PYQ:

•  "Political ideology is primarily concerned with the allocation and utilization of power." Comment. (21/15)

Introduction:

•  What is ‘ideology’? According to David Joravsky: When we call a belief ideological, we are saying at least three things about it: although it is unverified or unverifiable, it is accepted as verified by a particular group, because it performs social functions for that group.

•  In other words, holders of beliefs do not need to have had them ‘proved’ by some rational, scientific form of testing. 

o  To the believers they are the ‘truth’, the ‘reality’. All political ideologies claim ‘true’ definitions of liberty, equality, justice, rights and the ‘best’ society. 

o  The ‘particular group’ mentioned above might be any social group: class, nation, profession, religious organization, party or pressure group. All will have sets of ideological assumptions that are unquestioningly accepted as ‘proper’. 

o  The ‘social functions’ ideologies perform are numerous. They will include the creation of a sense of group solidarity and cohesion for members of that group through shared ideological values; an explanation of the past, an analysis of the present, and, usually, a vision of the future with some description of how a better future will come about.

•  An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially as held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use treats the term as mainly condemnatory

•  There has always been a widely held view in politics and political philosophy that ‘ideology’ merely provides a cloak for the struggle for power, the real stuff of politics. To justify their power and to persuade the people to obey, follow and support them, rulers use ideologies of various kinds.

Historical background:

•    Ideology has been in use in English since the end of the 18th century and is one of the few words whose coiner we can identify. The French writer A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy proposed it as a term to designate the “science of ideas,” and in that sense the word was quickly borrowed into English. Though ideology originated as a serious philosophical term, within a few decades it took on connotations of impracticality thanks to Napoleon, who used it in a derisive manner. 

•  Today, the word most often refers to “a systematic body of concepts,” especially those of a particular group or political party.

Thinkers’ perspective on ideology:

David W. Minar describes six different ways the word ideology has been used:

1. As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative.

2. As the form or internal logical structure that ideas have within a set.

3. By the role ideas play in human-social interaction.

4. By the role ideas play in the structure of an organization.

5. As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion; and

6. As the locus of social interaction.

For Willard A. Mullins, an ideology should be contrasted with the related (but different) issues of utopia and historical myth. An ideology is composed of four basic characteristics:

1.    it must have power over cognition.

2.    it must be capable of guiding one's evaluations.

3.    it must provide guidance towards action; and

4.    it must be logically coherent.

Terry Eagleton outlines (more or less in no particular order) some definitions of ideology:

1. The process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life

2. A body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class

3. Ideas that help legitimate a dominant political power.

4. False ideas that help legitimate a dominant political power.

5. Systematically distorted communication

6. Ideas that offer a position for a subject

7. Forms of thought motivated by social interests.

8. Identity thinking

9. Socially necessary illusion

10. The conjuncture of discourse and power

11. The medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world.

12. Action-oriented sets of beliefs

13. The confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality

14. Semiotic closure 

15. The indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure.

16. The process that converts social life to a natural reality

Political ideology and power

A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. Some political parties follow a certain ideology very closely while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them. The popularity of an ideology is in part due to the influence of moral entrepreneurs, who sometimes act in their own interests. 

Political ideologies have two dimensions:

(1) goals: how society should be organized; and 

(2) methods: the most appropriate way to achieve this goal.

An ideology is a collection of ideas. Typically, each ideology contains certain ideas on what it considers to be the best form of government (e.g., autocracy or democracy) and the best economic system (e.g. capitalism or socialism). 

•  The same word is sometimes used to identify both an ideology and one of its main ideas. 

o  For instance, socialism may refer to an economic system, or it may refer to an ideology which supports that economic system. 

•  The same term may also be used to refer to multiple ideologies and that is why political scientists try to find consensus definitions for these terms. 

o  For example, while the terms have been conflated at times, communism has come in common parlance and in academics to refer to Soviet-type regimes and Marxist–Leninist ideologies, whereas socialism has come to refer to a wider range of differing ideologies which are most often distinct from Marxism–Leninism.

•  Machiavelli advised, in The Prince (1513), that religion was a very useful tool for the ruler. To Machiavelli the real objective of politics was the getting and keeping of power. Appeals to the welfare of the people were merely part of what we would call the ideological window-dressing, hiding the raw struggle for power.

Conclusion:

The use of the word ideology in the pejorative sense of false consciousness is found not only in the writings of Marx himself but in those of other exponents of what has come to be known as the sociology of knowledge, including the German sociologists Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, and numerous lesser figures. 
Concluding the real meaning of ideology with the Hannah Arendt saying – “An ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man."