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ОглавлениеIdeology: an exclusionary idea?
ideology
ˌʌɪdɪˈɒlədʒi,ɪd-/noun
noun: ideology; plural noun: ideologies
1. a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
Google/OxfordLanguages
Defining ideology
The aim of this book is to encourage fresh debate about ideology in relation to participation. But it is important as a starting point to examine existing discussions of ideology. We are unlikely to make much progress if we don’t learn from what’s already been done and is already known. But this is no simple task. Not only is the aim to get beyond existing discussions, in this non-expert author’s view, such discussions are also often complex and opaque. Nonetheless, they demand investigation, if we want to take either discussion or action on ideology forward in any helpful way. So the aim of this first part of the book is to introduce the reader to the subject through a short, but hopefully not simplistic, discussion of ideology drawing on the existing literature. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in attempting this task, it is that while ideology may impact on all of us, in one way or another, it is something few of us seem to feel at home with.
So here, you might say, is the background science. Even attempting this task is complex because this field has developed its own massive literature, its own lexicon and field of study. Even the people arguing about ideology are, as might be expected, themselves coming from an ideological position. Thus, it is not only that the content of their discussion relates to ideology, but that it is also shaped by their particular ideological affiliations and commitments.
Commonsense understandings
So what is ideology? As with all words that aren’t in commonplace use, the first task is to define our terms. What does it mean? What domain does it delineate? This is easier said than done, as becomes clearer when we investigate what might be called the ‘expert discourse’ in the next section. But there is a constellation of meanings that tend to be attached to ‘ideology’.
When we look up the word in dictionaries, the definitions they offer highlight ideology’s relationship with values, beliefs and ideas. Thus:
•a body of ideas that reflects the beliefs and interests of a nation, political system, and so on, and underlies political action
•the set of beliefs by which a group or society orders reality so as to render it intelligible
•speculation that is imaginary or visionary
•the study of the nature and origin of ideas.
(www.dictionary.com/browse/ideology)
These values, beliefs and ideas can shape the way we think and act, both as individuals and together. These may be ideas that an individual, group or society has. Indeed, one of the interesting things about ideology can be the difference between our own personal ideologies and those of the society, community or country in which we live. Thus ideology is a set of ideas and values that underpins what we do – and what is done to us.
However, we have to remember that ideology on its own does not and cannot do anything. It is meaningless if no one adheres to it. Ideology has no effect if it gains no support or cannot be imposed. Without power underpinning it, a political ideology is no more than one person’s or group’s thoughts, aspirations or intentions. Beyond that it has no independent existence or influence. It must either have power behind it from its proponents or have power invested in it by others. Thus ideologies and ideological perspectives are inextricably linked with power (Chomsky, 2015). Different ideological perspectives are wielded by humans to explain, justify or legitimise a political or social order. Ideology can be used to justify oppression, but it does not oppress in itself. This is an important reminder that, beyond being an idea, ideology has no independent existence. It doesn’t do anything itself. It may be used to oppress or liberate. Ideology began as and continues to be an idea and, from this, have followed different ideological perspectives (Heywood, 2017; Wetherly, 2017).
Political ideology is identified as a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. Political ideologies are concerned with the wide range of concerns of a society, ranging from the economy, health and education, to social security, social welfare and immigration (Honderich, 1995, p 392). Ideology can mean much more than political ideology, but equally political ideologies have a habit of entering into every aspect of life, thought, ideas and behaviour, as we shall see later (Shorten, 2015).
We should not ignore the fact that some intellectuals seeking to analyse the status quo have long had ideologies in their sights. Political ideologies can be used to serve many different purposes. Thus the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her exploration of 20th century totalitarianism, highlighted how such regimes were presented in almost supra-human terms, as if their proponents were merely following the diktats of nature or history, arguing: ‘The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility’ (Arendt, 1951, page unknown). The feminist bell hooks, in contrast, highlighted the liberatory potential of feminism in the context of domination and oppression:
Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires. (hooks, 1984)
Checking out the ‘expert discourse’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when we check out the dedicated literature on ideology, ‘nobody has come up with a single adequate definition of ideology … the term has a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other’ (Eagleton, 2007, p 1). The word ideology has different histories and different conceptual strands, which in some cases are irreconcilable.
It was not always expected or meant to be like this. We are taught that the term ideology originated in (the French) revolution, when the rationalists of the Enlightenment were searching for a ‘science of ideas’ with which to make sense of and negotiate the highly charged and changing times they were living in (Kennedy, 1979). We will return to this idea of ideology as ‘science’ shortly. So it was that, more than two centuries ago, the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy introduced the term ideology in order to denote a new discipline that would study ‘ideas’: ‘ideologie’ (van Dijk, 2006, p 729). In modern political science, the notion is used in a more neutral, descriptive sense, for example, to refer to political belief systems (Freeden, 1996). We can seek to come up with a value-free, uncontentious definition like ‘a body of ideas’ or ‘the social representation of a group or class’. But this is likely to leave out many of the characteristics and qualities theoreticians have associated with ideology (Freeden et al, 2013; Leach, 2015).
However, the term ideology has also long been used in a pejorative way, to devalue and cast doubt on the views and beliefs of others. This has a very long history, which can be traced back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for whom ideologies were ‘a form of false consciousness’; thus, the working class may have misguided ideas about the conditions of its existence as a result of their indoctrination by those who control the means of production (van Dijk, 2006, p 728).
Here is ideology serving to mystify and deceive. Ideologies are often presented as a negative. The word ‘ideological’ is used crudely and dismissively, sometimes as a term of abuse, as though it makes an argument or an issue less valid, less true. When politicians criticise something as ‘ideological’, it is often as a cheap insult, with them pretending that they are themselves not guided by ideology. This tradition is alive and well and continues in day-to-day discussion and on the pages of the Right-wing press, where describing someone or something as ‘ideological’ has become a means of rubbishing them/it or challenging their veracity (Eagleton, 2007; Telegraph View, 2020).
We also have to remember that there are different kinds of ideologies. For example, there are expert and professional ideologies such as educational, legal, religious, and health care ideologies, among others. In this book, we are concerned primarily with political ideology; that is, ideology where different – sometimes opposed – groups, power, struggles, and interests are at issue and where the political process is essentially an ideological process (van Dijk, 2006, pp 731–2).
Most discussions of ideology and political ideology seek to explain what the terms mean and to explore key different ideologies that have developed through history. We can learn from these what goes to make up an ideology and what various important ideologies stand for.
There has even been talk of the ‘end of ideology’, as though competing political value systems and conflicts between them were a thing of the past and there was now only one ruling set of ideas or way of thought. This started in the 1950s with US sociologists and their assumption of the post-war dominance of Western capitalist liberalism or liberal democracy – that is to say, a form of government where representative democracy operates in a market economy. However, this assumption was powerfully challenged in the 1960s by the emergence of an international revolutionary student movement and neo-Marxists who determinedly challenged prevailing political ideologies (Kumar, 2006, p 170). However, the spectre of an ‘end to history’, through the ending of competing ideologies of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, was raised again by the US historian and political scientist Francis Fukuyama in the late 1980s (Fukuyama, 1992), following the fall of Soviet communism, with a significant disregard for the radical developments which were taking place in China, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. While this claim that we lived in a post-ideological age was used to give rhetorical force to developing US neoliberalism, it in turn came under heavy challenge, both intellectually and through international events. Later Fukuyama revised his timetable, but what he was really talking about was only the apparent ending of one form of ideology, Soviet communism (Menand, 2018). Political ideologies, if anything, continue to be alive and well, imposed with growing power and force.
There have also been suggestions that ideology has become less important and pervasive as technology and bureaucracy have developed and become more central (Habermas, 1971). However, neither of the latter can be seen as ideologically neutral and both can and have been used to serve ideological purposes. Thus, for example, the extension of bureaucratic control has been associated with marketisation and the advance of Western neoliberalism (Ritzer, 2008).
Writing in 2007, Eagleton commented on ‘the remarkable fact that the concept of ideology should be out of fashion among intellectuals at just the time when it was flourishing in reality’ (Eagleton, 2007, p xiii). I believe his words still hold true, perhaps more each day and as each new national and international political event takes place: ‘Ideology has never been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as a concept as it is today’ (Eagleton, 2007, dust jacket). Also it is difficult to think of many areas of human activity where history seems to have such a powerful, enduring and sometimes worrying and destructive effect as it seems to in relation to ideology. I should add that I say this both as someone who first studied and valued history as a university student and one of whose passions remains old motorcycles; their social, cultural and engineering past, restoration and renewal, their maintenance and use. So I’m not one to dismiss the importance of history. Reflecting particularly on my own 1940 BSA army despatch rider’s bike, this encourages an interest in what has gone before. But the history of ideology – as both a field of study and area of human activity – not only excites this interest, but also seems to force itself into your consciousness as soon as you seek to address the subject in any way, imposing constraints and restrictions. It can feel a subject that is unable to escape its past. This is a history that is made difficult to ignore, which seems sometimes to preoccupy and entrap ideology’s commentators and practitioners, where we constantly seem to be being punished for our forefathers’ ‘sins’.
The conventional history of political ideology is reminiscent of that we were taught of Western nations at school, except, instead of kings and queens, we are taken through lists of key political thinkers. Instead of royal houses and families, we learn about schools of thought.
Exploring the literature of ideology, particularly political ideology, has been a new and demanding task for me. It is both a complex and voluminous literature that it has felt hard work to get my head round. No wonder as we will see, it is often suggested that ideology is not an idea that seems particularly familiar or comfortable to many people. So the aim here is not to offer an exhaustive examination of the definition, nature and range of ideologies but rather to provide a starting point for setting off in a fresh direction. This text is not intended as a primer on political ideology, but rather an attempt to set us thinking about it in different ways. Of course, that means we have to get some handle on the conventional basics. Here we are trying to tread the difficult path of not getting lost in other people’s definitions and agendas, when the primary aim is to explore how people more generally do and can connect with ideas of ideology. At the same time, we cannot ignore the need to explore the meaning of the idea if there is to be any kind of meaningful discussion about it.
Starting points: the history
Students of ideology adopt different starting points in their historical analysis of political ideology. The English revolution (or, as it is more often known, the English Civil War) of the 17th century is perhaps a particularly helpful one here for consideration of ideology in a UK context. Not only is it a key ideological development in British history, when the economically emerging middle class challenged their restricted political power under absolute monarchy. It was also an early UK candidate for re-evaluation through the prism of Marxist ideology (Hill, 1940). However, we could also trace political ideology much further back, through feudalism and pre-feudalism, through mercantilism and then to the ‘Enlightenment’, industrialisation and post-industrialisation. More typically, we are taken through the history of great thinkers and political ideologists. This begins with liberals like Locke and Voltaire, believers in the social contract between state and citizens like Hobbes and Rousseau, conservatives like Edmund Burke and Chateaubriand, utilitarians like Bentham, Ricardo, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, the antecedents of Marx and Marxism, Kant and Hegel, post-Marxists like Touraine, Baudrillard and Bourdieu, and postmodernists like Lyotard and Foucault (Eagleton, 2007; Feuer, 2017).
Western Enlightenment interest in ideology was associated with liberal philosophy based on support for individual liberty, private property, the market and limited state power. Its most conspicuous expression, ‘utilitarianism’, offers an early warning against taking ideologies at face value. Utilitarianism’s maxim was that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number … is the measure of right and wrong’ (Burns and Hart, 1977, p 393). Given that it was the inspiration for the cruelty and harshness of the dreaded English New Poor Law introduced in 1834, imposed on many thousands of impoverished people, it actually seems to the present author, ‘much more to have served the interests and be concerned with the greatest happiness of the small minority who governed and influenced the state, had the vote and ran the Poor Law’ (Beresford, 2016, p 34). The 19th century also witnessed the emergence of Marxist, socialist and anarchist ideologies which not only offered radical alternatives to prevailing liberal ideology, but also powerful critiques of existing understandings of ideology. The original insight of Marxist thinking was that those who controlled the means of production shaped the ideology that was used to justify society. Since then, different theories have developed, like ‘false consciousness’, ‘cultural hegemony’ and lack of ‘cultural capital’, which highlight how such ideology can work to deflect the majority from their own best interests (Hawkes, 2003; Haralambos and Holborn, 2008; Heywood, 2013).
When philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau posited their ideas on the ‘state of nature’, imagining how things were before human civilisation, they did so on the basis of their existing state of knowledge, not on what we might know now from archaeology, carbon-dating and the rest. Similarly their thinking was tied to contemporary racist, sexist, heterosexist and colonialist assumptions and ways of thinking. Such formulations, as Eagleton observed, thus involve ‘epistemological questions’, that is to say, ‘questions concerned with our knowledge of the world’. As he goes on to say, some are ‘preoccupied with ideas of true or false cognition, with ideology as an illusion, distortion and mystification’ (Eagleton, 2007, pp 2–3). The focus of ideology’s founding fathers (for it was so) was largely limited to Western Greco-Roman societies.
If we now pick up a modern text which is trying to help us make sense of political ideology, like the Oxford Handbook (Freeden et al, 2013), we can quickly see both the limits of past discussions and explorations of such ideology and how all embracing such study can and should be.
Thus as well as encountering the classic families of ideology, like conservatism, liberalism, social democracy, communism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, republicanism, colonialism, anarchism, utopianism, we are also being acquainted with green, feminist, globalising, Islamic, Chinese, Modern African and South Asian and Southeast Asian ideologies (Freeden et al, 2013).
Ideology: the idea
Political ideology is a term fraught with problems, having been called ‘the most elusive concept in the whole of social science’ (McLennan, 1986, p 1). As has been said, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to develop serious discussion about any idea without clearly defining it. Yet it is difficult to do this with ideology since definitions are both multifaceted and heavily contested. They are also frequently described as value-laden and normative, which is hardly surprising, given that they often represent one or other kind of rationalisation, justification or analysis for action. Eagleton runs through most of the letters of the alphabet when he attempts to list some definitions of ideology (2007, pp 1–2). Thompson concludes that the single most widely accepted definition is to do with legitimating the power of a dominant social group or class, so in that sense its role is to ‘sustain relations of domination’ (Thompson, 1984, p 4) This is certainly how I have understood it to operate, in the way Eagleton defines: ‘the process of legitimation … by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought … and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself’ (Eagleton, 2007, pp 3–4). Such definitions are also generalised to extend to any ‘set of ideas by which (people) posit, explain and justify ends and means of organized social action, and specifically political action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order’ (Seliger, 1976, p 11).
Furthermore, ideologists are not simply neutral commentators on ideology; they are also developers and creators of it. Thus thinkers like Gramsci help explain why people may support regimes antagonistic to their own interests (Gramsci, 1971) or Foucault the relations between state, society and understandings of madness and ‘mental illness’ – although the latter tends to talk more of ‘discourse’ than ideology (Foucault, 1988). At the same time, there long seems to have been a search for an objective or ‘scientific’ understanding of ideology, as though the idea and its exponents are separable from norms and values and are merely demarcating an area rather than passing judgement on something – for or against. The contents of ideology and the views of their analysts may be a matter of opinion, but they tend not to be presented as such. On the other hand, there are more and less objective definitions of ideology, the former usually narrowly framed in terms of the political and cultural blueprint for a certain group or order.
When we make an initial check on the literature, for example, through Google Scholar and Researchgate, it seems to confirm that discussion exploring ideology and participation has been very limited. While, as we might expect, there is some focusing on the ideology of participation/involvement, there is much less examining participation in relation to ideology, particularly in relation to political ideology. One apparent exception is work by Douglas Ashford, although his focus is more specifically on the relationship of ideas to political behaviour (Ashford, 1972). He has also come in for criticism as more narrowly concerned with exploring major psychological approaches to the study of political behaviour (Cobb, 1973). Interestingly though, he seems to see people’s relationship with ideology primarily as ‘followers’, rather than initiators or co-creators, reinforcing conventional understandings of ideology as narrowly based.
Ideology’s non-participatory past
This book by contrast is primarily concerned with making the connections between participation and ideology. This seems to be a particularly timely project because of the widespread and growing interest in public and service user participation in all aspects of life, including politics and policy, and because of the complex inter-relations that connect these two key ideas – ideology and participation. Yet, when we come to investigate ideology, we encounter a very different history, with little apparent interest in participation. It is this we begin to examine next, as we embark on what seems like an unprecedented journey of discovery.
What is most striking is that ideology and its development rarely seems to have been understood as any kind of participatory process or project. This appears to be the case right from the start. As the Right of centre writer Ferdinand Mount reminds us, the creation of the idea of ideology was associated with a companion word ‘ideologues’, the intellectuals and theoreticians who advanced the discourse. Thus, in one sense, ideology has been private property from the start or at least a very narrowly based activity (Mount, 2012, p 112–3). As Mount said, Destutt de Tracy (who, as we have seen, coined the word ideology) conceived it as another science, one in which the young needed to be instructed. Thus the process of its development was a top-down one – with ideology a prescription ‘deduced from the principles of the Enlightenment [based on] the correct political ideas’ (Mount, 2012, p 113). Ideology was something people would be taught, rather than being actors in its formation.
But there’s another sense in which de Tracy seems to be laying the ground for preconceiving ideology as essentially an idea beyond being participatory. This is his emphasis on it as ‘scientific’. Again to quote Mount:
[de Tracy’s] primary epistemological claims – that ideology is a science, that from the principles of this science a uniquely valid social and political programme can be deduced, and that both the principles and the programme can and must be taught to the nation’s young and enforced by the state – these claims we shall meet again. (Mount, 2012, p 113)
Such claims occupy a particularly significant place in 20th century thought. Philosophers like Kant and Hegel reinforced notions of ideology as scientific. Following in their footsteps, Karl Marx also believed ideology to be a science, with its own scientists. Both Nazi and Soviet communist ideology were similarly conceived in such objective scientific terms. The rest of us are cast as the recipients rather than potential co-creators of political ideology, ultimately subject to its enforcement, rather than entitled to reinterpret or challenge it. It is invested with the authority attached to positivist scientific enquiry, as if it is based on the same kind of objective truths as natural science. Only its scientists are entitled to explore and experiment with it.
Keith Harrison and Tony Boyd extend this idea of the relationship most of us have with ideology as an essentially passive one, when they write about the transmission of ideology and people as merely empty vessels, or the ‘receptors’ for it, rather than actors with agency involved in any sense actively with it in a two-way process (Harrison and Boyd, 2003, p 143–5). As they discuss, this of course connects with those understandings of ideology simply as an instrument of power wielded by the dominant groups in society, even to the extent of ‘enslaving’ those who accept or believe in it. This is the very opposite of any kind of understanding of ideology as a collaboration between those who inspire it and those who support it, let alone any kind of co-production. An even more developed view of this, as these authors suggest, is where people’s influence on ideology is seen to be reduced by spin doctors and modern methods of communication (Harrison and Boyd, 2003, p 145).
An ultimate expression of this is propaganda, where people are essentially induced to believe in whatever misrepresentations, exaggerations or indeed lies, power holders choose to feed them.
Humphrey and Umbach (undated) develop the discussion about the relationship between political ideology and propaganda. Umbach, from her historical work, highlights how this can be a two-way process, but one where the individual is essentially subordinate to the dominant ideology, even though they may engage with it. As she also reports, while propaganda must engage with lived experience to carry conviction, it tends to manipulate and distort this (Humphrey and Umbach, undated). The ultimate objective of propaganda is to make people think and act as its proponents want, even if this means deceiving them, rather than supporting them to think for themselves.
However, going back to the early idea of ideology as science, we can also see an apparent contradiction almost built into it. As Ferdinand Mount reminds us, de Tracy, while committed to this notion, also regards our subjective or ‘sense experience (as) the only reliable knowledge that we can have of the world … The idea that our senses could delude us … is quite foreign to [him] … So the ambiguities of ideology were inbuilt from the start’ (Mount, 2012, p 114). We will return to this epistemological issue relating to ideology later, when we explore the possibilities of its participatory development.
The political and academic worlds of ideology, as this author has been discovering, are complex and dense. They can be difficult to understand. This also seems very much a private province, explored by few. That might not be by intention, but it is certainly likely to be true for many newcomers. No wonder the frequent suggestion that it is unfamiliar territory for many of us. This is our starting line for enquiry in Chapter 2, when the focus on the relations between political ideology and the people it can affect really starts.
