Understanding Political Ideologies
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descriptive and normative thought, so blurring the distinction between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’. This reflects the fact that the ideologies contain both descriptive understanding about the workings of the existing order ((a) above) and normative or prescriptive beliefs about the nature of the future society ((b) above). Third, although political theory examines the ends and means of political action, ideologies go further. They are concerned with ideas that seek to change the world, action-orientated ideas that link (b) and (c) in the list above. Ideologies are thus not political philosophies but, rather, applied political philosophies. Nevertheless, to view political ideologies as applied political philosophies is to suggest that they have a clarity of shape and internal consistency that they invariably lack; ideologies are only more or less coherent. Their apparent shapelessness stems in part from the fact that ideologies are not hermetically sealed systems of thought; instead, they are, typically, fluid sets of ideas that overlap with other ideologies and shade into one another. This not only fosters ideological development but also leads to the emergence of hybrid ideological forms, such as conservative nationalism (see pp. 137–9), socialist feminism (see pp. 196–7) and liberal multiculturalism (see pp. 237–8). Moreover, each ideology contains a range of divergent, even rival, traditions and viewpoints. Not uncommonly, disputes between supporters of the same ideology are more passionate and bitter than arguments between supporters of rival ideologies, because what is at stake is the true nature of the ideology in question – what is ‘true’ socialism, ‘true’ liberalism or ‘true’ anarchism? Such conflicts, both between and within ideological traditions, are made more confusing by the fact that they are often played out with the use of the same political vocabulary, each side investing terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ with their own meanings. This highlights the problem of what W. B. Gallie (1955–6) termed ‘essentially contested concepts’. These are concepts about which there is such deep controversy that no settled or agreed definition can ever be developed. In this sense, the concept of ideology is certainly ‘essentially contested’, as indeed are the other terms examined in the ‘Perspectives on …’ boxes found in this book. Clearly, however, there must be a limit to the incoherence or shapelessness of ideologies. There must be a point at which, by abandoning a particularly cherished principle or embracing a previously derided theory, an ideology loses its identity or, perhaps, is absorbed into a rival ideology. Could liberalism remain liberalism if it abandoned its commitment to liberty? Would socialism any longer be socialism if it developed an appetite for violence and war? One way of dealing with this problem, following Michael Freeden (1996), is to highlight the morphology, the form and structure, of an ideology in terms of its key concepts, in the same way that the arrangement of furniture in a room helps us to distinguish between a kitchen, a bedroom, a lounge, and so on. Each ideology is therefore characterized by a cluster of core, adjacent and peripheral concepts, not all of which need be present for a theory or a doctrine to be recognized as belonging to that ideology. A kitchen remains a kitchen over time despite the relatively recent concept of an open plan kitchen or a dining area.
However, ideologiesmay be either ‘thick’ or ‘thin’, in terms of the configuration of their conceptual furniture. Whereas liberalism, conservatismand socialism are based on a broad and distinctive set of values, doctrines and beliefs, others, such as anarchism and feminism, are more thin-centred, often having
Descriptive: An account of something that is devoid of value judgements, focusing just on what ‘is’.
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