what we should or do want, and how to achieve these goals, are often held to
be highly relative, and even purely subjective. Thus a 15th-century bishop,
19th-century mill owner and 20th-century Russian soldier are all expected to
see the world in crucially different ways that might not ever be capable of
reconciliation. Not only would they all have different values, they would have
different and incompatible explanations for why they valued what they
valued.
In theMarxistandHegeliantraditions of social thought these ‘world-
views’ are supposed to be related to one’s social, and particularly to one’s class,
position. In this version, factory owners and factory workers actually under-
stand their society in quite different ways, although it is also held that the
ideology of the ruling class of any society permeates into those of all other
classes. Very simply, capitalists will see their profit as the necessary and valid
return to their investment of money and effort, while their workerswouldsee it
as an unfair result of exploitation, unless they have been ideologically manipu-
lated into accepting the owner’s own views, and into acquiescing into afalse
consciousness, which leads to an erroneous vision of the capitalist’s version of
reality as inevitable and true. There are major theoretical problems with such a
full version of the idea of ideology, especially the obvious questions about why
one world-view, rather than another, should be given more credence. There
are also many much weaker versions of the word ‘ideology’ current in both real
political argument and academic political discourse. Often an ideology means
nothing more than a particular set of beliefs and values, with no specific view
about which set is correct, nor any special theory on how they come about.
Some modern social scientists of thebehaviouraltradition would even wish
to deny that ideologies are commonly-found phenomena at all, believing
instead that only a minority of the population have coherent and logically-
consistent views on the full range of social matters. Even if this is true, it
remains possible that human perception is so deeply socially influenced that
communication between different socio-economic cultures is always difficult
and can never be perfect.
Immigration
Demographic movements of people have occurred throughout history, some-
times on a vast scale and over very great distances, but before the development
of thenation stateonly warfare and conquest could exert any control over the
phenomenon. From perhaps the 17th century, however, immigration was the
process whereby citizens of ‘older’, usually European countries, moved to
newly-developing and underpopulated countries, mainly in North America
and Australasia. Although immigration controls were occasionally imposed, for
most of the period to 1945 relatively free immigration was not only allowed
Immigration