulers, the futility of challenging fate, beliefs which themselves may be consciously held, contain such surpluses of meaning. A few societies attempt to resocialize their young at a later stage and encourage them – within carefully confined limits – to challenge authority, to promote social equality, and to be wary of some hierarchies; in short, to think critically for themselves. But even in such societies, the outcome is only the establishment of a few pockets of people disposed to realize those liberal precepts. For most people, the liberal preference for continuously revising and re-evaluating one’s plans of life may be too much of a burden. Even for liberals, many of their sacred cows, such as the right to choose your own profession, are also taken for granted, rather than appreciated as an unusual gift of autonomy.

The hermeneutic school – the study of interpretation – brought its own benefits to studying ideology. One guideline of hermeneutics is that the meaning of texts can only be decoded if we are able to tap into the contexts in which the text was written and in which it would make sense. An ideology, too, is a text – an argument, a statement, a narrative, an appeal – whether written or oral (though, as we shall see, ideologies also possess non-textual dimensions). Thus, liberalism as expressed in the 1940s and 1950s by Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, or Jacob Talmon, emphasized negative liberty.
It preferred the absence of deliberate intervention in a person’s actions to a conception of liberty that allowed the state to intervene and regulate the conduct of individuals in order to release, or free, their potential. For this ideological reading of liberty to be properly understood it has to be set against the background of the oppressive totalitarian regimes to which these thinkers reacted. This aspect of hermeneutics dovetails with Mannheim’s emphasis on the social conditioning of ideology.

Another guideline of hermeneutics refers to the texts themselves. Texts open up manifold possibilities for their comprehension – they do not sanction one authoritative reading. The main reason for that is that the meanings of words, sentences, and by extension, ideologies, cannot be pinned down unequivocally. The multiple meanings they carry, their polysemy, forever render them indeterminate. A radical version of this standpoint was captured in the phrase ‘the authorless text’. Once a text was produced, the argument went, it embarked on a life of its own, subject to the understandings of its diverse future readers, rather than the control of its author. This idea threw a lifeline of great importance to analysts of ideology. The realization that ideologies – as texts – contained infinitely variable forms reinforced the argument that the term ‘ideology’ in the singular could no longer be employed to substitute for the multiple ideologies it concealed. However, polysemy could be taken too far. Its theoretical boundlessness was none other than an abstract logical property of texts. It suggested that we could never ascertain all the meanings that an ideology could carry, which may be true, but it offered no criteria on how to select the more significant from the less significant variants. That made it impossible to get a handle on the real world of ideologies. If there are infinite interpretations, all of which are valid simply because they make sense under certain conditions, how can we ever understand, let alone appraise, an ideology?

The response to that problem came from some theorists of ideology who contended that cultural and historical constraints
narrow down that indeterminacy considerably. Although we may always offer a new reading to an ideology, we need to take into account that the formulators of ideologies have ploughed distinct furrows and have made their specific marks on the field. As we have seen, the accumulative history of extant ideologies with their own staying power – conservatism, liberalism, or socialism – encouraged the major ideological movements to focus on a certain range of meanings and arguments, encompassed in a tradition, rather than to appear in inchoate and discontinuous forms. Questions such as individual liberty, the limits on state activity, or what to do with the poor, reappeared in many ideologies and obliged them to organize around those issues instead of others. From the standpoint of a given ideology this narrowing went even further, as the typical arguments of each ideology are presented in language that attempts to be as determinate as possible.

The way was now open to regard ideologies as devices specifically capable of coping with the indeterminacy of the political messages that circulated in a society. They handled that indeterminacy by selecting, privileging, and prioritizing certain social meanings among all those available, using various mixtures of persuasiveness, cajoling, and verbal force. Whereas, for example, the concept of change logically carried a host of meanings, conservatives attached the qualifiers ‘gradual’, ‘safe’, or ‘natural’ to the notion of change they wished to legitimate, while barring the qualifiers ‘radical’, ‘revolutionary’, and occasionally even ‘planned’. There were thus three steps in analysing ideologies. The logic of the
category
‘ideology’ was to acknowledge its limitless forms, reflecting the impossibility of pinning down meaning. Historical and cultural contexts, however, constricted the
range
of meanings from which to choose. Subsequently came the further observation: within that constricted range, any
particular
ideology tried to behave as if meaning could be made determinate. The question now became, how did ideologies actually go about whatever it was they were doing?