Ideology Lecture Two The Main Ideologies: An Overview
Ideology Lecture Two The Main Ideologies: An Overview
Ideology Lecture Two The Main Ideologies: An Overview
LECTURE
TWO
The
main
ideologies:
an
overview
Daryl
Glaser
INTRODUCTION:
MODERN
IDEOLOGIES
AND
THE
‘MODERN’
Which
are
the
main
ideologies
–
the
main
‘isms’
–
that
have
dominated
political
life?
There
have
always
been
ideas
guiding
political
life.
But
the
ideas
that
preoccupy
us
today
are
mostly
products
of
what
is
called
the
modern
period
–
by
which
I
mean
the
period
beginning
roughly
with
the
American
and
French
Revolutions
of
the
later
eighteenth
century
–
and
these
‘modern’
ideologies
will
be
our
main
focus.
That
is
not
to
say
that
the
‘pre’
or
‘non’
modern
ideologies
have
disappeared
from
the
scene.
They
still
make
appearance,
notably
under
the
rubric
of
conservatism,
which
is
precisely
in
part
a
reaction
against
‘modern’
ideologies.
Religious
revivalism,
itself
a
kind
of
radical
conservatism,
falls
into
this
category,
having
defied
the
modernist
expectation
of
inevitable
global
secularisation.
But
we
should
beware,
because
much
of
what
is
presented
as
a
restoration
of
the
old
and
true
is
actually
a
call
for
a
return
to
ideas
of
tradition
or
of
‘old
ways’
that
are
themselves
modern
inventions,
or
modern
re-‐imaginings
of
the
past,
often
reimagined
precisely
for
purposes
of
combat
with
(other?)
modern
ideologies.
But
the
other
modern
ideologies
–
and
even
the
less
outrightly
reactionary
brands
of
conservatism
–
mainly
involve
arguments
about
the
form
that
the
modern
should
take.
And
the
modern,
for
its
part,
arises
at
precisely
the
historical
moment
–
of
scientific
advance,
economic
change,
of
political
revolution
–
where
earlier
taken-‐for-‐granted
ideologies
of
the
‘pre’
or
‘non’
modern
are
thrown
into
question.
Modern
political
ideologies
originate
in
Europe,
and
in
combat
with
an
old
world
of
European
Christian
feudalism,
or
in
an
argument
about
what
should
replace
it.
In
the
Christian
feudal
world,
a
monarch
ruled,
a
landed
aristocracy
commanded
much
power,
the
different
social
orders
(the
aristocracy,
clergy,
peasantry,
townsmen)
‘knew
their
place’,
most
people
lived
in
the
countryside,
and
the
church
supplied
people
with
their
understanding
of
the
proper
divinely-‐ordained
order
of
things.
(Again,
some
need
for
caution:
this
is
an
ideal-‐typical
or
‘classical’
picture
of
feudalism
to
which
pre-‐modern
Europe
corresponded
only
to
varying
and
shifting
degrees.)
This
world
was
overturned,
materially,
by
the
rise
of
new
technologies
and
classes
and
towns,
and
ideationally
by
the
rise
of
new
ideas,
including
about
reason,
equality
and
social
1
mobility.
This
was
the
context
of
change
in
which
liberal
and
socialist
ideas
began
to
take
form
and
compete
in
offering
alternatives.
And
in
this
sense,
the
modern
ideologies
are
European.
The
combat
between
the
modern
and
its
predecessor,
and
the
ideological
arguments
over
what
should
replace
the
non-‐modern
order,
begins
in
Europe.
But
soon
enough,
mainly
thanks
to
colonialism
and
mercantile-‐capitalist
globalization,
the
whole
world
becomes
the
stage
for
this
same
struggle
between
the
old
and
new;
and
on
which
the
modern
is
universalized
to
varying
degrees.
But
because
modernist
ferment
originates
in
Europe,
and
because
the
modern
is
spread
coercively
from
Europe
in
order
to
serve
Europe,
it
is
experienced
by
many
non-‐Europeans
as
an
oppressive
imposition.
And
in
engaging
and
confronting
this
‘Western’
imposition,
the
ideological
and
political
leaders
of
the
South
and
East
faced
–
still
face
–
a
range
of
options.
(a)
They
could
adopt
modern
ideologies,
and
their
egalitarian
promise
that
European
colonialists
betrayed,
as
instruments
of
their
own
anti-‐colonial
liberation.
Liberalism
and
socialism
often
played
this
role
(in
Africa,
think
of
Christian
liberalism
or
Marxism-‐Leninism).
Movements
adopting
this
stance
often
themselves
became
local
instruments
of
modernity,
now
supposedly
pursued
in
the
interests
of
the
colonized.
(b)
They
could
‘rediscover’
–
in
reality,
reinvent
–
their
own
precolonial
traditions
as
sources
of
their
own
emancipation,
but
in
a
modern
ideological
light.
Nyerere’s
‘ujamaa’
–
African
socialism’
–
should
perhaps
be
placed
in
this
context.
(c)
Or
they
could
engage
in
their
own
form
of
conservative
reaction,
rejecting,
at
least
rhetorically,
modernity
as
such
as
western.
Many
an
anticolonial
revolt
has
involved
an
attempt
to
preserve
or
restore
older
orders,
usually
pretty
inegalitarian
older
orders.
Usually
such
revolts
are
defensive
and
localized.
But
in
Islamic
fundamentalism
we
perhaps
have
the
clearest
example
of
a
confident
and
proselytizing
current
of
anti-‐
modern
and
anti-‐European
reaction.
It
is
difficult,
though,
to
escape
the
stamp
of
the
modern,
and
of
modern
ideology.
‘Postcolonial
theory’
represents
perhaps
the
most
intellectually
ambitious
attempt
so
far
to
provide
a
comprehensive
indictment
of
Western
modernity
from
the
standpoint
of
the
Global
South.
Like
radical
anticolonialists
before
them,
they
insist
that
decolonization
involves
more
than
formal
or
flag
decolonization,
but
something
like
overthrowing
the
epistemology
of
the
liberal
West
and
the
‘epistemicide’
–
the
destruction
of
knowledge
systems
–
it
has
perpetrated
against
its
‘others’.
It
seeks
to
decenter
western
knowledge,
and
centre
the
trauma
caused
by
Western
racism
and
colonialism.
But
it
continues
to
borrow
from
Western
and
modern
currents
of
thought,
including
Marxism,
psychoanalysis
and
poststructuralism.
And
it
finds
a
home
in
the
Western
academy,
where
it
is
rather
fashionable.
Moreover
one
can
question
whether
it
is
an
ideology
at
all,
in
the
sense
of
offering
an
alternative
model
of
economics
or
governments
–
it
functions
primarily,
and
most
usefully,
as
a
source
of
cultural
critique
and
resistance
within
modernity
itself.
As
a
first
approximation,
we
can,
as
implied,
think
of
liberalism
and
socialism
as
arguing
over
the
forms
of
modernity,
and
conservatism
as
2
resisting
modernity.
The
argument
was
over
both
the
economic
and
political
forms
of
modernity.
How
should
goods
be
generated
and
distributed?
How
should
people
be
governed?
But
behind
such
questions
lay
still
deeper
ones.
What
are
the
conditions
under
which
human
beings
do
well,
and
indeed
what
sorts
of
creatures
are
human
beings?
And
who
or
what
should
be
our
source
of
authority
in
deciding
such
matters?
LIBERALISM
Politically,
those
who
came
to
be
called
the
liberals
sought
to
replace
the
feudal
system
of
‘estates’
(in
effect,
castes)
and
mercantilism
(state-‐regulated
international
trade)
with
a
regime
of
free
market
exchange
and
social
mobility.
Politically,
they
sought
to
replace
absolute
monarchy
with
representative
government.
In
place
of
the
authority
of
the
church,
liberals
looked
to
the
reason
and
the
reasoning
powers
of
the
individual.
Political
authority
ceased
to
derive
from
a
divine
mandate;
it
now
required
justification
as
a
source
of
benefit
to
individuals
enjoying
natural
rights.
The
central
liberal
idea
was
then,
and
now
still
is,
individual
freedom.
According
to
liberals,
individuals
should
be
free
to
make
choices,
exercise
moral
responsibility
and
develop
their
own
individual
talents.
They
should
be
free
to
decide
what
sorts
of
lives
they
wished
to
lead.
This
meant
that
collective
public
political
power
should
be
exercised
only
over
a
limited
field
and
as
far
as
was
necessary;
and
it
should
be
based
on
popular
consent.
Liberals
also
came
to
believe
in
the
idea
of
progress;
in
place
of
feudal
stagnation
or
the
cyclical
belief
in
restoring
golden
ages,
they
placed
their
faith
in
the
idea
of
linear
progress
towards
an
ever-‐better
future,
driven
not
by
utopian
schemes
but
by
the
dynamism
of
individuals
exercising
their
intellectual,
creative
and
market
freedom.
Liberals
thought
of
individuals
as
capable
of
making
rational
choices
in
their
own
interest
and,
directly
or
via
some
kind
of
‘hidden
hand’,
in
the
collective
interest
of
society.
Rational
self-‐interest
and
human
benevolence
could
between
them
be
harnessed
to
a
greater
good.
All
this,
at
any
rate,
was
the
idea.
Practice,
with
liberalism
as
with
all
ideologies,
has
often
been
a
different
matter.
In
principle
rights
belonged
to
all
human
beings,
or
to
all
capable
of
reason.
In
practice
liberal
rights
were,
in
the
early
history
of
liberalism,
reserved
mainly
for
property-‐owning
white
household
heads,
whether
in
Europe
or
in
its
colonies;
but
liberal
rights,
and
the
idea
that
they
should
be
enjoyed
equally,
became
a
banner
under
which
many
fought
for
full
political
and
legal
equality,
whether
as
women,
people
of
colour
or
as
colonized
peoples.
SOCIALISM
Socialists,
however,
were
dissatisfied
with
the
world
offered
by
liberalism.
Or
rather,
they
were
dissatisfied
with
the
new
world
of
industrial
capitalism
and
the
way
in
which
liberalism
sought
to
order
it.
For
socialists,
3
industrial
capitalism
was
a
world
of
class
domination
and
exploitation.
Market
competition
was
not
benign
but
a
source
of
division
and
conflict,
as
well
as
being
a
blind
force
that
deprived
humans
of
control
over
their
collective
economic
destinies.
In
an
industrial
context
it
generated
an
impoverished
working
class
whose
surplus
labour
enriched
capitalist
property
owners.
Work,
instead
of
being
a
source
of
creative
satisfaction
for
the
masses,
became
a
source
of
their
alienation
s
it
came
under
capitalist
direction.
Liberalism,
according
to
socialists,
either
offered
a
justification
for
this
capitalist
social
order,
disguising
its
gross
inequalities
under
a
pretence
of
equal
right;
or,
insofar
as
it
sought
freedom
and
democracy
and
equality,
it
did
not
take
these
ideas
far
enough.
The
freedom
and
equality
it
offered
was
too
thin
and
largely
formal;
it
did
not
deliver
the
substance
of
freedom,
which
remained
the
preserve
of
those
controlling
property.
Insofar
as
liberalism
came
to
be
associated
with
democracy,
the
democratic
regime
it
offered
was
thin,
elitist
and
served
merely
to
disguise
the
disproportionate
political
power
of
capital.
The
capitalists
were
the
new
ruling
class.
Socialists
sought,
in
place
of
liberal
industrial
capitalism,
a
new
world
free
of
class
domination.
Under
socialism,
class
conflict
would
be
replaced
by
social
harmony;
competition
by
solidarity;
the
blind
operation
of
the
market
by
conscious
collective
economic
control;
and
bourgeois
democracy
by
proletarian
democracy.
Proletarian
democracy
would
not
be
the
illusory
and
formal
political
democracy
of
liberal
capitalism;
it
would
be
a
substantive
democracy
of
the
collective
producer,
rooted
in
shared
control
of
economic
or
‘material’
life.
Under
socialism,
the
masses
would
no
longer
be
exploited,
but
would
jointly
control
the
product
of
their
labour;
workers
would
no
longer
be
alienated,
but
would
regain
the
possibility
of
enjoyable
and
convivial
work.
Socialists
did
not
necessarily
seek
to
replace
industrial
modernity
as
such.
What
became
the
dominant
stream,
Marxism,
believed
that
the
economic
dynamism
of
industrial
capitalism
could
be,
in
some
sense,
repurposed;
capitalist
industrial
modernity
could
be
replaced
by
socialist
industrial
modernity;
the
previously
capitalist
industrial
economy
could
be
placed
under
collective
proletarian
ownership
and
control.
The
productive
advances
of
industrial
society
would
help
to
overcome
the
material
scarcity
that
fostered
class
struggle
and
class
domination.
The
‘development
of
the
productive
forces’
would
create
conditions
under
which
not
only
classes
would
disappear
(following
a
transition
period
of
proletarian
class
rule)
but
the
state
itself
would
no
longer
be
necessary,
and
could
be
replaced
by
a
simplified
post-‐political
‘administration
of
things’
in
which
all
could
participate.
Not
only
industrialism,
but
science
itself
could
be
harnessed,
both
in
identifying
the
correct
strategy
for
socialist
revolution
and
in
constructing
a
socialist
order.
Indeed,
the
reign
of
bourgeois
ideology
would
be
replaced
by
the
objective
truth
of
Marxist
science;
and
reality
itself,
the
veil
of
ideology
lifted,
would
become
more
transparent,
enabling
all
to
participate
in
running
human
affairs
and
the
division
of
labour,
with
its
oppressive
specialisations,
to
disappear.
Even
more
than
liberals,
Marxists
and
communists
believed
in
the
possibility
of
human
progress,
even
of
a
kind
of
human
perfection
with
the
arrival
of
a
non-‐selfish
and
all-‐rounded
‘new
man’.
4
CONSERVATISM
If
liberals
found
this
utopian
vision
horrifying,
an
invitation
to
totalitarian
social
engineering,
for
conservatives,
both
progressive
liberalism
and
Marxism
were
complicit
in
the
creation
of
a
destructive
new
world
of
socially-‐engineered
human
affairs.
Both
disrespected
received
historical
wisdom,
putting
in
its
place
a
vision
of
relentless
progress;
both
replaced
religious
faith
with
the
God
of
Reason;
both
sought
to
plan
and
perfect
the
world
according
to
some
sort
of
rational
scheme,
instead
of
recognizing
the
limits
of
human
perfection.
In
its
most
reactionary
form,
conservatism
rejected
capitalism,
secularism
and
democracy,
seeking
instead
to
restore
a
lost
world
of
divinely-‐ordained
hierarchy,
one
in
which
the
authority
of
monarch,
church
and
landowner,
and
ultimately
that
of
God,
was
restored.
But
other
conservatives
sought
simply
to
slow
things
down;
they
claimed
that
conservatism
was
not
an
ideology,
but
simply
a
disposition,
one
that
sought
to
hold
on
to
cherished
beliefs
and
ways
and
to
temper
the
harshness
and
ambition
of
both
freewheeling
capitalist
individualism
and
socialist
collective
planning.
They
were
willing
to
accept
change,
but
not
rushed
change;
change
should
be
gradual,
measured
and
organic.
For
its
critics,
of
course,
this
amounted
to
a
rationalization
of
the
status
quo
and
its
inherited
privileges.
But
the
ideology
stood
to
appeal
not
only
to
landed
aristocrats,
but
to
others,
like
peasants
and
artisans,
who
feared
urban
industrial
change,
and
to
those
of
all
classes
–
clerics,
male
household
heads
–
who
stood
to
lose
authority
as
egalitarianism
advanced
and
traditional
ways
were
disrupted.
OTHER
IDEOLOGIES
If
liberalism,
socialism
and
conservatism
were
the
big
three
of
the
new
modern
industrial
age,
other
competitors
were
in
the
field
too
from
the
outset;
still
others
entered
it
later.
They
were
often
offshoots
or
elaborations
of
existing
ideologies,
or
attached
themselves
to
them.
On
the
‘left’,
anarchists
wanted
to
get
to
a
stateless
and
classless
communism
straight
away;
they
rejected
the
Marxist
idea
of
a
transitional
‘dictatorship
of
the
proletariat’,
or
even
the
social-‐democratic
idea
of
a
benevolent
welfare
state
(on
which
more
later).
They
considered
states
–
and
indeed
political
parties
–
to
be
inherent
sources
of
domination.
Later
egalitarian
ideologies,
like
feminism,
insisted
that
the
struggle
for
emancipation
should
be
waged
not
only
on
behalf
of
exploited
economic
classes
but
on
behalf
of
women
too,
the
subjugated
half
of
humanity.
Other
non-‐
class
claimants
would
emerge,
too,
over
time.
On
the
‘right’,
new
forms
of
backlash
against
egalitarian
and
democratic
progress
appeared.
Fascism
acquired
power
between
the
two
World
Wars;
its
varied
regimes
covered
a
spectrum
from
radical
reactionary
religious
conservatism
to
attempts
(in
Nazi
Germany)
to
implement
a
new
order
based
on
Pagan
5
romanticism,
pseudoscientific
theories
of
natural
race
hierarchy
and
the
Leader
Principle.
It
believed
above
all
in
the
nation,
conceived
of
as
an
organic
community.
With
these
new
ideologies,
the
relationship
to
modernity
becomes
muddied.
Some
anarchist
seemed
to
want
to
regain
the
‘primitive
communism’
of
preindustrial,
pre-‐state
communities.
Nazism
was
in
some
respects
a
reactionary
throwback,
but
certain
critics
saw
its
racial
pseudoscience
and
machinery
of
industrial
mass
killing
as
ultimate
expressions
of
modernity.
In
the
1960s
a
‘New
Left’
emerged
as
a
trenchant
critic
of
the
excesses
of
later
twentieth-‐century
capitalism’s
consumerism,
militarism,
imperialism
and
ecological
destructiveness.
Ecologism
–
radical
environmentalism,
if
you
like
–
was
a
product
of
this.
EVOLVING
IDEOLOGICAL
TRADITIONS
AND
THEIR
INTERNAL
DIVISIONS
Indeed,
once
we
look
more
closely,
we
find
all
of
the
ideologies
divided
on
the
issue
of
capitalist
industrial
modernity.
Liberals
welcomed
a
market-‐based
order,
but
many
did
not
like
what
industrial
capitalism
became
in
the
nineteenth
century.
Individual
freedom
seemed
to
mean
too
little
if
too
many
lacked
the
resources
to
make
their
freedoms
effective;
government
by
consent
became
too
truncated
if
private
corporations
acquired
too
much
power.
Liberals
were
believers
in
reform
and
progress,
and
they
desired
to
rescue
the
poor
from
their
degraded
condition.
Thus
was
modern
or
social
liberalism
born
in
the
late
nineteenth
century
that
become
a
powerful
ideological
engine
of
the
development
of
the
welfare
state
in
the
twentieth
century.
For
late
nineteenth
century
British
Idealists,
freedom
had
to
mean
more
than
a
negative
right
not
to
be
interfered
with;
it
had
to
extend
to
a
positive
freedom
in
which
people
acquired
the
effective
means
to
realize
lives
that
they
had
reason
to
value.
The
conditions
had
to
be
created
in
which
the
individual
prized
by
liberalism
could
realize
their
potential.
Moreover,
this
left
or
social
liberalism
became
less
preoccupied
with
private
property,
which
classical
liberals
had
seen
as
an
anchor
of
liberty,
and
more
willing
to
see
state
intervention
to
eliminate
poverty
and
correct
market
imbalances;
more
ready
to
empower
workers
with
union
rights;
and
more
committed
to
ensuring
that
formal
equality
of
opportunity
became
an
actual
substantive
equality
of
opportunity.
From
the
1970s
‘egalitarian
liberals’
like
John
Rawls
began
to
develop
liberal
theories
of
distributive
justice,
which
they
sought
to
reconcile
with
a
continued
commitment
to
political
and
civil
liberties.
Equality
–
in
the
form
of
equal
rights,
and
in
the
form
of
equal
entitlement
to
concern
and
respect
–
became
increasingly
elevated
as
a
liberal
value.
And
egalitarian
liberalism
became
increasingly
difficult
to
distinguish
from
the
parliamentary,
welfarist
and
reformist
version
of
socialism
termed
social
6
democracy.
The
two
became
joined
in
rejecting
both
Communist
totalitarianism
and
market
fundamentalism.
Of
course
other
liberals
resisted
such
trends,
insisting
on
a
more
classic
market-‐
based
variety
of
liberalism.
In
the
US,
where
liberalism
is
now
seen
as
a
more
redistributive
left-‐of-‐centre
ideology,
classic
market
liberalism
is
dubbed
‘libertarianism’.
The
pushback
against
the
welfare
state
by
libertarians
and
conservatives
alike
has
generated
the
e
ideology,
at
odds
with
liberal
egalitarianism,
known
as
‘neo-‐liberalism’.
And
in
the
case
of
socialism,
not
all
socialists,
not
even
all
Marxists,
followed
orthodox
Marxism
in
its
embrace
of
science
and
the
perpetual
expansion
of
human
productivity.
Classical
Marxism
itself
developed
in
part
as
a
critique
of
‘utopian
socialism’,
which
sought
to
escape
industrial
modernity
by
withdrawing
from
it
into
utopian
communes
and
villages
associated
with
the
names
of
people
like
Robert
Owen
and
Fourier.
Within
Marxism,
a
humanist
strand
developed,
inspired
in
part
by
the
later-‐published
earlier
works
of
Karl
Marx,
that
distanced
itself
from
Marxism
as
an
objective
scientific
theory
of
impersonal
social
relations,
and
embraced
a
concern
instead
with
overcoming
alienation
and
realizing
human
potential.
The
Frankfurt
School
became
a
stringent
opponent
of
what
it
saw
as
capitalist
modernity’s
cold
instrumental
rationality
and
its
mindless
commercialism.
We
have
already
referred
to
the
New
Left
and
ecologism,
some
subcurrents
of
which
found
Marxist
inspiration
for
their
hostility
not
only
to
capitalist
modernity
but
to
the
variant
of
socialist
modernity
that
had
emerged
in
the
Soviet
Union
and
East
Bloc.
Both
variants
of
modernity,
they
held,
were
in
thrall
to
a
kind
of
technocratic
managerialism.
And
now
there
are
strands
of
ecological
Marxism,
retaining
the
original’s
criticism
of
the
accumulation
imperative
and
the
prioritization
of
profit
over
people,
but
pushing
back
against
the
idea
of
continuous
economic
expansion
and
the
myth
of
communist
material
abundance.
And
even
conservatism
has
its
divisions
on
the
question.
Reactionary
conservatism
opposed
modernity
in
all
its
varieties.
But
some
other
conservatisms,
notably
in
Britain,
proved
remarkably
adaptable,
embracing
mass
democratic
politics
and
finding
a
working
class
constituency
for
its
vision
of
‘one-‐nation
conservatism’.
Christian
democracy,
drawing
inter
alia
on
Catholic
social
teachings,
made
similar
adaptations
in
continental
Europe.
A
moderate
conservatism
emerged
that
joined
moderate
socialism,
aka
social
democracy,
in
embracing
the
welfare
state.
The
moderate
conservative
argument
was
that
change
was
possible
and
needed,
but
had
to
be
gradual
and
tradition-‐respecting.
This
formula
has
served
conservatism
well,
enabling
it
to
survive
into
the
twentieth
century
as
a
powerful
political
force.
A
further
strand
of
conservatism
allied
itself
with
classic
economic
liberalism
to
produce
the
concoction
known
as
the
New
Right,
embodied
in
leaders
like
Thatcher
in
the
UK
and
Reagan
in
the
US.
Here,
again,
was
conservatism
adapting,
this
time
embracing
the
very
forces
of
capitalist
individualism
that
some
earlier
conservatives
had
rejected
as
a
dangerous
solvent
of
communal
and
spiritual
life.
7
CONCLUSION
What
emerges
clearly
from
these
further
developments
is
the
extent
to
which
the
great
ideological
traditions
are
both
internally
diverse
and
evolving.
There
is
more
to
be
said,
including
about
the
attitude
of
competing
ideologies
to
still
other
features
of
modernity
not
discussed
here
–
notably
the
modern
nation
state.
But
that
will
be
taken
up
in
a
later
lecture.
Recommended
further
reading:
Andrew
Heywood
(2013),
‘Political
ideas
and
ideologies’
in
Politics
(4th
edition)
A
QUESTION
TO
THINK
ABOUT:
Have
ideologies
become
so
internally
diverse
that
it
is
no
longer
possible
to
distinguish
them?
8