Understanding Political Ideologies
5
KEY FIGURE
ANTONIO GRAMSCI (1891–1937) An ItalianMarxist and revolutionary, Gramsci tried to redress the emphasis within orthodox Marxism on economic and material factors. In his major work, Prison Notebooks (1929–35), Gramsci rejected any form of ‘scientific’ determinism by stressing, through the theory of ‘hegemony’ (the dominance of bourgeois ideas and beliefs), the importance of political and intellectual struggle. While he did not ignore the ‘economic nucleus’, he argued that bourgeois assumptions and values needed to be overthrown by the establishment of a rival ‘proletarian hegemony’.
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Non-Marxist views One of the earliest attempts to construct anon-Marxist concept of ideologywas undertaken by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947). Like Marx, he acknowledged that people’s ideas are shaped by their social circumstances, but, in contrast to Marx, he strove to rid ideology of its negative implications. In Ideology and Utopia ([1929]1960), Mannheimportrayed ideologies as thought systems that serve to defend a particular social order, and that broadly express the interests of its dominant or ruling group. Utopias, on the other hand, are idealized representations of the future that imply the need for radical social change, invariably serving the interests of oppressed or subordinate groups. He further distinguished between ‘particular’ and ‘total’ conceptions of ideology. ‘Particular’ ideologies are the ideas and beliefs of specific individuals, groups or parties, while ‘total’ ideologies encompass the entire Weltanschauung , or ‘world-view’, of a social class, society or even historical period. In this sense, Marxism, liberal capitalism and Islamism can each be regarded as ‘total’ ideologies. Mannheim nevertheless held that all ideological systems, including utopias, are distorted, because each offers a partial, and necessarily self-interested, view of social reality. However, he argued that the attempt to uncover objective truth need not be abandoned altogether. According to Mannheim, objectivity is strictly the preserve of the ‘socially unattached intelligentsia’, a class of intellectuals who alone can engage in disciplined and dispassionate enquiry because they have no economic interests of their own. The subsequent career of the concept was marked deeply by the emergence of totalitarian dictatorships in the interwar period, and by the heightened ideological tensions of the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. Liberal theorists in particular portrayed the regimes that developed in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as historically new and uniquely oppressive systems of rule, and highlighted the role played by ‘official’ ideologies in suppressing debate and criticism, and promoting regimented obedience. Writers as different as Karl Popper (1945), Hannah Arendt (1951), J. L. Talmon (1952), Bernard Crick (1962) and the ‘end of ideology’ theorists examined in the final section of this chapter, came to use the term ‘ideology’ in a highly restrictive manner, seeing fascism and communism as its prime examples. According to this usage, ideologies are ‘closed’ systems of thought, which, by claiming a monopoly of truth, refuse to tolerate opposing ideas and rival beliefs. Ideologies are thus ‘secular religions’; they possess a
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