Re-energizing Ideology Studies

The maturing of a discipline

Michael Freeden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351234481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ideology studies have undergone significant growth over the past couple of decades. The scope of the discipline has been extensively broadened to include not only text and discourse but emotions, imagination, fantasy, rhetoric and visual forms. Its attention to detail and to the micro-manifestations of ideology in the everyday have borne considerable fruit, particularly at a time of ideological fragmentation and reassembly. Its research methods have been refined, embracing both conceptual innovation and empirical evidence drawn from many fields of social creativity.

During that period, the Journal of Political Ideologies has been a major vehicle of the discipline's advance and coming of age. The chapters in this book originally published as two special issues in the Journal. The book assembles and investigates some of the latest approaches and domains in which cutting-edge ideology-research is now under way. The multiple topics, sources and interdisciplinary perspectives it contains illustrate the variety and depth that ideology studies have attained. Its subjects range from historical and literary analyses, through feminist studies, and psycho-social interpretations. It takes in the new means of dissemination that the digital age has introduced, and offers fresh assessments of the many cross-fertilizations possible between ideology research, political theory, and international studies, as traditional ideologies vie with new ideological articulations and forms.

Still the stranger at the feast? Ideology and the study of twentieth century British politics

Dean Blackburn

ABSTRACT

This article explores the way in which scholars of twentieth-century British politics have engaged with the concept of ideology. It begins by revisiting Michael Freeden’s seminal intervention on the subject before going on to assess the way in which recent work has challenged, and indeed preserved, older assumptions about the nature and function of political ideas. In doing so, it pursues two objectives: it seeks to demonstrate the consequences of regarding ideas as a significant feature of twentieth-century politics, and it attempts to encourage a more vibrant dialogue between historians and other disciplines that are contributing to the field of ideology studies.

In the inaugural issue of Twentieth Century British History, Michael Freeden discussed the way in which historians of modern British politics had engaged with the concept of ideology. His principal observation was that many accounts had devoted insufficient attention to ideas. Not only had they assumed that ideology was an eliminable feature of political systems, but they had also suggested that ideas were the epiphenomena of other social and economic forces. Ideology, Freeden concluded, was often the ‘the stranger at the feast’.¹ This article revisits Freeden’s intervention and explores how recent scholarship has engaged with political ideology. In doing so, it pursues two objectives. First, it attempts to expose what is at stake when ideology is awarded an adequate status within understandings of modern British politics. And second, it encourages a more vibrant dialogue between historians and other disciplines that are contributing to the field of ideology studies.

Freeden’s intervention can be summarized briefly. In it, Freeden identified three problematic assumptions that had concealed ideology from the historian’s gaze. The first concerned the way in which ideology had been defined. Within many accounts, Freeden noted, it was assumed that ideology emerged from specialized, doctrinaire forms of thought and was produced by political elites. This notion was problematic in two respects: it invited the assumption that ideology was an eliminable feature of political systems, and it concealed ‘the connections between grass-roots thinking and feeling, and more highly articulated and structured expressions of political thought’.²

Freeden also challenged the assumption that ideas were epiphenomena that reflected ‘real’ social and economic relations. This conception of ideology had been inherited from the ontology of an earlier kind of Marxist analysis, and its implications were significant. As well as encouraging historians to regard ideas as being causally insignificant, it had also led some scholars to draw a distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘ideological’ modes of thought. Historians were thus disposed to regard ideology as an optional feature of politics whose influence was variable. Yet these assumptions were problematic, for they failed to acknowledge that even the most non-doctrinaire statements were imbued with ideological assumptions and values.³

Finally, Freeden raised concerns about the way that historians had classified political ideologies. Too often, Freeden claimed, it was assumed that Britain’s liberal, socialist and conservative traditions were distinctive formations whose boundaries were clearly defined, and as a consequence, historians had tended to attribute particular policy innovations to the direct influence of these discrete ideologies. Freeden demonstrated the deficiency of these conclusions by drawing attention to the permeable boundaries that existed between different ideologies. Because they share common concepts, different ideologies, he argued, necessarily overlap. And as they meet the demands of new historical contexts, they often colonize the conceptual terrain that had once been occupied by rival bodies of thought. Accordingly, Freeden advocated an approach to the study of ideologies that acknowledged their fluid conceptual boundaries and accommodated their logical contradictions. Evident here were insights that came to inform the conceptual model of studying ideologies that Freeden would later develop.⁴

Freeden concluded his analysis by drawing attention to the virtues of methodological pluralism. A range of analytical tools, he argued, would be necessary to illuminate the different features of political ideologies and the way they functioned within different social contexts.

History and the ‘ideational turn’

In recent decades, scholars in a number of disciplines have devoted greater attention to political ideas. Indeed, some writers have made reference to an ‘ideational turn’ that has transformed the way that political systems are understood.⁵ This shift can, in part, be attributed to the slow decline of older explanatory frameworks that defined ideas as an epiphenomena of political life. But of equal significance has been the influence of new developments in political philosophy and social science that have opened up new ways of understanding human consciousness.⁶ This ideational turn has been most visible in the field of political analysis, where new research programmes have emerged that are concerned, above all else, with determining the relationship between ideas and political change.⁷ But historians, including many who are concerned with the history of modern Britain, have also reconsidered the way that they engage with ideas. Three general developments can be identified. First, it has become common for historians of twentieth-century Britain to suggest that socio-economic phenomena are discursively mediated.⁸ Post-war economic decline, for instance, is now conceived as a phenomenon whose meanings were constructed as much by commentators and politicians as they were by concrete material forces.⁹ And the economic crises that have been associated with episodes of political change have come to be regarded as the subjects of narratives that had no necessary correspondence with external realities.¹⁰ Not all of the scholars who have contributed to this development have made direct engagements with the concept of ideology; many, particularly those under the influence of Foucauldian ideas, have been reluctant to employ this category.¹¹ But because their studies often make reference to acts of discursive narration that are necessarily attempts to control the meanings of a particular event or phenomenon, their studies have nonetheless opened up analytical space that ideology can occupy.

Second, historians of modern Britain have begun to award greater causal significance to political ideas. Challenging those models of political behaviour that tended to regard material interests as being constitutive of political ideas, they have illuminated the way in which the latter have often mediated the former. Some historians of 1980s Britain, for instance, have disputed the argument that Thatcherism’s ascendency followed from social and economic changes whose consequences were fixed. Instead, they argue, the interests of electors, financial institutions and others actors were determined by discursive interventions that were ideological in nature.¹² In part, this shift can be attributed to the social constructivist models of behaviour that have been developed by Peter Hall and Mark Blyth.¹³ These models, which have been sensitive to the importance of history to political processes, have broken decisively with the ontology of rational choice theory and have awarded ideas a central role in determining political conduct. They have also reconceptualized the nature of ideological competition. Whereas older accounts tended to regard the activities of elites and policy-makers as being of central importance, these models award greater significance to the broader social arena in which these actors are located. Policy-makers and other state actors, it is argued, operate within a discursive environment that is shaped by wider social forces, such that the conduct of the former can only be adequately understood in the context of the latter.¹⁴

Third, historians have become more interested in the relationship between formal, structured patterns of high political thought and the social conditions from which they emerged. No longer are Britain’s traditions of liberalism, social democracy and conservatism understood as the products of elite thinking that have been imposed upon the British state by elites. Rather, they are more likely to be conceived as social formations that have been shaped by cultural change. Here, the influence of the ‘new political history’ has been particularly influential.¹⁵ Contributors to this tradition have sought to locate party politics within much broader social and cultural contexts, and in doing so, they have made two contributions to the way political ideologies are understood. First, they have demonstrated that political ideologies are often social constructs that operate within a discursive context that is shaped by vernacular forms of thinking. And second, they have exposed the vast range of institutions and groups that have shaped political contestation within the parliamentary arena.¹⁶

While some scholars have explored the complexity of the major ideologies of British politics, others have drawn attention to the formations that competed with them for authority. Feminism, ecologism and other ideologies have thus been recognized as important ideational systems that have done much to shape Britain’s political landscape.¹⁷ And it has also become more common for historians to regard non-state actors as important producers of political ideas. The chief consequence of these developments has been to disrupt the view that British politics was marked by a dispute between three major ideologies whose character was determined by a small number of political elites.

Together, these three developments have done much to marginalize many of the assumptions that Michael Freeden identified in his aforementioned intervention. Not only have they exposed the deficiency of older explanatory frameworks that denied ideas a significant causal role, but they have also displaced the negative definition of ideology that concealed many formations from the historian’s gaze. But if the more problematic assumptions that Freeden described have been challenged, it is possible to identify the emergence of others that continue to obscure the central role that ideas have played in British political life. One of the most notable concerns the ontological status that is awarded to ideology. As we have seen, it is now less common for historians to define ideology as false consciousness. What can be detected, however, are instances where ideology is defined in relation to ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ forms of knowledge.¹⁸ Consider, for instance, the tendency for histories of the Labour party to describe Harold Wilson as a non-ideological figure who was concerned, above all else, with practical questions.¹⁹ At one level, these formulations serve a necessary function. Indeed, they draw a distinction between different kinds of political thinking that are informed by different epistemological beliefs. What they also threaten to do, however, is to define ideology as an eliminable feature of political life. For it follows that there are forms of social signification which are free of ideology and which are capable of representing an external reality in its true form. It would be more appropriate, then, to draw a distinction between rationalist and non-rationalist ideologies. Such a distinction acknowledges that different ideologies are informed by different epistemologies, but it does not invite the notion that some are less ideological than others.

The notion that ideology is necessarily doctrinaire also conceals the ideological character of ‘non-ideological’ statements. As Ewen Green noted in his study of Conservatism, such statements are ideological acts.²⁰ Not only are they informed by certain epistemological assumptions, but they also emerge from a particular understanding of appropriate political action. And once this is acknowledged, even the most disinterested and non-doctrinaire statements come to acquire ideological meanings. It thus becomes necessary to recognize the vast range of institutions and individuals who have contribute...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Still the stranger at the feast? Ideology and the study of twentieth century British politics
• 2 ‘Submission’: ambiguity, hypocrisy and misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq’s imaginary politics
• 3 Totalitarianism and the end of the end-of-ideology
• 4 ‘The spark gap is mightier than the pen’: the promotion of an ideology of science in the early 1930s
• 5 The attraction of ideology: discourse, desire and the body
• 6 Ideology in the age of mediatized politics: from ‘belief systems’ to the re-contextualizing principle of discourse
• 7 Neoliberal feminism as political ideology: revitalizing the study of feminist political ideologies
• 8 International ideologies: paradigms of ideological analysis and world politics
• 9 Back to the populist future?: understanding nostalgia in contemporary ideological discourse
• 10 Ideology, socialism and the everyday: forgotten lessons from the inter-war years?
• 11 Ideology in three voices: an adapted methodology for the study of political ideology
• Index