Introduction show chapter abstract and keywords

Michael Freeden

The study of ideologies is torn between various approaches that have emerged out of different conceptualizations of ideology, causing disarray and confusion among scholars. Appearing mainly as a peculiar and frequently unsavoury expression of distorted and power-serving political thinking, and thus as a point d'appui from which a transformative exposition of social thought and practice can be launched, or as a simplistic classificatory label for broadly based political belief-systems and the historical traditions in which they unfold, ideologies lag in the status stakes behind the high prestige of political philosophy, whether analytical or critical. A central aim of this book is to challenge the current predominant attitudes to ideologies and their scholarly analysis. Its argument will not follow Marxisant schools whose critical notions of ideology constitute attempts to transcend its illusory nature. To adopt that critical disposition is to deflect attention from the product itself and to deflate its status and value both as an intellectual phenomenon and as a means through which social understanding may be attained directly. The thinking encapsulated in ideologies deserves examination in its own right, not merely for what it masks. It should no longer be pigeon-holed as an impoverished and inferior relation of analytical and normative political philosophies. Rather, ideologies are forms of political thought that provide important direct access to comprehending the formation and nature of political theory, its richness, varieties, and subtlety. The academic investigation of ideologies, it will be claimed, must be accorded equal ranking with the study of political philosophy.The current state of affairs, with its exaggerated disjuncture between the two, gives rise to concern. As products, both political philosophy and ideology are genres of political thought that display strong similarities in their morphology

and that may overlap considerably in many of their normative and recommendatory features. As academic modes of construing the social world, the current distanciation of political philosophy as a subdiscipline—in particular, its Anglo-American varieties—from a serious consideration of concrete ideologies has significantly depleted the end p.1methodological tools at the disposal of political theorists. This neglect of ideologies has weakened our comprehension of political thought as a phenomenon reflecting cultural as well as logical constraints. Those constraints operate on the building blocks of political thought, its political concepts. It is all the more perturbing because, as a consequence, the signal capacities of reflectiveness and analytical precision displayed by contemporary political philosophers are channelled—in most individual cases—towards some features of political thought at the expense of others. The following inquiry offers a series of first steps to redress the balance.Traditionally, the exploration of political thought has been organized around the persons who have best expressed coherent political thinking, around the main overarching themes with which it has been concerned, around the formulation of philosophically valid political utterances, or around particular historical periods. But the basic units of thinking about politics are the concepts that constitute its main foci, just as words are the basic units of language, and in this book the argument is put forward that the analysis of political thought, as a scholarly enterprise related to the methodological interests of students of social phenomena, is most usefully promoted by proceeding from the conceptual morphologies it displays.Those internal configurations are detectable embodiments of the political beliefs of political actors, but with some important qualifications. The approach proffered here is not narrowly 'empiricist', in the sense of allowing particular data to dictate an inductivist general theory, as advocated by nineteenth-century positivists. It recognizes that the

meaning of such data depends on frameworks of interpretation. Assigning meaning through such frameworks is a very different process from the reflective yet imaginative creations and speculations of many political theorists and philosophers, conducted at some distance from the manifestations of political thinking they experience around them. It refers to human thought-behaviour that is empirically but indirectly ascertainable to the scholar, through its expression in spoken and written language. 1 Such thought-behaviour invariably includes, but is not identical with, the reflections and conjectures of political philosophers.This study is 'empirical' in that specific sense, while accepting both that the observations required must trace patterns not always discernible to the actors themselves, and that researchers cannot avoid imposing classifications on the subject-matter they end p.2investigate, or shaping aspects of the reality under investigation. Ideologies, it is contended, may be subject to three scholarly perspectives. The first is genetic, in answer to the question: how did a particular set of political views come about? History and evolution are central to this mode of understanding. The second is broadly functional, in answer to the question: what is the purpose, or role (if unintended), of a particular set of political views? The third is semantic, in answer to the question: what are the implications and the insights of a particular set of political views, in terms of the conceptual connections it forms? Which universe of meaning—deliberate as well as unintentional—is constructed by its conceptual configurations? This latter perspective is the one that informs this book, engaged as it is not in the causal or functional explanation of ideologies but in offering an interpretative framework through which to comprehend their concrete manifestations. Such interpretations and understandings, however, must retain links with the perceived historical and sociological realities within which political thinkers, grand and modest, employ the copious

range of political concepts that human cultures have put at their disposal. The analysis of political concepts is not, on this understanding, most usefully pursued by projecting their logical permutations and ethical possibilities in the abstract, often attached to universalizable models—currently the most common method of exploring them—but through locating them within the patterns in which they actually appear. Such patterns are most conveniently known as ideologies, those systems of political thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended, through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they, or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding. 2 Those 'perceived realities' need not constitute the real world, for the reality of that world is only partly germane to the understanding of ideologies. The conscious perceptions, and conscious and unconscious conceptions, of the participants in the social world are the object of our concern and a major, if indeterminate, cause of human conduct, and it is at that level that ideologies operate. In addition the social world is itself, contra the positivists, the end p.3consequence of such perceptions and conceptions and cannot be said to exist entirely independently and objectively of them. The nature of society and its structures, supposedly reflected in ideologies, are themselves partly the product of those ideologies, operating as ways of organizing social reality. One caveat must immediately be registered. True to the above, the views of this scholar cannot be absolved from the limitations of perception and comprehension that apply to all human thought-processes. The test of this study will have to be not in the objective truth of its analysis and methods but in whatever intellectual appeal and utility of perspective it may be deemed to have.Proceeding from the political concept as the unit of analysis in political thought, it is the main thesis of this book that ideologies are distinctive configurations of political concepts, and that they create specific conceptual patterns

from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations. That indeterminate range is the product of the essential contestability of political concepts, and essential contestability provides the manifold flexibility out of which ideological families and their subvariants are constructed. It is a parallel thesis that the furtherance of our understanding of political thinking will be best assisted through comprehending political concepts as obtaining meaning on three dimensions: time, space, and the morphology of their interlinkages, and that these three dimensions have to be integrated in an overarching analytical perspective. While the first two dimensions are commonly used in interpreting political thought, the addition of the third dimension of morphology is a special, though not exclusive, aspect of the approach offered in the following pages. Political concepts acquire meaning not only through accumulative traditions of discourse, and not only through diverse cultural contexts, but also by means of their particular structural position within a configuration of other political concepts. Hence ideologies are none other than the inevitable macroscopic consequence of attributing such meanings to a range of interrelated political concepts. Specific structures of political thinking do not exist prior to meaning but are themselves formed by permissible and legitimated codes and norms at the disposal of a given society, or by challenges to those prevailing codes and norms.Put differently, while the prevailing traditions of studying political thought have focused on truth and epistemology, ethical rightness, logical clarity, origins and causes, prescriptions, purposes and intentions—to name the more salient issues—political thought in its ideological manifestations can more fruitfully be end p.4regarded as a conflation of form and meaning, of the patterns that political thinking displays as a crucial facet of the interpretation and elucidation of its concepts. Those patterns are to be found in the thought-processes that produce political thinking, in its historical instances, in its

cultural representations, and to a lesser extent in its internal logical relations. 3 In contradistinction to preeminent structuralist positions, however, the history of an ideological tradition, the conventions through which it is understood and perceived, and its spatial diversities, must also play a central role in attributing meaning to the ideology in question. This entails superimposing diachronic on synchronic analysis and multiple synchrony on the examination of a single system, as well as appreciating that political concepts combine the contingent and the quasi-contingent. 4 This study does not profess to offer a complete analytical approach to ideologies. It will not, for example, directly emphasize narratives, myths, symbols, idioms, or the affectivity of language—all additional dimensions that can be superimposed on the ideological product. Its main concern is to focus on political concepts and examine how they can illuminate an understanding of ideologies.Because the construction and employment of ideologies are an aspect of political conduct, and the nature of politics is centrally linked to decision-making, the meanings ideologies convey are of a distinct type. From the perspective of conceptual analysis, making a decision relates crucially to bestowing a decontested meaning on a political term. The nature of political thinking is such that any of its instances invokes, intentionally or otherwise, a very large number of the most common political concepts. Thus configurations of necessarily decontested concepts are the sine qua non of thinking rationally about politics—that is, in a minimally organized and purposive way—with a view to political action. Those configurations, or clusters, are ideologies, a term employed irrespective of any pejorative or laudatory connotation it may have acquired, and without pre-empting any possible form that combinations of political concepts may exhibit. Monolithic ideal-types or utopias pursued to their logical conclusions are distinguished by the presence or absence of some fundamental political concepts—a distinction then employed as a taxonomic device. However,

temporally and spatially determinate arenas of political thought end p.5display the presence of most fundamental political concepts, while exhibiting variation and contention—and hence differentiating possibilities—over the specific mixture of the conceptual ingredients, and over their positioning vis-à-vis each other. The choice among political concepts and ideas is hence not necessarily mutually exclusive. Their compatibility depends entirely on the interpretation attached to each concept and the resultant composite structures. Competition over legitimacy is hence not among concepts but among meanings and structures. Nor is it sufficient to approach boundary problems between ideologies as a question of the one 'shading off' into the other. In the course of 'shading-off' important changes take place with respect to the decontestations of, and mutual relationships among, the political concepts in play. It is on this macro-process that analytical scrutiny should focus.While the function of ideologies is to guide practical political conduct, the analysis of ideologies (as distinct from the role assumed by some political philosophers) is not geared to directing or recommending political action. Its purpose is to explain, to interpret, to decode, and to categorize. In so doing it does not claim to offer a correct description of the world of ideologies, nor a complete account of the patterns of political thinking that world incorporates, nor the promise of an archimedal vista of social relations beyond the tarnished sphere of ideologies. It must rest content with holding out the possibility of a plausible, generally applicable, and reasonably comprehensive framework of analysis that is both intellectually and culturally satisfying, but that acknowledges the multiplicity of available perspectives on ideological thought as well as the inevitable gaps in recreating so intricate a phenomenon. 5 The readiness to accept manifold methodological approaches 6 need not result in fragmentation, for they are united by the same

research objective and by the desire to illuminate it with optimal interpretative light.These central characteristics of ideological analysis must not be seen as disadvantages. The following chapters air the proposition that, outside the sphere of political philosophy, which in its Anglo-American versions is engaged primarily in clarifying the consistency and logicality of political thought, in evaluating its validity, and in offering ethical prescriptions, the study of political theory end p.6would attain invigorating impetus and methodological refinement, were it to focus on the interrelationships of its basic concepts as a major clue to their decoding, and were that to be accomplished both while borrowing from philosophers and linguists some of their analytical rigour with respect to words and concepts, and from historians, cultural sociologists, and anthropologists the ability to situate those words and concepts temporally and spatially. In so doing we may also be able to cast new light on the complex nature of modern ideologies and attempt to reintegrate their investigation into the mainstream of political theory rather than, as so frequently is the case, regard them as a dubious and imperfect adjunct to a discipline that supposedly can exist independently of them. A political theorist is currently understood by many users of the term to be a creator of political theories. That usage need not be accorded monopoly status in establishing what political theory is. The aim of these pages is to promote another, parallel, political theory: the analysis of the 'behavioural' and structural properties of political concepts as reflecting concrete political language and debate, without which a full ability to formulate new theories will be deficient. It will also become evident that within Anglo-American and Continental scholarship there is enough common ground to allow for converging routes, traceable from different premisses and interests, which can sustain such a venture.In organizing this book, I have adopted different strategies to illustrate the range of possibilities immanent in the

analysis of ideologies, qualified by a lack of space in what had already become a long script. I have concentrated on the major ideological families of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, and have in addition discussed two relative newcomers, feminism and green ideology. It is not my intention to provide a primer survey or an exhaustive description of what the world of ideologies has to offer. Hence, for example, the absence of nationalism as a separate subject in the following pages: the addition of the suffix 'ism' does not automatically transform a term into an ideology. My purpose, rather, is to promote a particular approach to the study of political thought, and to resuscitate the analysis of ideologies as a major branch of knowledge about politics. I have therefore preferred throughout to employ different techniques and strategies as representative of modes of analysis, while trying to preserve the broader picture of the features of ideological families. Following on Part I, which introduces a theoretical apparatus through which ideologies may be interpreted and investigated, some of the case-studies constitute detailed examinations of political thinkers whose end p.7contributions to specific ideologies have been exemplary, while others present instances of group thinking. Some case-studies are contemporary, others historical. Some are based on a specific national ideological tradition, and are then accompanied with broader comparative explorations. Some are compressed into adumbrating their basis morphology; others are detailed, in order to proffer a sampling of their internal complexity. At all times these studies are related to the ideological family under discussion, and at all times the intention is to illuminate the multiple research paths available to the scholarly understanding of ideologies. To have explored all these possibilities in every instance would have taken a lifetime of research and would have resulted in an unreadable opus. Hence also the (arbitrary) decision to exclude fascism and communism, let alone non-Western ideologies; and the decision not to explore examples of common-language

discourse, or literary expressions of political ideologies, or mass ideological thinking—the latter deserving of more serious consideration than currently accorded by some academics. For reasons of space, comprehensiveness is merely secondary to the attempt to demonstrate the link between ideologies and political concepts and the significance of this link as a framework for scholarly inquiry.In sum, this book modestly offers an invitation to a tasting, which further scholarship may yet assist in transforming into a feast. There exists a rich world of intellectual and cultural behaviour which revolves round the mental activity of human beings engaged in constructing edifices of political ideas. That world has been explored from one perspective, that of the historian of ideas, interested in the evolution of chains of thinking, of themes, and of traditions. But imagine the undertaking presented here as equivalent to that of the anthropologist, examining not the history of practices over time but, rather, both their perennial and transient features, and concerned not with recommending practices or inventing new ones but with analysing them as windows into the human mind and the social institutions that derive therefrom. If we extend the notion of 'practices' to include patterns of political concepts, as a raw material pregnant with scholarly promise, an extraordinary creation of human mental ingenuity, appreciable both on its own and because it holds the key to the all-important political environments people inhabit, we may point the way towards introducing analytical rigour into a major aspect of human (thought) behaviour. That aspect has not been given sufficient attention by the various schools that have deliberated political theory. Without wishing in any respect to diminish the importance end p.8and attractions of both political philosophy and the history of ideas, the understanding of the politico-conceptual structures of the human mind is as vital to their pursuit as is their inspiration to this enterprise. The third angle of a

triangle of thinking about politics needs to be etched in as firm a hand as the other two.The introduction of a morphological perspective into the examination of political thought is long overdue. It is essential to the extent that for quite a few centuries political theory has been pivotally concerned with political concepts. It could conceivably be the case that the political concept as a central analytical unit will eventually give way to some other entity. When that happens, the study of political thought will have changed beyond recognition and its analysis may require different heuristic tools. But that is some way into the future. At this stage we still need to catch up with its past and present.end p.9end p.101 Staking Out: The Distinctiveness of Analysing Ideologies show chapter abstract and keywords

Michael Freeden

. . . there exists a definite prejudice . . . which regards the constituents and relations of the ideological domain as intrinsically capricious and chaotic in their essential nature. 1 Over the past half-century the concept of ideology has emerged as one of the most complex and debatable political ideas. It is remarkable for being discussed on levels that seemingly do not intersect, for attempting to organize phenomena that appear unrelated, and for causing confusion among scholars and political commentators. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, linguists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have all grappled with the notion of ideology. They are all aware that problems of definition and of approach are high on the agenda of students of ideology, yet movement towards accepted parameters has not been forthcoming. The result is a polysemic word which for some even connotes more than one concept, bound in various ways to different disciplines. Both scholars and non-scholars have

invested in it not only purposive, reflective, and critical thought but strong emotions. Yet it is also the case that the very existence of the facts to which ideology purportedly refers has frequently been denied.What, then, is the place of this study in the literature on ideology? What needs to be said that has not already been stated emphatically, repetitively, and even authoritatively? To pre-empt the argument that I will later present in detail, these pages are informed by a number of fundamental contentions. First, a central thesis of this book is that ideologies can fruitfully be approached as a major genre of political thought rather than—at least within the discipline of political theory—as poor relations of political end p.13philosophies. Through ideologies access can be provided to a close study and comprehension of the units of political thinking—those fundamental political concepts which shape political argument. Second, ideologies constitute a product of the human mind that can be ascertained through a threefold process: employing the conceptual analysis that political theorists have been trained to handle; utilizing the type of empirical and contextual inquiry in which historians are versed; and appreciating the morphological patterns which contribute to the determination of ideological meaning. The result is the study of political ideas and utterances within frameworks of cultural, temporal, spatial, and logical constraints, frameworks that optimize the richness of information and the depth of understanding that can be elicited from political thought. Such a perspective on ideology is still considerably underdeveloped. This, however, puts the cart before the horse. To begin with, we need to appreciate the challenges awaiting the student of ideology, what can be gleaned from the most salient theories and views currently in circulation, and where the present state of the art raises questions and leaves gaps to be filled.(a) The Conceptual Histories of IdeologyMost surveys of the genesis of ideology hark back to Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the progenitor of 'ideology' as an

aspiring scientific term indicating the study of ideas, and to its almost immediate demotion by the Napoleonic detractors of positivism as a pompous attempt to build castles in the air. 2 That meaning of ideology, though not the debate surrounding it, is now of little significance. Instead, modern scholarship pertaining to ideology still labours heavily under the mid-nineteenth-century shadow of Marx and Engels. This is by no means entirely a bad thing, for the Marxist approach to ideology has sensitized us to crucial aspects of human thinking in societies and about societies, and to the sources, limitations, and imperfections of such thinking. It has, above all, provided political philosophers and practitioners with critical vistas from which to assess, interpret, and attempt to transcend existing forms of social, economic, and political thought. The notion that human thinking reflects socio-economic practices is now virtually a truism, though not always in the specific Marxist garb which related ideology to the capitalist mode of production and its end p.14material contradictions. 3 The suggestion that types of thought perform concealing and dissimulative roles is likewise one widely adopted by psychologists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists as well as social theorists. The assigning to ideology of significant functions of power, domination, and exploitation in the political and economic realms is another pervasive feature in understandings of the phenomenon. 4 But the Marxist conception of ideology has also placed scholarly blinkers on the variegated nature of ideology by encouraging certain analytical directions and readings rather than others. It ascribes a pejorative meaning to ideology, exposing it as a distorted or inverted reflection of alienated socially produced thought, and opposing it to true consciousness. 5 Marx indeed often presented it in a double role, as an inversion of a distortion. 6 It identifies a particular historically situated epistemology which gives rise to ideology, thus implying its ephemerality rather than ubiquity. It presents ideology as a product of class and

associates it primarily with a ruling class, so that each society develops only one ideology serving the interests of the rulers. It concentrates on the domination and control aspects of ideology at the expense of other features and functions. The critical vistas it purports to offer have as yet to convince many that they are also archimedal points from which to establish truth and transform societies.Alongside this coherent and influential theory of ideology another contemporary version is positioned, so different in its focus and characteristics as to confound the scholar seeking some common ground. The product of a research culture centring on American political science, it concentrates on the concrete phenomenon of ideologies rather than the category of ideology. That is a significant shift. No longer is ideology regarded as an aberration of perception or of understanding; instead, a positivist empiricism is harnessed to identify and investigate a widespread social phenomenon: the existence of organized, articulated, and consciously held systems of political ideas incorporating beliefs, attitudes, and opinions, though latent beliefs are also included. 7 The study of this end p.15phenomenon is seen to involve the properties of a value-free social science. In countless textbooks, classificatory schemes are provided utilizing a left-right spectrum, or variations on that theme, to unfold the full range of the most salient ideological traditions. While such contemporary analysis looks at ideologies as ubiquitous forms of political thinking, 8 it does not, nor should it, consider them as identical with political thought. Instead, it employs a strongly functionalist approach that examines the purposes and contributions of ideologies to social and political life. They are identified as idea-complexes containing beliefs—encompassing consciously or unconsciously held values, understandings, interpretations, myths, and preferences—which support or contest political arrangements and processes, as well as providing plans of action for public political institutions; and in doing so they act as devices for mobilizing mass political activity. 9

Conservative sociologists in the Parsonian school have also demonstrated the integrative role of ideology in symbolically binding individuals to their societies, though that role is identified by nonconservatives as well. As Gouldner has put it, ideology 'links individual to society, person to group, by allowing certain selected components of individual consciousness to be shared with other persons . . . in public discourse'. 10 A similar analysis, joining the sociological and the psychological, had been proffered by Apter in the pioneering volume, Ideology and Discontent. The dual functions of ideology—'binding the community together' and 'organizing the role personalities of the maturing individual'—generate a byproduct, the legitimation of authority. 11 This contemporary version itself has a deviant form, which has more in common with popular perceptions of the nature of 'isms', but which complicates even further the task of explaining the nature of ideologies. It reflects the legacy of the French Revolution; specifically, the hostile reception of its slogans and principles, denigrated as abstract, a priori, and artificial. Its main features have been to denote ideology as a dogmatic, doctrinaire, and closed end p.16system of thought, removed from observed reality, manifesting both a high level of internal consistency which is the product of a deductive rationalism, and supported, in Daniel Bell's words, by a 'passionate' or emotional commitment which provides social levers for action. 12 This conception also attaches ideology to radical, non-democratic, frequently totalitarian, 13 political views of the left or the right that are usually superimposed by their promoters on a pluralist 'grass-roots' population, against the desires and interests of the latter. Cautioning against ideologies, theorists such as Sartori have instead commended political belief-systems as looser, more open, and pragmatic sets of ideas which are appropriate for, and responsive to, a democratic environment. 14 This view of ideology conforms to the pejorative connotation of its Marxist co-variant, 15 but abandons it as a route to a

critical demystification of social practices and thinking. It is deviant merely because it has not exhibited the staying power or the logical consistency characteristic of the other uses of ideology, and not because it fails to conform to a definitional norm, the existence of which would be alien to the methodology employed in this study.Not unexpectedly, such scholarly treatments of ideology both reinforce and reflect ordinary language usage. A case in point is the ill-fated 'end of ideology' thesis of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which claimed that a growing intra- and international consensus would attenuate ideological controversy and ultimately purge the world of it. As monolithic passion gave way to pragmatic pluralism, an exhaustion with the great 'isms' would diminish the impact of ideology on modern life. There is a striking irony in the affinity between that capitalist vision, announcing the convergence of life styles across the face of the globe which would result in the disappearance of conflicting Weltanschauungen, and the Marxist prediction of the withering away of ideology consequent upon the march of historical materialism. But if ideology patently is not dead, and verily burst into a new lease of life in the 1960s, some of the premisses that accounted for the 'end of end p.17ideology' thesis survived its demise, too. 16 In the language of the mass media, ideology is all too often vulgarized as the artificial and deliberate construction by misguided individuals, or élites, of systems of thought which have no bearing on human and political experience, or which aim to force such experience into a neat and orderly bed that distorts the naturally unshapely frame of its occupiers. 'The end of an age of ideology', exulted the press yet again when Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990. What the student of ideologies can make of that will be assessed in later chapters. It is because scholars such as Bell and Sartori defined and popularized ideology in the limited terms they did, that the possibility of its passing could be entertained and a non-ideological politics envisaged.

In effect, Sartori's more extensive category of 'belief-system' performs much the same role as ideology does in mainstream political science, his version of ideology being thus reduced to one of its manifestations, rather than excluded altogether. On the more general understanding of ideologies mooted by that mainstream, there is no reason to suggest that extreme, closed ideologies differ in their general features and functions from moderate, flexible, or broadly endorsed ones. Pragmatism, too, represents a point of view and conceals principled positions often unintelligible to their promoters. After all, the overused pragmatist injunction to judge something 'on its merits' implies preposterously that self-evident merits simply leap out of concrete cases for all to see, rather than that they are read into those cases by the so-called pragmatists themselves.The end-of-ideology thesis conflated a number of issues. In subscribing to closure versus openness, to abstract rationalism versus pragmatism, and to passion versus political disillusionment, it overlooked the possibility that closure was a matter of degree rather than a dichotomous distinction. It disregarded the area most ideologies occupy, somewhere between a deductive rationalism and an ad hoc empiricism. It underestimated the role of emotion in all ideological systems. It implied that the above categories overlapped, so that ideologies could only be closed and abstract and passionate and not, for example, open and passionately committed, as is liberalism, or dogmatically self-styledly 'pragmatic' and closed, as are some types of conservatism. In addition it advocated a consensus/convergence theory concerning the general acceptance end p.18of the welfare state and a mixed economy, based on a patently mistaken premiss. Even had such a full consensus existed, which was never the case, this would hardly indicate the end of ideology; rather, it would suggest the reduction of many ideologies into one, to which all assented. Plainly, the complexities involved in analysing ideologies had not yet begun to be considered. If ideology is, as will be

suggested here, a permanent and ubiquitous phenomenon, the end of ideology would signal the end of society itself, a world in which strong and cohesive political beliefs would neither be held nor acted upon.(b) in Search of a Single ConceptThe debates within the positivist-empiricist tradition of recent political science allow little, if any, space for class, for immanent views of the world, or for concealed domination structures. But can the Marxist and political-science perspectives on ideology be bridged? The answer is that this has already been happening in part, even within the Marxist tradition itself. The first assumption to be queried was the ephemerality of ideology and its link to a specific set of historical circumstances. Antonio Gramsci retained through his notion of hegemony a conception of ideology preeminently serving to safeguard the power of a dominant class over the masses. But he allowed for a phenomenon corresponding to that identified by political scientists, one of indefinite duration, performing integrative functions, and fashioned consciously by intellectual élites. 17 Louis Althusser similarly saw ideology as possessing on the one hand Marxist dissimulative and dominatory roles, but presenting itself on the other as a permanent objective phenomenon produced by all classes. It was both an 'imaginary' representation of the real and a 'lived' relation between individuals and their conditions of existence. Ideology was thus deserving of comprehension on its own terms, as a cultural apparatus existing in social practices 'interpellating' individuals and integrating them into their societies, though hardly as free agents and generally in the service of the state. 18 This led some Marxists to comprehend ideology as an autonomous determiner of practices, 19 while others end p.19denied that ideology was absolutely constitutive of reality and proposed a reciprocal relationship between the ideological and the material. The representational and discursive function of ideology was combined with the concrete practices embodying it. 20 Castoriadis likewise

evoked the notion of l'imaginaire social, the creativity of the human mind in conjuring up ideas that enable reflection on, and thus the meaningful existence of, the social and historical worlds. 21 Some post-Marxist understandings of ideology, following Lacan, offer it as a symbolic and fantasmic, rather than representational, discourse of domination which unconsciously structures a social reality. 22 The systemic and interconnected structures of ideologies have been increasingly emphasized, encompassing complex interrelationships between politics, economics, literature, law, religion, and art.These developments were paralleled in the field of structural and cultural anthropology. Most anthropological research has not focused directly on ideology, inasmuch as non-literate societies do not exhibit the typical ideological phenomena extant in modern or modernizing societies. Nevertheless, social anthropologists have contributed vitally to current thinking on ideology. Claude Lévi-Strauss focused on cultural symbols such as myths, and by extension on ideology as modern myth possessing an internal, self-contained logic. Unlike Althusser, he regarded ideology as a 'thought-of' order external to objective reality (a 'lived-in' order) and more akin to the supernatural. However, 'thought-of' orders could only be understood in relation to 'lived-in' orders and were part of the experience to which they referred. 23 Meaning is hence not provided deliberately through ideology, much as supernatural beliefs in undeveloped societies are there from the participants' viewpoint, rather than concocted by them. The function of ideology is therefore to join together with other mechanisms in imposing, unconsciously from the perspective of the participants, significant logical forms on content. Clifford Geertz's seminal paper proffered ideology as an ordered system of cultural symbols organizing and integrating social and psychological processes into meaningful patterns, enabling purposive action. In contrast to Lévi-Strauss, Geertz emphasized the cognitive and expressive features of ideology, providing 'maps of problematic social reality'

rather than opaque constructs requiring decoding by the observer. end p.20Significantly, Geertz saw ideologies as 'matrices for the creation of collective conscience', externally superimposed when institutionalized guides for conduct are weak. 24 The tension between the conscious and the unconscious emerges as a central facet of the analysis of ideologies. Indeed, it is a salient divide when the study of ideology moves to the individual level. Both psychoanalysis and psychological theory have developed further lines of enquiry of their own, establishing promising subgenres of ideological investigation that frequently move off in different directions. Psychoanalysis has had a notable influence on the study of ideology. It has identified personality types (authoritarian or democratic) and pathologies, uncovered the role of the unconscious within each individual (which has, from a very different conception of the unconscious, intriguingly coalesced both with anthropological assumptions about latent cultural symbolism and Marxist premisses concerning the unwitting distortion of truths), submitted the genre of the psycho-biography as an explanation of ideological tendencies, and presented ideo-cultural structures as a necessary constraint on human impulses. 25 Psychologists have concentrated on different areas, paralleling the main focus of political science on the cognitive aspects of ideology. As Brown has suggested, 'in a psychological analysis of ideology, the main concepts are . . . attitudes and beliefs, social and cultural influences, socialization and learning and the personality processes that mediate and actualize social relationships'. Crucially, ideology is merely the dependent variable, the focus being 'on individuals and their behavioural consistencies, and not on ideologies as philosophies or systems of ideas'. 26 In parallel with some psychological concerns, the study of generally unstructured and unsystematic attitudes gained impetus from the work of Converse and other political scientists. 27 Recently, social

psychologists have reapproached ideology as a process of reasoned thinking. 28 A distinctive image of ideology emerges from psychological explorations. It emphasizes cognition, choice, and the deliberate end p.21formation of shared patterns of belief, that is, cognitive selection in place of illusion. The conscious rather than the hidden thought-processes of individuals, processes that both emanate from the backdrop of social values and contribute to the assessment of those values, are subject to detailed scrutiny. 29 Those psychologists who use measurement devices such as scaling further imply that ideologies move along a single dimension—Rokeach's open and closed personality, 30 or conservative and radical attitudes—rather than allowing for multi-variance. Also, though psychoanalysis tends to focus on the individual, social psychology has highlighted ideology both as a framework within which all individuals operate and as a mass phenomenon. It also upholds the important distinction between qualitatively élitist and popular ideologies or, in Billig's redirection of earlier terminology, between intellectual and lived ideology. 31 Hence, despite micro-functions on the individual level, ideologies are primarily linked to central political structures, the latter seen to be both the objects and the disseminators of ideological activity. Like any discipline, psychology introduces perspectives, biases, and preferred positions which both enrich the understanding of ideology in other fields of knowledge and impede the cross-disciplinary utility of the concept.Piecing some of these perspectives together equips the student of ideologies with some valuable insights which will inform the analysis employed in this book. First, ideologies are importantly attached to social groups, not necessarily classes. Ideologies are produced by, directed at, and consumed by groups. Second, ideologies perform a range of services, such as legitimation, integration, socialization, ordering, simplification, and action-orientation, without

which societies could not function adequately, if at all. Third, ideologies are ubiquitous forms of political thinking, reflecting as they do variegated perceptions, misperceptions, and conceptualizations of existing or imagined social worlds. Consequently, though the phenomenon can and must be referred to in the singular as 'ideology', if the word is to indicate an identifiable concept, its plural forms—ideologies—are of abiding and central interest. The many theorists who concentrate on the generic term 'ideology' are largely conducting a debate about a particular perspective on the social and political world, and not a debate about a phenomenon within that world, or one helping concretely to constitute that world. Fourth, ideologies are inevitably associated end p.22with power, though not invariably with the threatening or exploitative version of power. For inasmuch as ideologies justify certain political decisions and encourage political action, they evoke power as the influence and direction of human beings. In that sense they are sometimes alluded to as 'neutral' analytical devices, though the strategy adopted here will have to qualify that neutrality heavily.Fifth, ideologies are distinct thought-products that invite careful investigation in their own right. In the final count, it is vital to recognize that in studying ideologies we are directing our analyses at actual arrangements of political thinking. The school of ideology as dogma, as a closed and abstract 'ism', is wishful thinking, a streamlined generalization which is itself a highly ideological product of the cold war. Even the so-called closed ideologies on which it concentrates are far more elaborate, more concrete and historically situated, than their portrayal by the pragmatist suggests. 32 True, we may never be able to detach completely the thought-products we examine from our own values and interpretative frameworks, but at least we should try to represent and discuss the features of ideologies that can be shown to exist. We need to do so while remembering also—in the pursuit of questions of function—not to neglect their wealth of detail, intricacy of

structure, and complexity of argument. This can only be achieved through employing interpretative methods of greater sensitivity than those available through the simple cognitive approaches applied to the study of ideologies by much existing political science. To date, theoretical treatments of ideology have been largely silent on the nature, forms of, and differences among, concrete ideologies and have adopted far too unitary an approach. On the other hand, the explorations of concrete ideologies have been insufficiently analytical with regard to the concept of ideology, frequently limiting their efforts to classifying attitudes. A main objective of this book is to bridge that gap.(c) Analytical MisconceptionsEven after a partial reconciliation has been effected between different schools and subschools engaged in ideology, many problems still abound. They concern both substantive and methodological end p.23weaknesses in their existing arguments and the eschewal of aspects of ideologies and their analysis which demand urgent attention. In particular, we need to decide what we still do not know about ideologies and what else is worth knowing. Part of the problem with what we do not know about ideologies is that we also 'know' or assume things for which there is no evidence, advertised aspects which lead on to false trails. One such unwarranted assumption is that concrete ideologies consist of mutually exclusive systems of ideas. Conservatism and socialism, for example, are presented as opposed to each other on most political questions; to subscribe to the tenets of the one creed would necessarily rule out endorsement of the beliefs of the other. People either support the institution of private property or challenge it; they either want greater equalization or resist it. For that assumption to hold, ideologies would indeed have to be utterly closed, and arguments would have to be tight and coherent. Yet both conservatives and socialists will be found to argue for individual liberty; both may entertain a notion of an organic community whose values

and purposes must be preserved. The reasons for this will be discussed in Chapter 2, but whatever they are, the notion of mutual exclusiveness cannot account for such ostensible overlaps. Its view of ideological space is not only systemic but oversystematic, one of clear boundaries, without shadings off, without a terra incognita, employing instead dichotomous relationships among idea-systems. It has consequently great difficulty in categorizing ideas and programmes, such as market socialism or an enforced laissez-faire system, which fail to slot neatly into preconceived groupings.This is one example arising from the predilections of cognitive political science. A second, not unrelated, assumption of dubious standing is the correlation of ideology and political movement or party, so that a particular ideology, say liberalism, is defined as the set of beliefs of members and adherents of the Liberal party. The postulation of a one-to-one relationship between ideology and institution has long bedevilled political and historical analysis, and produced considerable blindness to the multiplicity of ideologies espoused within each such grouping, as well as the large number of groups which entertain partially similar views. One of the many contributions of the French to political culture has been the ordering of political parties on a spectrum from left to right. The implicit supposition, concerning the unidimensionality of gradience between one ideology and the next—as, typically, from the extreme left, through a moderate centre to the extreme right—conceals the possibility that ideologies relate to each other on a number end p.24of idea-dimensions, and that their relative positions may change depending on the dimension selected: say, attitudes to central intervention, or views on national independence. It may well be that a multi-dimensional model is more appropriate to conceptualizing the interrelationships among ideologies, even if less amenable to graphic illustration or to marketing in terms of the requirements (as distinct from the actual belief-components) of political parties. 33

(d) Rival EpistemologiesApart from errors of cognition, classification, and conceptualization, the question concerning what we know and do not know relates to the epistemological status of ideology. Frequently, different issues are run together in scholarly exchange. The debate over ideology has been made to refer to what we can know about our social and political life; to what we actually do know, but in a distorted fashion; to what we think we know but actually do not; or to the impossibility of knowing for certain. For Marx and Engels, the phenomenon of ideology rested on the ontological premiss that being conditions consciousness. But, as has been astutely noted, 'when seemingly ontological conditions are challenged from the collective viewpoint of a dissident reality, they become visible as epistemological'. 34 Epistemologically, the Marxist conception emerged out of a particular set of conditions under which human consciousness reflected the dehumanized and alienated existence of human beings. This reflection was itself distorted, reinterpreting negative aspects of human existence, such as exploitation, in positive language such as that of rights. Consequently, ideology came to be seen as inextricably connected to issues of truth and falsehood or distortion, to misperceptions and dissimulations with respect to an objective reality. In particular, the study of ideology pertained to determining and explaining the impediments, both deliberate and, more intriguingly, unintentional or unconscious, placed in the path of uncovering truth and reality, a task associated by many Marxists with the establishing of scientific knowledge.end p.25Karl Mannheim's contribution to the inquiry into ideology was thus decisive both in heightening awareness of its epistemological pitfalls, and in rescuing ideology from some of the dead ends of Marxist analysis. Mannheim continued the Marxist tradition of linking ideology with its social genesis, but detached it from a particular social and historical group. By proposing to view ideology as the pluralistic product of diverse social groups undergoing

common formative experiences, Mannheim paved the way towards generalizing ideology as a omnipresent social phenomenon as well as a group product, to include Marxism itself. This was attained at the cost of undermining the universalist aspirations that ideologies tend to have, by relativizing them as situationally motivated. Indeed, whereas Mannheim's particular conception of ideology was a matter of error or lie, his total conception, as Weltanschauung, required unmasking as the interest-bound expression of a collective unconscious. Mannheim abandoned the prospect of ultimately unfolding a Marxist true consciousness, while becoming equally dissatisfied with the ensuing subjectivization of social knowledge. 35 Mannheim hence attempted to introduce a new epistemology by suggesting that 'all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer'. His alternative to treading the tightrope between the transcending of ideological relativism and the eschewing of ultimate values was to advance the notion of relationism, the balancing of multiple and conflicting social viewpoints which would be undertaken by the intellectuals, whose defining feature was their ability to cut loose from their social and historical roots. 36 Mannheim's sociology of knowledge thus restored to social thought the critical and evaluative dimensions it assumed upon encountering ideology. However, his version of intersubjective and approximate truth could not come to grips with accepting ideology (and its progressive counterpart, utopia) as a normal, rather than pathological or narrowly partial, manifestation of indeterminate social thought.Discounting the weaknesses both of the Mannheimian view of ideology and of Mannheim's solution to its existence, it expedited consideration of the relationship between political thinking and the external world and, within political thought, of the connections between the abnormal, the normal, and the normative. For ultimately the question that must be asked, as a preliminary to an end p.26

adequate and effective analysis of ideologies as actual thought-practices, is: what kind of political thinking is the thinking reflected in ideologizing? To answer that, some idea must be available about the boundaries between ideology and its prestigious counterpart, political philosophy. 37 We will find epistemological issues closely associated with this question, but also substantive issues which involve the nature and ends of political thought.(e) Philosophy and Ideology: The Unholy Alliance. . . a political philosophy is itself a social reality: it is an ideology in terms of which certain institutions and practices are justified and others attacked; it provides the phrases in which demands are raised, criticisms made, exhortations delivered, proclamations formulated, and, at times, policies determined. 38 From the outset it must be emphasized that political philosophy is not in a mutually exclusive relationship with ideology. Whatever the distinctions between them are, and whatever else can be said about them, both are, as forms of political thinking, shaped from political concepts and their interrelationships. That premiss informs the approach adopted in this study and it will legitimate the assertion developed in Chapter 2 that ideologies offer crucial scholarly access to the forms and substance of political thought. Nevertheless, many political theorists who are guided by the views and methods of political philosophy, particularly of the Anglo-American variety, have been known to open up an exaggerated 'chasm' between philosophy and ideology. A major source of confusion derives from the accepted understanding of political philosophy as concerned both with the direct production and with the evaluation of political thought. For a correct assessment of its boundaries with ideology to follow, it should therefore be contrasted with two different phenomena: on the one hand with ideologizing on the dimension of producing political thought; on the other with the analysis of ideology on the dimension of a end p.27

reflective, evaluative investigation into the nature of political thought. 39 This complex distinction is rarely made, at the cost of a considerable diminution in the understanding of the nature of the different forms of political thinking.On the first dimension of analysis, those engaged in ideological discourse make, as we have seen, stipulative assertions about the truth or correctness of their views. In so doing, they seek to legitimate interpretations and courses of political action in competition with other ideologies. Political philosophers, it would appear, are committed to different enterprises. Some are concerned with the truth-falsehood attributes of arguments, but they may be so while critically applying the notion of falsifiability and testing the validity of their beliefs and those of others. Political philosophers who hold to truths often adopt perfectionist perspectives and fault ethical arguments which fail to meet the foundational value-standards they set internally. Demonstration rather than assertion is the method adopted. Continuous reflection and self-criticism are de rigueur. Naturally, those distinctions are far from clear nor, taken on their own, are they sufficient to separate political philosophy and ideology categorically. Indeed, the methodological adherence to dichotomous presentation is itself a common weakness of political philosophers and of limited utility in this case. Liberal ideologists, in particular, may appear indistinguishable from their philosophical counterparts: the former may devote much effort to 'philosophizing' and engaging in self-reflection, and the latter to 'ideologizing' and opting for ineliminable value-preferences, in the above manner. This problem will attract consideration in later chapters.Political philosophers also lay great emphasis on the rational and logical aspects of their thought. Rational thought may itself be defined as logically entailed or inferred, but we may then simply be moving in the realm of truths designated as self-evident or internally consistent, in which case the coherence theory of truth is invoked. Alternatively, in the correspondence theory of truth

rationality requires sensitivity to refutable evidence and susceptibility to change once evidence for a particular argument is not forthcoming. Political philosophers may employ rationality to denote reflective, contemplative assessment of political beliefs on end p.28the grounds of good, justifiable reasons, 40 or of particular styles of truth-and-falsehood reasoning 41 or, borrowing from economics, to denote instrumental efficiency in attaining ends.On the first dimension of analysis, rationality may be contrasted either with irrationality or with emotion. Irrationality is often raised in relation to studies of mass ideology, which have shown how it is frequently characterized by non sequiturs and how incompatible beliefs can be held simultaneously. Fascism, for instance, is depicted as an ideology with strong irrational components. However, total irrationality is inconceivable in political thinking, as it would reduce debate to unintelligibility. More interestingly, rationality is contrasted with different degrees of emotive support displayed by ideologies for their propositions and values. We do not have to go all the way with Bell when he asserts that 'what gives ideology its force is its passion . . . the most important, latent, function of ideology is to tap emotion'. 42 Nor do we have to condone Feuer's fantasy of ideologists surrendering their 'rational, independent response' and giving in to 'an emotional need'—a myth of a mission and the validation of a claim to rule. 43 Ideologies do not dispense with reason. All major ideologies, bar the extreme right and even then not entirely, require some degree of reflectiveness and internal coherence.The findings of social psychologists support this case. There exists evidence to confirm the hypothesis that all individuals are rational, though in varying degrees, rather than rationality being a constant. 44 If this is so, it is inevitable that ideologies, like other forms of human thinking, will exhibit combinations of rational and non-rational components. It is also conceivable that ideologies may vary

among themselves in respect of the emotive force attached to their principles, and they no doubt differ in the degree of care or consideration devoted to their integration with scientific knowledge and culturally accepted modes of understanding and argument. Liberalism, for example, may be more open to change and to validation, and evince greater rationality in the sense of conforming to accepted methods of presenting evidence. If, however, liberal rationality leads to a single conception of rationality in the sense of advancing good reasons, it could conflict with the end p.29pluralist strain within liberalism. 45 Were indeed the boundaries between ideology and philosophy to stand or fall on the basis of plausible distinctions between different types of rational justification, it would call for an intellectual enterprise that would surely strain the resources of current liberal thinking.In sum, ideologies mix rational and emotive debate freely. They will be more hasty in ending discussion if rational persuasion proves inconclusive. They will be less thorough in pursuing the detailed implications of their arguments. After all, ideologies have to deliver conceptual social maps and political decisions, and they have to do so in language accessible to the masses as well as the intellectuals, to amateur as well as professional thinkers. This free mix of reason and emotion is intolerable to many philosophers, who do not regard emotive reasons for an argument as good ones. 46 Put plainly, for them a non-reflective argument is not an argument.The employment of rationality by philosophers, as well as social scientists, does however not clearly distinguish them from ideologists. For when rationality is conflated with truth, the beliefs to which it attaches adopt the distinct systemic and assertive features of ideology. Take Weberian Wertrationalität, according to which the pursuit of certain values may be considered rational irrespective of their instrumental cost. 47 Rational arguments are frequently characterized by those non-negotiable foundational beliefs, such as 'autonomy is a good', presented in an uncritical

form. This is of course a feature typical of 'open' as well as 'closed' ideological debate. Liberalism and socialism endorse deeply felt and broadly supported values. The reasons for supporting such values are never clearly set out. All belief-systems, even the most rationally inclined, contain components based on extra-rational preferences. It is quite plausible to view our attachment to democracy as a question of sentiment as much as of intellect. To be specific, the notion of democracy contains instrumentally rational preferences for certain decision-making processes (by comparing them to others in terms of outcomes, for instance), but it also contains non- or pre-rational preferences for weighting all individuals equally, based on cultural predilections and on social myths, not merely on moral end p.30considerations. It may of course be the case that the belief in those pre-rational assumptions itself has rational outcomes, but that is different from arguing that they are themselves totally rational. Political philosophers may refuse to employ non-rational argument deliberately and saliently, but they can rarely avoid a degree of emotional appeal built in to the advocacy and promotion of their moral positions. Beyond that there is also another problem, to which we shall return in Chapter 3, concerning the role political concepts and ideologies play in constructing social reality, so that their rational significance may be secured through their place in such a discourse or language game.On the second dimension—the evaluation of the nature of political thought—a gap may open up between some versions of political philosophy and the analysis of ideologies with respect to rationality. For in contrasting rationality with either emotion or irrationality, we neglect some further attributes of rationality, in particular its common association by Western political philosophers with universalism. In contradistinction, as we have seen, ideologies are presented epistemologically as time and space bound, often located in very specific historical and social circumstances. Yet it need not be the case that

ideologies fail to provide universal standards. It is quite possible to argue that they may incorporate methods of justification which are intelligible to right-thinking people across time and space, 48 and thus to allow for their investigation in terms of universality or, at least, 'valid trans-cultural judgements of superiority'. 49 Sociologists, for instance, have illuminated the rationality of ideologies as manifestations of variegated cultural relations. 50 Ideologies are designed to be communicable and are by no means idiosyncratically subjective. Furthermore, on the first dimension all ideologies present themselves as espousing universal rules which, on due consideration, people ought to adopt (failing that, it is frequently argued that those rules should be superimposed on people for their own good, to safeguard that rationality). But some relativist-inclined views challenge the link end p.31itself between rational argument and universalism. They posit instead that rationality relates to institutional norms that are 'internal to given societies'. 51 Ideologies may thus be conceived as congruent with, and dependent upon, general moral standards and cultural values pertaining to a specific society, though the possibility that those standards spread to most societies cannot be ruled out. Far from separating ideologies from philosophical and rational inquiry, they are now construed as displaying the very tendencies thought to characterize all social thought. Similar views are notably advanced by some historians of ideas, who contend that beliefs currently repudiated as untrue may not have been irrational according to the criteria employed by their advocates at the time. 52 Those views are also endorsed by political theorists who dismiss rationality as a natural or transcendental conception and regard it rather as a cultural capacity. 53 One way or another, the space between particular ideologies and universal rational philosophies begins to shrink conspicuously.It is of considerable relevance to the aims of this study to distinguish between the question 'does a universal

rationality exist?' and the question 'what is to be gained when someone assumes, knowingly or not, that the answer to the previous question is positive?' This latter question and its investigation is an instance of the domain of the analysis of ideology. Whoever invests moral or political values or beliefs with universal rationality is implying that they deserve to be scrutinized in a certain manner, and that every right-thinking person should, and would, adopt them. The claim of universalism promotes the assertions that the precepts be taken very seriously, that they are capable of transcending particular boundaries, that deviation from them is wrong and possibly dangerous, and that discourse about them can be discontinued. There is no reason why a relativist cannot accept the rationale behind universalism, if not its epistemology, its dressing up of an appeal to critical assessment as a statement about validity. In other words, to couch deliberately one's political language in universal terms (even if one denies the validity of universal assumptions, as end p.32for example a hermeneutically inclined liberal might) is intentionally to send a message that one is seeking to engage the attention, evaluation, and possibly the commitment of others to one's own political values, and that one regards those values as having a wider appeal than merely to the cultures and subgroups in which they are already held in respect. However, to convey the same message while using universalist language unintentionally is to indicate a belief in the overriding validity of intuitions and to make assumptions about human similarity, even identity, with particular repercussions concerning political conduct and its conceptualization. 54 Those may well relate to myths concerning the rationality of foundational values such as, to cite an example addressed in Chapter 6, the neutrality of democratic constitutions.(f) Unconscious and Rhetorical Components of IdeologyOn the first dimension identified above—the production of thought-practices—there also appears to be a divide between philosophy as a reflective, intentional, conscious

enterprise, and ideology as a compound of genuinely conscious beliefs, of unconscious assumptions, and of dissimulatively rhetorical statements. We learn from anthropology and from psychoanalysis about the importance of accounting for unconsciously held beliefs. But this requires more than the unmasking activity of a Marx or a Mannheim. The choice is not between the mask and the face. Both tell us complementary stories; both are there to stay. Once we abandon the doctrinaire adherence to truth and falsehood as an epistemological approach to ideology, the problem becomes one of interpreting and decoding, of trying to reconstruct the face we will never entirely see. Nor need this entail the further premisses that truth statements are impossible, or that there are no truth-falsehood statements within ideologies; simply that ideologies cannot be contained within a system of truth-falsehood statements. Suffice it to say that there is a disjuncture here between the scholarly analysis of ideology and much Anglo-American political philosophy. It is an asymmetrical divide. The latter is restricted to the analysis of intentional meaning. It attributes responsibility to individuals for composing deliberate thought-formations. It assumes that the mask reflects the face. end p.33The former regards political texts as capable of interpretation on more than one level, incorporating different methods that, in turn, apply both to the intentional and the unconscious. A conscious system of ideas implies also that the holder's beliefs are under his or her control, possibly subject to re-evaluation and modification, and directed towards the attainment of personal or social ends. Lacking that consciousness, the holder may be subject to social forces or deliberate manipulation. Once the Mannheimian hope in transcending those limitations through a sociology of knowledge is abandoned, the analyst is confronted with the task of uncovering or decoding patterns of thought unknown, or meaningless, to the holder, yet of vital explanatory power. This linkage between symbol

and signified is typical of much linguistic as well as anthropological work. 55 Some of those meanings are intended but badly articulated and some are implicit (they would have been intended had the thinker been made aware of their connection to what he or she meant to say). These meanings may be retrievable through additional prompting, if the author is still available, or through scholarly extrapolation, though some layers of meaning may equally be lost in the process of translation and reformulation by external and future analysts. But other thought-patterns are underloaded with meaning for their holders, and such wholly unconscious meanings are explicable only in frameworks applied by their consumers (members of the thinker's society and of later/other societies) or possibly by psychoanalysts, to take an example outside the ambit of this study. While duly and centrally concerned with the face value of political pronouncements, the study of ideologies cannot detach them from the implicit meanings they carry and the unintended patterns they form. Because concepts and ideas exist that are at best semi-articulated in people's minds, and for which they lack adequate words, the role of the analyst is to reconstruct and amplify those concepts by inferring them from other aspects of speech-acts of such individuals and the contexts of those acts. Moreover, because these patterns and the concepts which fashion them transcend the creative power of any one individual, ideologies being the products of groups, we may not be able to attribute authorship, and hence individual responsibility for thought-production, at all. Ideologies incorporate beliefs that are widely spread and end p.34held, but they may have no identifiable makers, or many makers. These issues will preoccupy us in Chapter 3.Of course, not all unconscious meanings are means of controlling other individuals and groups, of wielding exploitative or dominating power. The unconscious messages may, for all we know, permit the increase of individual choice, or further values which socialist as well as liberal societies may regard as liberating. Respect for

democratic voting procedures, for example, may be furthered through a culture in which communal games and sports, in families, schools, and youth clubs, socialize individuals to accept losing as well as winning, so that defeat in an election will be generally accepted, even by the power holders, as a signal to relinquish power. Emphasis on welfare rights need not imply paternalism, but a developmental view of human nature which encourages open-ended solutions to catering to human needs and a built-in critical revisionist perspective with respect to the law.As for rhetoric, is it often used in a similar sense to Mannheim's deliberate deceptions or half-truths, 'more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of a situation'. 56 The producers of ideology are assumed to use rhetoric as an inauthentic rendering of beliefs to which they subscribe cynically or not at all. Rhetoric is the weaving of a narrative tale deliberately employed as a persuasive device, much as Plato did in justifying his magnificent myth concerning the different metals from which people were composed. In politics, rhetoric may in addition involve simplification of complex ideological patterns for the sake of public presentation, either for electoral and mobilization purposes, or because its opponents paint a caricature of that ideology, aspects of which are even grafted on to its supporters' understandings. These pitfalls of public perceptions often percolate into scholarship itself. How can the researcher distinguish 'genuine' ideological assertions from these dissimulative exercises in rhetoric? There are four possible responses to this problem.First, we may contend that careful contextual analysis will assist in determining whether the beliefs expressed are indeed held. An acquaintance with prevailing patterns of discourse in a given society will place any particular act of 'rhetoric' in a set of comparative parameters. Second, ideologies are not only produced but consumed. If the audiences towards whom rhetoric is directed find it indistinguishable from genuine political beliefs, it will have the same effect on the formation of their opinions, on their

end p.35judgements and actions. Rhetoric will then enter the plural world of ideological debate as a serious contender for the legitimacy of its utterances. The mass consumption of ideologies is of equal importance when analysing fields of social meaning as is their production—to a large extent—by social and cultural élites. Hence the question of the sincerity of those beliefs, the motives and intentions behind their enunciation, the propaganda roles they are designed to play, are not directly pertinent to comprehending their effective function. Third, rhetoric (as metaphor, irony, hyperbole, and so on) may be inextricable as stylistic device from language in general and ideological language in particular. 57 In that capacity it will serve to highlight the meanings attached to political concepts and to emphasize specific interpretations. Fourth, even insincere rhetoric will display many of the features of genuine belief-systems. In order to be comprehensible it will exhibit logical and cultural patterns that may be highly informative to the analyst. It will also, like any articulated statement, be separately decodable on the unconscious level—a level underrated by students of rhetoric—and serve as a clue to more deeply held, and occasionally more complex, beliefs.(g) Ideology and the Limits on LogicWe still need to assess the place of logic in political philosophy and in ideology. Logic unquestionably plays a key role both in the philosophical formation of an argument and in the evaluation of its validity and persuasive power. In the composition of ideological arguments logic may not always be the most conspicuous attribute, and it may well be that mass belief-systems display low degrees of logical constraint. 58 It is also plausible that many ideologists will not be deterred by anything other than a demonstration of blatant illogic from holding to their positions. But logic must be evident in any articulate presentation of beliefs, and ideologies—because they are communicative as well as persuasive devices—will have recourse to some measure of logical consistency. The problem arises, rather, in sanctioning ideology as a valid form of political thinking

that meets the qualitative standards which philosophers expect of such thinking. In particular, leading lights in end p.36the Anglo-American schools of philosophy wish to maximize logical consistency in addition to endorsing critically perfectionist views of their normative arguments, and they may insist on employing rules of admissible evidence. 59 But the failure of most ideologies, even liberalism, that favourite child of Anglo-American philosophers, to satisfy such criteria is no reason for dismissing them as bad or inferior political thought.Logical analysis in this context can take one of two forms. It can insist on subjecting existing political debate to probing tests of reasoning, inference, and consistency. Or it can apply those to constructing models of arguments, abstracted from existing political debate, which form the basis of analysis, deduction, interpretation, and contention. In the first case, political theories as well as ideologies simply cannot bear the full weight of the meticulous logical analysis directed at them by some philosophers. It is not only that many of the most influential arguments, such as Rousseau's, would never have seen the light of day had a strict logician been set loose on them, but also that the most elaborate political theory must necessarily contain extra-logical value-preferences and conceptualizations. Logic and consistency must remain important, but not overwhelming, criteria for the assessment of arguments. Logical perfectionism can be detrimental to the optimalization of analytical insight. Furthermore, increasingly detailed chains of logic need to be curtailed arbitrarily from the logical viewpoint—that is, again by using extra-logical considerations—otherwise the ramifications of a particular argument will become unmanageable because potentially infinite. As for ideologies, it is precisely because the interpretative insights they will yield on the basis of logic alone are comparatively inadequate that we need to change our analytical strategy if we wish for something to emerge that has significance for the pursuit of scholarship and knowledge. We will need to readmit the role of the

emotional as well as the intellectual attractiveness of arguments, and we will have to examine cultural as well as logical validations of political thinking. Above all, the following chapters will argue that the morphology of ideologies affords insights into the nature of political thought that neither purist logical nor perfectionist analysis can provide.In the second case it is all too easy to dismiss certain theories as leading logically to morally unacceptable positions. Utilitarianism, for example, is frequently repudiated as a theory that condones end p.37the sacrifice of individual rights to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 60 But in so doing, philosophical critiques of utilitarianism often indulge in a caricaturizing oversimplification of utilitarian precepts in order to demolish them comprehensively, while ignoring the complex versions of utilitarianism which nineteenth-century thinkers such as Bentham and J. S. Mill have authored. The reason for this lies in a disposition among such philosophers to treat utilitarianism as a model proposition with all the features of a streamlined one-dimensional representation, rather than as a historically grounded intellectual doctrine.The weaknesses of some philosophical investigations, as far as the study of ideologies is concerned, may be illustrated through some typical devices they employ. The above example is an instance of the Aunt Sally or straw man syndrome, in which a particular model is postulated in order to destroy it through an immediate knock-out effect. An abstract and pure version of a theory is contrasted with highly sophisticated and complex alternative theories—in this case contained in contemporary rights discourses—and the contest can thus be won with a minimum of intellectual effort. Another device is the slippery-slope syndrome, in which a certain (often desirable) position is established, which through the inexorable application of logic will transform itself into another (often undesirable) position. A limitation on one's individual liberty to move around in one's car whilst driving, by enforcing the wearing of seat-belts,

may metamorphize into the opening of the sluice-gates through which a paternalistic state will engulf its members. The analysis of actual political argument may well establish, as with this example, that a good pair of methodological boots permits theorists or ideologists to hold their ground at a point more or less of their choice, by superimposing value and cultural preferences that cut this particular logical chain. We have already commented on the dangers of a third device—the dichotomy—as a categorizing implement that is, as will be shown in later chapters, most unhelpful in examining the relationships both among different ideological families and among political concepts.The analysis of ideologies will be furthered not through ignoring the strictures of logic, but through appreciating the interaction between logic, culture, and emotion or, put differently, between form and meaning. Fields of meaning are limited by logic and by available thought-practices, so that such fields are neither indeterminate nor rigidly bounded, neither flawlessly rational nor inarticulately emotional. The central importance of logical, rational, end p.38and universal models for testing, criticizing, and exploring new ways of thinking about politics has been sufficiently demonstrated to require no further defence. But on their own, the methods those activities involve do not always provide the most useful or relevant manner of conceptualizing and understanding the ways in which political thinking is conducted, and the ways meanings are attached to, and develop within, political discourse.Rather than concentrate on the logical consequences of holding a particular viewpoint and on the extrapolation of positions from a given historically and geographically located argument, there is a scholarly call to look more precisely at the given argument as it presents itself, intentionally or otherwise. The actual manifestations of political thinking, in the temporally and spatially bounded circumstances to which they are inevitably joined, supply us with the abundant varieties of political thought from which to embark on a voyage of understanding of this facet of the

human mind and its linkage with the worlds of government, power, and group-activity. The thesis this book wishes to promote is that rigorous, pertinent, and challenging political analysis can be the outcome of identifying the basic features and units of political thinking as they appear to us. We require more subtle and sophisticated means of examining the contents and forms of political thought, and we need to refrain from streamlining the central ideas it displays, sometimes to the point of travesty. Here, too, generalizations may be entered into, and it would be foolish to pretend that the methodology advocated in the next two chapters will not favour certain perspectives over others. It is, however, based on permitting constant intercourse between political conceptualization and the real world to which it relates and from which it springs. It also sees the role of the scholar as focusing on the patterns, continuities, and discontinuities political thinking displays, and the manner in which it shapes the politically possible, and not as focusing on its critical replacement with more coherent structures, or normatively preferable positions which are often unrelated to the contexts in which political thinking actually occurs. Otherwise, the chasm between the approaches offered by dominant Anglo-American philosophical perspectives and those which apply to the political-thought behaviour of individuals and groups is virtually unbridgeable.The more complex mainstream ideologies are comprised of ideas which, when carried to their logical extremes, could lead to serious contradictions and to substantive absurdities. But it is precisely because they are not carried to such extremes that those contradictions may be contained and that internal compatibilities end p.39among different ideas are possible. Ideologies are the factual counterparts to the counterfactuals of much political philosophy. The latter—in order to elucidate, attract, or deter—may devise ideal-types founded on single concepts or principles each of which, when pursued to its logical conclusion, conjures up a world incompatible with the

other. Ideologies, as actual practices of political thinking which never attain the total determinacy (and lucidity) of conterfactual thought, mix and balance the various concepts. The real question then is not, 'is there a mix?' but 'what is the range of mixes?'—what are the different possible conceptual combinations ideologies do and can produce? Political thought as it is constructed and as it does operate in societies, exhibits a far greater complexity than allowed for by unsympathetic or careless critics of ideologies, ever keen to categorize and label existing ideas in simplistic ways, and frequently proceeding to complex solutions based on, and reacting to, the ideational abstractions they have themselves created. To be sure, analysts of ideologies impose their personal, cultural, and social categories on the reality they observe. But their intellectual efforts are not directed towards perfecting that reality through thought-exercises that distance one from it, but towards an interpretation of the intricacies of the reality as it appears to them.It is also the case that knowledge about, and understanding of, political thought is not merely a matter of tracing its development over time, if by that one means looking at laws of historical evolution or at the systematic unfolding of ideas and concepts. Rather, it involves acknowledgement of changing historical perspectives and of history itself as a category formed, often invented, to advance certain forms of political thinking. Both causal and functional explanations of political theories are important, but in this study they will be introduced to add layers of comprehension to the study of political thought as the phenomenological account and analysis of the interaction between the political concepts that make up a theory. This requires examination of the features of a political theory or ideology as the products of the interplay between what the forms we identify mean, and how those meanings themselves are formed.(h) The Ubiquity and Specificity of IdeologyMany scholars are unhappy with the extension of the concept of ideology beyond the restrictions imposed on it by Marxist and

end p.40even Marxisant theory. They argue that such ubiquity will lose it any discriminatory force, and ideology will become synonymous with political thought in general. 61 That is not necessarily the case, but we have to tread very warily indeed. It will be seen throughout this study that, on the sole basis of the morphology of political argument, as explored in Chapter 2, it is difficult to separate ideologies from political philosophies. Both use the same raw material, political concepts; both do so in patterns which lend themselves to similar analysis; both introduce, consciously or unconsciously, particular cultural and temporal standards of attributing meaning to words. Nevertheless, though significant structural similarities abound, and though these structures assist in defining substantive content, the shrinking of the analytical distance between political philosophy 62 and ideology does not imply their total collapse into the same phenomenon. On the first dimension of producing political thought, high-quality political philosophies will cluster together in terms of their emphases on reason, logic, reflectiveness, and critical self-consciousness discussed above, whereas ideologies will scatter far more widely on the bases of those criteria. Indeed, some though by no means all political philosophies are articulated as 'semi-private' languages among professionals and specialists, penetrable only with great difficulty to the uninitiated, whereas ideologies have to appeal to masses, and be consumed and assimilated by them. They require therefore to be couched in a public language, or a language aspiring to be public. 63 Finally, whereas ideologies need to insert certainty into language because they compete over public policy-making and public recognition—a feature elaborated on in Chapter 2—some political philosophers may prefer more tentative formulations that allow greater flexibility of interpretation. Even here a sharp divide cannot be made. The liberal family of ideologies displays considerable flexibility, self-reflexivity, and openness itself, while many political philosophers insist categorically on the correct meanings of political terms.

It could also be asserted that ideologies abandon the ostensible end p.41detachment from the political arena which many political philosophers attempt to practise, ideologies being action-oriented and their producers being involved participants in that arena. But that is to suggest that the social world exists quite independently from our thinking about it (an approach challenged by nineteenth-century Idealism) or, even if there is an objective world, that we can have clear access to it and that our understandings of the world have no impact on our conduct in that world and on the ways in which it impinges on our conduct. Rather, to recommend a particular way of thinking about politics, on the first dimension of analysis, is also to recommend a particular way of acting in politics, to establish the rules for acting and the areas in which action is possible, to interpret the world—in particular the social world—and thus to assist in shaping it. We are inevitably caught in the circle of reflection and shaping, though this may be a dynamic, critical, and changing circularity. Hence the distinction between philosophy and ideology on that score too must be severely tempered. As Rorty has argued, though 'the world is out there, . . . descriptions of the world are not'. Language in its multiple forms is a human artefact through which the world is contingently comprehended and through which the human self is created. 64 Although actions and thoughts exist 'out there', they do not become practices or behaviour without the injection of meaning and interpretation. When Marx penned his famous words: 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it', 65 he was unwittingly paving the way to a threefold distinction. His was a contrast between what he saw as traditional European philosophy, in particular its speculative German manifestations, and the materialist dynamic of a dialectic acting on the world. More recently, this thesis could also have been seen as epitomizing the difference not between two conceptions of philosophy, but between philosophy and ideology. Finally, on the analysis proffered above, the Marxist distinction

between interpreting and changing collapses yet again, but now because all (social and political) philosophy, as well as ideology, can change the social world by changing prevailing conceptualizations of such a world, seen as partly dependent on those very conceptualizations for its own shape and structure.end p.42From here to a related observation, which refers to the use of a phrase that will repeatedly recur in these pages: thought-behaviour. The objection to the traditional philosophical distinction between thought and action can be queried on two levels: not only that thinking promotes certain kinds of action and, possibly, change, but that thinking is itself a kind of activity. But employing the term 'thought-behaviour' may appear to raise a difficulty. As Wittgenstein wrote: 'It is a travesty of the truth to say "Thinking is an activity of our mind, as writing is an activity of the hand' ". However, Wittgenstein was engaged in breaking down the distinction between thought and language, not in denying that thought is a process. 66 Elsewhere he wrote 'Is thinking a kind of speaking? One would like to say it is what distinguishes speech with thought from talking without thinking . . . A process, which may accompany something else, or can go on by itself.' 67 Other philosophers are content to go along with the proposition that 'a concept is a capacity for certain exercises of the mind' and that 'to say that a man has a certain concept is to say that he can perform, because he sometimes does perform, mental exercises of a specifiable sort'. 68 By thought-behaviour I do not wish to suggest that thought is distinct from language, 69 merely that although our analysis of (political) thinking obviously depends on its expression in speech or writing, it is also the case that much political thought is uncommunicated by its thinkers and needs to be inferred from their inadequate speech and writing acts, including the unconscious messages in those acts. On one level, 'ideologies include beliefs in people's heads, and these may be discovered by conventional

methods of empirical investigation'. 70 On another, the linguistic expression of ideologies may bear more meaning that the thinker is aware of, and the analyst must attempt to establish that additional meaning. The analysis of ideologies proffered here starts out from the assumption that thinking is a 'social fact', a process in which human beings engage. All instances of what could be termed silent speech may relate to thought-behaviour at a deeper level than its external linguistic expression, though thought-behaviour is intermeshed with language behaviour. Hence, as has end p.43already been argued, speech-acts construed as intentional acts constitute inadequate evidence of ideological thinking, and they require in addition an appreciation and decoding of the cultural, spatial, and psychological dimensions of meaning in which they occur. Much of that will never be retrievable.To sum up this section, what might have appeared as a paradox isn't really one. The ostensible paradox is that students of ideology can analyse philosophies as they would analyse ideologies, but philosophers of the kind discussed here cannot analyse ideologies as they would philosophies. What philosophers produce on the first dimension is supposed to differentiate them from what ideologists produce on that dimension, but that product would then immediately be appropriated as a target of analysis by students of ideology, operating according to the same guidelines they should apply to ideologies. Philosophers in their normative, substantive theory-producing mode, may clearly be caught in the analytical net proffered in this book. Both political philosophers and ideologists produce similar materials—arrangements of political concepts—and the differences between them, on the basis of the perspectives proposed here, are insufficient to warrant the analysis of their political thinking as belonging to entirely discrete categories. If we insist on the mutual exclusion of political philosophy and ideology, we shall merely bring about an artificial and deficient tidiness which will deviate from de facto practice, diminish the status of some ideologies by

denying their philosophical attributes, and likewise impoverish some political philosophies by disallowing their ideological features. Above all, we will have weakened considerably the power of scholarly analysis at our disposal.The difference we are alerted to must exist then on the second dimension of analysis. It is that between political philosophers as critical evaluators and students of ideologies employing their own preferred methods of inquiry. Put differently, the study of ideologies is the study of the more general type of political thought directly produced by human beings; in addition, the political thinking that some of those individuals produce lends itself to analysis in further ways, as answers to the kind of questions put by political philosophers. The difference lies entirely in the readings of political thought as subject-matter offered by these two scholarly perspectives. The problem for the student of ideologies is that readings undertaken by Anglo-American philosophers rarely include, as they certainly should do, their own formulations of political thought. To the question, 'are we all ideologists?' the answer end p.44is that we all have occasion to use political language in a selective manner, we all piece our political concepts together in particular patterns, we all interpret them in logically indeterminate but culturally significant ways, and these thoughts have bearing on the political activities of ourselves and of others. 71 Nor is it merely the case that philosophers sometimes don the ideologist's hat because on another dimension they are also committed members of a political community. Rather, even when engaged in professional philosophical thinking political philosophers also contribute to the construction of ideologies. That is not to suggest that every single political idea and utterance is ideological, but that every major political thought or speech act will include ideological components, and that very many such acts undertaken by each and every individual display the attributes of ideologies.

Those who object to calling political philosophers ideologists may query, say, which passages of Rawls's are ideological and which philosophical. That is the wrong question to ask. Rawls is both a philosopher and an ideologist because his texts can be subjected to totally diverse analyses and can carry various meanings for different types of reading (and for different disciplines). Rawls may also be intelligible to a grammarian and to a cultural anthropologist. Texts are multi-layered; the point is that even within the range of political thinking, they are capable of bearing more than one significant set of messages. Political philosophers use language ideologically, though their intentions and meanings may concurrently be understood as engaging in another type of thinking about politics—e.g. devising 'better' kinds of argument or 'critically appraising' or identifying 'intuitively correct' solutions.The above analysis has not addressed all pertinent questions. Returning again to the epistemological issue, we need now to reassess where we stand vis-à-vis ideologies. If certain social and political knowledge is impossible, it follows that we must ask two questions: what uncertain knowledge may be gained through ideology; and what can our uncertain knowledge of ideology be? Uncertainty is of course a question of degree. Ideologies or, more precisely, practising ideologists (and we are all such in one capacity) often feel unable to live with uncertainty and insist on establishing an illusory certainty, necessary to political decision-making. We shall discuss its nature in detail in Chapter 2. But the reflective scholar of ideologies may be able to—indeed, may have to—live end p.45with a degree of uncertainty. Thus the problem is twofold. First, how can the uncertain knowledge we have as practising thinkers about politics, as ideologists, be assessed? Do we dismiss it because we cannot be satisfied about its truth-value; will this orthodox view of ideology have to give way to a starkly relativist approach to political thought, as some postmodernists suppose; or can new

strategies be introduced for evaluating our perceptions and conceptions on the basis of their moral, emotional, or intellectual persuasiveness, or their ability to interpret facts meaningfully? Second, how can the value of the analysis of ideologies, such as the one advanced in this book, be assessed? Here again the manifold attractiveness of any proposal, as well as its attempt to bring new perspectives to bear, is significant. Part of the discussion pertinent to this issue will await the appraisal of hermeneutic approaches in Chapter 3.end p.46