There have also been suggestions that ideology has become less important and pervasive as technology and bureaucracy have developed and become more central (Habermas, 1971). However, neither of the latter can be seen as ideologically neutral and both can and have been used to serve ideological purposes. Thus, for example, the extension of bureaucratic control has been associated with marketisation and the advance of Western neoliberalism (Ritzer, 2008).
Writing in 2007, Eagleton commented on ‘the remarkable fact that the concept of ideology should be out of fashion among intellectuals at just the time when it was flourishing in reality’ (Eagleton, 2007, p xiii). I believe his words still hold true, perhaps more each day and as each new national and international political event takes place: ‘Ideology has never been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as a concept as it is today’ (Eagleton, 2007, dust jacket). Also it is difficult to think of many areas of human activity where history seems to have such a powerful, enduring and sometimes worrying and destructive effect as it seems to in relation to ideology. I should add that I say this both as someone who first studied and valued history as a university student and one of whose passions remains old motorcycles; their social, cultural and engineering past, restoration and renewal, their maintenance and use. So I’m not one to dismiss the importance of history. Reflecting particularly on my own 1940 BSA army despatch rider’s bike, this encourages an interest in what has gone before. But the history of ideology – as both a field of study and area of human activity – not only excites this interest, but also seems to force itself into your consciousness as soon as you seek to address the subject in any way, imposing constraints and restrictions. It can feel a subject that is unable to escape its past. This is a history that is made difficult to ignore, which seems sometimes to preoccupy and entrap ideology’s commentators and practitioners, where we constantly seem to be being punished for our forefathers’ ‘sins’.
The conventional history of political ideology is reminiscent of that we were taught of Western nations at school, except, instead of kings and queens, we are taken through lists of key political thinkers. Instead of royal houses and families, we learn about schools of thought.
Exploring the literature of ideology, particularly political ideology, has been a new and demanding task for me. It is both a complex and voluminous literature that it has felt hard work to get my head round. No wonder as we will see, it is often suggested that ideology is not an idea that seems particularly familiar or comfortable to many people. So the aim here is not to offer an exhaustive examination of the definition, nature and range of ideologies but rather to provide a starting point for setting off in a fresh direction. This text is not intended as a primer on political ideology, but rather an attempt to set us thinking about it in different ways. Of course, that means we have to get some handle on the conventional basics. Here we are trying to tread the difficult path of not getting lost in other people’s definitions and agendas, when the primary aim is to explore how people more generally do and can connect with ideas of ideology. At the same time, we cannot ignore the need to explore the meaning of the idea if there is to be any kind of meaningful discussion about it.
Starting points: the history
Students of ideology adopt different starting points in their historical analysis of political ideology. The English revolution (or, as it is more often known, the English Civil War) of the 17th century is perhaps a particularly helpful one here for consideration of ideology in a UK context. Not only is it a key ideological development in British history, when the economically emerging middle class challenged their restricted political power under absolute monarchy. It was also an early UK candidate for re-evaluation through the prism of Marxist ideology (Hill, 1940). However, we could also trace political ideology much further back, through feudalism and pre-feudalism, through mercantilism and then to the ‘Enlightenment’, industrialisation and post-industrialisation. More typically, we are taken through the history of great thinkers and political ideologists. This begins with liberals like Locke and Voltaire, believers in the social contract between state and citizens like Hobbes and Rousseau, conservatives like Edmund Burke and Chateaubriand, utilitarians like Bentham, Ricardo, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, the antecedents of Marx and Marxism, Kant and Hegel, post-Marxists like Touraine, Baudrillard and Bourdieu, and postmodernists like Lyotard and Foucault (Eagleton, 2007; Feuer, 2017).
Western Enlightenment interest in ideology was associated with liberal philosophy based on support for individual liberty, private property, the market and limited state power. Its most conspicuous expression, ‘utilitarianism’, offers an early warning against taking ideologies at face value. Utilitarianism’s maxim was that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number … is the measure of right and wrong’ (Burns and Hart, 1977, p 393). Given that it was the inspiration for the cruelty and harshness of the dreaded English New Poor Law introduced in 1834, imposed on many thousands of impoverished people, it actually seems to the present author, ‘much more to have served the interests and be concerned with the greatest happiness of the small minority who governed and influenced the state, had the vote and ran the Poor Law’ (Beresford, 2016, p 34). The 19th century also witnessed the emergence of Marxist, socialist and anarchist ideologies which not only offered radical alternatives to prevailing liberal ideology, but also powerful critiques of existing understandings of ideology. The original insight of Marxist thinking was that those who controlled the means of production shaped the ideology that was used to justify society. Since then, different theories have developed, like ‘false consciousness’, ‘cultural hegemony’ and lack of ‘cultural capital’, which highlight how such ideology can work to deflect the majority from their own best interests (Hawkes, 2003; Haralambos and Holborn, 2008; Heywood, 2013).
When philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau posited their ideas on the ‘state of nature’, imagining how things were before human civilisation, they did so on the basis of their existing state of knowledge, not on what we might know now from archaeology, carbon-dating and the rest. Similarly their thinking was tied to contemporary racist, sexist, heterosexist and colonialist assumptions and ways of thinking. Such formulations, as Eagleton observed, thus involve ‘epistemological questions’, that is to say, ‘questions concerned with our knowledge of the world’. As he goes on to say, some are ‘preoccupied with ideas of true or false cognition, with ideology as an illusion, distortion and mystification’ (Eagleton, 2007, pp 2–3). The focus of ideology’s founding fathers (for it was so) was largely limited to Western Greco-Roman societies.
If we now pick up a modern text which is trying to help us make sense of political ideology, like the Oxford Handbook (Freeden et al, 2013), we can quickly see both the limits of past discussions and explorations of such ideology and how all embracing such study can and should be.
Thus as well as encountering the classic families of ideology, like conservatism, liberalism, social democracy, communism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, republicanism, colonialism, anarchism, utopianism, we are also being acquainted with green, feminist, globalising, Islamic, Chinese, Modern African and South Asian and Southeast Asian ideologies (Freeden et al, 2013).
Ideology: the idea
Political ideology is a term fraught with problems, having been called ‘the most elusive concept in the whole of social science’ (McLennan, 1986, p 1). As has been said, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to develop serious discussion about any idea without clearly defining it. Yet it is difficult to do this with ideology since definitions are both multifaceted and heavily contested. They are also frequently