The word ‘ideology’ was coined by the French thinker Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) in about 1794 for what he hoped would become a new science of ideas. That usage never caught on, but the word was adopted by others, mostly as a negative description of the ways people mislead themselves and others through their beliefs. Of course, the word ‘utopia’ was coined much earlier, but the two terms have come to be connected, although in ways that can be confusing. The 20th century has been called the ‘age of ideology’, and utopia has been used both as a contrast to ideology and interchangeably with ideology. For example, when Communism, one of the most important 20th-century ideologies, began to collapse, this was often labelled the end of utopia.
The first person to associate utopia and ideology was Karl Mannheim, in his 1929 German book Ideologie und utopie and his very different 1936 English book Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. For Mannheim, ideology and utopia were central to his understanding of how and why people think the way they do, and he was searching for non-evaluative concepts that would allow him to study the subject objectively.
He argued that the ideas we have, the way we think, and the beliefs that follow are all influenced by our social situation. In particular, he called the beliefs of those in power ideology and the beliefs of those who hoped to overturn the system utopia. In both cases, their beliefs hid or masked the reality of their positions. Ideology kept those in power from becoming aware of any weaknesses in their position; utopia kept those out of power from being aware of the difficulties of changing the system. And both kept the believers from seeing the strengths in the other’s position.
17. Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) was a sociologist born in Hungary who chose exile to Germany to avoid the growing harshness of the Communist regime there, and then exile to England to avoid the National Socialist regime in Germany. He was the primary founder of the sociology of knowledge, and his 1929 book Ideologie und Utopie brought the terms ‘ideology and ‘utopia’ together as different ways of understanding the world
Mannheim’s practice was to put together articles that he wrote at different times without systematic revision, which results in inconsistencies in the key concepts, but the German edition of Ideology and Utopia was treated as a major intellectual event when it was published in 1929, giving rise to both glowing and very negative reviews. In re-doing the 1936 English edition for the English academic audience, Mannheim removed the preface and the very detailed table of contents and added essays and an introduction to the sociology of knowledge. The German edition has no subtitle; the English edition has the subtitle An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, and much of the added material is specifically designed to explain the sociology of knowledge and place the revised material from the German edition within that context.
In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim argues that both ideology and utopia emerge from political conflict. He wrote:
The concept ‘ideology’ reflects the one discovery which emerged from political conflict, namely, that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination.… The concept of utopian thinking reflects the opposite discovery of the political struggle, namely that certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it. Their thinking is incapable of correctly diagnosing an existing condition of society. They are not at all concerned with what really exists; rather in their thinking they already seek to change the situation that exists.
But as the theologian Paul Tillich said in a review of the 1929 German edition, ‘The utopian knows that his ideas are not real, but he believes they will become real. The ideologist typically does not know this’.
While Mannheim appears to place most of his emphasis on ideology, he regularly points to the importance of utopia and contends that ultimately utopia is more important than ideology, saying,
whereas the decline of ideology represents a crisis only for certain strata, and the objectivity which comes from the unmasking of ideologies always takes the form of self-clarification for society as a whole, the complete disappearance of the utopian element from human thought and action would mean that human nature and human development would take on a totally new character. The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing.
Although there were people who discussed both ideology and utopia together, and some scholars made significant contributions to our understanding of one or the other, after Mannheim, the words were mostly used separately. But in his 1975 lectures on the subject, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur brought them back together. Ricoeur argued that both ideology and utopia have positive and negative characteristics. Ideology’s negative form is distortion and utopia’s is fantasy. The two positive aspects of ideology are ‘legitimation’ and ‘integration or identity’; the parallel positive aspects of utopia are ‘an alternate form of power’ and ‘exploration of the possible’.
18. Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was a French philosopher who is recognized as one of the most significant philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. From 1968 to 1992 he was the John Nuveen Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Chicago where he gave a series of lectures on ideology and utopia and their relationship
Ideology tells a story, one that justifies or legitimates the existence and beliefs of the group and, in doing so, gives an identity to the group. But the stories are distortions of what actually happened, and it is important to ‘unmask’ this distortion.
The central problem for Ricoeur, as it was for Mannheim, is the pervasive influence of ideology and how it can be recognized from within. As Ricoeur put it, ‘We think from its point of view rather than thinking about it’.
Mannheim thought that movement among social classes, particularly by what he called ‘free-floating intellectuals’, made it possible to understand the situation from outside, and he argued that utopia could be a corrective to ideology. For Ricoeur, one of the functions of utopia is to undermine ideology.
From ‘nowhere’ springs the most formidable question of what is. Utopia therefore appears in its primitive core as the exact counterpoint of our first concept of ideology as the function of social integration. Utopia, in counterpoint, is the function of social subversion.
Ricoeur contends that utopia makes it possible to criticize ideology without having to step outside its influence. He writes,
This is my conviction: the only way to get out of the circularity in which ideologies engulf us is to assume a utopia, declare it, and judge an ideology on this basis. Because the absolute onlooker [Mannheim’s ‘free-floating intellectual’] is impossible, then it is someone within the process itself who takes the responsibility for judgment.
Ricoeur argues that from the no place of utopia it is our reality that looks strange. As he puts it, ‘Does not the fantasy of an alternative society and its exteriorization “nowhere” work as one of the most formidable contestations of what is?’ Utopia’s ability to unmask ideology by stating that there are alternatives is clearly one of its positive aspects. And utopia’s ability to challenge ideology is, for Ricoeur, restorative.
Ricoeur is particularly concerned with how utopia presents alternative ways of distributing power, and he sometimes seems to see utopias as primarily about power, and even made this one of the two positive aspects of utopia. And in relationship to ideology, this makes sense. The role of ideology is to support the current distribution of power; the role of utopia is to subvert that distribution.
Although Ricoeur spends much more time discussing ideology than he does utopia, it seems that utopia is, finally, more important than ideology. But the two clearly influence and change each other.
Today, ideology continues to be used negatively to refer to the way other people’s beliefs obscure the real situation, but it is also used by social scientists to refer to systems of belief, usually political beliefs, that organize a person’s view of the world. Thus, mostly without reference to utopia, ideology has become a central point of discussion in both international and domestic politics and as a part of the way people think politically is studied.
Ideologies and utopia are closely related. There is a utopia at the heart of every ideology, a positive picture – some vague, some quite detailed – of what the world would look like if the hopes of the ideology were realized. And it is possible for a utopia to become an ideology. The process by which utopia can become ideology is not entirely clear and undoubtedly varies from case to case, but it is likely that if a utopia is sufficiently attractive and powerful, it can transform hope and desire into belief and action to bring the utopia into being through a political or social movement. Most utopias do not go through this process and most that do fail. But if a utopia becomes a belief system that succeeds in coming to power in a small community, a country, or even a number of countries, it will almost certainly have become an ideology in the process. At that point, it will be challenged by one or more utopias, which may, but probably will not, succeed in overthrowing the ideology, but, as both Mannheim and Ricoeur argue, utopias are the way in which ideologies are challenged.
