Politics, along with physical labour and childbirth, is in Christian terms one of the curses of mankind. Machines have taken much of the sting from labour, and childbirth is no longer the pain it was. But what of the curse of politics? If men were angels, no government would be needed. But since some sort of government is needed, could we not find a better solution than the states revealed to us by history as riddled with war, poverty, and violence? High hopes of this kind have often erupted among the poor on the margins of politics, and have sometimes captured the centre. Such hopes unmistakably derive from a millennial version of Christianity, and they have had explosive consequences.
Anabaptists believing in the imminence of a new heavenly order took over the German town of Munster in 1534, for example, and instituted what was thought to be a perfect community. It bore a remarkable resemblance to modern totalitarianism. A tendency to religious despotism was evident in the English civil war after 1642. ‘It is God’s design’, a clergyman wrote in typical vein, ‘to bring forth the civil government, and all things here below, in the image and resemblance of things above.’
A powerful tradition with its roots in philosophy has also focused attention on the project of a perfect society. Many have been bewitched by Plato’s account of the philosopher escaping the cave of shadows in which most people live and seeing the reality of things. The true ruler could only be the philosopher, for only philosophers had access to the knowledge needed to guide a true community. Much later, the eighteenth-century philosophes thought that their grasp of reason constituted the knowledge needed to bring justice to the world, a process many of them could not distinguish from sweeping away the ancien régime. It was these writers who abandoned the traditional Western loathing of despotism, for they recognized that the new order demanded not only knowledge but also unlimited power. The European state, largely bound by constitutionality and the rule of law, was for this very reason doomed to imperfection.
The modern soil in which these ideas has grown was prepared by Francis Bacon, who took the purpose of human life to be the accumulation of useful knowledge in the cause of improving human conditions. By the end of the eighteenth century, technology had acquired such power over nature that advanced thinkers were already dreaming of exercising the same sort of power over society. Their first adventure came in France in 1789. The fact that it culminated in blood and tyranny merely sent them back, as it were, to the drawing-board.
Many streams of thought fed an aspiration which resembled the search for magical power. Religious speculations about God’s progressive revelation and the pantheist idea that God is the creation, rather than an external creator of it, spread into philosophy. In Scotland, a number of thinkers such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson saw the history of humanity as a progression of stages of evolution: people had evolved from nomads to a pastoral society which had given way to agriculture and culminated in the commercial society of modern times. Each step was taken to be a higher form of civilization, guided by what Adam Smith called the ‘invisible hand’. In Germany, these and many other ideas came to be influentially expounded by the philosopher Hegel, who revealed to his readers that history, which sceptics saw merely as an up and down ride over the bumps of human folly, actually exhibited a rational structure. Hegel thought that history progressed; the subjects of a modern state enjoyed a fullness of experience which had merely been potential in earlier societies.
Hegel’s was a formidable and complex philosophy, but it conveyed apocalyptic strivings to a group of young disciples who thought that he had solved, or at the very least nearly solved, the riddle of human existence. The most famous of them was Karl Marx, who fused Hegel with the burgeoning socialist ideas of early industrial Europe. Marx detected the fall of man in the institution of private property which had apparently emerged after the nomadic stage of primitive communism. The destiny of mankind was to recreate that early communal idyll in an advanced technological form, and that achievement it was which had necessitated the sufferings of history.
It was Marx’s characterization of the modern world which gave him such influence. Hegel had argued that after the slaveries and oppressions of history, modern Europe had at last achieved a civilization in which all were free. Marx revealed to his followers that this formal freedom was actually the most subtle form of oppression ever created. Moderns were, on the view Marx and Engels sketched out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, little more than puppets moved by the mysterious force of capital, which induced them to trade, migrate, work, and even think according to the concealed logic of the capitalist mode of production. There had been socialisms before, but Marx claimed that his was the first scientific socialism – the knowledge of the human condition which at last, after millennia of being buffeted by the waves of historical necessity, allowed mankind to seize the helm of the ship of state and guide it to port. It only required those who had this knowledge to seize the bridge in a process called revolution.
This was so brilliant a vulgarization of long-standing religious and philosophical themes that it has continued to fascinate subsequent generations. It combines a simple melodrama attractive to the people it was designed to mobilize – the unsophisticated proletariat – with an apparatus of ideas that could excite more intellectual followers. Hegel had been tempted to think that history had, in a sense, come to an end; Marx adopted the idea and located it in the future, as a project to be struggled for. Unlike Hegel, Marx consigned the state to what later Marxists called ‘the dustbin of history’. Indeed, a great deal of what had hitherto constituted civilization would disappear in the new epoch: morality, for example, and law. Philosophy itself, that tortuous wrestling with complicated abstractions dating back to Thales and the Greek pre-Socratics, would be replaced by a direct, unmediated consciousness of human reality, available to all. As Marx wrote in one of his most famous utterances: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’
Marxism is important not only historically, but also because it served as a model for many later revelations of the same kind. Its devotees experienced the immense excitement of people for whom all the confusing elements of life had suddenly fallen into place. It was thus quite different from political writing. One might be a passionate liberal or conservative, support parliament or the king, advocate or oppose the extension of the franchise, and so on, without in any way imagining that these enthusiasms constituted a revelation. Indeed, in an age in which Christian belief was declining, Marxism was the economy package which supplied its followers with a politics, a religion, and a moral identity all in one. For this very reason, it is not a political doctrine, though if its claims were accepted, it would be something very much more significant. Political doctrines give reasons; they talk to each other. Marxism could only declare the truth. For Marx, politics is merely the froth cast up by deeper processes. We thus need to distinguish Marxism and similar revelations, on the one hand, from political doctrines, which have a quite distinct logic, on the other. We may call these doctrines, which promise an earthly liberation, ideologies, and our next task must be to explain this curious word.
It was invented in 1797 by a French philosopher called Destutt de Tracy who had recently survived the Terror by the skin of his teeth. Tracy was working on the central project of the philosophes of that period: to clarify the understanding by bringing concepts to the test of experience and discarding those that failed. He might have called this new science psychology, but thought that its derivation (from the Greek psyche meaning ‘soul’) might convey something unacceptably spiritual. So he invented ‘ideology’ and it caught on. Its proponents were soon called idéologues. As liberal republicans in the confused decade of the Revolution, they came to support a rising young officer called Bonaparte. He soon discarded them, referring contemptuously to les idéologues as theorists whose meddling in politics did more harm than good. Destutt de Tracy continued to develop his science of the understanding, over four volumes, up to 1815, but ‘ideology’ for the moment survived merely as an occasional term with which to express contempt for impractical intellectuals.
In 1846, Marx and Engels wrote a huge work called The German Ideology in which they attacked their former associates in the circle of young Hegelians. Possessing, as they believed, the truth about how society worked, they needed a term to describe the false beliefs of those (especially the bourgeoisie) who had failed to transcend their social situation. They took up the word ‘ideology’. This work was not published until 1926, but the word was launched in a new direction. And already it will be clear that it contained two quite opposite ideas: that of truth and that of falsity. Ideology meant (for the ideologues themselves) a philosophical hygiene revealing truth, and (for Marx) the very falsity which needed to be cleansed. The problem of apparent contradiction disappears, however, when one realizes that the falsity of those false ideas is guaranteed by the truth of one’s own ideas. Ideology refers, as it were, to the negative and positive poles of a dogmatic conviction. Marxists had a true understanding of the world, and therefore whatever contradicted them must be false – that is, ideological, which meant both false, and false because reflecting the wrong social location. The same ambivalent usage marks anarchist versions of the truth, or those of radical feminists. So long as one grasps this symbiosis, the term ideology can be used without serious confusion as referring both to the truth, and also to all the other beliefs which are judged to be false in terms of that belief. Ideology thus exhausts the entire field of truth and error, so long as one judges that one knows, as Marx and his followers thought they did, what the truth is.
We need to follow the adventures of this word a little further. The first adventure happened within Marxism itself. Marxism asserted that ideas reflected material conditions, and the false ideas of the bourgeoisie, reflecting bourgeois conditions, were ‘bourgeois ideology’. But since all ideas were thought to be socially produced, the question must arise: where did communist ideas come from? The solution was that they bubbled up from the experience of the proletariat who were destined to bring truth-revealing communism into existence. Marxism in these terms was the ideology – the socially determined ideas – of the rising proletariat, which happened also to be true. Such is the view taken, for example, by Lenin, the most famous Marxist of his generation.
A second development resulted from the growth of political science as an academic discipline, especially in the United States, towards the end of the nineteenth century. Among the materials on offer for study were the rather miscellaneous theories of all those who had written, in one idiom or another, about politics. Words like ‘theory’ and ‘doctrine’ lacked the requisite technical panache for a developing inquiry, so ‘ideology’ came to be used to refer to this entire miscellany of beliefs, including both political ideas and what we are here marking off as a special kind of intellectual creation. ‘Ideology’ was foreign, and impressive-sounding, and was to generate many books with chapters recounting the arguments of the various ‘isms’ of which political debate is composed.
The story of the word is, then, remarkable, covering as it does the true, the false, and the political. Since a whole academic industry has grown up around the project of construing the very many variant meanings of this term, there is a clear case for leaving it to the mercies of nomenclatural mysticism. But its continuity with the past suggests that it remains useful. Ideologies, by contrast with political doctrines, claim exclusive truth. They explain not only the world, but the false beliefs of opponents as well. Ideologists possess the long-sought knowledge of how to abolish politics and create the perfect society. How might one put such a claim to the test? Marx himself wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach of 1846 that theoretical problems find their solution in practice. The logical character of Marxism, as of other ideologies, is by this test revealed in the actions of its followers when they come to power. What they have invariably done is to institute a reign of truth, in which discussion disappears and nothing else but the ideology is taught in schools, universities, the media, the law courts, and everywhere else. And this characterstic of Marxism is a universal truth, unaffected by culture. In Cuba among the Spanish Americans, in many states in Africa, in China, and most notably in the Soviet Union until its collapse, exactly the same policy was adopted, for it follows directly from the ideology itself.
It is easy to confuse ideologies and political doctrines, because how they look is always in large part determined (as with all rhetorical exercises) by audience and context. Communists and other ideologists operating in liberal democratic states must present their beliefs as if they were merely policy options to be supported by general and arguable reasons, for ideological dogmatism merely looks absurd except in conversation with fellow believers. On the other hand, enthusiasm may infect any political doctrine with the belief that its principles alone can save the world from evil. Libertarians who believe that political problems are caused only by governments interfering in the natural contractual relations between individuals are moving from a rhetorical to an ideological logic. ‘Democracy’ is sometimes the watchword of those who think that all political problems could be solved if only we became (what we are not yet) a real democracy. We may say that the constitutive illusion of ideology is that there is a possible structure of society whose achievement would allow rational actors to create a happy world.
Ideology is commonly signalled by the presence of a tripartite structure of theory. The first stage reveals to us that the past is the history of the oppression of some abstract class of person. It is concerned with workers as a class, not (as a politician might be) with workers at a particular time and place; or with women in general, or with this or that race. Specific discontents are all swept up into the symptomatology of the structurally determined oppression. The duty of the present is thus to mobilize the oppressed class in the struggle against the oppressive system. This struggle is not confined to the conventional areas of politics. It flares up everywhere, even in the remoter recesses of the mind. And the aim of this struggle is to attain a fully just society, a process generally called liberation. Ideology is thus a variation played on the triple theme of oppression, struggle, and liberation.
Politics, by contrast, assumes that any state will contain many ways of life, and that a responsive political order must make it possible for its subjects to follow their own bent. One implication of this practice is that most of life will not be about politics, any more than most of football consists of arguing with the referee. The doctrine that everything is political is an infallible sign of the ideological project of replacing the rule of law by the management of people. A further implication is that society will necessarily be imperfect, for if it allows people to be morally responsible, some of them are certainly going to be irresponsible.
Ideology challenges politics in the name of an ideal in which all desires are satisfied, but it first simplifies the issue by ruling out of court all but a remarkably limited schedule of approved desires, usually called ‘needs’. The word ‘community’ often stands for a simple way of life which we all live in a single basic role, as comrade, sister, hedonist, or mere human being. The classic ideologists of the last two centuries dreamed of the drama of revolution. Their only conception of political activity was working to make this grand event come about. No moth ever flew into the flames with more enthusiasm than the revolutionary. Revolutions have turned out to be what drug users called ‘a bad trip’, but the dream from which the drama emerged is far from dead. We must next consider how it mingles with deeper currents of contemporary thought.