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CHAPTER 1 ‘totalizing’ character and serve as instruments of social control, ensuring compliance and subordination. However, not all political creeds are ideologies by this standard. For instance, liberalism, based as it is on a fundamental commitment to freedom, tolerance and diversity, is the clearest example of an ‘open’ system of thought (Popper, 1945). A distinctively conservative concept of ideology can also be identified.This is based on a long- standing conservative distrust of abstract principles and philosophies, born out of a sceptical attitude towards rationalism (see p. 26) and progress. The world is viewed as infinitely complex and largely beyond the capacity of the human mind to fathom. The foremost modern exponent of this view was Michael Oakeshott (see p. 55). ‘In political activity’, Oakeshott argued in Rationalism in Politics (1962), ‘men sail a boundless and bottomless sea’. From this perspective, ideologies are seen as abstract systems of thought, sets of ideas that are destined to simplify and distort social reality because they claim to explain what is, frankly, incomprehensible. Ideology is thus equated with dogmatism: fixed or doctrinaire beliefs that are divorced from the complexities of the real world. Conservatives have therefore rejected the ‘ideological’ style of politics, based on attempts to reshape the world in accordance with a set of abstract principles or pre-established theories. Until infected by the highly ideological politics of the New Right (see p. 62), conservatives had preferred to adopt what Oakeshott called a ‘traditionalist stance’, which spurns ideology in favour of pragmatism, and looks to experience and history as the surest guides to human conduct.
KEY CONCEPT PRAGMATISM
disputes that seeks to clarify themeaning of concepts and hypotheses by identifying their practical consequences. The benefits of pragmatism in politics are that it allows policies and political assertions to be judged ‘on their merits’ (on the basis of ‘what works’), and that it prevents ideology from becoming divorced from reality and turning into mere wishful thinking. Critics, however, equate pragmatism with a lack of principle or a tendency to follow public opinion rather than lead it.
Pragmatism, broadly defined, refers to behaviour that is shaped in accordance with practical circumstances and goals, rather than principles or ideological objectives. As a philosophical tradition, associated with ‘classical pragmatists’ such as William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952), pragmatism is a method for settling metaphysical
Since the 1960s, however, the term ‘ideology’ has gained a wider currency through being refashioned according to the needs of conventional social and political analysis. This has established ideology as a neutral and objective concept, the political baggage once attached to it having been removed. Martin Seliger (1976), for example, defined an ideology as ‘a set of ideas by which men posit, explain and justify the ends and means of organized social action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order’. An ideology is therefore an action-orientated system of thought. So defined, ideologies are neither good nor bad, true nor false, open nor closed, liberating nor oppressive – they can be all these things. The clear merit of this social-scientific concept is that it is inclusive, in the sense that it can be applied to all ‘isms’, to liberalism as well as Marxism, to conservatism as well as fascism, and so on. The drawback of any negative concept of ideology is that it is highly restrictive. Marx saw liberal and conservative ideas as ideological but regarded his own as scientific; liberals classify communism and fascism as ideologies but refuse to accept that liberalism is also one; traditional conservatives condemn liberalism, Marxism and fascism as ideological but portray conservatism as merely a ‘disposition’. However, any neutral concept of ideology also has its dangers. In particular, in offloading its political
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