Ideology

An ideology is a set of beliefs and expressions that present, interpret, and evaluate the world in a way designed to organize, mobilize, and justify social and political action. The term was first attributed to Antonie Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), who saw the need the need for a systematic account of ideas that could be the basis for a rational and just society. But when Tracy fell out of favor with Napoleon I (1769-1821), the emperor called Tracy an “ideologue”: a thinker with a muddled metaphysics of benefit to no one.

Marxism

This negative connation associated with ideology continued in Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engel’s (1820-1895) The German Ideology (1846) where Tracy was cited as an example of a “bourgeois doctrinaire.” But the main target of Marx and Engels was Hegelian idealist philosophy, which claimed that consciousness existed independently of social relations. Marx and Engels believed by privileging ideas over the real driving forces in history, that is, economic forces; the idealist committed an ideological mistake by inverting the true order of things. But more importantly, capitalist used ideology to serve their interest by concealing class conflict and promoting a false consciousness in the people so that would not revolt against the current social order.

In Ideology and Utopia (1929), Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) agreed with Marx that ideas can only be understood against the background of the society that gives birth to them. However, this sociology of knowledge should be applied to all systems of thought, including Marxism itself, to reveal the partial insights that each system offers. Mannheim distinguished between particular and total concepts of ideology: the former revels how bias plays a role in the formulation of beliefs, while the latter discloses the presuppositions behind a worldview that are shaped by underlying social relationships. For Mannheim, Marxism confuses particular and total conceptions by claiming that the bourgeoisie’s self-interest produces capitalist ideology as well as the underlying social relationships of such an order.

The ambiguities of the Marxist conception of ideology also influenced Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924), Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), and Louis Althusser (1918-1990).  These thinkers saw ideology as a social tool to tie people to the state, and hence to capitalist society, by providing them a certain identity. The notion that ideology’s function is to furnish individual or group identity also affected twenty-first-century scholars such as Benedict Anderson, Carole Pateman, and Will Kymlicka in their understanding of ideology in a globalized context. Their focus on the identity of the individual and groups as emerging from a social context, as opposed to possessing a type of essence, has given rise to a number of gender and ethnic studies that examine how globalization either encourages or discourages the formation of these identities.

Liberalism

Francis Fukuyama also has contributed to the understanding of ideology in a globalized context by arguing that liberalism was the only viable paradigm to organize polities after the collapse of Soviet Communism. This end-of-ideology thesis, the triumph of liberalism, had been explored before, particularly in the works of Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006) Daniel Bell (1919-2011), and Raymond Aron (1905-1983). Fukuyama, however, argues that ideology is not the offshoot of deeper social and economic forces but rather is the explanation of history itself. Anthony Giddens shares Fukuyama’s optimism about liberalism in his “third way” of politics that seeks to combine the ideologies of conservatism and socialism. However, Samuel Huntington provides a bleaker response to this liberal triumphalism with his “clash of civilization” thesis that contends conflict is a permanent feature of global politics.

Politics and Ideology

From the perspective of mainstream social science, attempts to develop a Marxist or end-of-ideology model were seen as themselves ideological or “value-laden.” It was felt that political inquiry needed to rid itself of particular partisan commitments to be scientific in its study of political phenomena. For example, Giovanni Sartori argues that ideology is a useful explanatory concept and effective in political mass mobilization, whereas Clifford Geertz and Michael Freeden conceive of ideology as a cultural and cognitive map of symbols to render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful. All these thinks see ideology as an indispensable component of modern politics but ideology also can be subject to criticism from non-ideological perspectives.

A more pejorative conception of ideology can be found in the works of Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), Kenneth Minogue (1930-), and Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). These thinkers contend that ideology is characterized by a claim to insight that is superior to all competitors and akin to religion, Like religion, it defines the criteria used to distinguish true and false claims that are only known to an elite whose role is to dispel the false consciousness of the people, even if this requires violence. Ideologues can justify this action because they demand that people privilege one claim of identity at the expense of all others, and this privileged identity – whether it is race, gender, or class – becomes the sole basis of political organization.

Disciplines such as psychology have also influenced the study of ideology. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s (1901-1981) psychoanalysis theory, Slavoj Žižek argues that ideology is necessary illusion that imposes the appearance of coherence over the trauma and dislocation of social life. Unlike Marxists, Žižek does not believe a real state of things exists behind the illusion: there is only the illusion. Thus, the function of ideology is to mask traumatic social division in hostile fantasies. For example, a fascist society’s inability to achieve its full harmonious state is projected on the figure of the Jew, who is perceived as disrupting the communal order.

Religious Ideology

Religion has also played a role in shaping ideologies, particularly in the political ideology of Christian democracy that emerged in the late nineteenth-century and that continues to be influential in the twenty-first-century in Europe and Latin America. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum gave birth to the Christian democratic movement that called for the right of workers to organize, the protection of private property, and the rejection of both communism and unrestricted capitalism. Subsequent encyclicals such as Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Centesimus Annus 1991) called for the reconstruction on social, cultural, and moral issues while advocating a social marker economy that is based on the family.

Religion also shaped the ideologies of clerical fascism, corporatism, and liberation theology, although these ideologies largely diminished in power and influence. Clerical fascism and corporatism were primarily associated with the regimes of Benito Mussolini’s (1883-1945) Italy, Francisco Franco’s (1892-1975) Spain, and Antonio de Oliverira Salar’s (1889-1970) Portugal; whereas liberation theology was coined by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez and affected Latin American politics during the 1960s to the 1980s. However, the power and influence of these ideological movements diminished after the collapse of the fascist regimes and the condemnations of liberation theology by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984 and 1986.

References

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Aron, Raymond. The Opium of the Intellectuals. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001.

Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

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Freeden, Michael. Ideology: A Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the last Man. New York:  Free Press, 2006.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Giddens, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 1994.

Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks, edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg. Translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Translated and edited by Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988.

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John Paull II. Centesimus annus. [Encyclilcal On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum novarum]. May 1, 1991.  http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html.

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Lipset, Seymour Martin. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1981.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, “German Ideology.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, 5: 35-61.  London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm.

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Sartori, Giovanni. “Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems.” American Political Science Review 63 (1969): 398-411.

Smith, Christian. The Emergence of Liberation Theology:  Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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This essay was originally published with the same title in Robert L. Fastiggi, ed., The New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012-13: Ethics and Philosophy (Gale Publishers, 2013), 431-33.

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