Why Political Ideologies Matter
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WHY WE NEED POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES Although the world of political ideologies does not stand still, but fluctuates in response to ever-changing social and historical circumstances, we continue to live in the age of ideology. Ideology constitutes the vital link between theory and practice in politics. But why, specifically, do we need political ideologies? What role or roles do ideologies play?
These include the following: z z making sense of the world z z investing politics with moral purpose z z forging the collective.
Making sense of the world The most significant role performed by political ideologies is to widen and/or deepen our perceptual field, and, in the process, to make better sense of the world in which we live. In this sense, ideologies are ‘lenses’ through which we seek political understanding, sometimes referred to as ‘world-views’. This relates to the first key feature of political ideology: advancing a critical account of the existing order (see Figure 1.1, p. 000). If we try to see the world simply ‘as it is’ – that is, without the benefit of political ideology – we will see only what we expect to see, what we think we will see. The chief benefit of political ideologies is therefore that they alert us to relationships, processes and structures of which we may previously have been unaware. For example, looking at the world through a ‘feminist lens’ not only means rectifying the traditional ‘invisibility’ of women in the spheres of politics, art, literature, culture and so on, but it also allows us to see how the world might look if women’s values and concerns were treated as matters of central importance. In the same way, political ideologies help to expose ‘hidden’ prejudices and biases. This makes them a device for promoting critical self- reflection, a means of uncovering ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions and understandings about the established order. In the case of feminist ideology, this is reflected in our attempts to expose the ways in which mainstream thinking about social and political affairs is ‘ gendered ’. In this approach, ideologies are treated as paradigms (see p. 268), in the sense employed by Thomas Kuhn in his pioneering The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). As defined by Kuhn, a paradigm is ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by members of a given community’. Although Kuhn developed the concept of paradigm specifically in relation to the natural sciences, it has come to be widely applied
to the social sciences. The value of paradigms is that they help us to make sense of what would otherwise be an impenetrably complex reality. They define what is important to study and highlight significant trends, patterns and processes. In so doing, they draw attention to relevant questions and lines of enquiry, as well as indicate how the results of intellectual enquiry might be interpreted. Nevertheless, as the search for knowledge always takes place within a paradigm, this implies that rival paradigms – and therefore rival political ideologies – are incommensurable . Political ideologies, thus, do not provide competing accounts of the same world; in effect, they ‘see’ different worlds, and, in some respects, use different languages to describe
Gendered: The tendency to reflect the experiences, prejudices or orientations of one gender more than the other; bias in favour of one’s own gender. Incommensurability: An inability to compare or judge between rival policies or propositions because of the absence of common features.
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