Ideology

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IDEOLOGY

Though often employed as a catchall term in contemporary usage, including some philosophers' usage, ideology has a clearly identifiable historical origin and since its invention has borne some clear though disparate meanings (as well as, to be sure, some unclear ones) in several traditions of thought, most notably in the Marxian tradition.

It was Antoine Destutt de Tracy who, toward the end of the eighteenth century, conceived the notion of developing a science of ideas that would trace them back to their supposed material elements. The group around him became known as the Idéologues and at first found favor with Napoleon Bonaparte, whose coup ending the period of the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath they at first applauded. But they soon became his vehement critics (concerning, for example, his policy-driven revival of religion), and Napoleon returned the compliment by denouncing them for, among other things, allegedly indulging in wild ideas rather than respecting the exigencies of the concrete political situation. Thus did "ideologists" become an epithet, an expression of contempt.

As such, the term was picked up and used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels some four decades later. In Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology, 1976), a lengthy work, they lampoon their neo-Hegelian near-contemporaries, notably Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, on the ground that the supposedly weighty disputes of the latter are pseudobattles among merely abstract, primarily theologically based ideas, lacking any influence on, or even much connection with, the actual sociohistorical world. Here, "ideology" is equated with religion, metaphysics, moral theory, and similar products of pure consciousness and is given roughly the same highly pejorative valence, though affixed to an entirely different object, as that formerly given by Napoleon to the objects of his wrath.

But, unlike some of Marx's criticisms of the idealist philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel himself, which were printed during Marx's lifetime, The German Ideology was not actually published, and hence its textual details were not generally known, until 1932. Marx does, however, mention it, in a brief autobiographical sketch that appeared in 1859, as having been the early outcome—one left to the "gnawing criticism of the mice" when the original arrangement to have it published fell through—of his and Engels's newly elaborated systematic opposition to the "ideological" standpoint of German philosophy. At the same time, in their widely circulated Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 they at one point allude to the anticipated defection from class solidarity of a section of the bourgeois class, notably some (though by implication just a few) of the bourgeois ideologists, by virtue of the latter's having achieved a comprehensive overview of the process of history. While this passage is revealing as a veiled self-reference, it is equally interesting for its suggestion that "ideology" can have a positive connotation, as well. Hence the later ambivalence of the term in Marxist and non-Marxist contexts alike is already to be found in the classical writings of the Marxian tradition.

Connotations in Later Marxisms

The pejorative understanding of "ideology," linked as it is to the idea that most philosophers and other intellectuals typically engage in mystificatory, distortive justifications, or legitimizations, of the existing social order with the effect of reinforcing the dominant insitutions of the ruling class of which they are a part, continued to predominate especially in so-called "Western Marxism." By this is meant those strands of neo-Marxist thought that preserved their independence from the Communist Party, based primarily in the Soviet Union from the time of the Russian Revolution until the final decade of the twentieth century, the successive leaders of which stipulated the terms of what they considered to be orthodox Marxist theory.

Western Marxists, accused of "revisionism" by these leaders and their followers, tended rather to consider the wooden, dogmatic style and content of "orthodox Marxist" writings to constitute a serious distortion of Marx's ideas. For example, Herbert Marcuse, a leading figure in the early Frankfurt School in Germany before migrating to the United States, retained, analyzed, and applied the pejorative sense of the term "ideology" both in his 1958 critique of the Soviet Union, Soviet Marxism, and in his early 1960s indictment of Western society as tranquilized, democratic, but profoundly unfree, One-Dimensional Man (1966). Similarly, his erstwhile Frankfurt colleague, Theodor Adorno, another strong social critic, equated "ideology" with "false consciousness" and regarded it as being characteristic of those who are obsessed with enforcing identity and conformity and who fail to respect differences. The best-known member of the "later" Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, while he has diverged from Marxism in a great many respects, has continued to equate ideology with systematically distorted communication, to be combated through what he calls emancipatory critique.

The self-styled "orthodox" Marxists, however, took their cue on the question of the meaning of ideology above all from the Russian revolutionary leader, V. I. Lenin, who in his early call to arms, What Is to Be Done?, insisted that a clear-cut choice had to be made between bourgeois ideology, which he contemned, and "socialist" ideology, which he espoused and thought it necessary for professional revolutionaries to inculcate in the minds of the masses. Most of the subtler thinkers within the orbit of the Communist Party, such as the Hungarian György (Georg) Lukács (1971) and the Italian Antonio Gramsci, also saw ideology as a potentially and at least partially positive phenomenon, with Lukács depicting Marxism as the ideological expression of the proletarian class. One of the most complex and idiosyncratic conceptions of ideology to be developed by someone who was at the time a Communist Party member was that of the once influential French philosopher Louis Althusser (1969): He contrasted ideology with science, of which he saw Marx's theory of history as a leading instance, but at the same time he took ideology to be a pervasive and ineliminable part of human experience, regardless of a given historical society's class configurations.

Non-Marxist Conceptions

In Ideology and Utopia Karl Mannheim (1986), the German sociologist of knowledge who was himself influenced by the early Lukács, distinguished between what he called the "particular" and the "total" concepts of the term, the former being linked with suspicion concerning the motives of others as interested and biased—in other words, "ideology" as more purely pejorative—and the latter characterizing the comprehensive views of many large groups, such as classes, in the modern world. "Ideology" in the latter sense is to be seen as a pervasive historical phenomenon. Espousing a nonevaluative approach to the understanding of diverse worldviews (Weltan-schauungen ) that he denominated "relationism," Mannheim in effect paved the way for the much broader, more all-encompassing, less critical usage of the term "ideology" that has become common.

No treatment of the meandering evolution of this term could pretend to adequacy without noting the curious recurrence of announcements that its supposed referent has, or may have, ceased to exist. Political scientists, such as Seymour Lipset, and other philosophically oriented sociologists, such as Raymond Aron, have evoked this as at least a possibility, but no doubt its most famous assertion occurred in a lengthy tome by Daniel Bell, an American sociologist strongly influenced by the Marx scholar and philosopher turned fervent anticommunist, Sidney Hook. The title of Bell's book, especially its less well-known subtitle, accurately captures its principal claim; it is The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960). Understandably, but rather unfortunately, Bell's main title led to oversimplified interpretations of what he actually intended, which was not an umbrella thesis supposedly applicable to all future times and places.

To some (e.g., Hannah Arendt), ideology means totalitarianism, of which Communist ideology is a salient example; to others (e.g., Edward Shils attempting to define the term in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences ), it means, above all, intolerant belief systems that are by and large inimical to science. It is in any case evident that the confusion and even contradictoriness of meanings of the term that are traceable to its historical origins have continued to characterize its deployment, which remains widespread in the literatures of philosophy, political science, sociology, psychology, literary theory, and even popular journalism despite its alleged demise as a phenomenon at the end of the 1950s.

Evaluation

Apart from those, if there are any, who still share Destutt de Tracy's youthful confidence in the possibility of generating a materialist science of ideas based on an analysis of the origins of their components, it would seem that "ideology" would indeed lose its purpose as a part of our vocabulary if all negative, critical connotations were to be excised from it. At least one important meaning of it remains, and should continue to remain, that of suspect generalized claims, often entire theories, which purport to be true but are in fact intellectual constructions designed to reinforce particular interests, especially the interests of those in power. Although many of those who believe in particular "ideologies" as so understood may do so unreflectively—in an important sense, after all, it is the aim of skilful ideologists to maximize the number of such believers—ideologies in this sense of the word should in the last analysis be capable of being unmasked as sophistic and in bad faith.

But there are a number of philosophical problems involved in elaborating a coherent conception of ideology. The first of these concerns the question of one's basis for designating another's set of propositions or beliefs as ideological: How can one be sure that one's own supposedly critical standpoint is not itself ideological? May it not also be, in the last analysis, merely an elaborate apologia for an alternative special interest aspiring to social dominance? Marx and Engels thought to evade this difficulty by painting the proletariat as the class, the coming to power of which would usher in a classless society, without particular interests or internal relationships of dominance and subordination; hence, they believed, the class consciousness of the proletariat, history's first truly "universal class," should be regarded as radically different in kind from the bourgeois, feudal, and other ideological standpoints of the past. But may this not be just one more intellectual sleight of hand?

Another problem inherent in the conception of ideology as critical and "suspicious" is that of its explicit or implicit tendency to relegate philosophy itself, in its various branches, to the realm of ideology. At times Marx and Engels wrote as if philosophical and other ideas were in fact just epiphenomena, ghostly by-products of a real world of which the "base" consisted of the dominant forces of production; that is, the crafts, industries, and technologies of any given historical period, and the "superstructure" consisted of the political, legal, and other institutions developed in conformity with those forces. This conception, taken to its extreme, would deny that ideological phenomena have any autonomy, any force—in other words, that ideas as such can ever have real consequences. But such a claim runs counter to much of human experience. (Engels himself lived long enough to express regret over this misinterpretation of his views. He located its origin in the long past Zeitgeist of the era when he and Marx had begun formulating their own ideas, an era when the Hegelian and neo-Hegelian idealist philosophies, to which they were so opposed, were in the ascendancy.)

Ultimately, of course, the fundamental problem concerning ideology is the fundamental problem of virtually all of philosophy; that is, the problem of truth itself. How could we ever succeed in assuring ourselves and others, beyond all doubt, that a claim or set of claims that we assert to be an ideological distortion of the "true" state of affairs actually is such? For to do so would presuppose, contrary to all past experience, a complete and comprehensive grasp, on our part, of the true state of affairs.

See also Cosmopolitanism; Postcolonialism; Republicanism.