interprets ‘ideology’ as a way of political thinking typical of totali-
tarian movements. To Popper an ideology is an all-encompassing
and closed system of thought. Not only does such a system have
something to say about virtually all political, social and moral issues,
but it is virtually impossible to disprove because there is always an
explanation, within the terms of the ideology, for any apparent
deviation from its predictions. Thus for some (perhaps crude)
Marxists the revolution is always ‘imminent’ – but when it fails to
come it is because the revolution was betrayed by its leaders,
objective social conditions were misinterpreted, or capitalism found
new outlets for its surpluses.
For Popper, then, ideological thinking should be opposed to
scientific theorising which always produces falsifiablehypotheses. A
scientific approach to social matters consists in developing piecemeal
explanations about how things work and testing them out – not in
having a grand theory that explains everything. The validity of
scientific propositions (which are falsifiable) can be agreed upon by
any two persons of good will in the light of the current evidence and
are subject to modification in the light of new evidence. To make
political judgements, however, people must also employ judgements
about values, which are specific to them and cannot be resolved by
looking at evidence. Political innovation therefore depends upon
building consensus about values between the people concerned as
well as correctly interpreting cause and effect. Consequently rather
than building some grand Utopia on the basis of first principles, social
change should proceed by means of ‘piece-meal social engineering’
(Popper, 1960: 64).
From this point of view the political doctrines of the centre –
democratic socialism, liberalism and conservatism – are all non-
ideological since they accept the need to base social policy upon as
scientific as possible a review of its effects, and upon the value
judgements of the members of the community affected.
However it is quite common to use the word ‘ideology’ in a much
looser way to mean any more or less cohesive set of political prin-
ciples. In this sense, liberalism, socialism and conservatism can also be
described as ‘ideologies’, and this is the sense in which we have used
the word as the title for this chapter. Marxists tend to use the word to
suggest the dominant ideas of a society, which they see as reflecting
its means of production, and therefore the exercise of power. Thus70 IDEOLOGIES