Political ideology has been an essential component of world history for over 200 years. Ideology sprang out of the upheavals – economic, social and political – through which the modern world took shape, and has been intimately involved in the continuing process of social transformation and political development. Although ideology emerged first in the industrializing West, it has subsequently appeared throughout the globe, creating a worldwide language of political discourse. However, opinion has been deeply divided about the role that ideology has played in human history. Has ideology served the cause of truth, progress and justice, or has it generated distorted and blinkered world-views, resulting in intolerance and oppression?
This debate has often been carried out in negative terms, highlighting criticisms of ideology, often by predicting its imminent demise. However, what is remarkable is how many and how varied the obituaries for political ideology have been. The various obituaries have been viewed as different forms of ‘endism’. The idea of the ‘end of ideology’ became fashionable in the 1950s and early 1960s, and suggested that politics was no longer concerned with larger normative issues, as technical questions about how to deliver affluence had come to dominate political debate. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism, so-called ‘end of history’ theorists argued that ideological disagreement had ended in the final victory of western liberal democracy. Alternative forms of endism have highlighted the alleged redundancy of the left/right divide, on which the ‘classical’ ideological traditions depended, and held that the triumph of rationalism and modern technology has fatally undermined the ideological style of thought. Ideological politics, however, remains stubbornly resistant to being disinvented. Indeed, as the principal source of meaning and idealism in politics, ideology is destined to be a continuing and unending process.
ENDISM
End of ideology?
The idea of the ‘end of ideology’ became fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s. The most influential statement of this position was advanced by Daniel Bell (1960). Bell was impressed by the fact that, after World War II politics in the West was characterized by broad agreement among major political parties and the absence of ideological division or debate. Fascism and communism had both lost their appeal, while the remaining parties disagreed only about which of them could best be relied on to deliver economic growth and material prosperity. In effect, economics had triumphed over politics. Politics had been reduced to technical questions about ‘how’ to deliver affluence, and had ceased to address moral or philosophical questions about the nature of the ‘good society’. To all intents and purposes, ideology had become an irrelevance.
However, the process to which Bell drew attention was not the ‘end of ideology’ so much as the emergence of a broad ideological consensus among major parties, and therefore the suspension of ideological debate. In the immediate postwar period, representatives of the three major western ideologies – liberalism, socialism and conservatism – came to accept the common goal of managed capitalism. This goal, however, was itself ideological – for example, it reflected an enduring faith in market economics, private property and material incentives, tempered by a belief in social welfare and economic intervention. In effect, an ideology of ‘welfare capitalism’ or ‘social democracy’ had triumphed over its rivals, although this triumph proved to be only temporary. The 1960s witnessed the rise of more radical New Left ideas, reflected in a revival of interest in Marxist and anarchist thought and the growth of modern ideologies such as feminism and ecologism. The onset of economic recession in the 1970s provoked renewed interest in long-neglected, free-market doctrines and stimulated the development of New Right theories, which also challenged the post-war consensus. Finally, the ‘end of ideology’ thesis focused attention exclusively on developments in the industrialized West and ignored the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s communism remained firmly entrenched in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, China and elsewhere, and that revolutionary political movements were operating in Asia, Africa and parts of Latin America.
End of history?
A broader perspective was adopted by Francis Fukuyama in his essay ‘The End of History’ (1989), later developed into The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Unlike Bell, Fukuyama did not suggest that political ideas had become irrelevant, but that one particular set of ideas, western liberalism, had triumphed over all its rivals. Fascism had been defeated in 1945, and Fukuyama clearly believed that the collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe in 1989 marked the passing of Marxism-Leninism as an ideology of world significance. By the ‘end of history’, Fukuyama meant that the history of ideas had ended, and with it, fundamental ideological debate. Throughout the world there was, he argued, an emerging agreement about the desirability of liberal democracy, in the form of a market or capitalist economy and an open, competitive political system.
Without doubt, the eastern European revolutions of 1989–91 and the dramatic reform of surviving communist regimes such as China profoundly altered the worldwide balance of ideological debate. However, it is far less certain that this process amounted to the ‘end of history’. One difficulty with the ‘end of history’ thesis is that no sooner had it been proclaimed than new ideological forces rose to the surface. While liberal democracy may have made impressive progress during the twentieth century, as the century drew to a close there was undoubted evidence of the revival of very different ideologies, notably Islamism, whose influence has come to extend from the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa into the former Soviet Union and the industrialized West. It is possible, for example, that the ‘death of communism’ in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe prepared the way for the revival of nationalism, racism or religious fundamentalism, rather than led to the final victory of liberal democracy.
Underlying Fukuyama’s thesis was the optimistic belief, inherited from classical liberalism, that industrial capitalism offers all members of society the prospect of social mobility and material security, encouraging every citizen to regard it as reasonable and attractive. In other words, it is possible for a broad, even universal, agreement to be achieved about the nature of the ‘good society’. This can nevertheless only be achieved if a society can be constructed that is capable both of satisfying the interests of all major social groups and of fulfilling the aspirations of at least a substantial majority of individual citizens. Despite the undoubted vigour and efficiency that the capitalist market has demonstrated, it certainly cannot be said that capitalism has treated all social classes or all individuals alike. Ideological conflict and debate are thus unlikely to have ended in the late twentieth century with the ultimate worldwide triumph of liberalism, any more than they did with the ‘inevitable’ victory of socialism so widely predicted at the end of the nineteenth century.
Beyond Left and Right?
Yet another form of ‘endism’ is the belief that, as the established features of modern society have crumbled, the political creeds and doctrines it threw up have been rendered irrelevant. This notion is usually advanced through the idea of postmodernity. Not only have the major ideologies, both left-wing and right-wing, been adapted to the ‘postmodern condition’, giving rise to ‘post-isms’ such as postliberalism, post-Marxism and postfeminism, but, according to postmodern theorists, our way of understanding and interpreting the world has changed, or needs to change. This reflects a shift from modernism to postmodernism. Modernism stemmed largely from Enlightenment ideas and theories, and was expressed politically in ideological traditions that offer rival conceptions of the good life. The clearest examples are liberalism and Marxism. Modernist thought is characterized by foundationalism. In contrast, postmodernism is anti-foundationalist; the central theme of postmodernism was summed up by Jean-François Lyotard (1984) as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, meta-narratives being universal theories of history that view society as a coherent totality.
However, such tendencies also provide evidence of the decline of the left/right divide, which marks an important transition in ideological politics. The left/right divide helped to structure ideological debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in that, to a large extent, competing ideological positions and arguments offered different solutions to essentially the same problem. The problem was the destiny of industrial society, and the various solutions offered ranged from free-market capitalism, on the one hand, to central planning and state collectivization on the other. Ideological debate, then, tended to focus on the desirable balance between the market and the state. Since the 1960s, however, politics has certainly not become less ideological, but ideological developments have become increasingly fragmented. The ‘new’ ideologies – feminism, green ideology, religious fundamentalism and multiculturalism – have each, in their different ways, opened up new directions for ideological thinking. However, because each, in a sense, has thrown up its own ideological discourse (based on gender, nature, religion, culture and so on), they are not part of a larger discourse, as applied in the case of the clash between capitalism and socialism.
Nevertheless, various explanations have been offered for the declining salience of the left/right divide. Samuel Huntington’s vision of a ‘clash of civilizations’ linked it to changes in global politics that have occurred because of the end of the Cold War. A world divided along ideological lines, with the USA and the Soviet Union respectively representing the forces of capitalism and communism, had faded and eventually disappeared, leaving politics to be structured by issues of identity and, in particular, culture. In this view, developments such as the growth of Islamism and the rise of China and India constitute ‘civilizational’, rather than an ideological, threats to the West.
Anthony Giddens (1994), in contrast, linked the exhaustion of both left-wing and right-wing ideological traditions to sociological developments associated with the emergence of so-called ‘high modernity’. Giddens placed a particular emphasis on the impact of globalization and the tendency for peoples’ lives to be shaped increasingly by developments that occur, and events that happen, at a great distance from them. This, together with the emergence of a ‘post-traditional’ social order and the expansion of social reflexivity, has created societies that are so fluid and complex that they have, effectively, outgrown the major ideological traditions. Politics, therefore, has gone beyond left and right, a development that has been particularly evident in the ‘hollowing out’ of parliamentary socialism since the 1990s. In an alternative analysis of the implications of an interconnected or interdependent world, Sil and Katzenstein (2010) have argued that it is necessary to go ‘beyond’ paradigms, including academic disciplines as well as theoretical or ideological systems, in order to understand political realities that are increasingly multifaceted and multidimen-sional. In this view, no paradigm, ideological or otherwise, is capable, on its own, of fully explaining the almost infinitely complex realities it purports to disclose.
Triumph of Reason?
The debate about the replacement of ideology by rationalism goes back to the nineteenth century and the firm distinction that Marx drew between ‘ideology’ and ‘science’. For Marx, ideology was intrinsically false because it serves as a vehicle for advancing class interests. In contrast, he portrayed his own ideas as a form of ‘scientific’ socialism. Science, in this view, provides an objective and value-free method of advancing human knowledge, so releasing humanity from enslavement to irrational beliefs, which includes superstitions, prejudices and, in this case, political ideologies. This, indeed, has proved to be one of the enduring myths of modern times. It has recurred, for instance, in relation to the cultural and intellectual implications of globalization, one of the chief features of the emerging global age being an acceptance of a western model of rationality, reflected, most obviously, in the value placed on technology and technological development. In this sense, ideology may be in the process of being displaced by scientism.
However, science is not the antithesis of ideology, but can perhaps be seen as an ideology in its own right. For example, science has been linked to powerful social forces, in particular those represented by industry and technology. Scientism could therefore be viewed as the ideology of the technocratic elite, its main beneficiary being the transnational corporations that are increasingly responsible for funding scientific and technological developments. Moreover, significant ideological controversy has surrounded the advance of science. This can be seen in the case of some ecologists, who view science and technology as the source of the environmental crisis. Multiculturalists and religious fundamentalists, for their part, have sometimes interpreted rationalism as a form of cultural imperialism, on the grounds that it undermines faith-based belief systems and helps to strengthen western and often materialist modes of understanding.
The Resilience of Ideology
However, each of these versions of endism has one thing in common: they are conducted within an ongoing framework of ideological thinking. In different ways, each of them heralds the demise of ideology by highlighting the triumph of a particular ideological tradition, be it welfare capitalism, liberal democracy, postmodernism or scientism. Rather than demonstrating the weakened grasp of ideology, endism in fact shows its remarkable resilience and robustness. Once invented, ideological politics has proved stubbornly resistant to being disinvented.
What, nevertheless, is the source of ideology’s survival and success? The first answer to this question is undoubtedly its flexibility, the fact that ideological traditions and forms go through a seemingly endless process of redefinition and renewal, and, if necessary, new ideologies emerge as old ones fade or fail. The world of ideologies thus does not stand still, but changes in response to changing social and historical circumstances. The second and deeper explanation is that, as the principal source of meaning and idealism in politics, ideology touches those aspects of politics that other political form cannot reach. In effect, ideology gives people a reason to believe in something larger than themselves, because people’s personal narratives only make sense when they are situated within a broader historical narrative. A post-ideological age would therefore be an age without hope, without vision. This is evident in modern, ‘de-ideologized’ party politics, in which, as parties of both left and right become detached from their ideological roots, they lose their sense of purpose and direction, failing to provide members and supporters alike with a basis for emotional attachment. As parties come to sell ‘products’ (leaders or policies) rather than hopes or dreams, party membership and voter turnout both fall, and politicians become increasingly desperate to re-engage with the ‘vision thing’. By creating an appetite for the resurgence of ideology, post-ideological politics contains the seeds of its own undoing, a tendency that helps to explain, for instance, the rise of both right- and left-wing populism in the period since the 2007–9 global financial crisis. For this, if for no other reason, political ideology is destined to be a continuing and unending process.
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