Ideology is one of the most controversial concepts in political analysis. This term was created in 1796 by the French philosopher Destut de Tracy (1754-1836) and meant “the science of ideas.” In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Engels ([1846] 1970) gave this concept a new meaning, which boiled down to ideas supporting the class system. Writers such as Talmon (1952) and Arendt (1958) viewed ideology as an instrument of social control to ensure subordination. Distinctly conservative use of the term “ideology” was developed by Michael Oakeshott (1962), who argued that ideologies distort political reality.
According to Heywood (2013), each of these concepts’ disadvantage is negative character and value subjectivity. Since the mid-20th century, controversy has erupted over the relevance of ideology. According to Bell (1960) and Fukuyama (1992), the supply of political ideas is exhausted. Moreover, there is a lot of debate about whether politics can exist without ideology. The modern socio-scientific meaning of ideology boils down to an action-oriented belief system, an interconnected set of ideas that in one way or another directs or inspires political action.
The classic ideologies are liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. Core aspects of liberalism are individualism, liberty, equality, toleration, an agreement between power and society, and constitutionalism. The primary forms of liberalism are: classical, which implies minimal political and economic intervention by the state (Paine, ([1776] 1987), and modern, which allows for state intervention, which expands freedom (Mill ([1859] 1982).
The distinctive aspects of conservatism are commitment to tradition, pragmatism, human imperfection, hierarchy, authority, and the importance of owning property. The result of traditional conservatism is paternalism. European conservatism’s ideological trend is Christian Democracy, which is characterized by adherence to the social market principles and qualified interventionism (Heywood, 2013). The New Right represents a departure from conservative thought, which in Andrew Gamble’s (1981) words is ‘the free economy and the strong state.’ The proponents of neoliberalism, Hayek (1948), Friedman (1962), and Nozick (1974), advocated the free market, while the neoconservatives advocated the restoration of traditional values: families and religions.
Socialism, the critical aspects of which are community, fraternity, social equality, distribution according to need, the existence of social classes, and common ownership, is the idea of building a society of social equality. In the 20th century, there were two rival camps within the socialist movement: revolutionary socialists or communists and reformist socialists or social democrats. Marxism is a political force in the form of the international communist movement. There is orthodox communism associated with the experience of Soviet communism. Neo-Marxism, the leading followers of which are Cox (1987) and Wallerstein (1984), deals with the consideration of states’ inequality. Social democrats advocate greater social equality while maintaining democratic freedoms. Social democracy presupposes active participation of the state in society’s life but does not oppose a market economy.
There are other ideological traditions. Fascism is a nationalist dictatorship created by Mussolini in 1919-1923 in Italy. It is characterized as one of the extreme forms of totalitarian politics, with a nationalist ideology, with a particular idea of the superiority of one nation over others. Anarchism denies the need for coercive control and power over man. There are forms of anarchism: anarcho-capitalism, mutualism, and anarcho-communism. Feminism, whose development is associated with the ideas of Wollstonecraft ([1792] 1985) and Friedan (1963), is to provide women with full civil rights. Feminist thinking has traditionally been analyzed in terms of a division between liberal, socialist, and radical schools of thought. Green politics or ecologism is based on the idea of a harmonious relationship between man and nature. Cosmopolitanism is an ideological concept according to which each person belongs to single world culture. According to Waldron (1995), the division into states, nations, and peoples is considered obsolete. Non-western ideological trends include Postcolonialism (Fanon, 1968), Religious fundamentalism, Asian values, and Dualism.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bell, Daniel. 1960. The End of Ideology?: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s. New York: Free Press
Cox, Robert. 1987. Production, Power and World Order. New York: Columbia University Press
Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Gamble, Andrew. 1981. An Introduction to Modern Social and Political Thought. London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s Press
Hayek, Friedrich. 1948. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press
Heywood, Andrew. 2013. “Political Ideas and Ideologies” In Politics, 4th ed., edited by Andrew Heywood, 27–55. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. [1846] 1970. The German Ideology. ed. C. J. Arthur. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Mill, John Stuart. [1859] 1982. On Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Mill, John Stuart. [1861] 1951. Considerations on Representative Government. In Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, edited by H. B. Acton. London: Dent
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Oakeshott, Michael. 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London and New York: Methuen.
Paine, Thomas. [1776] 1987. ‘Common Sense’. In The Thomas Paine Reader, edited by M. Foot. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Talmon, Jacob Leib. 1952. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. London: Secker & Warburg.
Waldron, Jeremy. 1995. ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative’. In The Rights of Monority Cultures, edited by W. Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1984. The Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wollstonecraft, Mary. [1792] 1985. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin.