Ideology. Marius S. Ostrowski
to the cultural manifestations of capitalist, classist society. At the turn of the 1900s, sociology’s crystallisation as a discipline with many parallel traditions (positivist, anti-positivist, conflict-theoretic, functionalist, etc.) introduced new focuses on the collective and individual dynamics of crowd psychology and the role of propaganda and the media, as well as non-classist explanations for ideological support. Meanwhile, the growing prominence of scientific and statistical research methods enabled new approaches to studying ideology via polling, quantitative survey research, and breakdowns of electoral results. By the mid-1900s, the ascendancy of social science pushed the study of ideology heavily towards comparative empirical assessments of voters’ and legislators’ policy preferences and the demographics of pro- and anti-system movements. At the same time, new challenges and modifications to classical social theory (especially the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism) found ‘ideology’ increasingly inflexible and outmoded as an analytic tool, spurring the development of new lexicons to explain the conditions and impulses for human thinking, expression, and other social actions.
Parallel to these developments, the same period saw the emergence and consolidation of a growing number of ‘schools of thought’ that fit the description of integrated bodies or ‘tellings’ of ideas – which are increasingly defined as (and accept the label of) ‘ideologies’. From the early 1800s, the amorphous strands of post-Enlightenment political, economic, religious, and legal thought coalesced into a ‘Big Four’ of increasingly distinct ‘families’ (conservatism, liberalism, socialism, anarchism), the inaugural forms of their respective ideological traditions. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, these ‘Big Four’ underwent major transformations in response to four new ideological arrivals (social democracy, communism, Christian democracy, fascism), the results of split-offs from the conservative and socialist traditions. The mid- to late 1900s saw further transformations and shifting fortunes among all eight of these ideological families and, thanks to seismic shifts in the economic, political, and cultural constellations of global power that have continued into the 2000s, the ascendancy of two more (libertarianism, green ideology). All the while, developments in these ten ideological traditions were accompanied by a cumulative succession of narrower ideological currents that coursed within and between the ‘Big Four’ and their rivals – from nationalism and republicanism in the 1800s to feminism, religious ideologies, and ideologies of race in the 1900s, and finally to queer ideologies, populism, and ideologies of (dis)ability at the turn of the 2000s. This proliferation of rival intellectual movements led to competing ‘canons’ of symbolic, literary, and media outputs tied to the rising importance of various (often cross-cutting) social groups – including groupings by geography, language, occupation, wealth and income, age and health, sex, gender, and sexuality, religion, race and ethnicity – which together fostered alternative accounts of ‘which ideas matter’.
For much of this time, the ‘study of ideology’ and the ‘study of ideologies’ operated with considerable mutual autonomy and internal diffuseness. But by the turn of the 1980s, and accelerating prodigiously since the 1990s, a major wave of new appreciations of ideology and ideologies have emerged that seek to unite the study of both in a systematic, holistic way. They do so from a wide range of disciplinary angles: social and political theory, intellectual history, philosophical hermeneutics, sociolinguistics, communication studies, social psychology, and political science. Their shared aim is to elevate ‘ideology’ from an instrumental factor in analysing other social phenomena and a tool in other subfields’ arsenals into a dedicated ‘subject’ and subdiscipline in its own right. Early markers of the emergence of ‘ideology studies’ and its multiple theoretical approaches were laid down by a spate of books that explicitly tackled the concept’s definition and social function and offered the first syncretic overviews of the history and ‘state of play’ of ideology studies. These ranged from conceptual histories of ideology theory by Hans Barth (1977) and Jorge Larraín (1979) to evaluations of its latest developments by David Manning (1980), Howard Williams (1988), and David McLellan (1995), along with a mixture of both by Terry Eagleton (1991); from the critique of ‘thinking in ideology terms’ by Kenneth Minogue (1985) to the defence of ideology analysis as a tool of critique by Raymond Geuss (1981); from refinements of existing traditions by Göran Therborn (1980) and John B. Thompson (1984) to wholly novel accounts by John Plamenatz (1970), Martin Seliger (1976), and Raymond Boudon (1989). At the same time, academic journals were founded that made explicit space for ideological analysis, including Rethinking Marxism (1988–), Constellations (1994–), and Historical Materialism (1997–) in the Marxist tradition, Philosophy and Social Criticism (1973–) and Theory, Culture & Society (1982–) in a more ecumenical vein, and the Journal of Political Ideologies (1996–) as the first dedicated ideology studies journal, alongside the formation of university centres dedicated partly or fully to the study of ideologies, at Essex (1982–), Boston (1988–2010), Cambridge (1994–), Oxford (2002–11), Queen Mary (2007–), Nottingham (2013–), St Andrews (2013–), and Helsinki (2016–).
This development has been accompanied by an increasing percolation of ‘ideology’ terminology into the conduct and self-conception of popular discourse. Individual and collective exponents of social thinking describe themselves and others more and more using ideological labels alongside their occupational credentials. Formally impartial academic or civil-society bodies are increasingly described as ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ activists or advisers; cable and online news outlets and talk radio present as ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive/radical’, sometimes featuring partisan ‘paid contributors’ and framing issues as ‘both-sides’ debates; and voters’ ideological self-identification in attitudes surveys is becoming more label-explicit and polarised. Meanwhile, in vernacular language, we increasingly deploy ideological labels as terms of insult – neoliberalism, racism, sexism, Eurocentrism – or distinction – antifascism, multiculturalism, constitutionalism, patriotism. This trend both reflects and supports the current long-term rise in ideological polarisation, which originated in the 1970s to 1980s but has distinctly accelerated since the 1990s. The proliferation of ideological traditions has widened the range of salient issues on which we can take a stance: forms and levels of taxation, public healthcare, abortion, military intervention, gay marriage, and so on. The views we hold about these issues are grouped into binaries or stretched out along several spectrums; where these binaries/spectrums extensively align rather than cross-cut, and our views on one issue correlate strongly with certain views on the others, we become clustered into a small number of camps with few overlaps. In recent decades, ideological polarisation has manifested as intensifying ‘us-versus-them’ divisions, marked by mutual distrust between different camps, questioning one another’s moral legitimacy, and viewing one another as existential threats (to themselves and their way of life or to society as a whole). Society, in short, has become more ideologically self-conscious and more self-consciously ideological – more aware that there are multiple ways to ‘recount’ or ‘tell’ ideas, and more prepared to take a clear position on which ‘account’ or ‘telling’ to commit to.
§3 Plan of the book
For at least two centuries, ideology has been vitally important to shaping society in many complex ways. Yet over the last three or four decades, ideology has achieved hitherto unmatched prominence in social research and social life: it has recaptured scholarly attention, and it has risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. In doing so, it has brought the central questions about the concept back into focus, prompting new developments in the study of ideology on both sides of the pejorative/non-pejorative divide. This book is intended as a waymarker along the path of consolidation of ideology studies: an opportunity to take stock of how ideological (and ‘ideologological’) understandings have evolved since the 1970s to 1990s, which centres the discussion on ideology rather than using it to preface elucidations of (political) ideologies. It draws on historical and contemporary approaches to ideology analysis, emphasising areas of overlap and disjunction and illustrating how to profitably combine them to illuminate ideology’s personal and social impact. A book of this size cannot hope to provide an exhaustive account of every aspect of ideology and its study. But it can act as a point of orientation for those searching for a way into ideology’s complex