Ideology

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Ideology

The previous edition of this Encyclopedia contains two entries devoted to Ideology, one on its concept and function by Edward Shils, the other on “Ideology and the Social System” by Harry M. Johnson, which taken together well illustrate the difficulties involved in achieving a common understanding of the term’s meaning. Shils’s contribution is quite stipulative and opinionated. After distinguishing ideologies from “outlooks and creeds, systems and movements of thought, and programs” (p. 66), it asserts that “all ideologies—whether progressive or traditional, revolutionary or reactionary—entail an aggressive alienation from the existing society,” that “participation in the routine life of the civil political order is alien to the ideological spirit” (p. 68), and that no great ideology has ever considered itself obliged to respect the modern, scientific spirit in its quest for truth (p. 73). Johnson, while apparently agreeing to some extent with this final assertion of Shils’s and offering some important observations about the historical role of the concept, is most concerned to explore the role of ideologies within the theoretical framework developed by Talcott Parsons. Nevertheless, however unscientific it may be thought to be, the term ideology has come to play a very prominent role in the discourses of virtually all of the social sciences, so that it is essential to attempt to clarify its meaning(s).

ORIGINAL MEANING

The simple original sense of the term, first deployed by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, was, parallel with the Greek-based names of so many academic disciplines, the study of ideas. Tracy’s intention, as a materialist philosopher, was systematically to map the material origins or causes of the ideas in people’s heads, and to this end he directed the short-lived Institut de France where such research was undertaken. It briefly enjoyed the favor of Napoleon Bonaparte, who later turned against it. Upon returning from his defeat in Russia in 1812, Napoleon denounced ideology, in an address to the Conseil d’Etat, as a dark metaphysics, dedicated to a subtle search for first causes upon which to base laws. Rather, he urged, laws should be based on a knowledge of the human heart and on the lessons of history. Ideology, he concluded, was responsible for all the misfortunes that had befallen “our beautiful France” (“notre belle France ”). In other words, for Napoleon the problem with ideology—quite paradoxically, in light of some contemporary conceptions of it—was that it was based on an excessively scientific philosophy. Since that time, the term ideology has never entirely escaped the pejorative connotations that Napoleon imposed upon it.

Karl Marx and his lifelong colleague Friedrich Engels wrote a lengthy, highly polemical manuscript entitled The German Ideology in which this pejorative sense predominated. Although it was to be the better part of a century before this product of the mid-1840s was published in full, its core notion of ideology was reflected in other works of theirs, such as The Communist Manifesto (1848), and thus became a part of the broad Marxist tradition. According to this notion, ideologies are large thought-systems (e.g., metaphysics, morality, and religion) that in reality have their basis in human beings’ material life-processes, but that mistakenly come to be regarded as independent of the latter and as having a superior life of their own, as supposedly eternal verities. Just such an assumption had been central to the thinking of Hegel, the most influential philosopher during Marx’s early years, who saw history itself as the work and self-realization of a supra-material reality that he called Absolute Spirit, and who tried to show in some detail just how this was so. For Marx and Engels, ideologies typically have the conservative effect of justifying existing relationships of dominance and subordination; thus, according to them, it was not surprising to find contemporary “bourgeois ideologists” defending the capitalist system as the highest and best possible, or in Hegel’s terms as “the end of history.” However, at a time of crisis, which they declared their own era to be, a certain segment of the bourgeois ideologists are able correctly to grasp the movement of history and go over to the side of the subordinate class, the proletariat. In this way, readers might infer, members of this enlightened group (among whom they obviously included themselves) succeed in overcoming and getting beyond ideology.

AMBIGUITIES

But there is sufficient ambiguity in The German Ideology to explain why some of Marx’s intellectual heirs—especially so-called “orthodox Marxists” of the Soviet era—could employ the word ideology in a more positive sense, even referring uncritically to “Marxist ideology” in official textbooks of dialectical materialism. Louis Althusser, a French Marxist theorist who exerted considerable influence during a brief period in the 1960s, regarded ideology as an all-pervasive, inescapable phenomenon, one that is closely connected with Freud’s notion of the “Unconscious”: Ideology, for Althusser, is the mechanism by which, through their imaginations, individuals relate themselves to human existence in different historical epochs. At the same time, Althusser distinguished ideology from science—the latter being, for him, a set of objective concepts detached from interests, the brilliant discovery of which within the domain of history he located in the later work of Marx. (In a very interesting anticipation of what is essentially the same idea—to wit, that there is a strong conceptual contrast to be drawn between science and what others have called ideology—Thorstein Veblen, when discussing the increasingly dominant role of science in the modern world, had also suggested that the continued coexistence, along with science, of more romantic and dramatic as well as pragmatic ways of thinking may be a human necessity.)

By contrast, in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s the Marxist psychologist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, at once an admirer and a strong critic of Freud, continued to treat ideologies as predominantly negative, repressive phenomena. At the margins of Marxist thinking later in the twentieth century, the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault rejected Althusser’s science/ideology dichotomy and increasingly distanced himself from “ideology critique” in favor of minute, detailed examinations of actual disciplinary and other practices in which there are uneven distributions of power. According to Foucault, relations of dominance and subordination cannot be explained primarily in terms of what neo-Marxist partisans of ideology critique, such as Reich, like to call “false consciousness.”

This same basic ambiguity has also pervaded much of the non-Marxist literature on the subject. Max Weber, clearer than most in this respect, identified two senses of ideology, the first consisting of a reflection of the dominant thought of a given time, the other being the pejorative sense of a manipulative distortion of reality. Johnson, in his previously mentioned Encyclopedia article, makes a small, parenthetical concession to this tradition of ambiguity by explaining that, while from his standpoint the expression ideological distortion is strictly speaking redundant (because all ideology is for him distortive), nevertheless he would continue to use the full expression, “since this technical meaning of ‘ideology’ is not universally established” (p. 77).

Among treatments of ideology that have been of greatest importance for the social sciences is that of Karl Mannheim, who, in Ideology and Utopia (1929), asserted that, in addition to the “particular” concept of ideology—which equates ideology with a “phenomenon of deception,” or what Mannheim’s Marxist contemporary Georg Lukács called “the reified mind” or more recent thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse often call “false consciousness”—we must also recognize the rise, in modern times, of a “total,” more or less universal concept of it, which sociologists of knowledge can explore across various societies and social groups in an historically “relativizing,” value-neutral way. Mannheim’s advocacy of this kind of theoretically rigorous, scientific, but very broad inquiry seems ultimately to have had the unintended effect of generalizing and “de-fanging” the notion of ideology to such an extent that its contours have become extremely vague and open-ended in much of the more recent literature.

THE “END OF IDEOLOGY”

This tendency was well illustrated in the controversy, which reached its height in the early 1960s, over the alleged “end of ideology.” These words constituted the title of a book by Daniel Bell; other, mainly but not exclusively American, political scientists and sociologists, including Seymour Lipset and Edward Shils, also came to be associated with this idea, which came popularly to be regarded as a literal statement about the then-contemporary historical situation. But, as Shils himself makes quite clear at the end of his Encyclopedia article, neither Bell nor Shils nor most other “end of ideology” scholars intended to make a blanket statement about the demise of ideology in general, as distinguished, at best, from the demise of certain types of ideological thought such as Marxism. This point is particularly well expressed by the fiercely anti-Marxist Raymond Aron at the end of his preface to the new edition of his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals. Aron admits to having previously evoked the end of the age of ideology, and then adds: “But if I detest ideological fanaticism, I like little better the indifference which sometimes succeeds it. … Ten years ago, I thought it necessary to fight ideological fanaticism. Tomorrow it will perhaps be indifference which seems to me to be feared. The fanatic, animated by hate, seems to me terrifying. A self-satisfied mankind fills me with horror” (pp. xv–xvi).

Thus it would appear that social scientists will be unable to dispense with the highly elusive concept of ideology for the foreseeable future, and that, if they ever come to feel that they can, this will probably signify something historically catastrophic.

SEE ALSO Althusser, Louis; Mannheim, Karl; Marxism