Ideology

• 1. Introduction

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  Ideology began as a word coined by a French aristocrat sitting in prison. Antoine Destutt de Tracy was held from November 1793 to October 1794, awaiting trial during the Reign of Terror. He read Locke and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in his cell. From that reading he built, in 1796, a new discipline he called the science of ideas. Today the word he invented carries a heavy charge. Call someone an ideologue and you accuse them of being blindly partisan, zealous, or fanatical. How did a term meant to defend rational thought become a term of abuse? Why does Karl Marx use it as a weapon, while political scientists treat it as a neutral label? And what exactly is the difference between a belief you simply hold and an ideology that holds you? The answers run through revolutions, prisons, and the works of thinkers who could not agree on what the word even means.

• 2. Science Of Ideas

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  Antoine Destutt de Tracy lived from 1754 to 1836 and described himself as a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher. He wanted a secure foundation for the moral and political sciences. He built his science of ideas on two things: the sensations people experience as they interact with the material world, and the ideas that form in their minds because of those sensations. Tracy conceived ideology as a liberal philosophy. It would defend individual liberty, property, free markets, and constitutional limits on state power. He argued that ideology was the most generic term available, since the science of ideas also covers how ideas are expressed and deduced. The coup d'etat that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794 freed Tracy to pursue this work. His major book, The Elements of Ideology, appeared between 1804 and 1815 and was soon translated into the major European languages. The word came from the French idéologie, joining idéā, close to the Lockean sense of idea, with the suffix -logíā.

• 3. A Term Of Abuse

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  Napoleon Bonaparte, who lived from 1769 to 1821, turned ideology into an insult. He hurled it against his liberal foes in Tracy's Institut national. According to Karl Mannheim's reconstruction of how the word shifted, the modern meaning was born when Napoleon described his opponents as the ideologues. From there the term moved back and forth between positive and negative connotations for a century. When post-Napoleonic governments adopted a reactionary stance, the concept influenced Italian, Spanish, and Russian thinkers who began calling themselves liberals. They tried to reignite revolutionary activity in the early 1820s, among them the Carbonari societies in France and Italy and the Decembrists in Russia. Karl Marx, who lived from 1818 to 1883, adopted Napoleon's negative sense. He once dismissed Tracy as a fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire. Over time the word lost some of its sting through what one might call the euphemism treadmill. It became a neutral tool for analyzing the political opinions and views of social groups.

• 4. Marx And False Consciousness

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  For Marx, ideology is a system of consciousness that grows out of economic relationships. It reflects and perpetuates the interests of the dominant class. His base and superstructure model splits society in two. The base denotes the relations and modes of production. The superstructure denotes the dominant ideology, meaning religious, legal, and political systems. The economic base determines the political superstructure. In a feudal mode of production, religious ideology dominates the superstructure. In capitalist formations, ideologies such as liberalism and social democracy take over. Marx saw ideology as the motivation that keeps an exploited person supporting the very system that alienates them, often without awareness. Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, quotes Marx to capture this false consciousness: they do not know it, but they are doing it. Antonio Gramsci used cultural hegemony to explain why the working class misread their own best interests. Marx put it plainly: the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production. This idea proved central to the sociology of knowledge, drawing in Karl Mannheim, Daniel Bell, and Jurgen Habermas.

• 5. Defining The Indefinable

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  There are many different kinds of ideologies, including political, social, epistemological, and ethical. Manfred Steger and Paul James offered a definition that stresses both patterning and contingent claims to truth. They wrote that ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps, they said, help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth. David W. Minar set out six different ways the word has been used, from a collection of ideas with normative content to the locus of social interaction. Willard A. Mullins gave ideology four basic characteristics. It must have power over cognition, guide one's evaluations, provide guidance toward action, and be logically coherent. Terry Eagleton listed many definitions in no particular order, including socially necessary illusion and the conjuncture of discourse and power. German philosopher Christian Duncker called for a critical reflection of the ideology concept, defining it as a system of presentations that lay claim to absolute truth. The disagreement is itself a clue to how slippery the word remains.

• 6. Unifying The Faithful

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  Eric Hoffer, the American philosopher, identified the elements that bind followers of an ideology together. Hatred came first. Mass movements can rise and spread without a God, Hoffer wrote, but never without belief in a devil, and the ideal devil is a foreigner. Imitation followed: the less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others. Persuasion came from a proselytizing zeal rooted in a passionate search for something not yet found. Coercion bred fanaticism, since people forcibly converted to Islamic or communist beliefs become as fanatical as those who did the forcing. Leadership demanded audacity, iron will, cunning, and a delight in symbols. The leader, Hoffer argued, does not lead followers toward the promised land but only away from their unwanted selves. Action kept the masses occupied with great projects, marches, and industry so original thought stayed suppressed. Suspicion completed the set, with prying and spying and a tense awareness of being watched that encouraged conformity rather than dissent. Crane Brinton traced a parallel sequence in The Anatomy of Revolution, where men of ideas give way to fanatics and then to practical men of action.

• 7. Geography Of Belief

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  Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan built the World Values Survey, which since 1980 has mapped social attitudes in 100 countries representing 90 percent of the global population. The results suggest that where people live closely correlates with what they believe. In much of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, people prefer traditional beliefs and show less tolerance for liberal values. Protestant Europe sits at the other extreme, leaning toward secular beliefs and liberal values. The United States stands out as an exception. Alone among high-income countries, it adheres to traditional beliefs, in this case Christianity. Studies have also shown that political ideology is somewhat genetically heritable. In political science, a political ideology offers a blueprint for how society should work, addressing the economy, government, environment, education, health care, and much else. It carries two dimensions: goals, meaning how society should work, and methods, meaning the most appropriate ways to reach that arrangement. Cultural relativity complicates any tidy classification. What Americans now call conservatism, much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism, and a conservatism in Finland would be labeled socialism in the United States.

• 8. The Post-Ideological Trap

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  After 1991, many commentators claimed we were living in a post-ideological age, where redemptive, all-encompassing ideologies had failed. This view is often tied to Francis Fukuyama's writings on the end of history. Slavoj Zizek pushed back hard. He argued that the very notion of post-ideology can enable the deepest, blindest form of ideology. It is a false cynicism, adopted to lend one's view the respect of seeming objective while pretending to neutral detachment. Rather than escaping ideology, Zizek said, this lapse only deepens commitment to an existing one. He called it a post-modernist trap. Peter Sloterdijk had advanced the same idea already in 1988. Sociologists define ideology as cultural beliefs that justify particular social arrangements, including patterns of inequality. Dominant groups use these beliefs to keep their social power over non-dominant groups, passing the dominant ideology along through media, family, education, and religion. Sociological examples include racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and ethnocentrism. Hannah Arendt drew the sharpest line. An ideology, she said, differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess the key to history, or the solution for all the riddles of the universe.