"Our Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, that we might learn from their experience, " Laluna began the talk, as usual, after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam. "And that night, I saw two young importirs, Arjun—nickname Juna—and Yudhisthira—or Yudhis—had a little discussion in an airplane, bound for Paris..
'When people hear the word 'ideology',' said Yudhis, 'they often associate it with 'isms' such as communism, fascism, or anarchism. All these words do denote ideologies, but a note of caution must be sounded. An 'ism' is a slightly familiar faintly derogatory term—in the United States even 'liberalism' is tainted with that brush.'
'But not every 'ism' is an ideology—consider 'optimism' or 'witticism',' Arjun respond, 'and not every ideology is dropped from a great height on an unwilling society, crushing its actually held views and convictions and used as a weapon against non-believers.'
'We produce, disseminate, and consume ideologies all our lives,' said Yudhis, 'whether we are aware of it or not. So, yes, we are all ideologists in that we have understandings of the political environment of which we are part, and have views about the merits and failings of that environment.'
'Imagine,' Juna added, 'yourself walking in a city. Upon turning the corner, you confront a large group of people acting excitedly, waving banners and shouting slogans, surrounded by uniformed men, trying to contain the movement of the group. Someone talks through a microphone and the crowd cheers. Your immediate reaction is to decode that situation quickly. Should you flee or join, or should you perhaps ignore it? The problem lies in the decoding. Fortunately, most of us, consciously or not, possess a map that locates the event we are observing and interprets it for us. If you are an anarchist, the map might say, 'Here is a spontaneous expression of popular will, an example of the direct action we need to take in order to wrest the control of the political away from elites that oppress and dictate. Power must be located in the people; governments act in their own interests that are contrary to the people's will.'
If you are a conservative, the map may say, 'Here is a potentially dangerous event. A collection of individuals are about to engage in violence in order to attain aims that they have failed, or would fail, to achieve through the political process. This illegitimate and illegal conduct must be contained by a strong police grip on the situation. They need to be dispersed and, if aggressive, arrested and brought to account.'
And if you are a liberal, it may say, 'Well-done! We should be proud of ourselves. This is a perfect illustration of the pluralist and open nature of our society. We appreciate the importance of dissent; in fact, we encourage it through instances of free speech and free association such as the demonstration we are witnessing.'
'Ideologies,' Yudhis remarked, 'map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the worlds we inhabit. Making sense, let it be said, does not always mean making good or right sense. But ideologies will often contain a lot of common sense. At any rate, political facts never speak for themselves. Through our diverse ideologies, we provide competing interpretations of what the facts might mean. Every interpretation, each ideology, is one such instance of imposing a pattern—some form of structure or organization—on how we read (and misread) political facts, events, occurrences, actions, on how we see images and hear voices.
The term ideology originates from French idéologie, itself deriving from combining Greek: idéā (ἰδέα, 'notion, pattern'; close to the Lockean sense of idea) and -logíā (-λογῐ́ᾱ, 'the study of'). The initial coiner of the term 'ideology', Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher, writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, intended to create a proper branch of study concerned with ideas. He sought to establish ideals of thought and action on an empirically verifiable basis, from which both the criticism of ideas and a science of ideas would emerge.'
'In discussing ideologies,' Juna commented, 'generally, we will mainly refer to political ideologies and that ideologies as political devices. When ideology is used in other senses—such as the ideology of the impressionists or of Jane Austen, an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security—the word is borrowed or generalized to indicate the much vaguer notion of the cultural ideas guiding the field or steering the practitioner in question. One problem with the term 'ideology' is that too many of its users have shied away from injecting it with a reasonably precise, useful, and illuminating meaning.'
'Political ideology, if studied through the lenses of conceptual history, begins with the assumption that ideology escapes definition. Friedrich Nietzsche provided the argument for this assumption with his statement that what is definable has no history. Taking Nietzsche seriously on this point consequently means that what has a history cannot be defined. Ideology as a concept does indeed have a history.
Now let see how the concept of ideology developed through the lense of history. Napoleon transformed the term ideology from an expression of an academic imagining of a new science exploring how ideas conformed to laws into a political concept of conflict. The term lost its philosophical-apolitical connotation and became a polemic catch word in the public debate. In particular, he attacked the leading ideologue Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, who, in a lecture in the Paris Institut National in 1796, had introduced the term ideology into philosophical language.
Now let's see how the concept of ideology developed through the lense of history. Napoleon transformed the term ideology from an expression of an academic imagining of a new science exploring how ideas conformed to laws into a political concept of conflict. The term lost its philosophical-apolitical connotation and became a polemic catch word in the public debate. In particular, he attacked the leading ideologue Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, who, in a lecture in the Paris Institut National in 1796, had introduced the term ideology into philosophical language.
In the USA, there was great interest in the French debate. There was widespread familiarity with Napoleon’s curse of the ideologues and it was commented upon in American public debate. Thomas Jefferson was influenced by the ideologues and corresponded with Destutt de Tracy and others. He distributed their works. However, he was more interested in their outlines and designs of economics and politics than their theory of ideas.
John Adams, in turn, was influenced by Napoleon’s view. He calls the Project Ideology’, wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1813. Indeed, Adams referred to all those who dreamt of a future better constitution—Franklin, Turgot, Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, and
others—as ‘Idiologians.’
The reinterpretation of the concept of ideology initiated by Napoleon was noticed in the debate in Germany even earlier than in the USA. In 1804 a reference was made to the fact that across the French debate the terms protestant, philosopher, encyclopedist, economist, principalist, ideologue, illuminist, democrat, jacobine, terrorist, and homme de sang were used synonymously. A few years later, Ideologe was used incisively and polemically, ‘Cossacks and ideologues, scoundrels and friars are unblessed extremes wrongful against the youth’. However, only from around 1830 was ideology used more regularly as a political invective. Conservatives deemed as ideologues those who wanted to realize the principles of the French Revolution and argued for liberalization, people’s sovereignty, press freedom, emancipation of the Jews, and a constitution. Political theoreticians were referred to as visionaries, sticklers for principles, doctrinaire professors, and ideologues. In March, 1848 King Wilhelm I of Württemberg referred to certain members of his government as ‘ideologues and advocates of principles’ and the assembly in Paul’s Church in Frankfurt was suspected of doctrinaire professorial vanity. The Prussian Prime Minister, Otto von Manteuffel, characterized the various attempts to bring about German unification, basic citizen rights, and a constitution at this time as helpless efforts of German ideologues, who failed to take the actual political preconditions into consideration. ‘They will never achieve anything because they make up their ideas beforehand, stick to them and run their heads against the wall’. It was not only conservatives who criticized the ideologues. Critique also came from socialists. Ferdinand Lassalle called all those who had lived their lives ‘in books and are used to exist in and sacrifice everything for ideas and thoughts’ ideologues. Lassalle’s view was that if behind the claims for freedom there was no material interest, no class interest, then ideas were just the dreams of a handful of ideologues and emotionalists. Lassalle defined ideology as unrealistic thinking.
In the 1840s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made their first contribution to the debate on ideology. In the German Ideology of 1845/46 they developed a fundamental critique of the young Hegelians, in particular Ludwig Feuerbach. For a long time, the content of this critique remained fragmented and somewhat unclear since the text was published in substantial excerpts only in 1903/04 and did not appear in full until 1932. From around 1890 onwards, more than half a century after the writing of the original text, Engels made attempts to clarify what he regarded as misunderstandings. Marx and Engels rooted their analysis in the tensions pertaining to ideology as they had appeared in the German debate since the 1830s. Thus, on the one side there was the Napoleonic view of ideology as unrealistic escapism and philosophical reverie and, on the other side, the argument of Heine and others that Napoleon’s contempt for the ideologues was wrongful and ironic, given the fact that he had stumbled on ideology during the German wars of liberation. In 1841 Engels wrote, for instance, that those who rejected the term did not want to know that what they called theory and ideology had been transformed into the blood of the people and had been infused with life, which meant that ‘not we but they [those who rejected the concept] err in the utopias of the theory.’
According to Marx and Engels, romanticism and idealism posed a major problem for German understandings of ideology as it emerged in the nineteenth century, and had led to erroneous assumptions about the independent existence of ideas. Philosophers disguised reality in their fight against phrases instead of trying to come to terms with the real world. Marx and Engels labelled this philosophical activity ideology. In a well-known metaphor, they maintained that ideology and reality are like the upside-down depiction in a camera obscura or on the retina of the eye. They argued that the young Hegelians were subject to the illusion that imaginations, thoughts, and concepts determined the life and history of humanity. They turned the concept of ideology upside down themselves and argued that they based this step on scientific analysis, which was contrary to ideology.
From the 1890s, the new interpretative trend, developed in particular by social democratic thinkers, maintained the distinction between matter and idea, basis and superstructure in principle, but far more than Marxism, saw these as intertwined dimensions. Around 1900, the ideology concept transcended its Marxist associations to become a general and rather value-neutral term in philosophy and sociology. Value was infused through amendments like socialist, liberal, conservative, nationalistic, false, and right. The dilution of Marxism by social democrats, austromarxists, and others from the 1890s onwards, which did not prevent the coexistence of orthodox versions of Marxism and class language, gradually resulted in new understandings. The view that people are products of their environment, became more widespread. As Marx put it, ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under selfselected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’
