sciousness and not the other way around. For Marx and Engels, it is the changing historical conditions that are fundamental Anu Saksena to the formation of ideas. Engels added that
We have been told on two occasions over the last 50 years that the “age of ideology” or the “age of history” has come to an end. While both these debates were met with a great deal of scepticism, it was nevertheless felt that contemporary ideological debate would centre around questions of identity and ethnicity and not on the role of government in the economy. The current global economic crisis has brought ideological debates back to the forefront. It has revived ideological debates on the role of government in the economy and demonstrated that ideology will continue to play a central role in economic and political life.
Anu Saksena [] is a freelance writer based in Singapore.
Economic & Political Weekly
What Is Ideology
The term ideology is one of the most contentious terms in the vocabulary of social sciences. Few terms have been subject to as much debate and controversy. The term ideologie was coined by the French philosopher Antoine Destutt in the midst of the French Revolution to signify a “science of ideas”. However, the association of ideology with science was short-lived and the term quickly degenerated into a pejorative term. The first major figure to use the term in a pejorative way was Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had initially been sympathetic to Tracy’s work. However, after becoming emperor he caricatured Tracy’s group as “ideologues”, denouncing them as armchair metaphysicians who wished to reform the world only in their heads while nonetheless trying to undermine political authority. [He was influenced both by his desire to seek the support of traditional groups, notably the Catholic Church, and a growing realisation that emotive forms of politics could help underpin his dictatorial rule.] Napoleon thus began a long line of critics who were to associate ideology with traits such as simplistic analysis, divorced from reality and/or an authoritarian desire to improve people’s lives [Eatwell and Wright 1993: 2].
The concept of ideology was further invested with a pejorative meaning, albeit in a different sense by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Adopting a materialist conception of history, Marx believes that it
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ideology was nothing but “false consciousness”. Comparing ideo logy to the “camera obscura” in the German Ideology, they argue that ideology offers an “upside-down” or “inverted” vision of reality.
The most influential Marxist statement on ideology appears in the German Ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas, i e, the class which is
the material force of society, is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force. The class
which has the means of material production
at its disposal has control at the same time
over the means of mental production, so that
thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those
who lack the means of mental production
are subject to it [Marx and Engels 1974: 64].
Thus ideology was all about delusion and falsehood as it concealed the reality of class exploitation and served the interests of the ruling class. Marx did not believe that his own ideas were ideology; instead they were based on a scientific understanding of society. Therefore, while ideology was false or inverted reality, Marx’s own theories were scientific as they had uncovered the contradictions of society. In Marxist thought we thus see the contrast between ideology and science and falsehood and truth. Marx believed that a classless society would be devoid of ideology as the proletariat will not need any illusions, thus treating ideology as a temporary feature of class societies.
A move away from classical Marxist understanding of ideology was seen in the works of later Marxists like V I Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. The pejorative connotations associated with ideology were discarded. For them, ideologies were a set of ideas which served or embodied the interests of particular social classes. Every social class produces its own ideology, so it is possible to speak of “proletarian ideology” as well as “bourgeois ideology”. These ideologies could be true or false, right or wrong and therefore the distinction in classical Marxism between science and ideology was lost. Lenin in What Is to be Done? [1921] described
NOTES
socialism as the ideology of the proletariat and believed that it would help in developing working class consciousness. Later Marxists also saw in ideology one of the factors behind the unexpected resilience of capitalism. Gramsci believed that people are not ruled by force alone but by ideas. In Gramsci’s view, the “hegemony” of the bourgeois lay in its dominance of civil society, which included all the organisations which diffused the ideology of the ruling class. Althusser claimed that ideology is the cement that binds human societies and gives people a sense of identity. Therefore, ideology would always be present even in a communist society.
Non-Marxist Conceptions
One of the earliest attempts to construct a non-Marxist conception of ideology was undertaken by German sociologist Karl Mannheim, who witnessed the disintegration of the German Weimar Republic in the 1920s. In this period of intense ideological debate, Mannheim, particularly in his major work Ideology and Utopia [1936], was moved to confront and explore the nature of ideological discourse. Mannheim derived his basic premise from Marx that ideas arise in the context of our social existence; our political outlooks are conditioned by the concrete settings in which they arise. But Mannheim opposed the Marxist tendency to debunk ideological positions by unmasking the selfish motives and hidden interests that underlie them. Marxists, he believes, tend to trivialise ideology into a sinister conspiracy. Ideas, Mannheim argues, are not much distorted by social interests as they are shaped by them. Only when it becomes clear to us that our political ideas are an inherent and unavoidable part of the global social pro cess will the concept of ideology be rescued from its debasing political use. However, the problem with Mannheim’s concept of ideology is his struggle with relativism. If all ideas are equally conditioned by social context, can any perspective be spoken of as superior to others? It leads us to the problematic relativist conclusion that there are no general standards by which to judge ideas [Susser 1995: 19-20].
A pejorative understanding of ideology was also seen amongst thinkers on the other end of the ideological spectrum. Several mainstream social scientists in the period after the second world war felt that political inquiry needed to rid itself of particular partisan commitments in order to offer a “value free” and scientific way of explaining political phenomena. In one influential example, Giovanni Sartori in his article “Politics, Ideology and Belief Systems” [1969] expresses a sceptical attitude towards ideology as inherently totalitarian and potentially dispensable. He proposes that ideological belief systems can be distinguished from pragmatic belief systems. Pragmatic belief systems are practicallyminded and open to revision in the light o experience, where ideological belief systems privilege the authority of theory over practice and are resistant to revision in the light of experience. It is worth noting that, while officially “value-free”, this conception of ideology as close minded, manipulative, etc, is laden with negative connotations, and that the examples of ideology in Sartori’s article are Marxism, socialism and communism. By contrast, liberalism is acquitted of the charge of being an ideology [Festenstein and Kenny 2005: 10-11].
A similar attitude towards ideology is also seen in Kenneth Minogue’s article “Ideology after the Collapse of Communism” [1994]. Minogue defines ideology as the project of creating social perfection by managing society, based on the belief that human beings are homogeneous and malleable. Like others before him, Minogue also a creates a distinction between ideo logy, using Marxism as a model ideology, and liberalism. Comparing ideology to religion, he says all ideologies claim total knowledge and superiority to all competitors, including science, philosophy and history. He dubs the relationship between ideologues or elites and masses as a “tutorial relationship”, with the ideologues seeking to “correct the masses”. Describing ideologies as “salvationist doctrines”, he blames them for much of the turmoil of the last two centuries, while adding that western liberal governments by keeping ideological ambitions at bay have avoided much of the turmoil.
The Anthropological Idea
While the concept of ideology has been subject to a great deal of critique, there are others who have sought to free it from its negative connotations. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz put the view that ideologies are like cultural maps, sets of symbols that render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful for those experiencing them. Ideologies are born and come into conflict where societies are in the throes of change, from revolutionary France to post-colonial states such as Indonesia and Morocco. No longer able to rely on spontaneous responses or on established images of social order, people in periods of social disruption require a way of orienting
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august 8, 2009 vol xliv No 32
themselves to their social world that is at once free of tradition [including myth and religion] but able to mobilise some of the collective beliefs and sentiments that tradition shaped and secured. For Geertz, as for Althusser, ideology is a way in which an underlying functional problem of social dissonance is managed by and for people but the causes of this dissonance are thought to lie in secularisation and the breakdown of traditional order rather than in class conflict. Geertz views ideology both as an indispensable component of modern political life, and also as subject to criticism from non-ideological perspectives [Festenstein and Kenny 2005: 11].
In a similar vein, Michael Freeden in his writings, particularly through his editorship of the Journal of Political Ideologies, defends the concept of ideology and strives to free it from its pejorative connotations. Freeden defines ideologies as inventive and imaginative representations of social reality. They play an important role in the fashioning of group identities and policies and are therefore an ineliminable fact of social life. Arguing for the centrality of ideologies in politics, he says they provide ideational resources from which political systems draw. Political ideologies offer decision-making frameworks without which political action cannot occur. Ideologies compete with one another over which set of concepts is the most powerful for understanding society and over the formation of public policy. Refuting the belief that ideologies are rigid or closed systems of thought, he believes that ideologies do not have a severely unbending structure. Despite holding on to some nonnegotiable contentions [for example, liberalism’s belief in human rights or distributive justice], ideologies display sufficient plasticity and are not plagued by rigidity of thinking. According to Freeden, the flexibility of ideologies has led to indeterminate ideational combinations.
End of Ideology
We have been told on two occasions over the last 50 years that the age of ideology has come to an end. The “end of ideology” thesis was put forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s by social scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils and Raymond Aron, who
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celebrated the demise of radical ideologies in the west. The thesis was based on the belief that ideological conflict had come to an end, at least in the advanced, industrialised societies of the west. These thinkers believed that while the communist bloc posed an external threat, it did not offer any serious ideological threat to the west where a pragmatic and socially responsible form of liberalism had triumphed. Politics was believed to be characterised by a broad agreement amongst major political parties and the absence of ideological debate.
As Daniel Bell [1960: 397] wrote:
Few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down ‘blueprints’ and through ‘social engineering’ bring about a new utopia of social harmony. At the same time, the older ‘counter-beliefs’ have lost their intellectual force as well. Few ‘classic’ liberals insist that the state should play no role in the economy, and few serious conservatives, at least in England and on the continent, believe that the Welfare State is ‘the road to serfdom’. In the Western world, therefore, there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State, the desirability of decentralised power; a system of mixed economy and of pluralism. In that sense, too, the ideological age has ended.
Lipset also believed that western societies in the post-second world war period had eliminated the need for ideologies since they had solved the fundamental political and economic problems of the industrial revolution that created these ideologies. There was a belief that basic agreement on political values had been achieved and politics was now more about peripheral, pragmatic adjustments. Lipset [1969: 406-08]:
This very triumph of the democratic social revolution of the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies to motivate them to political action.... the democratic struggle will continue, but it will be a fight without ideologies, without red flags, without May Day parades.
The initial impetus to the “end of ideology” derived from three main sources. First, there was a clear belief in the 1950s among a generation that had lived through the 1930s and 1940s – with the wars, Nazism, Stalinism – that ideological politics was a set of dangerous delusions and was at the root of much of the pain, misery and warfare of the mid-20th century. These
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apparent delusions focused on Marxism-Leninism in the cold war period. Second, in spite of the fact that ideologies serve a function in developing societies, it was held that in industrialised democratic societies they no longer served anything more than a decorative role. Most of the major parties in industrialised societies had achieved, in the welfare, mixed economic structure, the majority of their aims. The “end of ideology” thesis was in part a partial reflection of the improvements and growth of western economies in the 1950s. Third, the end of ideology debate coincided with an attempt on the part of sociologists, American sociologist in particular, to construct a “science” of society, in place of superstition. In some ways this was a partial return to Tracy, although the terminology had changed. In Tracy, ideology was the science to unravel superstitions. In the social sciences of the 1950s, ideology was the superstition which needed unravelling. The development of empirical social science demanded a valuefree rigour, scepticism, empirical verification or falsification, unsullied by the emotional appeals of ideological or even normative political theory [Vincent 1995: 11-12].
Ideology as Totalitarianism
The prevailing belief that “politics” was distinct from ideology resonated with the “end of ideology” thesis. Ideology denoted a totalitarian mentality which prevented all political discussion other than on its own content. Ideology was considered distinct from a pluralist, free, tolerant and rational society where “politics” takes place. W riters as diverse as Ralph Dahrendorf, J L Talmon, Bernard Crick, Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, in their different ways, all spoke of “totalising ideologies” and closed societies [fascism and communism], as distinct from tolerant civil politics and open societies. Ideology, in this reading, becomes an intolerant and limited perspective in comparison to forms of non-ideological, open and tolerant p olitics. In this total context it was therefore argued that ideology had ended in advanced, industrialised democratic s ocieties [ibid 10, 12].
The collapse of communism in eastern Europe led to the reinvention of the end of ideology thesis, albeit in a different form. Francis Fukuyama in his essay “The
NOTES
End of History” [1992] put forward the claim that the collapse of communism in eastern Europe marked the demise of Marxism-Leninism as an ideology of any significance and the triumph of western liberal capitalism. By the “end of history”, Fukuyama did not imply that “occurrence of events” had come to an end but that the history of ideas and with it ideological debates had ended. He derived his conception of history from Hegel, who believed that “end of history” would come about when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. For Fukuyama, western liberal capitalism represented this final stage in the evolutionary process [Fukuyama 1992: XII].
According to Fukuyama, advances in modern science have led to an increasing homogenisation of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. The linking of such societies through global markets has lead to the emergence of a universal consumer culture. Thus the ‘‘logic of modern natural science’’ leads to capitalism rather than socialism. Fukuyama argues that while in many cases authoritarian states have achieved high rates of economic growth, it is man’s ‘‘struggle for recognition’’ that provides the ‘‘missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics’’. What differentiates man from animals is his desire not merely for material prosperity but a desire to live with dignity.
...this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognising their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realisation that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition [ibid: XV-XX].
Fukuyama’s “endism” is subject to a variety of objections. He has been criticised, particularly, for his one-sided reading of developments in the third world [Susser 1995: 14]. Michael Freeden says that it is not uncommon to hear liberalism being described as history’s winner, without much consideration of the variant of liberalism that has supposedly won, or of the widespread disaffection in the industrialised world with the costs of liberal capitalism, of the other kinds of ideology predominant in much of Asia, or sweeping across the Muslim world or, perforce, of the criteria for winning the ideological competition [Freeden 2001a: 8].
The very notion of winning runs counter not only to an open-ended notion of time, but to the pluralism and occasional fragmentation that complex societies display. A given ideology may win a temporary offensive with respect to one of its components, while losing a range of other battles. Marxism may have prevailed in introducing social determinism into the equations of human nature and political action, and in pointing the way towards the present-day currency of globalisation, but other intellectual outposts it claimed victory over – for example, the negation of the division of labour, or the inevitability of historical development – have since been abandoned. Liberalism may have introduced the concept of human rights to all civilised forms of historical discourse, but failed to convince us of some of its other tenets: the power of individual human rationality or the inviolable sanctity of private property [Freeden 2001b: 8-9].
Thus, the “end of ideology” and “end of history” debates are themselves ideological, displaying a faith in western liberalism. At different stages in the course of the last two centuries we have been informed of the inevitable triumph of Marxism, free market capitalism or social democracy. Such proclamations do not imply the demise of history but underscore the fact that ideologies and ideological debates are a permanent feature of political life.
Ideology and the Global Economic Recession
All ideologies are the product of crises of one kind or another. Periods of change and upheaval have brought about the birth of new ideologies and the reorienting of old ideologies. The late 20th century and the 21st century has witnessed the emergence of two significant ideologies – environmentalism and Islamic fundamentalism – in response to the problem of environmental degradation and the growing sense of alienation amongst Muslims. The world now finds itself in the midst of another crisis – global economic recession – that has been compared by some economists to the Great Depression of the 1930s. While its immediate cause may have been mortgage
august 8, 2009
defaults in the US, it has raised fundamental questions not only on the working of free market capitalism and the role of government in the economy, but also deeper questions about the susceptibility of human nature to greed and avarice.
Until recently it was believed that contemporary ideological debate would centre around questions of identity, ethnicity and nationality and not on the role of government in the economy. However, the global economic meltdown has brought ideological debate on the state and the economy back to the forefront. The crisis, which began with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, quickly spread to Europe and other parts of the world, including Asia. It has affected people from all walks of life throughout the world due to lost economic output and lost jobs. Financial institutions have seen their capital depleted by losses and write downs, forcing governments to bailout larger institutions deemed “too big to fail”. Trillions of dollars have been spent in providing liquidity support, recapitalisation, guarantees and insurance to stem the meltdown. The economic slowdown has been blamed on the bursting of the housing market bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis. However, those on the other side of the ideological spectrum say that its real cause is the increasing deregulation of the financial markets and the excesses of freemarket capitalism. They believe that the financial crisis is merely a symptom of another deeper crisis that is a systemic crisis of capitalism itself.
Greater government has become the inevitable reaction to this crisis. It has brought about significant ideological shifts among intellectuals and policymakers. Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, has refashioned himself from a free market ideologue into a champion of intensive financial regulation. In his last column for the Financial Times before joining the Obama administration, Summers said the pendulum “should now swing towards an enhanced role for government in saving the market system from its excesses and inadequacies’’ [Hirsh and Thomas 2009: 19]. However, others like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman believe that the action taken by the Obama administration has been
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piecemeal in nature and have called for fundamental financial reforms. Krugman, who is ideologically a European Social Democrat, says that the government must guarantee the liabilities of all the nation’s banks and nationalise the big “zombie” banks – and do it fast [Thomas 2009: 13]. These developments show that capitalistbashing is no longer confined to the Far Left. President Obama’s recovery plan has consisted of $787 bn stimulus package to create jobs, a $275 bn plan to rescue the housing sector, and a public-private initiative to soak up $1 trillion in bad bank assets. The package has led to fierce ideological debate in the US, with social democrats like Krugman saying that it is not enough and libertarian conservatives s aying that Obama is turning the US into a socialist state.
Until the financial crisis began last year, leaders in continental Europe had been told by the Americans and the British that their economies were sclerotic, overregulated and too state-dominated, and that to prosper in true Anglo-Saxon style they needed a dose of free-market reforms. The continental countries have not escaped the recession, yet American and British leaders have admitted that in some ways continental Europe has coped well. Tough job protection laws have slowed the rise of unemployment. Generous welfare states have protected those who are always the first to suffer in a downturn and acted as part of the “automatic stabilisers” that expand budget deficits when consumer spending shrinks. In Britain and to an even greater extent in America people have felt more exposed. The downturn has confirmed that the continental model with its comparatively efficient public sector has its strengths [The Economist 2009: 13]. One of the more lasting effects of this crisis will be a steady shift towards the European ideology of social democracy, based on governance, regulation and paternalism.
Although China is often said to lack “soft power”, many of its ideas on economics and governance are also coming into ascendance and being looked favourably by the west. In this model, the government continues to benefit from the international market but retains power over the economy’s “commanding heights” through strict
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control over the financial sector, restrictive government procurement policies and selective curbs on import of goods and services [Holsag 2009: A14]
The impact of the economic crisis is likely to be long-term and far-reaching. It has unleashed competing forces that are both progressive and reactionary. One such reactionary response has been the problem of protectionism which could further deepen the crisis. Most countries have resorted to populist measures erecting to deal with the crisis. Far from heeding their pledges not to erect trade barriers, many countries have raised import duties or passed stimulus measures packed with trade distorting subsidies. Russia has raised tariffs on used cars, China has tightened import standards on food, Argentina has tightened licensing requirements on auto parts, textile and leather goods. A number of countries, most notably the US, are subsidising their embattled automakers. The most vivid example of that policy is the “Buy America” clause in the US, stimulus package, which was intended to ensure that only American manufacturers benefited from public spending projects. Though the Obama administration persuaded the Congress to water it down, protectionism has reared its ugly head and could slow down the process of globalisation.
The economic slowdown has led to rising poverty and unemployment, thereby creating the prospect of greater social instability. It could even strengthen xenophobic feelings and strengthen fundamentalist sentiments. According to a study on “Muslim Integration since the 11 September 2001 Attacks’’, conducted by the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies, economic insecurity is a more potent source of tension between Muslims and wider European and American society than religious d ifferences. Attacks by Islamic extremists on the US and European capitals such as London and Madrid have sparked debate about whether a failure of Muslims to integrate into western society has fuelled fundamentalism. The study on around 30,000 people in 27 countries claims that most Muslims are happy to live alongside people of other faiths and want to be a part of the wider community. However, despite their desire to belong only a small number of
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Muslims in Britain – 10% – consider themselves integrated into British society. That compares with 46% of Muslims in France and 35% in Germany. The global economic crisis could exacerbate such issues, with competition for jobs and resources adding stress to race relations [Associated Press 2009: C 20].
Conclusion
To sum up, debates over the causes of the global economic crisis and the best strategy to manage it have demonstrated that ideology will continue to play a central role in modern economic and political life. Though the vitality of capitalism is not being questioned, currently, we are witnessing the rising ascendency of social democracy as a more socially responsible alternative to free market capitalism. We may also witness the birth of new ideological groupings that cut across ideological families. Ideologies will continue to provide us with the resources to link theory with action and to make sense of the confusing and conflict-ridden world that we live in. Far from being on the wane, we can be certain that ideologies and ideological debate are well and alive.
References
Associated Press [2009]: “Muslims and Westerners Divided by Poverty Not Religion”, The Straits Times, 9 May: C20.
Bell, Daniel [1960]: The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties [New York: Collier Books].
Eatwell, R and A Wright ed. [1993]: Contemporary Political Ideologies [London: Pinter Publishers].
Festenstein, Mathew and Michael Kenny [2005]: Political Ideologies [Oxford: Oxford University Press].
Freeden, Michael, ed. [2001a]: Reassessing Political Ideologies, The Durability of Dissent [London: Rouledge].
– [2001b]: “Editorial: What Is Special about Ideologies?”, Journal of Political Ideologies, 6 [1]. Fukuyama, Francis [1992]: The End of History and the Last Man [London: Penguin Books]. Hirsh, Michael and Evans Thomas [2009] “The Re Education of Larry Summers”, Newsweek, 2 March: 10. Holsag, Jonathan [2009]: “The Rise of the Beijing Consensus”, The Straits Times, 20 April: A14. Lipset, Seymour [1969]: Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics [Heineman: London]. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels [1974]: The German Ideology [London: Lawrence and Wishart].
Minogue, K [1994]: “Ideology after the Collapse of Communism” in A Shtromas [ed.], The End of Isms? [Oxford: Blackwell].
Susser, Bernard [1995]: Political Ideology in the Modern World [Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon]. The Economist [2009]: “A New Pecking Order”, 9-15 May: 13. Thomas, Evan [2009]: “Obama’s Nobel Headache”, Newsweek, 6-13 April: 13. Vincent, Andrew [1995]: Modern Political Ideologies [Oxford: Blackwell].