Ideology is “like halitosis”: it’s “what the other person has.” So writes Terry Eagleton in his book Ideology: An Introduction. The Bernie bro thinks the tech bro is being ideological when the latter rhapsodizes about crypto and autonomous economic zones. The red cap–clad suburban dad thinks the “postmodern” professor is trapped in ideology when she champions green energy and Black Lives Matter.
So conceived, ideology is what blinkers the ideologue’s vision, whether willfully or by way of the mystifying propaganda of certain powers that be. It is to be contrasted with one’s own ideology-free common sense, strictly rational technical analysis, or moral clarity. You’re wearing distorting glasses you don’t even realize are there; I see naturally, and with perfect vision.
As Eagleton points out, this is just one conception of ideology, heavily influenced by Marx’s critique of the ideology of bourgeois capitalism. As many social scientists conceive of it—and as the political scientist Jason Blakely conceives of it in his recent book, Lost in Ideology—ideology is not something you can really do without. Some kind of ideological orientation is a precondition for participating in and understanding modern political life, and “proclaim[ing] oneself beyond ideology is the surest sign that one is adrift in it.”
According to this perspective, we can’t hope to see without ideological glasses, nor can we simply rip them off the faces of the mystified and misled. We must instead settle for careful, humble interpretive study of how ideologies, including our own, tend to overemphasize some facts while obscuring others, how they fall prey to internal incoherence, and how they “naturalize” arrangements that are in fact socially constructed.
Blakely’s approach has much to recommend it. It emphasizes the ways ideology can create social meaning and come to replace religion and other transcendent sources of meaning in modernity. Ideologies, Blakely emphasizes, can also bleed into each other and blend into new hybrids. Marxists and conservatives can share worries about the way unchecked capitalism erodes sources of meaning; fascists can “go green.” While Blakely stresses that because of its basis in human culture, ideology can’t have a science, he also manages to steer clear of a hands-off relativism. Just because we all need some kind of ideology doesn’t mean we can’t judge other ideologies based on their internal contradictions or outright falsehoods. To extend the metaphor, we may all need glasses, but some of us are at least aware of them and have the good sense to get our prescription adjusted once in a while.
But there remains one consideration that can get short shrift when you abjure the pejorative conception of ideology—namely, power. In The German Ideology, Marx famously wrote, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Marx considers those ruling ideas “nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.” This is no doubt a radical simplification that underestimates the capacity of culture and ideology (the “superstructure” in Marx’s language) to affect economic and material reality (the “base”). It also enables Marx’s dubious “scientific” theory, which, as Blakely points out, ends up falsely naturalizing a particular interpretation of social reality no less than the theories of the bourgeois economists Marx criticized.
Nevertheless, there’s reason to be wary of treating ideology as just an orienting worldview. This definition risks downplaying the ways power can distort how we talk about politics and influence ideas that help reproduce unjust material relations. As Eagleton writes, “The ‘sociological’ view that ideology provides...the ‘cognitive map’ which orientates its agents to action, is too often depoliticizing in effect, voiding the concept of ideology of conflict and contradiction.”
Blakely opens his book by adopting just such a definition of ideology as a cognitive map. In his 1964 essay “Ideology as a Cultural System,” the anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes ideologies as “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience.” These maps or “sense-making aids,” Blakely writes, “help orient people within political space—not merely existing as narratives on a page but guiding their actions and practices, helping them to move in the world.”
But there are, Blakely points out, important differences between maps and ideologies. Ideologies can be fluid in a way that maps can’t. And ideological maps don’t just represent some stable world “out there”; they are instead “worldmaking.” This is why ideology, Blakely contends, can maintain such a firm grip on people, and why “converting” from one ideology to another can feel so profound. When someone finds a new ideological home, the scales seem to fall from their eyes and everything falls into place. Ideologies thus tend to mistake their own meaning-making for the natural world itself. Here, Blakely enlists Borges’s famous story of mapmakers so ambitious that they construct a map that covers, and occludes, the entire territory it’s meant to represent.
Blakely proposes that his culturally sensitive interpretive approach can allow readers to evaluate ideologies—others’ and their own—and chart an enlightened course that avoids both dogmatism and relativism. Although he avoids the term “hermeneutics” and does not mention the founder of modern hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Blakely is very much writing in that tradition. These omissions are presumably meant to make this book more accessible to a general readership, but they obscure the origins—and possible limitations—of Blakely’s approach and prevent him from dealing seriously with competitors.
The bulk of the book involves applying Blakely’s hermeneutic philosophy to individual ideologies in short but perspicuous chapters concerning liberalism, republicanism, white supremacy, libertarianism, progressivism, fascism, environmentalism, and feminism. Blakely’s strategy is to lay out each ideological tradition’s configuring cultural assumptions and then show where it can go astray by treating these assumptions as universal truths.
A “paradigmatic case” for Blakely is John Locke’s classical liberalism. Writing at the beginning of the age of European colonial empires, Locke reasoned on the basis of a “state of nature” existing prior to any particular human culture, in which rights to personal autonomy and private property were sacrosanct. While Locke admitted there should be limits on property claims, according to one’s needs and the proviso that enough be left for others, he considered private property to be natural. He thereby justified European land enclosures in both the old and new worlds. His proto-liberalism also naturalized the state as being necessary to guarantee natural rights and as justified by the implicit consent of the governed—the so-called “social contract.”
According to Blakely, Locke reveals himself here to be a “philosopher who lacks (ideological) self knowledge”:
He unwittingly helped invent and promulgate the very thing he believed himself to be simply uncovering empirically. The more his map was enacted by mass mobilization, the more it appeared to be the simple, verifiable truth of the world. A newly born culture served the role of corroborating nature. Yet part of the very force of Lockean liberalism is that it naturalizes its own politics and therefore covers over its own original creative, even poetic act. The basic justifying concepts of later liberal-capitalism appear as part of the very machinery of the world. Liberal ideology is inescapable because it is natural.
Blakely is right: Locke’s articulation of principles of private property and legitimate governance helped motivate the development of liberal-capitalist culture and institutions to the point that many can scarcely imagine a just or “naturally” justifiable political order without them.
But it’s much more doubtful that Locke was unwittingly inventing these principles. No matter how cloistered, no philosopher writes in complete independence of the material conditions in which he finds himself, and Locke was less cloistered than most philosophers. He was active on England’s Board of Trade and an investor in the African slave trade. His patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was a founder of the colony of Carolina, whose constitution Locke helped draft.
Locke’s ideas were not independently conceived and then used to create a world that now appears inescapable. They were an expression and justification of processes already underway, including both the rolling back of the ancien régime in Europe and the rolling out of a new system of appropriation and exploitation abroad. “Fatefully,” Blakely writes, “[Locke’s] doctrines had a tight ideological fit with Europe’s burgeoning project of settler colonialism in the Americas.” This makes it sound as if the fit were just a coincidence, when it was more or less intentional.
In his treatment of white supremacy, Blakely is more amenable to the idea that ideologies can be products of unequal material conditions. Of Thomas Jefferson’s pseudo-scientific theories of Black inferiority, Blakely writes, “He is quite clearly justifying in theory what was already occurring around him in practice.” As the historian Barbara J. Fields and others have shown, the ideology of white supremacy—indeed the concept of race itself—did not justify slavery before the fact. Africans were kidnapped, shipped across the Atlantic, and forced along with their children into a lifetime of coerced labor because they could be and because the developing global system of trade and production depended on free labor. Ripped out of their cultural context and transplanted into an alien world, Africans could be more easily and more cheaply exploited. Systematic white supremacy emerged to justify and reproduce a system that could not otherwise be squared with Anglo-American liberal pretensions. Similarly, Fields writes, under feudalism, “The peasants did not fall under the dominion of the nobility by virtue of being perceived as innately inferior. On the contrary, they came to be perceived as innately inferior by virtue of having fallen under the nobility’s dominion.”
Even in his discussion of white supremacy, though, Blakely tends to emphasize the worldmaking character of ideology at the cost of the ideology-making character of domination. “A cultural approach to ideology,” he writes, “makes clear how Jefferson’s pseudo-scientific speculations remain naive to the ability of ideological maps to create a world in their own image.” But this cultural approach too often suggests that it is the “creative,” “poetic” work of individual thinkers like Locke and Jefferson that is responsible for distorted perceptions of reality when these are more often the expressions of systems of domination. In such cases, we rely on ideologies not to create new worlds but to perpetuate the world as it already is.
In the 1960s, a debate broke out between the hermeneut Gadamer and the renowned German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas. Habermas accepted many of the tenets of hermeneutics but rejected Gadamer’s claims about the impossibility of transcending the hermeneutic point of view. Gadamer had sought to combat the Enlightenment’s dogmatic view of reason and its disdain for tradition and prejudice. Prejudice, or pre-judgments, are—like ideologies in Blakely’s analysis of politics—necessary preconditions for any kind of understanding. We can’t do without them.
Habermas agreed that the Enlightenment tends to misunderstand both itself and human reason and fall prey to its own forms of prejudice. But he rejected the idea that because we rely on prejudices and traditions, we must confine ourselves to a modest internal critique of them. Through theoretical reflection, we have the capacity to distance ourselves from prejudices and ideologies, and accept or reject them on the basis of reason rather than power or dogmatic tradition alone. Habermas held out hope of an interpretive standpoint from which distorting ideologies can be clarified and demystified. Of course, such a standpoint would itself be subject to contestation and have its own cultural background to account for, but Habermas believed that reason can break free of tradition, at least to some extent. Critical reflection does not just result, as Blakely would have it, in the modification of an ideological map from which there is no escape; it can provide genuine emancipation from dominant ideologies.
Blakely is perhaps right that giving up this emancipatory ideal would dampen the power of inflated theories like Marx’s, whose historical excesses proved disastrous. But giving it up also requires—perversely, in my view—that we treat ideology critique as its own form of ideology. Thus, in a discussion of Marx’s theory of alienation, which describes how capitalism can estrange people from human nature, Blakely writes:
One of Marxism’s most potent sense-making features is to offer an ideological cartography for locating the endemic anxieties and discontents that wrack modern people. Suddenly this deep sense of estrangement has a political set of coordinates.... Civilization’s discontents are political in nature. When this reinterpretation of political reality occurs, the description is also enactive: alienation is not simply brutely discovered in its real significance, but brought into being and intensified as carrying a certain political content.
As Blakely points out, when those inspired by Marx today invoke alienation, they often point out that “[t]he mental health crisis is depoliticized by bourgeois psychologists, doctors and health experts.” On Blakely’s hermeneutic model, it is necessary to regard the attempt to “politicize” mental illness as an ideological maneuver of the same kind as the one it’s trying to replace. Blakely thus reframes an argument over social reality as an argument between two incommensurable but equally enactive “maps of meaning.”
But whatever one thinks of Marx, it’s clear that he’s on to something here. Social alienation in capitalist societies—including, in its most recent iterations, widespread depression, suicide, and the “loneliness crisis”—aren’t just individual or biological problems; they’re social problems with economic and political causes.
Apart from the fact that one is broadly right and the other broadly wrong, the politicized and depoliticized interpretations differ from each other in their origins. Turning alienation into an individual pathology serves particular interests—including those of pharmaceutical companies and politicians looking to evade responsibility—and derives its influence, which is out of all proportion with its interpretive value, from the economic and political power of those interests. By contrast, there’s little money or power in Marx’s theory of alienation, whose origins stretch back to the Romantics, Aristotle, and, arguably, the Old Testament.
Of course, ideas influence our experience of the world. But they can also liberate us from ideologically rigid ways of being and understanding. It may not always be easy to tell these two kinds of ideas apart, and what is liberatory in one generation may become oppressive in the next. Still, if we treat the critique of power as no different from the exercise of power, we deprive ourselves of a vital means to freedom.
Lost in Ideology
Interpreting Modern Political Life
Jason Blakely
Agenda Publishing
$25 | 208 pp.
