Ideology in Politics: An Essay in Analysis

This article presents narratives and arguments around the theme of ideology, based on the human condition of language. Despite having already been investigated by many authors, which hinders any claim to originality, the theme is not capable of a definitive delimitation. The issue of ideology will be addressed in line with the interpretation of notable intellectuals, with an emphasis on the culture irradiated by the media. The script of the article, constituted from a bibliographic review and a critical and reflective approach, gathers digressions on the issue of Lyotard's meta-reports and Baudrillard's hyperreality.

For more than thirty years, the concept of ideology virtually disappeared from philosophical and sociological discourse. It is only recently that there have been attempts to reactivate this concept as a central category of political critique – as it was until the 1970s. In this text I start with an attempt to illuminate the reasons why the concept of ideology, which I believe can serve as a central conceptual tool for diagnosing and analysing the pathologies of the political, was forgotten for years. The main part of the text focuses on an attempt at an actualising reconstruction of this category: a reconstruction that should be capable of meeting the standards of conceptual analysis as defined primarily in modern analytic philosophy. This attempt is accompanied by a discussion of concrete examples of actual ideological constructions as well as by an analysis of their political functions and effects. In this discussion I focus on ideological constructions that have had a significant negative impact on the process of establishing liberal democracy in the former communist countries in Eastern Europe, and especially in Bulgaria.

2016

Capitalist subjectivity can be thought of as being structured by mass-society and ideologies. This seems especially apparent in times of crisis. To a certain extend we can grasp these ideologies as illusions of the collective mind. However, I’m concerned that this perspective is too general to describe the specific character of modern-type ideologies such as nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism. The critical theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed a differentiated concept which can help us to understand the specifics of the above ideologies. In this essay I will point to an as of yet unresolved contradiction within their concept. My aim is to resolve this contradiction by reconstruction, using Detlev Claussen’s notion of religions of everyday life (Alltagsreligionen) in the process. After this I will make a case for renewing the concept of ideology as an analytic tool and I will end by sketching some preliminary thoughts on its use in

Consider, as a final example, the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and misery of the lives of the young blacks in American ciries. Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans -to insist that it is outrageous that an American should live wichout hope.

The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology: Two Volume Set

By contrast with many political concepts, ideology has fairly clear beginnings. Whilst several early enlightenment thinkers developed important accounts of the role of ideas as part of their challenge to the existing intellectual frameworks, 5 the term ideology emerged out of the French enlightenment, and in particular the work of Antoine Destutt de Tracy. De Tracy's Éléments d'Idéologie sought to lay the foundations of a new science of ideasan idea-logybased on a largely materialist theory which rooted ideas in physiological sensations. 6 De Tracy and fellow ideologues like Joseph Marie Degérando, George Cabanis and Constatin de Volney enjoyed a short period of success in revolutionary France. 7 They fell foul, however, of Napoleonwho, after a brief period of patronage, rapidly turned against them as his French Empire came under criticism from liberals and republicans. 8 The ideologues were directly suppressed from 1803 onwards, with Napoleon declaring them 'dreamers and dangerous dreamers', 'brooders' and 'empty brains', who pursued a 'shadowy metaphysics' to which 'we must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered'. 9 The immediate post-Napoleonic era retained this division between a broad vision of ideology on the one hand, and a narrower, negative meaning on the othera famous organising narrative for discussing the conceptual ambiguity of the term. De Tracy's Éléments remained popular in some circles, but forces loyal to the restored Bourbon monarchy (as well as others both inside and outside France) railed against 'ideology' as denoting dangerous republican radicalism. 10 In consequence, this negative usage gained the upper hand, and by the time of the 1848 revolutions 'Napoleon's association of "ideology" with abstract metaphysics and utopian, political liberalism became a widespread pejorative usage'. 11 Such an understanding of ideology remained a largely untheoretical notion of public political rhetoric, but laid the foundation for its much more intellectually influential mobilisation by Karl Marx.

Pólemos. Materiali di filosofia e critica sociale, 2016

Ideology, and its study, have been subject to an interpretational tug-of-war among political theorists that, until recently, has devalued their status as an object of scholarship. Disputes have raged over the scientific standing of ideology, its epistemological status, and its totalitarian and liberal manifestations. Many political philosophers have eschewed its group orientation, and the more recent interest of students of ideology in ordinary political language and in the unconscious and the indeterminate. Following an historical survey of changing fashions and more durable features in the analysis of ideology, it is argued that ideology should be explored as the most typical form of political thinking, and that its study conducts political theorists to the heart of the political. Ideology is now seen as ubiquitous, while the methodologies through which ideologies are studied take on board conceptual malleability and ideational pluralism, and offer bridges between identifying 'social facts' and their inevitable interpretation.

JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE, 2017

Ideology is a key subject of inquiry for the scholars of political science, media studies, sociology, philosophy and other disciplines of Social Sciences. It is excessively used in interpretation, formulation and functioning of many states' political systems. Yet, the literature on the concept of ideology seems wanting in content and analyses. Ideology has been ascribed as something that the 'other' nations are afflicted with. It was a concept that was associated with Germany and Italy during the Second World War and USSR in the Cold War in the last century. And it was also the reason why ideology had acquired much literature during these tumultuous times. But ideology as a concept needs scrutiny which is the aim of this paper. The paper argues that no state in the international system functions without the influence of some significant ideology, whether it is United States of America or Uganda. It also argues that all nations in the international system utilize and operate on some sort of ideology. It also attempts to differentiate between political, economic and moral ideologies. The paper goes on to capture the various aspects, features and dimensions of the term ideology.

Critical Sociology, 2014

The 'ideology-theoretical turn' of the late 1970s and 1980s claimed a re-foundation of Marxist research into ideology, which was stuck in several respects. Its attempt to overcome the traditional fixation on a criticism of 'false' consciousness is still valid. It led, however, in particular in the tradition of the Althusser School, to an over-general notion of ideology that repressed the radical and critical impulses of Marx and Engels' concept of ideology. Going deliberately against the grain of a predominant tendency in secondary literature, which places Marx/Engels' and Gramsci's concepts of ideology on opposite poles of the spectrum, the essay shows that the strength of the respective approaches lies in their particular combination of ideology-critique and ideology-theory. The dichotomy of these strands is misguided and counterproductive and needs to be overcome by the renewal of an ideology-critique which is informed and backed up by a materialist theory of the ideological.