Thanks to Jordan and Jason, and especially to Chuck

Glad to be back and Proud to be a part of this IWP Series of Lectures and Events

“Ideology”—A Word in Search of a Meaning

The idea for this talk came from a textbook that I recently reviewed for possible adoption in my foreign policy course. The title of the text— Ideologies of American Foreign Policy, by Callaghan, O’Connor, and Phythian— appealed to me because I thought it focused on a subject of great importance—the influence of ideological thought on public policy in general and on twentieth and twenty-first century foreign policy in particular.[1] But when I read the first chapter, “The question of ideology,” I was confused. The authors’ understanding of political ideology was certainly not my understanding and was, quite frankly, so indistinct and broad that I could not pin it down. I decided to follow up the sources cited in the text, and the second part of this lecture reflects my reading of those and other related sources.

I should not have been surprised by the authors’ account, I suppose, because the word “ideology” has been used to mean a lot of different things other than the meaning that I am most familiar with. I was somewhat comforted in my confused state when I opened one of the principal sources cited by the textbook authors, Terry Eagleton’s Ideology, and found his list of sixteen definitions of the term “ideology” that were “currently in use.”[2] Karl Mannheim, one of the most influential theorists of ideology, began his extended discussion of ideology with the comment: “firstly, we have to disentangle all the different shades of meaning which are blended . . . into a pseudo-unity.”[3] And sociologist Daniel Bell, author of the 1950s work The End of Ideology remarked that the term was a word with “multivariate functions.”[4] I then decided it may be useful, to me at least, to pick the major meanings out from the tangle and try to make some sense of them.

In order to dress up this sow’s ear of a lecture into something like a silk purse presentation, I might claim that it is like one of Plato’s early aporetic dialogues: those frustrating and irritating discussions about the true meaning of some significant and much-used term like courage or piety only to end without a clear conclusion, without a neat answer to the question of what the term means. That, I am afraid, is what I will mostly give you today—a description the established traditions of usages or meanings of the term “ideology” with some personal comments mixed in. The meanings of “ideology” in the traditions are related, but not identical, to one another. They are now so well established that it is too late and futile to argue that one or the other meaning, or any meaning for that matter, is the correct one. You may recall, however, that those early Platonic dialogues were mercifully short.

If this were a lecture in chemistry and I were explaining the correct definition of the term “sodium chloride,” it would be a different story. Within the context of the science of chemistry and its systematic or technical language, there is and must be only one, universally acceptable and accepted definition of sodium chloride or serious consequences will follow. Ambiguity is not permitted.

But for terms in the less systematic science of politics and in common discourse ambiguity cannot be eradicated. Many words are used as labels for very different ideas. Those labels are well-established, alas!, and legitimate, as much as I hate to admit it. Even in the confines of political science, the term “ideology” has well-established but distinctly different meanings. It is too late to lock the barn-door to prevent the theft of the label, but perhaps we can turn on some of the barnyard lights and see the subject a little more clearly.

All users that I have come across agree that ideology is some form of “thought,” though some would not limit it to just thought. When we discuss the nature of a type of thought—ideology, philosophy, theory, doctrines, dogmas, belief systems, worldviews, culture, public opinion, and so on—we immediately run into the problem of language. All the terms I just mentioned are used so often and in so many different ways that in examining them, analyzing or breaking them down, and defining them, we find ourselves stumbling over our own feet, using as tools vague and undefined terms in an effort to arrive at clear and distinct ideas. And so it is in our effort to clarify the term “ideology.”[5]

Not only is the term “ideology” used as a label for many different concepts, but the theoretical or critical tools and ideas that we want to use to define and distinguish the term—tools like philosophy, theory, myth—are also understood today in many different ways, including as ideological themselves: these terms have multiple meanings; they are labels for different concepts. We can only follow the path of Plato in his early dialogues and hope that our discussion leads in the end to greater clarity about our subject.

Preliminaries

From the sources that I surveyed, I concluded that there are two main traditions of usage or meaning of the term “ideology,” the first of which I label the Epicurean or “Materialist” tradition and the second the “Apocalyptic” or “Political Religion” tradition. Before considering those traditions, let me begin with a couple of common usages. “Ideology” is often used simply as a synonym of “philosophy.” This, it seems to me, was particularly common early in the twentieth century. “Philosophy” denotes the search for truth and for truth about the most fundamental aspects of life. “Ideology,” whether as a science or study or as a set of ideas, does not search for truth about the permanent things. I—and, as it turns out, a lot of students of this subject—for various reasons wish this were not so, but until some video or podcast criticizing this usage goes viral worldwide, I do not have much hope for a change in this usage.[6]

A second usage is very similar to this first one but has a better pedigree and is used with more discipline. Journalists and political scientists who study voting behavior generally and legislative voting behavior in particular use the term “ideological” to differentiate a certain type of voting behavior from other common types. Thus, an “ideological” vote is distinguished from a party vote, one reflecting the wishes of one’s party, and from a constituent vote, one reflecting the perceived wishes of one’s constituents. The late political scientist James Q. Wilson defined “political ideology” as “a coherent and consistent set of beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers ought to obey, and what policies rulers ought to pursue.”[7] This concept of ideology is usually identified with the emergence of the liberal and conservative political movements in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. An “ideological” vote, then, was one rooted in these two “ideologies”—liberalism or conservatism—and not in the cues from party leaders or the material interests of constituents. Though railing for years against this usage of the term “ideology,” I have reluctantly come to accept that, narrowly employed, it is a useful definition for distinguishing one type of voting from another. It left the barn.

The Epicurean or Materialist Tradition

We come then to the first major tradition, the Materialist Tradition, a complex of ideas stemming from the very term “ideology” and its origins. It is the tradition embraced by the authors of the foreign policy textbook that I mentioned a moment ago, and it must be accorded “pride of place” in the history and usage of the term. The tradition today is identified with the Frankfurt School of social theory and is represented in Europe and the United States by a number of influential social, literary, and political theorists, two of whom—Terry Eagleton and Michael Freeden—are prominently cited in the Callaghan foreign policy textbook. It also rests largely on the contributions of Marxists, both orthodox and unorthodox, from the late 19^th century to the present.

In proceeding through the twists and turns of this 225-year history, I want to make four stops: the first with the founder of ideology, Destutt de Tracy; the second with Karl Marx; the third with Karl Mannheim; and the fourth with the aforementioned Terry Eagleton and Michael Freeden.

De Tracy

The origin of the term “ideology” can be determined with great accuracy, and the story is often retold, probably because it is easy to tell since the term is only 225 years old. The term “ideology” was coined by the French intellectual Destutt de Tracy and first publicly pronounced by him in a lecture in April of 1796.[8] It emerged from the epicurean intellectual environment of the Lockean Enlightenment and its materialist ontology, which was prominent among French intellectuals in the late 18^th century.

“Ontology,” the core of metaphysics, is the study of “the order of being,” the study of the fundamental structure of reality. For these materialist thinkers, reality consists entirely of physical matter in motion. Our thoughts, ideas, and therefore all knowledge, which are perhaps not physical things, must be products of our bodily sensations: ultimately they must be the direct results of physical causation. (Hence, the terms “sensationalism” or “sensualism” are often applied to this theory of knowledge or epistemology.) The formation of ideas and thoughts, therefore, is in principle subject to observation or science, and it was precisely this empirical science that Tracy proposed as ideologie. The premise of this “science”—that ideas must be understood as the product of physical or environmental causes—is still the fundamental assumption of this tradition. With the ontological assumption that only the material is real went the scientific method of analysis: breaking each idea down into its clear, distinct, observable component parts. And what better subject matter to analyze was there than the fuzzy ideas of religion and of the existing French and European culture that was rooted in medieval mystery and superstition.

Emmet Kennedy points out that in coining the term and introducing the new science, Tracy and his compatriots did not intend it to be a disinterested discipline; they had an agenda. They intended it to be a useful tool for a broad philosophical and political program that included (1) making ideology rather than religion the foundation of morals, (2) replacing ontology or classical metaphysics with this science of ideas, and (3) establishing a liberal, secular, republican government in France. Though once a supporter of the “ideology” project, Napoleon quickly changed his mind after taking power and uttered his famous criticisms of these “ideologues.” The pejorative sense thus acquired by the term “ideology” taints it to this day. (Napoleon was not alone in his sentiments. Our own John Adams called ideology “the science of idiocy.” Jefferson, of course, defended it.)

Indeed, within a few years of its appearance in 1796, the commonly recognized meaning of the term had morphed from a science or study of ideas to a particular set of ideas to be studied: from verb to noun; from an empirical science to an empirical phenomenon, itself to be studied.[9] In Kennedy’s words:

“’Ideology’ was, in the minds of its founders, more than the Greek translation of ‘science of ideas.’ It was a political and social ideology as well.”[10]

The term continued to be applied to the liberal republicans in Tracy’s circle, who were sometimes “in power” and sometimes in opposition over the next half century, but “ideology” also came to be applied to rival political factions who rested their agendas on abstract ideas.

Marx

When Marx began writing in the 1840s, “ideology” was still often associated with the liberal, or perhaps we may say “market,” republicans. Indeed, Emmet Kennedy points out that Marx learned of the term directly from reading Tracy’s treatise on liberal economics. But, according to Daniel Bell, in Marx’s thought the meaning of the term underwent some “curiously different transmutations.” Marx like Napoleon identified “ideology” with mistaken ideas and with mistaken philosophy. In his early work The German Ideology, in which he went after the Young Hegelians who were influential among the German intelligentsia of the time, Marx said, “There is no specific difference between German idealism and the ideology of all the other nations.”[11]

His point here is that ideology or idealism is fundamentally wrong because it puts the cart before the horse: the eternal truths and ideas that the dominant political groups in societies rely upon to legitimize their regimes are actually created by those very groups and imposed upon the rest of society in order to secure the elites’ authority. These dominant ideas, standards, and ideals are fashioned by the elites to serve their own interests. They are not objectively “true.” They are permeated with self-delusion and self-interested lies and deceit.[12] Reality, understood as material reality, is according to Marx the true basis of ideas, not vice versa.

These abstract principles duplicitously reflect the real, material interests of the dominant political class, which is also the dominant economic class in Marx’s scenario. As such, the ideas and principles need to be debunked, analyzed, or “unmasked” in order to get at the truth. (This function of unmasking Karl Mannheim later picked up in his conception of ideology.) Though Marx never used the term “false consciousness,” and only one instance of that term can be attributed to his collaborator Friedrich Engels, the term “false consciousness” has been adopted by many Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists in this setting. The attitudes and beliefs—the “consciousness”—that has been instilled into most members of society is not objectively true; it is not what it seems. It must be unmasked in order to understand the true material interests beneath it. Marx’s use of the term “ideology” to refer to the ideas that the dominant political group promulgates in order to legitimize its rule is still one of the primary functions of the term in Marxist literature.

If Marx’s view of ideology was so negative and so limited to the false ideas of the elites in power, then how is it that Marxist thinkers have been the principal caretakers and nurturers—the “proprietors” we might say—of the idea of “ideology” in the years after Marx? To understand that, I believe we must look to another Marxist idea presented in the Manifesto.

Marx famously said:

Your very ideas are but an outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all.

And, a few pages on:

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life.[13]

Marx did not identify this totality of consciousness with “ideology” here or elsewhere in his writings, but the association is obvious. Here is explicitly stated the epicurean or materialist theory of the physical or material causes of ideas.

Marx here goes beyond classical epicurean ontology, however. In orthodox materialist fashion, Marx certainly identified the causes of ideas as our physical environment, but he identifies the causes specifically with the prevailing economic conditions—the dominant mode of production. The emphasis upon the economic causes was part of his larger conception of dynamic or “historical” materialism.

Marx projected a narrative onto all human history. Our physical environment—the cosmos—is not a static order, it is dynamic. It is “teleological;” that is, it is headed in a particular direction, and the engine of this movement is the evolving mode of production necessary to human life. He termed this engine at one point the “economic base” of society. And in any society, he said, the masters and representatives of the dominant economic class will acquire political power and project their ideas based on economic self-interest onto the rest of society. The economic-political elites establish what Gramsci later termed a cultural hegemony—an “ideological superstructure”—that rests on the economic self-interests of the dominant class. The problem is that the economic system that is the foundation of our ideas at any one time is constantly in the process of necessary change and evolution toward its final—socialist—destination.

In this economically-based society, the roles people play in society, which is necessarily out of step with the economic laws of history, are what Marx refers to as “character masks.”[14] The object of studying ideology for Marxists was the “unmasking” of the false ideas which actually disguise the true economic interests beneath.

Mannheim

This Marxist conception of ideological disguises and the need for unmasking to get to the truth is fundamental to the classic work Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim in 1929. By this time a number of Marxists had come to doubt the primacy of economics in the formation of people’s thoughts and ideas and to doubt Marx’s economic “laws of history” as well, but continued to identify themselves with Marxism and to explore the issues raised by the materialist conception of the origin of all consciousness.[15] [Benito Mussolini broke with organized Marxism on the very issue of the primacy of economics as determiner of human consciousness.[16]] But Mannheim has arguably been the most influential voice in this stage of the development of the materialist tradition.

Mannheim, a sociologist famous for his concept of the sociology of knowledge, began his intellectual life as a Marxist and contributed a number of key concepts to this tradition of ideology. His most significant contribution, perhaps, was his rejection of economic class as the fundamental and necessary driver of consciousness. Mannheim identified the origins of our consciousness with “all historical and social environments.”[17]

Mannheim also followed the logic of the materialist conceptions of reality—and of man as a non-exceptional part of physical reality—to argue that not only our consciousness—our conscious thoughts and ideas—are products of our environment but also our unconscious motivations for those thoughts, feelings, urges, and ideas—our “unconscious-ness,” if I may call it that—is historically and socially determined. All of this is subject to empirical observation and thus to scientific investigation. “The emergence,” he says, “of the problem of the multiplicity of thought-styles which have appeared in the course of scientific development and the perceptibility of collective-unconscious motives hitherto hidden, is only one aspect of the . . . intellectual restiveness which characterizes our age.”[18] From here it is but a short step to identifying ideology with non-verbal behavior as well, as Michael Freeden does in his concepts of “thought practice” and “political thought behavior.[19]

With this assertion of the environmental determination of our conscious and unconscious lives, an idea implicit in Marx’s Manifesto statements on consciousness became explicit: ideology is coextensive with and impossible to distinguish from all human culture.[20] The study of all conscious actions, including the identification of the unconscious motivations of our actions, is sociology and the sociology of knowledge in particular.

Mannheim distinguishes between partial or particular ideologies, which reflect the self-interests of discrete, self-conscious groups, and total ideologies, which constitute the worldview of whole societies or large segments of society. Partial ideologies, which are formulated to defend and advance the agendas of interest groups within society contain conscious lies and unconscious self-delusions. These are the ideas and arguments that must be “unmasked,” as Marx explained. The unmasking falls within the science of psychology.

Total ideologies, which legitimize a whole culture, contain fewer conscious, calculated lies and more unconscious self-deception and delusion. They are not simply the aggregate of all the individual and partial ideologies but constitute an independent system or structure. They cover all of the ground once covered by religions. They are too broad for simple unmasking. They can only be subject to philosophical skepticism and replacement, but Mannheim did not deny that objective or truthful critiques of total ideologies are possible.

Though Mannheim distinguishes between ideologies and utopias, “utopias” can be best understood as a third form of ideology adduced by Mannheim. They are total ideologies that are total ideologies that provide ideal, desirable alternatives to presently existing cultures.]

As Michael Freeden remarks, “Mannheim implicitly resurrected the agenda of Destutt de Tracy that Marx and Engels had largely ignored.” Ideology was an empirical science and was central to the science of sociology. Mannheim set the stage for the contemporary discussions of “ideology” that I surveyed.

Eagleton and Freeden

I turn finally to two contemporary students of ideology, the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton and the philosopher Michael Freeden, both prominently cited in the foreign policy textbook as authorities on the subject.

Taking a look at Eagleton’s book first, his study is helpful for someone looking into this materialist tradition of ideology for the first time. His book is a witty and frequently humorous intellectual history of ideology with chapters entitled “From Lukacs to Gramsci” and “From Adorno to Bourdieu.” His purpose, in the chapter entitled “What is Ideology?” was precisely my own. As I mentioned earlier, he begins by listing sixteen “definitions of ideology currently in circulation.”[21] His goal? To find a “useful” definition. As it were, after a mighty struggle that made me think of someone trying to move about in a very small room in which everything is covered with a very sticky coating, or perhaps someone caught in a spider’s web, he finds six.[22] The stickiness comes from his every attempt to find a distinctive use for the term: the critical or analytical terms that he uses to approach ideological phenomena are themselves ideological products; the “interests” that many, including Marx, think are behind the disguises are also deemed to be ideological constructions by other theorists. Ideology seems to have a claim on all human thought.

In the course of his survey, he rejects the definition that all thought and action is ideological because if everything is ideological, then what does it mean to be non-ideological? To explain everything as ideological is to explain nothing. A selection or selections must be made.

Eagleton concludes that in studying ideologies, “we are dealing less with some essence of ideology than with an overlapping network of ‘family resemblances’ between different styles of signification.”[23] He ultimately settles on two meanings or usages, both of which relate “belief systems” to political power—one “refers to the ways which many signs, meanings and values help to reproduce a dominant social power” (shades of Marx’s definition) and the other denotes significant “conjuncture[s] between discourse and political interests.”[24]

Eagleton also addresses the problem of objective truth that is entailed by understanding of ideology as false consciousness: if all thought subject to ideological distortion, how can we affirm anything, even our analysis of “ideological” thought, as “true.” His response, an affirmation of what he calls the “moderate rationality of human beings[:] we . . . have some capacity for making sense of our world in a moderately cogent way.” Or else, we’d all be dead.

As a literary critic, his discussion often focusses on language and its use in fighting to obtain power or to defend against the power of others. This also is one of the major factors in Michael Freeden’s theory of ideology.]

Where Eagleton seems to be a customer looking for a useful tool, Michael Freeden is a recognized theorist of ideology. His major work is a possibly comprehensible treatise entitled Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, which runs to almost six hundred pages of the densest prose I have attempted since Hegel’s Phenomenology, and with about the same success. Unsurprisingly, I found his book Ideology: A Very Short Introduction much more helpful. In it he places the theory of ideology in the contemporary, European intellectual world and stirs post-Marxism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, as well as political ideologies, non-political ideologies, and identity politics into the mix. The principal contributors to the tradition that Freeden identifies are Marx, Mannheim, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci.

Where Eagleton perused the alternatives and reasoned his way to a selection of useful concepts of “ideology,” Michael Freeden constructs an elaborate theory of “ideology” that does not seem to exclude any contribution. He contributes a substantial glossary of analytic terms such as macro-ideologies, micro-ideologies, thin ideologies, the “four Ps”—proximity, priority, permeability, and proportionality—decontestation, deconstruction, encoding and decoding ideological signs, and discourse analysis. Freeden condensed his six hundred page into one hundred; to attempt to reduce it to a couple of paragraphs in this lecture is frankly beyond me.

Nevertheless, we can summarize his understanding in his own words as “a set of ideas, beliefs, opinions, and values that (a) exhibit a recurring pattern, (2) are held by significant groups, (3) compete over providing and controlling plans for public policy, and (4) do so with the aim of justifying, contesting or changing the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community;” it “is a wide-ranging structural arrangement that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts” and symbols; and that “compete over the control of political language as well as competing over plans for public policy,” and he adds the competition over the control of political language is primary.” The expression of the ideas, beliefs, and values is both verbal and behavioral, as I mentioned above.[25]

In Sum

What I think we can take away from this tradition, without being at all snarky or cynical is captured very well by Terry Eagleton:

The term ideology has a wide range of historical meanings, all the way from the unworkably broad sense of the social determination of thought to the suspiciously narrow idea of the deployment of false ideas in the direct interests of the ruling class.[26]

The Epicurean-materialist premise that our conscious thoughts and unconscious motivations are all products of our environment and that the causal relationships between the sources and the human results can be scientifically studied and understood certainly leads to an immense and ‘unworkably broad’ subject matter that exceeds human efforts. To find that the term “ideology” has been applied by different students to different aspects of the whole range of human thought and action is not surprising. To find a particular unambiguous usage acceptable to all would be surprising, given the impossibly broad range of relevant data. Yet the workers in this tradition continue to try to do just that. Hence, the title of this lecture: a word in search of a meaning, or I should say, a word in search of a unique, technical, and thereby useful, meaning.

My radical misgivings aside, we may draw a few conclusions. There does seem to be a tendency to identify ideologies with beliefs that are actually held by groups of people rather than with ideas or theories that may have no present followers. Ideology is properly a social science focused on people with beliefs, not a philosophical inquiry into ultimate truths. Second, though ideologies can be either political or not, there seems to be a tendency to identify ideologies with groups who are contesting for political power. Mannheim explicitly states this; Freeden argues that ideologies should be deemed relevant to politics, thus implying that in the twenty-first century ideology is being increasingly understood as not necessarily political. Third, in the two authors Eagleton and Freeden and in many they cite, language is the weapon of political warfare these days.

The Political Religion Tradition

The second major tradition, and the one that I have adhered to since grad school, applies the term “ideology” primarily, if not exclusively, to one set of ideologies recognized by both Terry Eagleton and Michael Freeden. (Freeden refers to them as the “repulsive” ideologies;” Eagleton as “oppositional.”) It is well-described by Richard Watkins. Ideologies, Watkins says, are “sets of ideas involving visionary and grandiose schemes of social change.”

Watkins reflects his awareness of the ongoing debate over the meaning of ideology in the Materialist Tradition that I have just described in his 1964 book The Age of Ideology, but he chooses to use the term in a more limited, yet ironically more familiar, sense:

In this book we do not pursue this lively intellectual debate over the nature and function of ideology. We use the term in its most common [c. 1964] colloquial sense as a set of ideas involving visionary and grandiose schemes of social change.[27]

Though I have tried to find a clear origin of this narrower usage of the term in the mid-twentieth century, I have not been able to pin it down.

Daniel Bell may offer an explanation of this usage in his book The End of Ideology, first published a few years before Watkins’s Age of Ideology. Bell identifies his own use of the term with Mannheim’s “total conception” of ideology:

[A]n all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality, . . . a set of beliefs, infused with passion . . . [that] seeks to transform the whole of a way of life. . . . Ideology, in this sense, and in the sense that we use it here, is a secular religion.[28]

Bell specifically identifies period from the 1930s to the 1950s as the era in which ideology flourished only to come to an end in the 1950s. In defending his application of the term mostly to left-wing theories, he says,

While there are “ideologies” of the “right” as well as of the “left”—as there are now “ideologies” of economic development—one’s historical contexts defines one’s usage; and the word ideology was a product of the “left” and gained a distinctive resonance in that context.[29]

The two prototypical ideologies for Bell and Watkins, of course, were Nazism and Marxism. Both movements were grounded on cosmic scenarios projected upon the world that take in all of human history—past, present, and future. Both reduced the causes of all human history and human action scientistically to a single factor, economic or biological, and both laid out a path to the future, which, with a bit of revolutionary human help, was imminently possible, if not inevitable. The future for both ideologies was envisioned as utopian: wonderful and free of the evils of the present; the future would be different from the present not just because it was better but because it was perfect. This future would continue until the end of time or, at least, for an unimaginably long time, say a thousand years, depending on whether one’s conception of history was linear like Marx’s or cyclical like Hitler’s. There were forces opposing the revolution—it would be a struggle—but victory over the opponents was in the cards—the revolution would succeed if everyone did what was necessary to achieve this perfect human order.

To those of us of the West and the Abrahamic religious tradition, this picture of the future clearly suggested the promised “heaven on earth” or, more particularly, the thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints and martyrs after Satan has been cast into the abyss: the original Millennium of chapter 20 in the Book of Revelation, which is also known, of course, by its alternative title, the Book of the Apocalypse. It is no wonder that these twentieth-century political movements were analyzed in religious terms that seemed particularly fitting to the subject. The future was visionary or apocalyptic, despite the claims of scientific proof; the future continued to the end of time—it was an eschatological vision; or it lasted a thousand years, literally a millennium—it was millenarian (or chiliastic if you prefer the Greek word for 1,000). As Bell put it, these movements were “secular religions.” Or as the psychoanalyst and prolific author Eric Fromm wrote in his sympathetic introduction to Marx’s early writings, “Marx’s aim, socialism, based on his theory of man, is essentially prophetic Messianism in the language of the nineteenth century.”[30]

The idea that ideologies may be likened to religions was not original with Bell or Fromm. In the 1930s, the American historian Carl Becker cited the work of Alexis de Tocqueville for this insight. In 1856, De Tocqueville said of that other great ideological revolution, the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution: “In all of the annals of recorded history we find no mention of any political revolution that took this form: its only parallel is to be found in certain religious revolutions. . . . [T]he French Revolution, though ostensibly political in origin, functioned on the lines, and assumed many of the aspects, of a religious revolution.”[31]

Becker applied de Tocqueville’s insight to his own attempt to understand the Bolshevik Revolution, which had taken place a dozen years before his1932 book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers: “And now, in our day, the first act in the social revolution, accompanied and sustained by the communist faith, has just been staged in Russia.”[32] Becker continues:

The Russian is most of all like the French Revolution in this, that its leaders, having received the tablets of eternal law, regard the ‘revolution’ not merely as an instrument of political and social reform but much more as the realization of a philosophy of life which being universally valid because it is in harmony with science and history must prevail. For this reason the Russian Revolution like the French Revolution has its dogmas, its ceremonial, its saints.”[33]

A few years after Becker’s book, Eric Voegelin wrote a book entitled The Political Religions, a thinly veiled critique of the Nazi Revolution during his own time.

I must acknowledge here also what is perhaps the most influential work by a twentieth century historian and required reading for any student of ideology in this second tradition of political religion: Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium, first published in 1957. Cohn describes the “revolutionary millennialism” of the Middle Ages and chronicles the “revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists” from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries.[34] Cohn traces the structure and the course of development of many revolutionary chiliastic movements, and in his final edition explicitly relates it to the Nazi and Marxist revolutions of his day. Cohn concludes that “the parallels and indeed the continuity are incontestable.”[35]

Daniel Bell argues—persuasively, I think—that the rise of political ideologies as secular religions owes its development to the broad loss of faith in the nineteenth century. Bell compared ideology and philosophy and their focus on ideas. Philosophy, he argues, seeks to eliminate passion from the rational comprehension of ideas; ideology is essentially the active, the passionate, application of ideas, or, flipping the figure, the channeling of emotion through ideas. Contrasted to religion, which also essentially channels “emotional energy,” ideology channels the energy into the politics of this world. Religion channels it away from earthly concerns “onto the litany, the liturgy, the sacraments, the edifices, the arts.” Religion, according to Bell, also provided a way to cope with death and the fear of death, which ideology does not.

It may well be that with the decline in religious faith in the last century and more, this fear of death as total annihilation, unconsciously expressed, has probably increased. One may hypothesize, in fact, that here is a cause for the breakthrough of the irrational, which is such a marked feature of the changed moral temper of our time. Fanaticism, violence, and cruelty are not, of course, unique in human history. But there was a time when such frenzies and mass emotions could be displaced, symbolized, drained away, and dispersed through religious devotion and practice. Now there is only this life, and the assertion of self becomes possible—for some even necessary—in the domination over others.[36]

Referring to the catastrophic events occurring between 1930 and 1950 in Europe, he says:

For the radical intellectual who had articulated the revolutionary impulses of the past century and a half, all this has meant an end to chiliastic hopes, to millenarianism, to apocalyptic thinking—and to ideology.[37]

The essential characteristics of ideologies in this tradition, we might call it, vary slightly from author to author, but we may take Watkins’s concept as a good place to start. He introduces his study of a broad array of political ideologies by identifying five distinctive characteristics of ideology:

1. political ideologies have been based on the revolutionary conviction that life here on earth is capable of being perfected by human knowledge and action;

2. ideologies self-consciously evoke “the people” as the ultimate beneficiary of progress and ideological victory;

3. the goals to which modern ideologies address themselves are typically utopian and apocalyptic;

4. ideologists habitually think in the simplified terms of a struggle between “us” and “them,” friend and enemy;

5. until the end of the nineteenth century, and to some extent even now, successful ideological movements have derived much of their strength from the extreme optimism of their views regarding human progress.

Norman Cohn’s conception of the vision of salvation that guided the medieval revolutionary millenarians is compatible with Watkins’s. Cohn found that millenarian sects and movements always picture salvation as:

1. collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity;

2. terrestrial (or immanent), in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly (transcendent) heaven;

3. imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly;

4. total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself;

5. miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies.

Eliminating the faith in universal progress that animated so much of the nineteenth century reformers and revolutionaries, and the miraculous intervention that the secular turn of the nineteenth century made unnecessary or non-existent, the central idea of a revolutionary struggle in order to establish an earthly paradise or utopia—or to immanentize the eschaton—is common to both.

The religious or Abrahamic template which seems so relevant here also explains in part the totalitarian goal—the perfect ordering of all of life including our thoughts and words, what we do and what we don’t do—aspired to by Marxist communism and by national socialism, and indeed by Mussolini’s fascism. Departure from the perfect political order is treated as sin—by our thoughts and our deeds, by what we have done or failed to do—which is broader that our conception of mere criminal behavior and remarkably similar to the broad conception of ideology that we described a few minutes ago.

The antinomianism or rejection of all authority—ethical, legal, and political—that follows from the total rejection of existing social and political order is a direct parallel to the religious antinomianism of ancient Gnosticism. But the revolutionary optimism of proponents of these ideologies is not. Rather, the faith that men can act as gods, changing and renovating reality—the basic order of being—is characteristic of the esoteric or Hermetistic tradition, in which ultimate faith and confidence for salvation from this terrible hell on earth is also placed in a certain gnosis or key to reality.

Conclusions

What are the main contrasts that we can draw the previous conception or tradition of ideology? First, in the study of political ideologies conducted within this latter tradition, the term “ideology” is not really necessary. The analysis of the French, Russian, and German revolutions is not enhanced by any recognizable concept of ideology. “Political religion” seemed to work for de Tocqueville and Becker quite nicely. Students of these phenomena are not interested in finding a proper use for the term; they are concerned with finding the essential and secondary characteristics of the ideas and the movements that implement the ideas.

In their discussions of this subject matter, neither Eric Voegelin nor Gerhart Niemeyer characterized it consistently as “ideology.” Voegelin, of course, used the term “political religion” in his early book and later referred to this mode of thought as doxa (opinion) and Gnosticism.[38]

Niemeyer used the term “total critique of society,” arguing that such comprehensive condemnations of existing cultures take two forms: an “axiological critique” based on an “underlying ‘natural’ order of human existence which is hidden and buried under the existing ‘false’ order of politics;” and a “teleological critique,” which views the present from the perspective of an imaginary future or “telos of value.”

This brings us to a significant distinction between the materialist, Marxist conception and the colloquial, political religion conception of ideology. For the materialists, the general understanding of ideology is sociological. As Freeden says, insofar as it focuses on ideas, the ideas are maintained by people as beliefs. They animate and motivate human action. For those in the Political Religion tradition, it is the ideas themselves that is the essence of ideology: the study of ideology is philosophical. A forgotten manuscript long forgotten by everyone may indeed contain a political ideology because of the argument it presents, just as it may present a non-ideological philosophy or some other argument or narrative entirely. Ideology is generally understood as deformation of philosophy or theory, whether or not anyone believes it at any given time.

As a pretense of philosophy, an ideological set of ideas can be evaluated on the basis of the soundness of its concepts and the aptness of its symbols. It can be determined to be true or false. Voegelin argues that ideologies all ignore one of the four components of reality—the natural, the individual, the social, and the divine—and substitute an imaginary idea for the component ignored. Philosophy assumes that true reality can be apprehended by the human mind; much contemporary ideology does not.[39]

This is not to say that the latter school of thought ignores political movements of ideological believers. Voegelin wrote about “gnostic mass movements,” but the significance of these movements is found in the ideas, millenarian or gnostic, that the members believe in. Norman Cohn, of course, focused on revolutionary movements of people motivated by millenarian, gnostic, and anarchistic beliefs.

One other contemporary scholar and student of fascism, Marxism, and totalitarianism, A. James Gregor, argues for a broad, sociological conception of ideology that includes, as one essential component, a central myth or narrative.

When we focus on political ideologies as coherent arguments or theories that can and must be theoretically evaluated, we must have recourse to the basic conceptions of philosophy and political theory in particular: [empirical verifiability] ontology, cosmology, anthropology.

So what is “ideology”? Does ideology describe some particular discrete aspect of reality; is it an empirical science? Or, if there is no reality other than thought, human consciousness (and unconsciousness), does it describe some unique type of thought or consciousness? Does the term generally serve some useful purpose?

After my review of the sources I have just discussed, my answer is “no,” there is no aspect of reality that particularly requires the label “ideology” to enhance the focus or study of something real. I agree with Eagleton: “ideology” today, in the absence of carefully stipulated definitions, describes too much to be a useful concept. It does not advance understanding to say that all thought—and action—is “ideological. But we have seen that those narrower useful concepts tend to be swallowed by the “lively intellectual debate,” as Watkins describes it, and do not survive as distinct, general concepts.

The subject matter that the term is intended to label has often already been identified with another, more lasting label. This is my principal objection to using the term as a synonym for “philosophy” or “theory.” Both of those terms identify real types of human thought and action, though the love and pursuit of wisdom or the critical clarification of social and political symbols is not quickly and easily explained. The lasting and useful definitions of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, theory, and theology, to name a few, can certainly not be found in a dictionary—even an online dictionary. But usefulness and precision, in this regard, are complements, if not the same thing, and it is always a good thing to know precisely what you are talking or thinking about.

Or the subject matter itself does not really exist: it is a product of a particular theoretical perspective that rests neither on sound concepts or empirically verifiable facts.

For my own part, I will continue to use the term primarily to refer to the repulsive, oppositional revolutionary political and cultural movements of the past century and of the present, but I aim to be more hesitant in throwing the term around.

Lecture given at the Institute of World Politics, Washington, D.C., 2020.

[1] John Callaghan, Brendon O’Connor, and Mark Phythion, Ideologies of American Foreign Policy (New York: Routledge, 2019). Cp. Thomas A Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1948), cited in Walter McDougall Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

[2] Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 1.

[3] Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1936), 55.

[4] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 394.

[5] See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1987), chapter 1, especially pp. 27-31.

[6] See Richard H. Cox, Ideology, Politics, and Political Theory (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1969), 43.

[7] James Q Wilson, American Government, Brief Edition (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1987), 83.

[8] I have particularly relied here upon Emmet Kennedy’s article in the Journal of the History of Ideas: “’Ideology’ from Destutt De Tracy to Marx,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 3 (July 1979): 353-368. See also Cox, supra.

[9] Cp. Terry Eagleton’s similar observation in Ideology, 63-64.

[10] Ibid., 358. Compare Hobbes’s discussion in chapter 14 of Leviathan where he begins by referring to “the right of nature . . . [as] the liberty each man has to use his own power, as he will himself,” but soon remarks that because of the universal war of everyone against everyone, it follows that “every man has a right to everything.” Or “philosophy”: from a life lived in love of wisdom to the wisdom itself.

[11] The German Ideology (Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 1976), 30. This passage, which was originally part of Marx’s written manuscript but was crossed out, continues: “The latter too regards the world as dominated by ideas, ideas and concepts as the determining principles, and certain notions as the mystery of the material world accessible to the philosophers.” Cox points to this identification of a philosophy with ideology as the foreshadowing of the similar practice today.” Cox, 43.

[12] Napoleon and Burke also condemned such deductive reasoning from abstract principles to political policies, which they independently referred to as “metaphysical.”

[13] The Communist Manifesto New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987, 2008), 52, 55. The section on proletarians and communists.

[14] Cp. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), chapters 1, 4, 5 (“unmasking”).

[15] Marx affirmed these “natural laws of capitalist production . . . working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” Quoted from Das Capital by Roger S. Gottlieb in An Anthology of Western Marxism, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5.

[16] To whom could be added the Marxists Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, and others.

[17] Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12.

[20] Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 47-76).

[22] He lists “in a progressive sharpening of focus”:

1. “the general material process of ideas, beliefs, and values in social life”;

2. “the ideas and beliefs (whether true or false) which symbolize the conditions and life experiences of a specific, socially significant group or class”;

3. “the promotion and legitimation of the interests of such social groups in the face of opposing interests”;

4. the promotion and legitimation of the interests of a dominant social power;

5. “ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class specifically by distortions and dissimulation”; and,

6. “false and deceptive beliefs . . . as arising not from the interests of the dominant class but from the material structure of society as a whole.”

[27] Watkins and Kramnick, 2. The first usage of the term in this colloquial sense that I have found is perhaps in Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, first published in 1930 and translated into English in 1932 where he relates it to the outlook of the emerging masses, newly liberated from the culture arrested by the dead hand of the past, that views the future as entirely “open to all contingencies, constitut[ing] authentic life, the true fullness of our existence.” Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1932), 34. Mannheim, in Ideology and Utopia, says in 1929: “For most people, the term “ideology” is closely bound up with Marxism,” but he does not indicate whether he means bound up with the Marxists’ use of the term (cp. Bell) or with referring to Marxism as an ideology.

[28] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 399-400. Mannheim remarks in Ideology and Utopia (1929): “For most people, the term “ideology” is closely bound up with Marxism, and their reactions to the term are largely determined by the association.” (55)

[30] Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Continuum, 1961, 1966), 5.

[31] From Part One, Chapter Three, of De Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert. Doubleday Anchor Books (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1955), 10, 11. Emphasis in original.

[34] The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). The first edition was published in 1957.

[38] The New Science of Politics, in Modernity without Restraint (Columbia, MO; University of Missouri Press, 2000), 111. “The term ‘ideology’ has come into vogue and in some respects is related to the Platonic doxa. But precisely this term has become a further source of confusion because under the pressure of what Mannheim has called [the total conception of ideology], the general suspicion of ideology, its meaning has been extended so far as to cover all types of symbols used in propositions on politics, including the symbols of theory themselves.”

[39] Callaghan et al, following Freeden, say: “For anyone familiar with debates about epistemology, or anyone who has studied the course of twentieth century politics, Mannheim’s appeal to a political truth that goes beyond ideology has no more support today than the Marxist-Leninist case for ‘scientific socialism’ as the standpoint of the proletariat.” At, 2. Eagleton’s “epistemology itself is at the moment somewhat out of fashion.” Supra, 10.