Part 2 Classical ideologies
What is ideology?
The term ideology has acquired a fairly unsavoury meaning. Politicians regularly
condemn policies they disagree with as ‘ideological’, meaning that such policies are
dogmatic, prejudiced and blinkered. Ideologies are seen as closed systems, beliefs
that are intolerant and exclusive, so that socialists, conservatives, liberals and
anarchists are often anxious to deny the ideological character of their thought.
We are sceptical about this narrow use of the term ideology. An ideology is a
system of ideas, organised around either an attempt to win state power or to
maintain it. To call a set of beliefs ideological is merely to argue that ideas are
organised for a particular statist purpose: they form the basis of a political movement
(focused around the state) whether this is a movement we approve of or not. The
term is generally used to denote a belief system: in our view, it is more than this.
Ideologies are belief systems focused around the state. ‘Moderate’ movements are
as ideological as extremist ones although some movements may embrace many
ideologies, and in the case of nationalism, for example, ideologies that contradict
one another. Tony Blair spoke of the 1997 election as the last election in Britain
based on ideology, although he certainly identified New Labour as embracing a set
of ideas.
The ‘negative’ connotation of the term can only be preserved by linking ideologies
to the state; a post-ideological world is a world without the state.Origins and development of the term
The reality of ideology goes back to the birth of the state, so that it is impossible
to agree with Habermas’s argument that ‘there are no pre-bourgeois ideologies’
(McLellan, 1995: 2). We would see no problem in describing Aristotle’s theory or
St Thomas Aquinas’s position as ideological since these were ideas that impacted
upon society and moved people into action in relation to the state. However, the
term itself was coined in the aftermath of the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt
de Tracey who used the idea positively to denote a science of ideas. The term referred
to ideas that were progressive, rational, based upon sensation and free from
metaphysical and overtly religious content. De Tracey was placed in charge of the
Institut de Franceand regarded the spreading of ideology as the spreading of the
ideas of the French and European Enlightenment.