Ideology

10 Key excerpts on "Ideology"

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  eBook - ePub

  Troubling Sociological Concepts

  An Interrogation

  • Martyn Hammersley(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  © The Author(s) 2020 M. Hammersley Troubling Sociological Concepts https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51644-4_2

  Begin Abstract

  2. Ideology

  Martyn Hammersley

  1   

  (1) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

   

    Martyn Hammersley

  Email: [email protected]

  End Abstract

  The term ‘Ideology’ is widely used in sociology today and in other disciplines and areas as well. Yet, at best, its meaning is ambiguous . McLellan (1995 : viii, 1) describes it as ‘slippery’ and as ‘the most elusive concept in social science’, while Gerring (1997 : 957–959) has suggested that “Few concepts in the social science lexicon have occasioned so much discussion, so much disagreement, and so much self-conscious discussion of the disagreement […]’. As this indicates, what the term means can vary significantly; and, as we shall see, some of its main senses involve serious analytic problems. Furthermore, there are other terms whose meanings partially overlap, such as ‘worldview’ or ‘Weltanschauung’, ‘perspective’, ‘belief system’, ‘attitude’, ‘paradigm’, ‘frame’, ‘cognitive style’, and even ‘myth’, ‘hegemony’, ‘culture’, ‘imaginary’ (as deployed by Castoriadis or Taylor), ‘habitus’ (as employed by Bourdieu) or ‘discourse’ (in the way this word is sometimes employed in Cultural Studies). The conceptual terrain covered by the term ‘Ideology’ therefore requires careful attention.

  At the most basic level, the different senses the word is given share in common the assumption that particular sets of beliefs, usually both factual and evaluative, are distinctive to particular groups or categories of person. Traditionally, it was social classes that were treated as having ideologies, but ideologies are now frequently also assigned to other groups or social categories, and to organisations and other entities (from generations to nations).

  Of course, this basic component of the concept is rarely the only one: it does not capture all of the meaning that the term ‘Ideology’ usually carries. And, once we move beyond this core, we encounter significant variation in meaning between usages. These are generated by adopting one or more of the following additional features:

  1. 1. The set of beliefs is tightly organised, as against looser collections of ideas.  
  2. 2.
     The beliefs involve a false representation of the world, this perhaps extending even to believers’ views about what is in their own interests. And there is further variation among senses of ‘Ideology’ as regards why these beliefs are false:

     1. a. The beliefs are false because they have been designed by others to manipulate people’s behaviour to serve some external purpose.

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  Human Behavior

  A Cell to Society Approach

  • Michael G. Vaughn, Matt DeLisi, Holly C. Matto(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 14 Belief Systems and Ideology Belief systems and Ideology are universal ways that humans conceptualize their world. Ideology matters because it influences worldviews, shaping individuals' perceptions of human behavior and how best to intervene in positive ways in those behaviors. The ideals that constitute a given Ideology are heavily intertwined with belief. One major example is political ideologies, which prescribe a set of ideas about how the world should be viewed and how humans should behave in it. Ideologies are therefore self-justifying. Adherents to a particular political Ideology such as liberalism or conservatism often have strong beliefs regarding these ideals. Ideologies are often abstract, but their believers apply them to everyday events such as how one lives their life and behaves around others. In this way they become codified as rules for living. It is common for those in powerful positions to use Ideology to sway the masses and maintain control. This view of Ideology is often associated with classical Marxist thought, in which the impact of the dominant Ideology of a ruling class leads to a situation of false consciousness: People in the nonruling class adhere to an Ideology that is essentially not in their best interests. However, ideologies are distributed widely, and groups across economic strata often adhere to particular ideologies. Ideology is also influenced by technology, the physical environment, institutions, and our biology. As such, Ideology and belief systems are associated with the same biosocial constraints as the other major sectors of the cell-to-society perspective

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  The Meaning of Ideology

  Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

  • Michael Freeden, Michael Freeden(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 We also come across it as a lazy synonym for any set of ideas (historians are occasionally guilty of that). We encounter it in endless textbooks as a simple descriptor for a discrete set of major political belief systems, invariably including liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism and the rest of the pack. And, of course, we discover it— thoroughly demonstrated by the chapters in this volume—as a fundamental and variegated feature of social life, opened up to sophisticated scrutiny through increasingly refined tools of analysis that are employed by different disciplines to further their understanding of the areas they investigate.

  Among political theorists, Ideology is buffeted by the winds of academic fashion, reflecting not only substantive foci of interest but reigning methodologies—indeed, almost a justification of the dominant Ideology thesis itself, in the shape of 'dominant methodologies' concealed from many of their users. At one point in time we find it caught in the debate over whether the study of politics is a science or an art. At another it appears against the backdrop of a liberalism fighting to retrieve ground against the twin onslaughts of communism and fascism. At a third, it falls prey to the methodological individualism that has typified much Western—and especially American—social science. At a fourth point, it is appropriated by a convergence of new developments in linguistics, philosophy and psychology to recover its Marxist critical edge—critical, however, in the sense that it is once again exposed as a dissimulative device. But those developments also encourage a critical stance in a non-Marxist sense, as a reflective exploration of the features of Ideology. And at a fifth point, it is reconstructed as the most typical and accessible form of political thinking. In between it has been pronounced dead—twice!—and resurrected—twice!—thus outclassing one central creed of a well-established religion, religion of course being a set of beliefs and practices with which Ideology is sometimes thought to be in competition.

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  Ideology

  • Marius S. Ostrowski(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  comparative political science, which connects the concept to the specific ways in which we can express our social views in contemporary (democratic) political institutions.

  §1 The social- and political-theoretical epicentre

  To the limited degree that it is possible to speak of ‘dominant’ approaches to Ideology studies, three of the ones that fit this description best are housed within social and political theory. The first of these is conceptual morphology, which sees Ideology as a framework of distinctive patterned conceptual configurations that allow us to understand the social (specifically, political) world (Freeden 1996, 2013). As one of the approaches at the forefront of the turn towards vernacular thinking and expression, it looks for Ideology in explicit political statements – i.e., statements geared towards ‘providing and controlling plans for public policy’ and ‘justifying, contesting, or changing the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community’ – by people in a variety of political roles, from professional politicians and journalists to grassroots activists and voters, of course alongside the theoretical output of intellectuals. It sees ideologies as mutually distinct and distinctive patterned configurations of concepts (e.g., liberty, equality, order, security, democracy, rights), which are created out of indeterminate, unlimited possible combinations by processes of ‘essential decontestation’ that impose specific meanings on these concepts and build them into contingent vocabularies governed by quasi-grammatical rules. These ideologies compete for control of the public language we use to represent, establish, maintain, and transform our societal (especially political) arrangements by thematising certain concepts as central to ‘making sense’ of society and contesting how their rivals have decontested these concepts’ social meaning and significance. When examining ideological sources, the conceptual morphologist focuses on the structural arrangement (i.e., position, configuration) of the Ideology’s concepts, in particular how this affects their explicit meaning and implicit connotations through their mutual logical and cultural ‘adjacency’ – i.e., their necessary semantic connection as part of concretising each concept’s meaning and their cultural contextualisation within temporally and spatially circumscribed prevailing practices, social institutions, systemic ethical theories, or societal technologies. This casts them in the role of an interpretative (antipositivist) sociologist of ideas, who aims to generate a ‘Verstehen

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  Mapping Ideology in Discourse Studies

  • Simo K. Määttä, Marika K. Hall, Simo K. Määttä, Marika K. Hall(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  attitudes. For instance, ideological beliefs on immigration may be based on an underlying racist Ideology, an antiracist Ideology, a neoliberal, a nationalist or a socialist Ideology. Compared to the more specific beliefs on social issues, that is, social attitudes such as immigration, abortion or homosexual marriages, among many others, thus, ideologies need to be relatively stable. They develop and change slowly, and are slowly acquired by the members of an ideological group. Socialism, feminism, neoliberalism, and environmentalism took decades to develop, and one does not become a socialist or feminist overnight.

  Although we may have some informal ideas about the typical contents of ideologies as they are typically expressed in the discourse of ideological leaders, it is as yet unknown what the cognitive structures of ideological systems are. One property of these systems however seems quite plausible: They are polarized, and thus also define social ingroups and outgroups: Us vs. Them.

  Thus, ideologies are probably basic self-representations of groups: Who are we? Besides this fundamental ideological Identity, it is likely that ideologies also represent the characteristic Actions and activities of a group as their Aims, Norms and Values, Reference groups and Resources. In other words, an Ideology may be organized by a mental schema of fundamental categories defining social groups. Thus, the professional Ideology of journalists may feature Making News as central activity, with the Aim of informing the public, with the values of objectivity or fairness, with the public and the state as reference groups, and the fundamental resource of information – defining the basic interest concern of the group, to be defended at all costs. Similar basic structures may organize feminist, anti-feminist, racist or anti-racist, liberal or socialist ideologies.

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  Power, Politics, and Society

  An Introduction to Political Sociology

  • Betty Dobratz, Lisa Waldner, Timothy Buzzell(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As shared at the beginning of this chapter, Ideology is an important element of political culture and this is reflected in the classical theories of politics and power, as well as the contemporary frameworks reviewed in the opening of the analysis. One useful way of thinking about the many approaches to the concept of Ideology is by categorizing the vast research on Ideology in four ways that highlight the interplay between culture, power, and social action: (1) Ideology understood as an ability to comprehend power expressed in the social context, (2) political attitudes and beliefs that make up a constellation or collection of orientations about power, (3) beliefs about issues and politics changed by deliberation or talking about politics, and (4) Ideology as a function of historical and social-class influences that conceal or distort to assure power. Each of these research traditions has to date generated a great deal of understanding about the interactions between individual citizens, their political thinking, and structural influences that have effects on the nature of power in society.

  Ideology AS POLITICAL “SOPHISTICATION”

  Early studies of Ideology were designed to test the basic assumptions of democracy that voters are informed, keen decision-makers. In other words, social scientists were interested in the assertion that democracy required citizens to be informed using what they understood about issues and candidates to come to logical conclusions to make decisions. Much of the early work on Ideology in American politics began as a result of two studies. In 1964, Converse asserted that most American voters had little ideological sophistication. Rather, understanding politics was a function of “constraints” that had little to do with comprehension of issues, or thinking in a critical way about the pros and cons of policy positions held by political candidates. In the classic study of American voting, this lack of sophistication was confirmed. Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes (1960) found that, indeed, a larger portion of American voters did not vote based on what was then described as a sophisticated

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  Ideology and Utopia

  • Karl Mannheim(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The non-evaluative general total conception of Ideology is to be found primarily in those historical investigations, where, provisionally and for the sake of the simplification of the problem, no judgments are pronounced as to the correctness of the ideas to be treated. This approach confines itself to discovering the relations between certain mental structures and the life-situations in which they exist. We must constantly ask ourselves how it comes about that a given type of social situation gives rise to a given interpretation. Thus the ideological element in human thought, viewed at this level, is always bound up with the existing life-situation of the thinker. According to this view human thought arises, and operates, not in a social vacuum but in a definite social milieu.

  We need not regard it as a source of error that all thought is so rooted. Just as the individual who participates in a complex of vital social relations with other men thereby enjoys a chance of obtaining a more precise and penetrating insight into his fellows, so a given point of view and a given set of concepts, because they are bound up with and grow out of a certain social reality, offer, through intimate contact with this reality, a greater chance of revealing its meaning. (The example cited earlier showed that the proletarian-socialistic point of view was in a particularly favourable position to discover the ideological elements in its adversaries’ thought.) The circumstance, however, that thought is bound by the social- and life-situation in which it arises creates handicaps as well as opportunities. It is clearly impossible to obtain an inclusive insight into problems if the observer or thinker is confined to a given place in society. For instance, as has already been pointed out, it was not possible for the socialist idea of Ideology to have developed of itself into the sociology of knowledge. It seems inherent in the historical process itself that the narrowness and the limitations which restrict one point of view tend to be corrected by clashing with the opposite points of view. The task of a study of Ideology, which tries to be free from value-judgments, is to understand the narrowness of each individual point of view and the interplay between these distinctive attitudes in the total social process. We are here confronted with an inexhaustible theme. The problem is to show how, in the whole history of thought, certain intellectual standpoints are connected with certain forms of experience, and to trace the intimate interaction between the two in the course of social and intellectual change. In the domain of morals, for instance, it is necessary to show not only the continuous changes in human conduct but the constantly altering norms by which this conduct is judged. Deeper insight into the problem is reached if we are able to show that morality and ethics themselves are conditioned by certain definite situations, and that such fundamental concepts as duty, transgression, and sin have not always existed but have made their appearance as correlatives of distinct social situations.20

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  Knowledge and Belief in Politics

  The Problem of Ideology

  • Robert Benewick, R. N Berki, Bhikhu Parekh, Robert Benewick, R. N Berki, Bhikhu Parekh(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ideology and Social Science

  W. G. RUNCIMAN

  I start from the assumption, which I had better make explicit, that the problem posed by the title of this paper is peculiar to the social, as opposed to the physical and biological, sciences. There is a sense in which these can, if you wish, be said to have a problem of Ideology too. If, in the manner of T. S. Kuhn or, before Kuhn, of N. R. Hanson,1 we think of a scientific theory less as a set of connected laws and more as one way among others of looking at the world, then the choice between rival theories is perhaps a little more like a choice between social and political philosophies than used to be supposed by positivist philosophies of science. But apart from the detailed criticism to which views of this type have themselves been subjected,2 I take it for granted in any case that there is a difference between a set of connected scientific laws and a Weltanschauung; that scientific theories, however haphazard the process by which they are arrived at and however provisional their status at any given time, stand or fall by being publicly tested against potentially disconfirming evidence; and that scientific progress can roughly be described as a cumulative demonstration that specified sets of operationally definable terms are co-extensive. The construction of wide-ranging and well-tested theories is, to be sure, the common goal of the social sciences too. But the question which this still leaves open is whether the social sciences are at the same time ‘ideological’ in some way which makes them incompletely ‘scientific’ in the conventional sense.

  I take it also for granted that we are not concerned with either the motives of social scientists or the uses to which their findings may be put. Both questions are of moral as well as practical importance; but they are common to the sciences of man and of nature alike. The practice of a particular branch of academic inquiry may be morally undesirable not simply because the information made available as a result may be put to immoral use but because the mere execution of the research may already produce effects which it would be immoral not to prevent. Indeed, this may well arise more frequently in the social sciences than the natural, since according to the moral values held by most of its practitioners the scientific investigation of one person’s behaviour by another can, under at least some circumstances, constitute a violation of the freedom and dignity of the person investigated. But despite this the validity of the research, if carried out, will be logically a separate matter—as separate as the morality of eugenics from the validity of molecular biology or of the Manhattan Project from the quality of the nuclear research which made the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible.

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  The Art and Craft of Political Theory

  • Leslie Paul Thiele(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ideology is most often employed as a negative epithet implying that an individual’s or group’s beliefs and values constitute rationalizations of its social power or class privilege. But it is also used as a relatively neutral term to denote any system of belief about society or politics, especially if has practical implications. College courses on political ideologies typically focus on a wide range of the “isms” that compose the traditional political spectrum—anarchism, communism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism—alongside an assortment of other “isms,” including nationalism, feminism, environmentalism, populism and (religious) fundamentalism.

  In the years following World War II, many intellectuals (such as Edward Shils, Raymond Aron, Seymour Lipset, and most notably Daniel Bell) spoke about the “end of Ideology.” They believed that a consensus had arisen, at least in the Western world, about the bankruptcy of communism and the immorality of unconstrained capitalism. Free enterprise and liberal democracy, in tandem with a welfare system that served as an adequate safety net for the less fortunate, was deemed too good and too stable a system to require revolutionary change or even significant reform. Consequently, it was believed that pragmatic politics aimed at incremental, technical solutions of complex social problems would replace the simplified worldviews, apocalyptic visions, and strident claims to world-historic truths promulgated by ideologists of the past.

  A few decades later, and with a Hegelian slant, Francis Fukuyama pursued a similar theme, writing about the “end of history.”41 Fukuyama’s claim was that the economic, technological, political, and moral achievements of liberal democracy and marketplace economics made ideological visions and struggles obsolete. History, understood as the battlefield of ideologies, had stopped.

  To be sure, the global ideological battle between communism and capitalism has all but disappeared. Yet ideological visions persist, and ideological struggles—chiefly grounded in territorial, economic, ethnic, and religious claims—continue to flare up across the globe. Liberal democratic Ideology, while increasingly pervasive, is not the only player left on the field of history. Indeed, nondemocratic regimes replaced democratic ones over fifty times in the last century—and that does not count democratic regimes toppled as the result of a foreign invasion.42 Freedom House, the most widely acknowledged organization monitoring the health of democracy worldwide, observed in 2018 that we are entering “a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom. Democracy is in crisis.” The remark was made as the world witnessed its 12th consecutive year of decline in “global freedom,” with more than double the number of countries suffering net declines in political rights and civil liberties as those registering gains.43

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  The Philosophy of Art History (Routledge Revivals)

  • Arnold Hauser(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Only when we assign ideological phenomena to particular social units do we get beyond a mere registering of historical sequence; only then are we able to work out a concrete, sociologically useful concept of Ideology. In a historically advanced period there is no one Ideology, but only ideologies—in the same way as there is not just Art, but the various arts, or as there are several relevant artistic trends to be distinguished, corresponding with the various influential social strata. This does not alter the fact that in any historical period one class predominates, but it reminds us that this predominance does not go unchallenged by competitors in the spiritual realm any more than in economics or politics. As a rule, the new forces of production begin to manifest themselves in the form of “new ideas,” giving rise to dialectical tensions in the field of thought which often work themselves out in economic organization only at a later date; but this does not invalidate the contention of Marx and Engels that the new ideas are only a sign “that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created.” 7 In fact, we frequently get a situation in which the spiritual tendencies are much more tangled, more pervaded by deep-seated oppositions than the economic; in which, as for example in the age of the enlightenment, the ruling class was already spiritually divided into two hostile camps while economically it still maintained an appearance of unity. The differing composition of the publics is undoubtedly not the sole explanation of the differing speeds of change found in the different arts. In the various branches of art, the traditional formal rules that prescribe modes of representation and set limits to what may be represented can be more rigorous or less, and so can offer more resistance or less to the influence of contemporary social conditions

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