Ideology Society Written by: Maurice Cranston • ©2016 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Ideology, a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it. This article describes the nature, history, and significance of ideologies in terms of the philosophical, political, and international contexts in which they have arisen. Particular categories of ideology are discussed in the articles socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism. • Origins and characteristics of ideology The word first made its appearance in French as idéologie at the time of the French Revolution, when it was introduced by a philosopher, A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, as a short name for what he called his “science of ideas,” which he claimed to have adapted from the epistemology of the philosophers John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for whom all human knowledge was knowledge of ideas. The fact is, however, that he owed rather more to the English philosopher Francis Bacon, whom he revered no less than did the earlier French philosophers of the Enlightenment. It was Bacon who had proclaimed that the destiny of science was not only to enlarge human knowledge but also to “improve the life of men on earth,” and it was this same union of the programmatic with the intellectual that distinguished Destutt de Tracy’s idéologie from those theories, systems, or philosophies that were essentially explanatory. The science of ideas was a science with a mission: it aimed at serving people, even saving them, by ridding their minds of prejudice and preparing them for the sovereignty of reason. Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idéologues devised a system of national education that they believed would transform France into a rational and scientific society. Their teaching combined a fervent belief in individual liberty with an elaborate program of state planning, and for a short time under the Directory (1795–99) it became the official doctrine of the French Republic. Napoleon at first supported Destutt de Tracy and his friends, but he soon turned against them, and in December 1812 he even went so far as to attribute blame for France’s military defeats to the influence of the idéologues, of whom he spoke with scorn. Thus ideology has been from its inception a word with a marked emotive content, though Destutt de Tracy presumably had intended it to be a dry, technical term. Such was his own passionate attachment to the science of ideas, and such was the high moral worth and purpose he assigned to it, that the word idéologie was bound to possess for him a strongly laudatory character. And equally, when Napoleon linked the name of idéologie with what he had come to regard as the most detestable elements in Revolutionary thought, he invested the same word with all of his feelings of disapprobation and mistrust. Ideology was, from this time on, to play this double role of a term both laudatory and abusive not only in French but also in German, English, Italian, and all the other languages of the world into which it was either translated or transliterated. Some historians of philosophy have called the 19th century the age of ideology, not because the word itself was then so widely used, but because so much of the thought of the time can be distinguished from that prevailing in the previous centuries by features that would now be called ideological. Even so, there is a limit to the extent to which one can speak today of an agreed use of the word. The subject of ideology is a controversial one, and it is arguable that at least some part of this controversy derives from disagreement as to the definition of the word ideology. One can, however, discern both a strict and a loose way of using it. In the loose sense of the word, ideology may mean any kind of action-oriented theory or any attempt to approach politics in the light of a system of ideas. Ideology in the stricter sense stays fairly close to Destutt de Tracy’s original conception and may be identified by five characteristics: (1) it contains an explanatory theory of a more or less comprehensive kind about human experience and the external world; (2) it sets out a program, in generalized and abstract terms, of social and political organization; (3) it conceives the realization of this program as entailing a struggle; (4) it seeks not merely to persuade but to recruit loyal adherents, demanding what is sometimes called commitment; (5) it addresses a wide public but may tend to confer some special role of leadership on intellectuals. In this article the noun ideology is used only in its strict sense; the adjective ideological is used to refer to ideology as broadly defined. On the basis of the five features above, then, one can recognize as ideologies systems as diverse as Destutt de Tracy’s own science of ideas, the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, communism and several other types of socialism, fascism, Nazism, and certain kinds of nationalism. That all these “-isms” belong to the 19th or 20th century may suggest that ideologies are no older than the word itself—that they belong essentially to a period in which secular belief increasingly replaced traditional religious faith. Seventeenth-century England occupies an important place in the history of ideology. Although there were then no fully fledged ideologies in the strict sense of the term, political theory, like politics itself, began to acquire certain ideological characteristics. The swift movement of revolutionary forces throughout the 17th century created a demand for theories to explain and justify the radical action that was often taken. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) is an outstanding example of literature written to justify individual rights against absolutism. This growth of abstract theory in the 17th century, this increasing tendency to construct systems and discuss politics in terms of principles, marks the emergence of the ideological style. In political conversation generally it was accompanied by a growing use of concepts such as right and liberty—ideals in terms of which actual policies were judged. Hegel and Marx Although the word ideology in the sense derived from Destutt de Tracy’s understanding has passed into modern usage, it is important to notice the particular sense that ideology is given in Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, where it is used in a pejorative way. Ideology there becomes a word for what these philosophers also call “false consciousness.” G.W.F. Hegel argued that people were instruments of history; they enacted roles that were assigned to them by forces they did not understand; the meaning of history was hidden from them. Only the philosopher could expect to understand things as they were. This Hegelian enterprise of interpreting reality and reconciling the world to itself was condemned by certain critics as an attempt to provide an ideology of the status quo, in that if individuals were indeed mere ciphers whose actions were determined by external forces, then there was little point in trying to change or improve political and other circumstances. This is a criticism Karl Marx took up, and it is the argument he developed in Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The German Ideology) and other earlier writings. Ideology in this sense is a set of beliefs with which people deceive themselves; it is theory that expresses what they are led to think, as opposed to that which is true; it is false consciousness. Marx, however, was not consistent in his use of the word ideology, for he did not always use the term pejoratively, and some of his references to it clearly imply the possibility of an ideology being true. Twentieth-century Marxists, who frequently discarded the pejorative sense of ideology altogether, were content to speak of Marxism as being itself an ideology. In certain communist countries, “ideological institutes” were established, and party philosophers were commonly spoken of as party ideologists. Marxism is an excellent example, a paradigm, of an ideology. The political context Ideology, rationalism, and romanticism If some theorists emphasize the kinship between ideology and various forms of religious enthusiasm, others stress the connection between ideology and what they call rationalism, or the attempt to understand politics in terms of abstract ideas rather than of lived experience. Like Napoleon, who held that ideology is par excellence the work of intellectuals, some theorists are suspicious of those who think they know about politics because they have read many books; they believe that politics can be learned only by an apprenticeship to politics itself. Such people are not unsympathetic to political theories, such as Locke’s, but they argue that their value resides in the facts that are derived from experience. Michael Oakeshott in England described Locke’s theory of political liberty as an “abridgment” of the Englishman’s traditional understanding of liberty and suggested that once such a conception is uprooted from the tradition that has given it meaning it becomes a rationalistic doctrine or metaphysical abstraction, like those liberties contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which were so much talked about after the French Revolution but rarely actually enjoyed, in France or elsewhere. Whereas Oakeshott saw ideology as a form of rationalism, Edward Shils, a U.S. political scientist, saw it more as a product of, among other things, romanticism with an extremist character. His argument was that romanticism has fed into and swelled the seas of ideological politics by its cult of the ideal and by its scorn for the actual, especially its scorn for what is mediated by calculation and compromise. Since civil politics demands both compromise and contrivance and calls for a prudent self-restraint and responsible caution, he suggested that civil politics is bound to be repugnant to romanticism. Hence Shils concluded that the romantic spirit is naturally driven toward ideological politics. Ideology and terror The “total” character of ideology, its extremism and violence, have been analyzed by other critics, among whom the French philosopher-writer Albert Camus and the Austrian-born British philosopher Sir Karl Popper merit particular attention. Beginning as an existentialist who subscribed to the view that “the universe is absurd,” Camus passed to a personal affirmation of justice and human decency as compelling values to be realized in conduct. An Algerian by birth, Camus also appealed to what he believed to be the “Mediterranean” tradition of moderation and human warmth and joy in living as opposed to the “northern” Germanic tradition of fanatical, puritan devotion to metaphysical abstractions. In his book L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel), he argued that the true rebel is not the person who conforms to the orthodoxy of some revolutionary ideology but a person who could say “no” to injustice. He suggested that the true rebel would prefer the politics of reform, such as that of modern trade-union socialism, to the totalitarian politics of Marxism or similar movements. The systematic violence of ideology—the crimes de logique that were committed in its name—appeared to Camus to be wholly unjustifiable. Hating cruelty, he believed that the rise of ideology in the modern world had added enormously to human suffering. Though he was willing to admit that the ultimate aim of most ideologies was to diminish human suffering, he argued that good ends did not authorize the use of evil means. A somewhat similar plea for what he called “piecemeal social engineering” was put forward by Popper, who argued that ideology rests on a logical mistake: namely the notion that history can be transformed into science. In Logik der Forschung (1934; The Logic of Scientific Discovery), Popper suggested that the true method of science was not one of observation, hypothesis, and confirmation but one of conjecture and experiment, in which the concept of falsification played a crucial role. By this concept he meant that in science there is a continuing process of trial and error; conjectures are put to the test of experiment, and those that are not falsified are provisionally accepted; thus there is no definitive knowledge but only provisional knowledge that is constantly being corrected. Popper saw in the enterprise of ideology an attempt to find certainty in history and to produce predictions on the model of what were supposed to be scientific predictions. Ideologists, he argued, because they have a false notion of what science is, can produce only prophecies, which are quite distinct from scientific predictions and which have no scientific validity whatever. Though Popper was well disposed toward the idea of a “scientific” approach to politics and ethics, he suggested that a full awareness of the importance of trial and error in science would prompt one to look for similar forms of “negative judgment” elsewhere. By no means are all ideologists explicit champions of violence, but it is characteristic of ideology both to exalt action and to regard action in terms of a military analogy. Some observers have pointed out that one has only to consider the prose style of the founders of most ideologies to be struck by the military and warlike language that they habitually use, including words like struggle, resist, march, victory, and overcome; the literature of ideology is replete with martial expressions. In such a view, commitment to an ideology becomes a form of enlistment so that to become the adherent of an ideology is to become a combatant or partisan. In the years that followed World War II, a number of ideological writers went beyond the mere use of military language and made frank avowals of their desire for violence—not that it was a new thing to praise violence. The French political philosopher Georges Sorel, for example, had done so before World War I in his book Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence). Sorel was usually regarded as being more a fascist than a socialist. He also used the word violence in his own special way; by violence Sorel meant passion, not the throwing of bombs and the burning of buildings. Violence found eloquent champions in several black militant writers of the 1960s, notably the Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon. Moreover, several of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s dramatic writings turn on the theme that “dirty hands” are necessary in politics and that a person with so-called bourgeois inhibitions about bloodshed cannot usefully serve a revolutionary cause. Sartre’s attachment to the ideal of revolution tended to increase as he grew older, and in some of his later writings he suggested that violence might even be a good thing in itself. In considering Sartre’s views on the subject of ideology it must be noted that Sartre sometimes used the word ideology in a sense peculiarly his own. In an early section of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason), Sartre drew a distinction between philosophies and ideologies in which he reserved the term philosophy for those major systems of thought, such as the rationalism of Descartes or the idealism of Hegel, which dominate people’s minds at a certain moment in history. He defined an ideology as a minor system of ideas, living on the margin of the genuine philosophy and exploiting the domain of the greater system. What Sartre proposed in this work was a revitalization and modernization of the “major philosophy” of Marxism through the integration of elements drawn from the “ideology,” or minor system, of existentialism. What emerged from the book was a theory in which the existentialist elements are more conspicuous than the Marxist. Ideology and pragmatism A distinction is often drawn between the ideological and the pragmatic approach to politics, the latter being understood as the approach that treats particular issues and problems purely on their merits and does not attempt to apply doctrinal, preconceived remedies. Theorists have debated whether or not politics has become less ideological and whether a pragmatic approach can be shown to be better than an ideological one. On the first question, there seemed to be good reason for thinking that after the death of Stalin and the repudiation of Stalinism by the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, at least, was becoming more interested in the “pragmatic” concerns of national security and the balance of power and less interested in the ideological aim of fostering universal communism. This in turn seemed to many to have resulted—in both the United States and the Soviet Union—in a shift toward a pragmatic policy of coexistence and a peaceful division of spheres of influence. There were indications in many countries that the old antagonisms between capitalist and socialist ideologies were giving way to a search for techniques for making a mixed economy work more effectively for the good of all. But while many observers believed that there was much evidence of a decline of ideology in the latter 1950s, others believed that there were equally manifest signs in the following decade of a revival of ideology, if not within the major political parties, then at least among the public generally. Throughout the world various left-wing movements emerged to challenge the whole ethos on which pragmatic politics was based. Not all these ideologies were coherent, and none possessed the elaborate intellectual structure of the 19th-century ideologies; but together they served to demonstrate that the end of ideology was not yet at hand. As suggested earlier, certain controversies about ideology have to some extent been rooted in the ambiguity of the word itself, and this is perhaps especially relevant to the confrontation between ideology and pragmatism, since the word pragmatism raises problems no less intractable than those involved in connection with the word ideology. In the senses outlined at the beginning of this article, ideology is manifestly not the only alternative to pragmatism in politics, and to reject ideology would not necessarily be to adopt pragmatism. Ordinary language does not yet yield as many words as political science needs to clarify the question, and it becomes necessary to introduce such expressions as belief system, or to name the relevant distinctions, to further the analysis. Almost any approach to politics constitutes a belief system of one kind or another. Some such belief systems are more structured, more ordered, and generally systematic than others. Though an ideology is a type of belief system, not all belief systems are ideologies. One person’s belief system may consist of a congeries of ill-assorted prejudices and inarticulate assumptions. Another’s may be the result of deep reflection and careful study. It is sometimes felt to be convenient to speak of a belief system of this latter type as a philosophy or, better, to distinguish it from philosophy in the technical or academic sense, as a Weltanschauung (literally, a “view of the world”). The confrontation between ideology and pragmatism may be more instructive if it is translated into a distinction between the ideological and the pragmatic, taking these two adjectives as extremes on a sliding scale. From this perspective, it becomes possible to speak of differences of degree, to speak of an approach to politics as being more or less ideological, more or less pragmatic. At the same time it becomes possible to speak of a belief system such as liberalism as lending itself to a variety of forms, tending at the one extreme toward the ideological, and at the other toward the pragmatic. Ideology of the Cold War What came to be called the Cold War in the 1950s must be understood, to a large extent, as an ideological confrontation, and, whereas communism was manifestly an ideology, the “noncommunism,” or even the “anticommunism,” of the West was negatively ideological. To oppose one ideology was not necessarily to subscribe to another, although there was a strong body of opinion in the West that felt that the free world needed a coherent ideology if it was to successfully resist an opposing ideology. The connection between international wars and ideology can be better expressed in terms of a difference of degree rather than of kind: some wars are more ideological than others, although there is no clear boundary between an ideological and nonideological war. An analogy with the religious wars of the past is evident, and there is indeed some historical continuity between the two types of war. The Christian Crusades against the Turks and the wars between Catholics and Protestants in early modern Europe have much in common with the ideological conflicts of the 20th century. Religious wars are often communal wars, as witness those between Hindus and Muslims in India, but an “ideological” element of a kind can be discovered in many religious wars, even those narrated in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), in which the people of Israel are described as fighting for the cause of righteousness— fighting, in other words, for a universal abstraction as distinct from a local and practical aim. In the past this “ideological” element has in the main been subsidiary. What is characteristic of the modern period is that the ideological element became increasingly dominant, first in the religious wars (and the related diplomacy) that followed the Reformation and then in the political wars and diplomacy of the 20th century. Ideology Society Written by: Maurice Cranston • ©2016 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Ideology, a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it. This article describes the nature, history, and significance of ideologies in terms of the philosophical, political, and international contexts in which they have arisen. Particular categories of ideology are discussed in the articles socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism. • Origins and characteristics of ideology The word first made its appearance in French as idéologie at the time of the French Revolution, when it was introduced by a philosopher, A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, as a short name for what he called his “science of ideas,” which he claimed to have adapted from the epistemology of the philosophers John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for whom all human knowledge was knowledge of ideas. The fact is, however, that he owed rather more to the English philosopher Francis Bacon, whom he revered no less than did the earlier French philosophers of the Enlightenment. It was Bacon who had proclaimed that the destiny of science was not only to enlarge human knowledge but also to “improve the life of men on earth,” and it was this same union of the programmatic with the intellectual that distinguished Destutt de Tracy’s idéologie from those theories, systems, or philosophies that were essentially explanatory. The science of ideas was a science with a mission: it aimed at serving people, even saving them, by ridding their minds of prejudice and preparing them for the sovereignty of reason. Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idéologues devised a system of national education that they believed would transform France into a rational and scientific society. Their teaching combined a fervent belief in individual liberty with an elaborate program of state planning, and for a short time under the Directory (1795–99) it became the official doctrine of the French Republic. Napoleon at first supported Destutt de Tracy and his friends, but he soon turned against them, and in December 1812 he even went so far as to attribute blame for France’s military defeats to the influence of the idéologues, of whom he spoke with scorn. Thus ideology has been from its inception a word with a marked emotive content, though Destutt de Tracy presumably had intended it to be a dry, technical term. Such was his own passionate attachment to the science of ideas, and such was the high moral worth and purpose he assigned to it, that the word idéologie was bound to possess for him a strongly laudatory character. And equally, when Napoleon linked the name of idéologie with what he had come to regard as the most detestable elements in Revolutionary thought, he invested the same word with all of his feelings of disapprobation and mistrust. Ideology was, from this time on, to play this double role of a term both laudatory and abusive not only in French but also in German, English, Italian, and all the other languages of the world into which it was either translated or transliterated. Some historians of philosophy have called the 19th century the age of ideology, not because the word itself was then so widely used, but because so much of the thought of the time can be distinguished from that prevailing in the previous centuries by features that would now be called ideological. Even so, there is a limit to the extent to which one can speak today of an agreed use of the word. The subject of ideology is a controversial one, and it is arguable that at least some part of this controversy derives from disagreement as to the definition of the word ideology. One can, however, discern both a strict and a loose way of using it. In the loose sense of the word, ideology may mean any kind of action-oriented theory or any attempt to approach politics in the light of a system of ideas. Ideology in the stricter sense stays fairly close to Destutt de Tracy’s original conception and may be identified by five characteristics: (1) it contains an explanatory theory of a more or less comprehensive kind about human experience and the external world; (2) it sets out a program, in generalized and abstract terms, of social and political organization; (3) it conceives the realization of this program as entailing a struggle; (4) it seeks not merely to persuade but to recruit loyal adherents, demanding what is sometimes called commitment; (5) it addresses a wide public but may tend to confer some special role of leadership on intellectuals. In this article the noun ideology is used only in its strict sense; the adjective ideological is used to refer to ideology as broadly defined. On the basis of the five features above, then, one can recognize as ideologies systems as diverse as Destutt de Tracy’s own science of ideas, the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, communism and several other types of socialism, fascism, Nazism, and certain kinds of nationalism. That all these “-isms” belong to the 19th or 20th century may suggest that ideologies are no older than the word itself—that they belong essentially to a period in which secular belief increasingly replaced traditional religious faith. Seventeenth-century England occupies an important place in the history of ideology. Although there were then no fully fledged ideologies in the strict sense of the term, political theory, like politics itself, began to acquire certain ideological characteristics. The swift movement of revolutionary forces throughout the 17th century created a demand for theories to explain and justify the radical action that was often taken. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) is an outstanding example of literature written to justify individual rights against absolutism. This growth of abstract theory in the 17th century, this increasing tendency to construct systems and discuss politics in terms of principles, marks the emergence of the ideological style. In political conversation generally it was accompanied by a growing use of concepts such as right and liberty—ideals in terms of which actual policies were judged. Hegel and Marx Although the word ideology in the sense derived from Destutt de Tracy’s understanding has passed into modern usage, it is important to notice the particular sense that ideology is given in Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, where it is used in a pejorative way. Ideology there becomes a word for what these philosophers also call “false consciousness.” G.W.F. Hegel argued that people were instruments of history; they enacted roles that were assigned to them by forces they did not understand; the meaning of history was hidden from them. Only the philosopher could expect to understand things as they were. This Hegelian enterprise of interpreting reality and reconciling the world to itself was condemned by certain critics as an attempt to provide an ideology of the status quo, in that if individuals were indeed mere ciphers whose actions were determined by external forces, then there was little point in trying to change or improve political and other circumstances. This is a criticism Karl Marx took up, and it is the argument he developed in Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The German Ideology) and other earlier writings. Ideology in this sense is a set of beliefs with which people deceive themselves; it is theory that expresses what they are led to think, as opposed to that which is true; it is false consciousness. Marx, however, was not consistent in his use of the word ideology, for he did not always use the term pejoratively, and some of his references to it clearly imply the possibility of an ideology being true. Twentieth-century Marxists, who frequently discarded the pejorative sense of ideology altogether, were content to speak of Marxism as being itself an ideology. In certain communist countries, “ideological institutes” were established, and party philosophers were commonly spoken of as party ideologists. Marxism is an excellent example, a paradigm, of an ideology. The political context Ideology, rationalism, and romanticism If some theorists emphasize the kinship between ideology and various forms of religious enthusiasm, others stress the connection between ideology and what they call rationalism, or the attempt to understand politics in terms of abstract ideas rather than of lived experience. Like Napoleon, who held that ideology is par excellence the work of intellectuals, some theorists are suspicious of those who think they know about politics because they have read many books; they believe that politics can be learned only by an apprenticeship to politics itself. Such people are not unsympathetic to political theories, such as Locke’s, but they argue that their value resides in the facts that are derived from experience. Michael Oakeshott in England described Locke’s theory of political liberty as an “abridgment” of the Englishman’s traditional understanding of liberty and suggested that once such a conception is uprooted from the tradition that has given it meaning it becomes a rationalistic doctrine or metaphysical abstraction, like those liberties contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which were so much talked about after the French Revolution but rarely actually enjoyed, in France or elsewhere. Whereas Oakeshott saw ideology as a form of rationalism, Edward Shils, a U.S. political scientist, saw it more as a product of, among other things, romanticism with an extremist character. His argument was that romanticism has fed into and swelled the seas of ideological politics by its cult of the ideal and by its scorn for the actual, especially its scorn for what is mediated by calculation and compromise. Since civil politics demands both compromise and contrivance and calls for a prudent self-restraint and responsible caution, he suggested that civil politics is bound to be repugnant to romanticism. Hence Shils concluded that the romantic spirit is naturally driven toward ideological politics. Ideology and terror The “total” character of ideology, its extremism and violence, have been analyzed by other critics, among whom the French philosopher-writer Albert Camus and the Austrian-born British philosopher Sir Karl Popper merit particular attention. Beginning as an existentialist who subscribed to the view that “the universe is absurd,” Camus passed to a personal affirmation of justice and human decency as compelling values to be realized in conduct. An Algerian by birth, Camus also appealed to what he believed to be the “Mediterranean” tradition of moderation and human warmth and joy in living as opposed to the “northern” Germanic tradition of fanatical, puritan devotion to metaphysical abstractions. In his book L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel), he argued that the true rebel is not the person who conforms to the orthodoxy of some revolutionary ideology but a person who could say “no” to injustice. He suggested that the true rebel would prefer the politics of reform, such as that of modern trade-union socialism, to the totalitarian politics of Marxism or similar movements. The systematic violence of ideology—the crimes de logique that were committed in its name—appeared to Camus to be wholly unjustifiable. Hating cruelty, he believed that the rise of ideology in the modern world had added enormously to human suffering. Though he was willing to admit that the ultimate aim of most ideologies was to diminish human suffering, he argued that good ends did not authorize the use of evil means. A somewhat similar plea for what he called “piecemeal social engineering” was put forward by Popper, who argued that ideology rests on a logical mistake: namely the notion that history can be transformed into science. In Logik der Forschung (1934; The Logic of Scientific Discovery), Popper suggested that the true method of science was not one of observation, hypothesis, and confirmation but one of conjecture and experiment, in which the concept of falsification played a crucial role. By this concept he meant that in science there is a continuing process of trial and error; conjectures are put to the test of experiment, and those that are not falsified are provisionally accepted; thus there is no definitive knowledge but only provisional knowledge that is constantly being corrected. Popper saw in the enterprise of ideology an attempt to find certainty in history and to produce predictions on the model of what were supposed to be scientific predictions. Ideologists, he argued, because they have a false notion of what science is, can produce only prophecies, which are quite distinct from scientific predictions and which have no scientific validity whatever. Though Popper was well disposed toward the idea of a “scientific” approach to politics and ethics, he suggested that a full awareness of the importance of trial and error in science would prompt one to look for similar forms of “negative judgment” elsewhere. By no means are all ideologists explicit champions of violence, but it is characteristic of ideology both to exalt action and to regard action in terms of a military analogy. Some observers have pointed out that one has only to consider the prose style of the founders of most ideologies to be struck by the military and warlike language that they habitually use, including words like struggle, resist, march, victory, and overcome; the literature of ideology is replete with martial expressions. In such a view, commitment to an ideology becomes a form of enlistment so that to become the adherent of an ideology is to become a combatant or partisan. In the years that followed World War II, a number of ideological writers went beyond the mere use of military language and made frank avowals of their desire for violence—not that it was a new thing to praise violence. The French political philosopher Georges Sorel, for example, had done so before World War I in his book Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence). Sorel was usually regarded as being more a fascist than a socialist. He also used the word violence in his own special way; by violence Sorel meant passion, not the throwing of bombs and the burning of buildings. Violence found eloquent champions in several black militant writers of the 1960s, notably the Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon. Moreover, several of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s dramatic writings turn on the theme that “dirty hands” are necessary in politics and that a person with so-called bourgeois inhibitions about bloodshed cannot usefully serve a revolutionary cause. Sartre’s attachment to the ideal of revolution tended to increase as he grew older, and in some of his later writings he suggested that violence might even be a good thing in itself. In considering Sartre’s views on the subject of ideology it must be noted that Sartre sometimes used the word ideology in a sense peculiarly his own. In an early section of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason), Sartre drew a distinction between philosophies and ideologies in which he reserved the term philosophy for those major systems of thought, such as the rationalism of Descartes or the idealism of Hegel, which dominate people’s minds at a certain moment in history. He defined an ideology as a minor system of ideas, living on the margin of the genuine philosophy and exploiting the domain of the greater system. What Sartre proposed in this work was a revitalization and modernization of the “major philosophy” of Marxism through the integration of elements drawn from the “ideology,” or minor system, of existentialism. What emerged from the book was a theory in which the existentialist elements are more conspicuous than the Marxist. Ideology and pragmatism A distinction is often drawn between the ideological and the pragmatic approach to politics, the latter being understood as the approach that treats particular issues and problems purely on their merits and does not attempt to apply doctrinal, preconceived remedies. Theorists have debated whether or not politics has become less ideological and whether a pragmatic approach can be shown to be better than an ideological one. On the first question, there seemed to be good reason for thinking that after the death of Stalin and the repudiation of Stalinism by the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, at least, was becoming more interested in the “pragmatic” concerns of national security and the balance of power and less interested in the ideological aim of fostering universal communism. This in turn seemed to many to have resulted—in both the United States and the Soviet Union—in a shift toward a pragmatic policy of coexistence and a peaceful division of spheres of influence. There were indications in many countries that the old antagonisms between capitalist and socialist ideologies were giving way to a search for techniques for making a mixed economy work more effectively for the good of all. But while many observers believed that there was much evidence of a decline of ideology in the latter 1950s, others believed that there were equally manifest signs in the following decade of a revival of ideology, if not within the major political parties, then at least among the public generally. Throughout the world various left-wing movements emerged to challenge the whole ethos on which pragmatic politics was based. Not all these ideologies were coherent, and none possessed the elaborate intellectual structure of the 19th-century ideologies; but together they served to demonstrate that the end of ideology was not yet at hand. As suggested earlier, certain controversies about ideology have to some extent been rooted in the ambiguity of the word itself, and this is perhaps especially relevant to the confrontation between ideology and pragmatism, since the word pragmatism raises problems no less intractable than those involved in connection with the word ideology. In the senses outlined at the beginning of this article, ideology is manifestly not the only alternative to pragmatism in politics, and to reject ideology would not necessarily be to adopt pragmatism. Ordinary language does not yet yield as many words as political science needs to clarify the question, and it becomes necessary to introduce such expressions as belief system, or to name the relevant distinctions, to further the analysis. Almost any approach to politics constitutes a belief system of one kind or another. Some such belief systems are more structured, more ordered, and generally systematic than others. Though an ideology is a type of belief system, not all belief systems are ideologies. One person’s belief system may consist of a congeries of ill-assorted prejudices and inarticulate assumptions. Another’s may be the result of deep reflection and careful study. It is sometimes felt to be convenient to speak of a belief system of this latter type as a philosophy or, better, to distinguish it from philosophy in the technical or academic sense, as a Weltanschauung (literally, a “view of the world”). The confrontation between ideology and pragmatism may be more instructive if it is translated into a distinction between the ideological and the pragmatic, taking these two adjectives as extremes on a sliding scale. From this perspective, it becomes possible to speak of differences of degree, to speak of an approach to politics as being more or less ideological, more or less pragmatic. At the same time it becomes possible to speak of a belief system such as liberalism as lending itself to a variety of forms, tending at the one extreme toward the ideological, and at the other toward the pragmatic. Ideology of the Cold War What came to be called the Cold War in the 1950s must be understood, to a large extent, as an ideological confrontation, and, whereas communism was manifestly an ideology, the “noncommunism,” or even the “anticommunism,” of the West was negatively ideological. To oppose one ideology was not necessarily to subscribe to another, although there was a strong body of opinion in the West that felt that the free world needed a coherent ideology if it was to successfully resist an opposing ideology. The connection between international wars and ideology can be better expressed in terms of a difference of degree rather than of kind: some wars are more ideological than others, although there is no clear boundary between an ideological and nonideological war. An analogy with the religious wars of the past is evident, and there is indeed some historical continuity between the two types of war. The Christian Crusades against the Turks and the wars between Catholics and Protestants in early modern Europe have much in common with the ideological conflicts of the 20th century. Religious wars are often communal wars, as witness those between Hindus and Muslims in India, but an “ideological” element of a kind can be discovered in many religious wars, even those narrated in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), in which the people of Israel are described as fighting for the cause of righteousness— fighting, in other words, for a universal abstraction as distinct from a local and practical aim. In the past this “ideological” element has in the main been subsidiary. What is characteristic of the modern period is that the ideological element became increasingly dominant, first in the religious wars (and the related diplomacy) that followed the Reformation and then in the political wars and diplomacy of the 20th century. IDEOLOGY Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit. Mason Cooley The shortest dictionary definition of ideology has to be “visionary theorizing”. Given, however, that “theory” is usually taken to mean something like “constructing rational models of an observed phenomenon” – how can this exercise be, at the same time, visionary? Therein, of course, is the rub. Ideology is, on the one hand, a theoretical ordering of observed reality; but it is, on the other, an active (indeed – activist) ordering. It tells us what the world is like, but it also takes sides, by telling us what is wrong with the world and how to fix it. Such an explanation is “visionary” by virtue of the simple fact that it is situated in the future – the envisaged time when the wrongs of the world will be put right. But ideology is not simply fiction or wishful thinking. It must be rooted in observable reality and this is hinted by the suffix –logy at the end, derived from the Greek logos, meaning (among other things) “reason”. This active, future-oriented nature of the concept is behind the classic dictionary definition of ideology as “a set of beliefs, especially the political beliefs on which people, parties, or countries base their actions”. Political means “things relating to the wellbeing of the polis” (i.e. the political community); and so an expanded definition of ideology would read something like: “a set of explanations which outline a better future for people, organized as a political community”. Michael Freeden, the noted student of ideology, reminds us: “We produce, disseminate, and consume ideologies all our lives, whether we are aware of it or not.” There is a reason for this: “Ideologies… map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the worlds we inhabit.” The term “ideology” was coined by a French Enlightenment aristocrat called Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (1754-1836). He advocated “ideology” as a science, which could not only explain the world, but also point to its shortcomings and ways to remedy them, i.e. – could change the world. Destutt’s investigation of ideology led him to conclude that all political doctrine should be judged by reason and reason alone; that a republican form of government was preferable to a monarchy; and that the state should not interfere in the economy. These conclusions got him in trouble with Napoleon, who as Emperor could not afford to agree with any of them. So the Emperor entered the philosophical battle field and, rather successfully, managed to turn “ideology” into a term of abuse. Karl Marx (1818-1883) followed Napoleon by describing Destutt as a “fishblooded bourgeois doctrinaire”, but his irritation with ideology stemmed from entirely different grounds. Together with his partner Friedrich Engels (18201895), Marx was convinced that almost everything people knew about the world was false – an “ideology” imposed on them by a ruling class that was interested, not in objective knowledge, but in keeping the workers, exploited by that class, from asking uncomfortable questions. "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” wrote Marx and Engels. “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production." The outcome, for the working people, was that they looked at the world through a “false consciousness”. And it fell to people like Marx and Engels (who called themselves “Communists”) to help the working people see through the illusions of ideology; and recognize that their interest lies in overthrowing the ruling class, abolishing private property and constructing a society, where nobody rules anybody else and everything is everybody’s. Through the second half of the 19th century, “ideology” continued to labour under the label “distorted view of reality”. Political thinkers and parties avoided using the word and, while in reality being heavily ideological, preferred to use other words to denote their packages of ideas, such as “programme”, “manifesto”, “platform” and even “philosophy”. Things changed after the First World War. That war was such a catastrophe for all involved that people came to the conclusion that there was something very wrong with the way the world’s politics were constructed. The search for an answer to questions, such as “What went wrong?” and “How to fix it?” produced a new age of ideology. The new political movements and parties shrugged off the old stigma on ideology as “false consciousness” and began claiming that an ideology (theirs, of course) could be a “correct” or even a “scientific” description of the world. In Italy, for Mussolini’s Fascists claimed that what was wrong was the existence of political parties, who divided the nation and weakened its state. The Fascists produced an ideology, which placed the State above everything else: “The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative,” adding, for greater clarity: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. In that State, people are represented – not via competing political parties, but via “corporations” (professional guilds). Employers are represented as employers, workers – as workers, farmers – as farmers and so on. On top of all this stands the one Party that embodies the unity of the State. In Soviet Russia, Stalin’s Communists believed that what was wrong with the world was the existence of private property and the division of society into two classes: those who had private property; and those who did not (and were therefore forced to work for those who did). The ruling class was abolished, as was private property, along with the entire political edifice of “capitalist democracy”, such as independent media, rule of law, human rights and political parties. This regime was called “dictatorship of the proletariat” and was described, by Stalin himself, as “the tightest and mightiest form of state authority that has ever existed in history.” Based on this ideology, the Communists evolved a state structure similar to that of the Fascists. There being no parties, people were to be represented through their workplace organizations, called “Soviets”, who sent representatives to the “Grand Soviet” sitting in the capital city. On top of this construction was placed the one Party, which embodied the interests of the working people. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazis (National Socialists) believed that what was wrong with the world was that its “races” were not properly situated one towards the other. The Nazis believed that there were superior and inferior races; and that the superior ones were by right the rulers of the inferior. But under the rule of democracy, races were all jumbled up together, leading to chaos and degradation. The Germans, thought the Nazis, were a superior “Aryan” race; and were, therefore, rightfully obliged to dominate inferior races, such as Jews and Slavs. But, under democracy, the German “race” had been penetrated by Jews and Slavs, who were degrading the Germans. Hitler himself wrote: “All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word 'man.'” By definition, therefore, all non-Aryans were not “man”, not truly human or, in the Nazis’ own word – “untermenschen”, under-human. What needed to be done, therefore, was to cleanse Germany of inferior races; and then assert Germany’s right to rule over all countries populated by inferior races. In order to do this, the united German people needed to be cleansed from the divisions of democracy and competing political parties, as well as of independent media and rule of law (because both placed superior and inferior races on the same footing). On top of this, as with the Fascists and the Communists, stood the one Party, embodying the historical destiny of the Aryan German “race”. All of these “scientific” ideologies were extremely war-like and ultimately produced the Second World War, giving “ideology” a bad name again. Post-war political parties avoided using this term, returning to words such as “programmes”, “platforms” and, increasingly, “policies”. In 1960, a celebrated thinker, Daniel Bell (1919-2011) even published an influential collection of essays, called “The End of Ideology”. The non-Stalinist Left, however, focused closely on the term “ideology” in order to understand what it in fact may mean. Even before the Second World War, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), languishing in one of Mussolini’s prisons, came up with a novel concept, overturning Marx’s idea of “false consciousness”, as well as the newer concepts of “scientific” ideology. Gramsci came to the conclusion that it was not necessarily the case that the dominant ideas of a given time were those of the ruling class. It is true, argued Gramsci, that most of the time they were; but not always and not inevitably. Quite simply, the dominant ideas of an age represented a hegemony of someone’s ideas. That “someone” could be the ruling class; but could also not be the ruling class. Therefore, if one was to struggle against the ruling class, one could first try to acquire “hegemony” – i.e. to ensure that her ideas were seen as natural and common-sensical by society; and then attack the privileged groups and classes on the grounds of common sense. Ultimately, today’s PR industry is one of the outcomes of this “hegemonic” approach to ideology. Without any linkage with Gramsci’s prison writings (which became known only at the end of the 1960s), a Leftist circle of thinkers known as the “Frankfurt School” also explored the problematic of ideological hegemony (without calling it that). These thinkers evolved, by the 1960s, an approach known as “Critical Theory”, described by one of its authors, Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) as a theory that is critical to the extent that it seeks “human emancipation from slavery”, acts as “a liberating influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings. Critical theory was in the business of: explaining what is wrong with the world; identifying the actors to change it; and providing clear norms for criticism and a strategic framework for social transformation. The ultimate core of the theory, according to Horkheimer, was that it “has as its object human beings as producers of their own historical form of life”. Or, as modern social anthropologists would have it – human beings as “authors” of their own lives, rather than as actors playing out someone else’s script for their lives. Critical theory, we see, was a classic piece of “ideology” – an activist explanation of the world. Together with Gramsci, however, the critical theorists were convinced that the production of ideology was not inevitably the domain of the ruling class. Anybody could do it – anybody could join the battle of ideas for the future of their society. And, in the 1960s, many people did. In the USA, Critical Theory informed much of the struggles for civic rights, as well as the various attempts by the hippie “Movement” to reconstruct America along new lines. In Western Europe, the student rebellions in France and elsewhere were attacking the powers-thatbe from the position of new ideas of personal liberation. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, whole nations confronted the dominant Communist ideology and demanded that they be the authors of their own lives, rather than playing out scripts written in the Kremlin. Suddenly, everyone was in the business of trying to attain “ideological hegemony” – something which set the stage for the gradual return of “ideology’ to the world of politics and government. In the Communist East of Europe, the official package of ideas, underpinned by the totalitarian dictatorships, had lost its hegemony by the beginning of the 1980s. In spite of all efforts on the part of the dictators, by that time it had become “common sense” that communism was a failure; and had no future. “Hegemony” had been attained by those who were critical of the communist system, although they had no access to the media and no right to form political parties or movements. By the time Communism was openly challenged, in the destruction of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, there was nobody left who believed in the system enough to defend it. This situation immediately led to another burst of “end-of-ideology” thinking. Weeks before the fall of the Wall, the American thinker Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) attained instant fame when he published an essay titled “The End of History”. In it, he argued that all arguments as to the best way to organize human life – all ideology and, indeed, all “history” – ended with the demise of the Communist ideology. Liberal democracy and the market economy would, from here on, be unchallenged. We are witnesses, wrote Fukuyama, to “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” To his credit, he did foresee that some form of militant Islam may, at some point in the future, rise to challenge this new hegemony; but he did not really believe it possible. For a while, the world behaved as if, indeed, all ideological arguments were, once and for all, over. In politics, Left and Right agreed on more or less the same policies and packages of ideas, structured around the concepts dominant at the moment of the fall of the Wall – i.e. concepts arising out of a Right-Conservative interpretation of the world, as best formulated by the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and American President Ronald Reagan. Everyone joined in the celebration of the death of ideology, while unconsciously producing new ideologies. One example is the European Union’s ambition for an “ever-closer union”, published in 2000. This was a typical ideological exercise, outlining what was wrong with the current situation (not enough coordination between the policies of member states) and providing a solution (ever-closer union). Another example were the economic policies, dominant from the end of the 1990s in Europe and the USA. These policies believed that what was wrong with the economy was too much state interference; and that what needed to be done was – to withdraw the state from the economy (“deregulation”). “Ideology”, nevertheless, continued to be a dirty word in politics, replaced increasingly by “pragmatism”: the idea that there was nothing basically wrong in the world and that government and politics were, therefore, a matter of fixing various problems arising. This way of thinking continued until the attacks, mounted on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, signaled that there was, indeed, an Islamist challenge to the then current hegemony. By 2008, when policies fuelled by the celebration of the free market produced the largest-ever world financial crisis, few believed that ideology was truly dead. To compound matters, a few years later Russia declared itself in ideological opposition to liberal democracy and in 2013 invaded, by force of arms, a neighbouring country, Ukraine, which had declared its allegiance to liberal democracy. A handful of countries, run by dictators, followed Russia’s lead and also declared themselves free of the “liberal-democratic ideology”. By 2015, there was much that was obviously wrong with the world; and challenges to the hegemony of liberal democracy and market economy were multiplying around the globe. As people today search for answers to the usual questions in such situations – “What went wrong?; “How to fix it?” – ideology is back (if it ever truly went away).
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