Ideology

Marius S. Ostrowski

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509540747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over its long history, the concept of ideology has acquired a vast and at times incommensurable roster of meanings: positive and negative, analytic and critical, philosophical, psychological and scientific. But how precisely should we understand and study ideology today? What is its connection to key issues in social life and social research, such as capitalism and class, democracy and partisanship, nationality, sex and gender, race and ethnicity?

In this book, Marius S. Ostrowski navigates a path through the complex maze of ideology's rival interpretations, tracing the shifting fortunes of ideology analysis from its classical origins to its recent renaissance. The result is a concise interdisciplinary overview of how ideologies combine and arrange ideas and how they manifest in our psychology and behaviour. Drawing on a wide array of examples from across the world, the book outlines the historical preconditions that allowed modern ideologies to emerge and illuminates how we experience ideology's influence in our day-to-day lives.

Ideology will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars across the social sciences and anyone seeking to understand the way ideology shapes how we understand the world around us.

1
Introduction

Among the concepts that colour social life and permeate social research, few carry as many and as diverse connotations as ‘ideology’. In essence, ‘ideology’ signifies a worldview or overarching philosophy, constituted by an integrated body of individual or collective characteristic claims, aims, principles, beliefs, and manners of thinking. Yet, in our vernacular usage, we also inflect the term with a series of highly specific and loaded overtones. We call ‘ideological’ ideas and arguments that we consider wrong and misleading, that we find lacking in evidence, limited and ‘broad-brush’ as opposed to nuanced and comprehensive. We use the word to dismiss implausible, abstract theorising when it crowds out sensible pragmatism, idealism versus a solid grip on reality, and fanciful ‘visionary’ speculation when we want ‘cold hard facts’. ‘Ideology’ means something dangerous and risky, weird and abnormal rather than mainstream, radical as opposed to moderate, synonymous with ‘taking things too far’. The term sometimes takes on religious associations: the doctrinal formality of a credo, dogma, or gospel; the zealotry and fanaticism of the ‘true believer’. Similarly, we think of ideology as ossifying or freezing discussion and debate, trapping us in a state of opinionated, unreflective mindlessness. This often overlaps with advocacy and propaganda (especially from official or pre-eminent sources), grandstanding, ‘playing to the gallery’, bias, and blind partisanship rather than impartiality. ‘Ideology’ becomes tied up in the material and cultural self-interest of (especially powerful) social groups, who pursue a hidden, nefarious agenda for society with crusading militancy. Meanwhile, we use the most iconic signifier of ideology, the ‘ism’, to casually and indiscriminately refer to almost any ‘way of thinking’ (or ‘being’) or collection of ideas: transnationalism, postmodernism, neoliberalism, Peronism, secularism, of course, but also truism, witticism, neologism, alcoholism, ageism, and so on.

At the same time, in its original historical form, ‘ideology’ denotes the ‘study of ideas’, in the same sense as the (often scientific) acquisition of knowledge associated with constructs such as ‘biology’, ‘criminology’, or ‘sociology’. Paring the concept down to its semantic roots reveals the rich penumbra of allusive meaning that surrounds it. The ‘ideo-’ morpheme stems from the ancient Greek word ἰδέα: a form or shape, a kind or class of ‘element’ with a certain inherent nature or quality, a particular outward semblance or appearance, expressing a clear archetypical style, mode, or fashion, all encapsulated in terms such as ‘principle’, ‘notion’, and ultimately ‘idea’. In turn, ἰδέα connotes εἶδος, which shares the meanings of ‘form’, ‘kind’, ‘quality’, and ‘appearance’ but expands on them to incorporate physical figural ‘looks’, a typical habit, exemplifying or constitutive pattern, state or situation, policy or plan of action, even designated province or department of referential meaning, thus covering the gamut from ‘core essence’ to ‘visible likeness’. Meanwhile, the ‘logy’ suffix derives from the notoriously multifarious word λόγος: fundamentally, it refers to a word or utterance and the process of thought or reflection; yet these meanings are both stretched to cover wider language and spoken expression, phrases and even full sentences, argumentative reasoning, deliberation, and explanation, which together shape debate, discussion, and dialogue. In turn, these inform a vast range of further meanings, from computational reckoning and measurement to reputation, value, and esteem; relations of correspondence to regulative laws; statements of case and cause to formulated hypotheses; mentions of rumour and hearsay to narrative histories or legendary tales; proverbial maxims, proposed resolutions, assertive commands, eloquent literature, and all other senses of purposive discourse. Perhaps the most accurate way to distil these all into a single definition is to describe ‘ideology’ as literally an ‘account’ or ‘telling’ (i.e., both enumeration and narration) of ideas. Through metonymy, ‘ideology’ has shifted from referring to a field of study to naming the object of study itself, as with ‘geology’, ‘pathology’, or ‘technology’; but the sense of a deliberate, meaningful arrangement of ideas has remained.

These two alternative ways of parsing the concept of ‘ideology’ speak to rival understandings of the role that ideas and their patterned groupings play in society (Boudon 1989, 23; Geuss 1981, 4–25; Thompson 1990, 5–7). The first casts ideology in a pejorative or negative light: as a source or instrument of dissimulation and manipulation, which fosters equally fictitious unity and disunity among us where neither need exist. The second understanding adopts a non-pejorative if not strictly positive view of ideology: as a way to understand and describe the nature and meaning of the world around us. While there is scope for overlap and compatibility between their claims about ‘what ideology is and does’, these two understandings have engaged in a long-running struggle for epistemic primacy. Over the two centuries that have elapsed since the term ‘ideology’ entered the lexicon of social research, their relative balance has continually oscillated, propelled by many crucial developments and ‘watershed’ events that punctuated society’s historical trajectory. Mass enfranchisement, economic collapse, total war and genocide, colonialism and decolonisation, religious revival, and the proliferation of countercultures all left their mark on our conceptions of ideology, tying it to an ever-expanding range of views covering everything from personal identity and behaviour to models of social order. Meanwhile, the analytical study of ideology and ideologies (‘ideologology’!) has at various times fostered, resisted, aligned with, and cross-cut these trends. Some approaches have understood their essential task as being to expose and undo the damage ideology causes, from the first Marxists and later the first critical theorists to ‘end of ideology’ and ‘end of history’ approaches. Others favour the more equivocal role of seeking to accurately determine ideology’s ‘laws of motion’, from the original idéologues and subsequently the first political scientists to the social theorists, intellectual historians, and social psychologists working on ideology today.

§1 The central questions in the study of ideology

Despite often strongly divergent inclinations towards pejorative or non-pejorative understandings of ideology, the various approaches to ideology analysis consistently feature a core roster of essential debates, which can be framed as a series of contrasting pairs. The most fundamental of these concerns whether ideology is true or false. This debate hinges on whether ideologies as integrated bodies and ‘tellings’ of ideas correspond closely and demonstrably with reality, or whether they act as ‘alternative realities’ that obscure, deflect from, or contrast with reality ‘as it actually is’. On the former side, ideology is presented as a set of claims about reality, either as it is or as it should be. Ideologies and their constituent ideas are themselves real, acting as generalised ‘placeholders’ for everything from personal mindsets to societal institutions; they are also true in that we ‘hold’ ideas, which influence us into actions and reactions that are likewise real. Moreover, since our encounters with reality in our social existence and actions are always ultimately through (our own and others’) subjective experiences, to all intents and purposes the reality ‘that matters’ is our ideological construction of it, so that ideology is ‘true as far as we are concerned’. Meanwhile, the latter side instead sees ideology as an attempt to portray reality as something other than it is: a ‘mask’ placed over the actual facts, a misdescription of ‘how things really work’ or ‘why things really are the way they are’, a superficial explication and justification that (often deliberately) does not capture the deep societal forces at play. It distracts from other, more important motive influences on our existence and behaviour, such as our interests, drives, or contextual incentives. Above all, ideology creates and maintains a tension between our perception and our experience of society, since there is still a reality ‘out there’ beyond our capacity to ‘name’ it.

A closely related question is whether ideology is a necessary or unnecessary factor in our engagement with reality. The core consideration here is whether all humans rely unavoidably on (in)formal ideological frameworks of meaning, knowledge, and value to understand the world and their place within it, or whether some at least can – and should – transcend ideologies’ convenient, insufficiently considered hermeneutic and epistemic ‘shortcuts’ to reach a ‘higher’, clearer, and direct form of understanding. One approach argues that our ‘access’ to reality is only possible via some form of ideology – even if it does not call itself by that name – in the sense that some ‘account’ of ideas is required to make any claims about reality at all. Ineradicable societal division and disagreement over how to engage with reality engenders several viable alternative ways of ‘telling’ ideas and manifesting them in society (via factions, movements, parties, etc.), laying the foundations for ideological disputes. Moreover, since reality is itself inherently changeable and indeterminate, ideas and their meanings can always be challenged and revised. By contrast, the opposing line is that it is both possible and highly desirable to attain a stance towards reality that lies ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ ideology, typically through applying scientific and critical methods of enquiry. It finds that all divisions can be bridged or overcome, and that compatibilising different ‘tellings’ provides permanent resolutions to ideological disputes, leading in effect to ideology’s elimination. Similarly, it is possible to ‘settle’ how ideas should be ‘recounted’ and integrated, and a healthy dose of logical reasoning and empirical testing can mostly remove reality from ideology’s ‘reach’.

The next dispute is over whether ideology represents a temporary or a permanent fixture in society. This concerns whether ideology is uniquely a feature of certain forms, phases, or time-periods of human society’s developmental trajectory, with an identifiable beginning and end, or a constant presence wherever human society exists, with at most marginal qualitative changes in its essential character. The former position identifies modernity as the ‘starting point’ of ideology, characterised by increasingly dense, urbanised populations, the shift to mass production in agriculture and manufacturing, innovations in communication and transport, and an increase in the purview and complexity of state and legal functions. Ideology, on this account, is the fortuitous product of intersections between industrial capitalism and class conflict among bourgeois business owners and proletarian wage-workers, constitutional parliamentary democracy and electoral competition among parties, and contingent Western European geoeconomic–geopolitical–geocultural primacy. It likewise has an identifiable ‘end point’ through the transition to a new societal form or phase (e.g., ‘final communism’, globalised liberal democracy). The latter view, meanwhile, denies that ideology can have a definite beginning and, instead, points to clear milestones of qualitative ideological transformation from its long premodern history, tied to theological disputes, feudal rivalries, or personalist courtly factionalism. It observes that ideology is not only present but has often pursued parallel, entirely unrelated trajectories in different societies that are (at least partly) independent of capitalist, democratic, or Eurocentric developments. Accordingly, it is sceptical that there can ever be an ‘end of ideology’ and, instead, conceives of large-scale societal transition as a change in the dynamics of ideological ‘dominance’ or ‘hegemony’, expecting ever new social divisions around which future ideologies can take shape.

Another dimension of debate is over whether ideology is best conceived as a singular or a plural phenomenon: as ideology or ideologies. The key question here is whether it should be grasped as a totality alongside other powerful social forces, without becoming distracted by petty internal differences that do not alter its overall effects, or whether treating it monolithically prevents detailed analysis of how complex interpersonal and intergroup social dynamics play out through inter-ideological encounters. One side insists that ideology must be understood, first and foremost, as a discrete social domain with dedicated functions, ranked alongside (and sometimes subordinated to) the economic and political domains and sometimes elided with ‘discourse’ or ‘culture’. On this conception, ideas and how they are ‘recounted’ or ‘told’ are epiphenomenal to ideology’s social functions, and differences between ideologies are inconsequential compared to the gulf between them and society’s economic and political ‘drivers’. Insofar as ideology is significantly internally differentiated, it can be modelled as a single spectrum along which people’s positions can be ranked (e.g., liberal–conservative, left–right, radical–reactionary), often using scalar numerical quantifications. The other side argues for a more refined breakdown of ideology that incorporates its extensive range of different social manifestations: its legal, religious, media, and educational aspects as well as its economic and political forms. Likewise, it holds that the precise hierarchy, ordering, juxtaposition, and deployment of ideas is vital to charting simultaneous and intertemporal differences within and between ideologies and their effects on the shape of society. On this granular account, ideology is a collection of many different partly overlapping bodies of ideas – older or newer, larger or smaller, more or less complex and stable – which can be meaningfully sketched out only in multidimensional space.

A further question concerns whether ideology is primarily an individual or a collective phenomenon. This debate is about whether the locus at which ideology’s social effects should be evaluated is human beings’ personal mental and bodily status and behaviours, or whether it is more promising to treat ideology as the expression of various societal group dynamics. One view frames ideology in terms of identity, as a mechanism to impose social salience on our personal biological and demographic features, and to create, recognise, and/or push back against our positions in hierarchies of privilege and discrimination. It sees ideology as a social force operating on our personal psyches – mobilising our unconscious and subconscious, crafting correlations with our personality-traits, fostering certain emotions and forms of reasoning, and influencing our evaluative and epistemological judgments. Moreover, it shapes our social behaviours, from voting and consumption preferences to labour decisions and choices over ‘personal growth’ and self-development (e.g., sport, fitness, leisure pursuits). The alternative view examines ideology as an articulation of social group solidarity based on posited commonalities of contextual situation and experience,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The evolution of ideology theory
• 3 What is ideology?
• 4 Ideology and ideologies
• 5 The experience of ideology
• 6 The dimensions of ideology studies
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement