If a week is a long time in politics, 20 years is a very long time indeed in the life of a political ideology—and in the study of ideologies. The 20th anniversary of the Journal of Political Ideologies presents a good opportunity to reflect on changes that have taken place in the way ideologies are studied. It also offers an occasion to contemplate the substantive ideologies whose periodic rise and fall from scholarly favour tells us something both about academic fashions and about the manner in which ideologies on the ground have metamorphosed at a notably hastened tempo. Finally, there is another story concerning the way the JPI has developed and consolidated its foci over that period. All those stories are intertwined.
In the 1990s, the study of political ideologies was still at the margins of political theory, and a total outcast among some political philosophers. Although introductions to political ideology were standard courses for undergraduates, they invariably covered a simple survey of the beliefs and values of the major ideological families: the big three of conservatism, liberalism and socialism and the slightly less permanent entourage that included members such as anarchism, nationalism, feminism and environmentalism. The study of ideologies at universities rarely advanced to a more complex level. Nor was that study assisted by the divide between an empirical positivist approach to ideologies as belief systems to be recorded and categorized on the one hand and the continental Ideologiekritik on the other. The latter was, and still is, central to German scholarship, though prominently adopted by post-Marxist and post-structural studies everywhere, as well as by varieties of critical discourse analysis. It involved reacting to ideology in a hail of disapproving criticism. If the aim was to unmask its distortions and the social costs it incurred, it was hardly surprising that the ideas and perceptions ideologies actually contained were not to be taken seriously, which is something quite different from lauding or censuring them. But ‘serious’ political theorizing was loath to extol the actual manifestations of ideologies. It rested content with two things above all: seeking social and political improvement—whether of institutions or of the quality of political thinking and analysis available—or removing the false clutter that blinded people to incontestable social truths.
Much of this boils down to the question: In which disciplinary area should the study of political thought be situated? The history of political thought appears to belong to history, but of course it isn’t the history of political thought at all. It is rather a construct concocted by philosophers, classicists and theologians that identifies an elitist, unrepresentative succession of geniuses or nigh-geniuses as the sole producers of valuable, informative or revealing political thinking. Then there are those for whom political thinking as the exploration of social and political justice places it firmly within the domain of ethics; and those for whom political thinking is an intellectual battle to obtain analytical clarity in thought and language. Many of those evince a lack of pan-disciplinary pluralism and an intolerance of approaches different from their own, or from some mainstream to which they subscribe. That was epitomized in a remark by a philosopher colleague when I first embarked on the analysis of ideologies: ‘The study of inferior minds can only produce inferior work’.
Highly significant writings on ideology had already been produced by cultural sociologists such as Karl Mannheim, but not in a register that political theorists were able—at least at the time—to recognize. Linguists had developed their own literature on semiology and semantics, but yet again in a technical language unknown to political theorists. Another little-known but remarkable source of ruminating earnestly on ideology was a special issue of Current Sociology in 1960 (vol. 9, 2, pp. 91–117) that looked back at its sociological study during the preceding 20 years. In a long introduction, written by Norman Birnbaum followed by an extensive bibliography, he saw it as a confrontation of Marxism and ‘bourgeois’ sociology. Birnbaum observed perceptively: ‘The study of ideology … is at the intersection of the empirical and philosophical components of our discipline [sociology]: it draws upon the resources of history, psychology, politics, and a number of cultural sciences, including linguistics’. That was prescient to a large degree, except that political theory has become the main anchor of developments in that field in recent decades. Indeed, Birnbaum added the then discerning distinction between the analysis of ideology and of ideologies, but for him the former was theoretical and the latter empirical. One of the most striking developments in ideology studies as part of political theory is a change in emphasis since Birnbaum addressed the topic: we now also possess sophisticated theoretical approaches to the empirical analysis of ideologies.
It was time for ideology studies to stake a weighty claim to be part of the social sciences. What if it transpired that political language and thinking were to be regarded as central features of the manner in which people conduct themselves as members of a society—a crucial aspect of what the political consists of? What if between a peculiar history of political thought and the unattainable heights of prescriptive social ethics we could identify a type of thinking that was characteristic and typical of social life and that provided vital clues for understanding and interpreting what was happening within any society? What if group and collective thinking required a distinct kind of investigation? What if all that was part of the intellectual imperative of Verstehen?
Here the Journal of Political Ideologies identified a niche—more of a gaping hole, really—that any student of politics would have to address as part of the empirical questions: What do the forms of political thinking across a society look like? What work do they do? What light do their fluid manifestations cast on the options open and closed to political expression, performance and activity? In particular, the JPI is part of a shift away from a focus on formal abstract political thought towards recognition of the centrality of vernacular political thinking as the most pervasive, typical and instructive set of practices that shed light on the political, and a corresponding interest in the microstructures of ideologies, a perspective that Marxist conceptions of ideology have always been reluctant to adopt.
Moving forward in that direction was not easy. The burdensome prejudices of existing scholarship merged with the low risk-taking inclinations of journal publishers. Andrew Vincent, James Meadowcroft and I first contacted a renowned friendly neighbourhood press in Oxford in 1992. For almost a year they commissioned report after report, obtaining mixed views about the potential market of a journal dedicated solely to political ideologies as well as the scholarly viability of such an enterprise. Eventually we ran out of patience with that indecision, although it was accompanied by the utmost courtesy and by eventual assurances that the academic case for the journal and its intellectual validity had been fully accepted. That contrasts sharply with our subsequent experience with a North of England academic publisher. Letters and emails went back and forth. We complied with their advice and extended geographically the composition of our prospective editorial board, specifically requesting Terence Ball—whom I buttonholed out of the blue at an APSA conference to his initial alarm—to keep an eye on the American scene. We acceded to their urgent request to supply a list of articles on ideology that had recently been published in other journals in order to demonstrate the type of material the JPI might be looking for. All that seemed to persuade them and they responded that it was now ‘full steam ahead’. A contract was finally drawn up in late 1993 and their representative was due to travel down to Oxford the next morning to sign it. I went into my office to await his arrival and found a fax on my desk: the meeting was off, the draft contract scrapped and the plan to publish ditched. No explanation was ever forthcoming.
All this goes to show how difficult it was 20 years ago to legitimate and breathe life into an area of studies still regarded with suspicion by academics, still squeezed in between the conventional approaches to political theory of political philosophy and the history of political thought, still tainted with the derogatory brushes of inauthenticity and manipulation, still dismissed as an obfuscating epiphenomenon that had to be cleared away before a proper understanding of society could emerge. But the battle recommenced. Other publishers were approached, though initially to little avail, until in mid-1994 it was serendipically suggested to me to contact an Abingdon publisher, Carfax Publishing Company. Its publishing director, David Green, met me and within half an hour we had sealed an arrangement. Thus, began an exciting venture and a very rewarding professional relationship with a supportive publisher, now part of the Routledge and Taylor and Francis families.
Many submissions to the JPI in its early years continued to reflect unfamiliarity with the evolving methods of studying ideologies, as well as with its subject matter, and it became the main challenge of the JPI to work towards changing that culture. One major problem was that initially potential authors found it difficult to avoid writing articles with strong normative content, not necessary denigrating ideology but prescribing the adoption of specific ideological positions. We wanted, as far as possible, to abstain from such advocacy and to focus on analysing and understanding ideologies irrespective of their moral and social values. That was anathema to those who were bemused by our efforts to insist on a space between Ideologiekritik and positivist, attitudinal political science. Between the Scylla of rejecting ideology and the Charybdis of descriptively collating ideologies, we claimed to navigate a route of interpretation and decoding, pursued at a high standard of scholarship. Matters weren’t made easier by a couple of offerings prior to the JPI’s launch with titles such as ‘beyond ideology’, which we deemed to be somewhat premature in a journal endeavouring to argue its corner!
Another problem was the difficulty of some scholars to identify what was distinct about ideologies in contrast to other manifestations of political thinking. I pass over an article that consisted of various letters, reproduced without comment, written by the author to two world leaders on opposite sides of the once iron curtain, to which sadly no replies were forthcoming. But Gandhi, Oakeshott, Rorty and Arendt have occasionally been the subjects of analysis without reference to any of the many ideological issues that could have related to their work. The JPI has never objected to submissions on single thinkers as long as they were also discussed as representing a trend, or contributing significantly to the articulation or modification of an ideological position. But it did not see its role as merely replicating philosophical, historical or cultural analyses of individuals: there are enough good journals already doing that. Political ideologies were conceived as having some relationship to group thinking or activity, and they also significantly included unintentional messages and their consumption by others: forms of communication that could not be entirely accounted for by personal agency. Furthermore, they had to be understood in a context of plurality: One problem with Marxist understandings of ideology was that they tended towards the singular reference to ‘ideology’, a consequence of postulating a dominant ideology swallowing up its dualistic opposite. Rather, the sense of continuous, fluctuating competition over voice and public policy had to be at the heart of ideology studies.
Eventually the JPI settled into some kind of gravitas and consistency. The geographical spread of its contributors unfolded to include not only the UK and the USA, but Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, and parts of the greater Middle East or West Asia including Iran, Israel and Turkey. Submissions came from China and Japan, from all of Western Europe (with the notable but possibly predictable absence of France, from which only two articles were received over the 20 years, both commissioned!) and increasingly from much of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. We have always pursued the policy of encouraging younger scholars and they have been allotted considerable space in the pages of the JPI. After all, one has to begin publishing somewhere … It is also the case that younger scholars have been more open and sympathetic to the methods and questions that ideology studies generate, and not as wedded to Marxist and post-Marxist interpretations of ideology as some of their older colleagues (although those are welcome too), or to dismissing ideologies as doctrinaire or dogmatic or, even worse, as trivial.
The JPI has found itself at the crossroads of important intellectual developments, reflected also in the composition of its editorial board. Once the focus on ideology studies began to develop first and foremost as a genre of political theory, it found itself in greater affinity with a number of distinct disciplinary areas that flourished in its neighbourhood. Two in particular were prominent. The one was what might be loosely termed an extended Essex school, whose leading lights were Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and, at least at one remove, Slavoj Žižek. The other was discourse analysis, located at the interstices of sociology, linguistics and cultural studies. Laclau and Žižek were supportive of the JPI at its launch and were among many leading scholars who contributed articles to its early years that lent the new venture weight. But there always was a slight danger of being sucked in too strongly into the intellectual communities of those often close-knit postmodern approaches. The JPI was gratified that members of the Essex school saw the journal as one of its academic homes, and has always offered them a podium from which the journal has benefited greatly. But, as with any particular approach, we felt bound to act cautiously. Consequently, the JPI continued to pursue strict substantive independence with respect to schools of thought concerning the analysis of ideology. It did not want to be seen as the vehicle of any particular interpretative stance. Not least, the editor had to struggle with the semiprivate language of some of the post-structuralists, pleading with them that they needed to communicate with a readership beyond their own circles. Academic prose has to be, as far as possible, accessible and comprehensible to non-experts in any professional jargon. Moreover, the JPI resisted institutional affiliation. It was loosely associated with the Centre for Political Ideologies at Oxford University between 2002 and 2011, and with the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies at Nottingham University between 2013 and 2015, not least in terms of overlapping personnel, but never part of either.
Discourse analysis posed a slightly different problem. Like ideology studies, it too focuses on the ordinary and the normal, and it too is not wedded to macro-political structures but to everyday language and conversation. But it is both broader and narrower than ideology analysis. It is broader because it can encompass all kinds of utterances, including those that have minimal or indirect impact on public policy-making, which is what ideologies engage in, or that do not necessarily possess significant or ‘thick’ ideological features. It is narrower, especially in the form of critical discourse analysis, because the latter concentrates on biases, prejudices and forms of social discrimination with the aim of exposing defective human practices and, ultimately, correcting them. Unlike Ideologiekritik, ideology studies are not in the business of correction, though it is quite reasonable to expect them to point out the ideational and institutional consequences of given and possible thought patterns, the work they do and fail to do, without passing judgement. If ultimately the JPI has cultivated an approach to ideology, it is indeed as the abstention from judgement and from substantive partialities, as distinct from refraining to voice methodological preferences for meaningful research.
A more recent overlap has been the emergence of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), though the interchange with ideology research has not yet realized its full potential. It is astonishing that conceptual history and the study of political thought have until recently moved in largely separate spheres. After all, both are centrally focused on concepts, ideas and discourses that have played a crucial role in our understandings and interpretations of the societies of which we are part, and the societies that surround ours. Sovereignty, authority, rights, the state, democracy, liberalism, equality, anarchism, dictatorship—the list of common concerns just goes on and on. And both are centrally focused on conceptual change. But whereas change for conceptual historians is largely a matter of the temporal and spatial contexts that impact on language and meaning, for students of ideology—particularly those like myself interested in conceptual morphology—conceptual change is also built into concepts as an internal property, because of the different conceptual concatenations that the endless permutations of essential contestability ordain.
Most political theorists are still unaware of what Begriffsgeschichte entails. Most conceptual historians harbour a rather conventional view of what is included in political thought and are probably ill at ease with distinctions between political thought, political theory, political philosophy and ideology (and so, one has to add, are most political theorists!). The internationalization of conceptual history followed a remarkable meeting in the Finnish Institute in London in 1998, two years into the life of the JPI—attended also by its editor, who took the opportunity to introduce the investigation of ideologies and the mission of the JPI to an audience of historians. The JPI had in fact pre-empted an examination of the potential contacts between the two fields by running an editorial on the relationship between ideologies and conceptual history in 1997. There are encouraging signs that conceptual historians are beginning to take on board the intertwining of concepts and the semantic fields they fashion, rather than tracing an isolated concept through time. Many are now prepared not just to emphasize the appearance of the words that connote a concept, but to explore the complexity of the conceptual field in which they are situated. Some initial resistance to the expansion of ideology studies is also to be expected from a sphere of research that originated in Germany, the home of Ideologiekritik. One may hope that further cross-fertilization will be forthcoming.
Fundamentally, a journal can only reflect what is being submitted to it, but it can occasionally invite authors to present a particular subject, it can commission special issues and it obviously sifts articles out in what is a process of choice exercised both by assessors and editors. Inevitably, some very good pieces on ideology are submitted to other journals and some articles, turned down by the JPI, then appear in highly respectable alternative journals. Unavoidably, we sometimes make mistakes both of selection and of omission—that comes with the territory—but at other times genuine disagreements surface about the respective merits of treating ideologies, and ideology, as a field. Certain trends are clear to see. Sixteen articles, whether accepted or not, have had global, globalization or anti-globalization in the title: the first in 1996, but nine in the past five years. Populism first made an appearance in 2002; it then occurred in 17 additional titles, and also had a special issue devoted to it in 2004. Anarchism and post-anarchism scored very highly with 21 appearances and also a special issue in 2011. Both are still strong contenders for journal space. Feminism has been less prominent with nine title appearances. Islam, Islamism and political Islam have 15; green ideology, environmentalism and ecologism together have 15 as well. If we compare those to the ‘traditional’ ideological families of conservatism, liberalism and socialism, those are still in a different league: Conservatism has had 40 appearances; liberalism has had 64 (while neoliberalism has had an additional 17); and socialism has had 26. Nationalism too is up there with 35 title occurrences. Of course many of these macro-themes are tucked in between the lines of the articles themselves. But we have a rough indication of the ratio between the ideological stalwarts and the impact of more immediate contingency on ascending and retreating belief and advocacy groups as a consequence of tectonic shifts on the world stage. One can also note in parallel the diminutive attention paid to state ideologies in contrast to movements, political parties, cultural predispositions and individuals representing or developing ideological stances. Attention to the configuration of state, ideology and power has been marginalized alongside the decline of the state—or the perception of the state—as an overbearing political unit.
All that, however, does not tell the story of the methodological innovations that have coursed through the JPI. In particular, significant articles on the conceptualization of ideology itself have tilted the balance conclusively in favour of bestowing gravitas on the sub-discipline. It is not that a distinct approach to ideology has been pushed on its pages but that different methods have had important airings along the years, so that someone perusing the volumes of the past two decades will find a comparative journey through major interpretations of ideology and their application to concrete evidence. Ideology as indispensable fantasmic veil-drawing, ideology as the articulation of social identities, ideology as distorted belief, ideology through the lens of discourse analysis, ideology as conceptual morphology, ideology as rhetorical language, ideology as aggregated attitudes, ideologies as bifurcated or multiple psychological tendencies, ideology as performativity, ideology as ritual, ideology as consensus formation, ideology as the management or mismanagement of agonism and dissent, ideology as rupture—all these have been given a fair platform. There is no leading ideological school and that is devoutly to be wished. In more ways than one the fragmentation of ideologies over the past generation is mirrored in the absence of a hegemonic understanding of what ideologies are and what work they perform. Indeed, the former monolithic conceptualization of ideology as false consciousness or as exercising an ideational and hegemonic power stranglehold over a subjugated people, group or class was the main obstacle towards enabling the maturing and flourishing of ideology studies.
What are the broader lessons that we can learn as students of politics and of political theory? First of all, that any society is bubbling with both thinking and feeling the political. Views, opinions, preconceptions, anxieties, hopes, resentments, taking pride, visions, frustrations, all these and more are integral to the normal goings-on among people. They may be directed at governments, at strangers, at foreign states, at local leadership; they may be expressed at dinner, in pubs, at rallies and demonstrations. They may be filtered through protest movements, social media, the press and television, neighbourhood organizations, leisure clubs and activities, the workplace and, of course, elections. Many of the participants in those ubiquitous activities may be unaware of their political nature and even regard themselves—erroneously—as apolitical or anti-political. Thinking about politics—that is, about its substantive, ideological concerns—and thinking politically—that is, attempting to make socially significant decisions, or behaving in such a way that affects one’s lives and the lives of others—are entirely ubiquitous everyday happenings that permeate societies and human interaction in all walks of life.
Second, the study of ideologies also reveals that these are down-up practices that more than counterbalance the stereotypical up-down perceptions of politics as emanating ‘institutionally’ from states, governments, leaders, parties, and ‘authoritative’ groups. Of course, those too are part and parcel of the political, focused and powerful as they can appear, and so-called ‘anti-politics’ is anything but: it is usually a (political) reaction to those salient forces. But the study of ideologies, as a reflection of the constellations of group thinking embedded in any society, is a secure route to linking up political theory with political science—something that has more or less been abandoned at universities as political theory has been taken over by philosophers and, to a lesser degree, by historians. There is nothing wrong with those interdisciplinary interchanges, but ideologies are above all a feature of political life. And the increasing—and rather belated—subtlety that their investigation now displays is a breakthrough in what political theory should encompass. This returns us to a point I have frequently made in the editorial pages of the JPI, that Weberian Verstehen—the sating of intellectual curiosity and the endeavour to comprehend what it means, and why it is important, to study patterns of political thinking in and across societies—must earn pride of place in a scholarly agenda, irrespective of our inevitable, necessary and desirable normative involvement with the political worlds of which we are part.
Third, what can the study of ideologies export to the various pools of knowledge that we cultivate? What skills can be brought to bear on the humanities and the social sciences through their exploration, and which already existing skills can be imported from elsewhere into their investigation? One impact must be the confirmation of the normality of plurality in the context of unhelpful myths concerning dominant ideologies and frames. Current insistence on the oneness and omnipresence both of globalization and neoliberalism are cases in point. Dichotomies, too, such as those employed in the USA, dividing the attitudinal worlds into liberals and conservatives, are heuristic devices that caricature complexity. Another impact is the awareness that political thinking occurs in clusters of considerable fluidity and indeterminacy and that the search for scholarly precision cannot draw inspiration from the subject-matter it explores, nor attempt to impose on it fanciful and fixed regularities as distinct from looser and more plastic patterns.
Yet another feature is being assimilated into ideology research and re-exported from there into political theory. It is the identification of non-verbal practices and manifestations as crucial carriers of ideological and ideational import. We know that political theory has been ill-equipped to handle performativity in the arts, in photography, film and TV, in carnivalesque behaviour, in ceremonies and in ordinary body language, common as such explorations are in other disciplines. Emotions as an integral aspect of the language of politics are slowly coming into their own, but with a much reduced professional language of analysis and interpretation as yet unable to match the sophistication of our excursions into the written and the verbal.
A further impact is that the field of politics itself is due for a serious recasting. It has already moved from government to governance. It now has to transcend, though of course not abandon, the governance aspect in order to incorporate the insights that power theorists such as Dahl, and late 20th century feminists, began to explore: the political is located at any point of social conduct and thought and it is all the more illuminating for that. Clearly, politics will remain about the wielding of unequal power in and across societies, it will address leadership and decision-making for groups, it will focus on juggling and experimenting with public social arrangements, it will concern the macro-institutions of states and their relation to sub-national and super-national structures, it will involve political interactions with economics and ecology. But the realm of the political deserves a far more expansive purview which, in my own research, I have attempted to adopt in my journey from Ideologies and Political Theory (1996) to The Political Theory of Political Thinking (2013). For what we have learned from ideology studies is that many features of ideology are concurrently features of the political in general, and findings from investigating the former can and should be extended to the heart of the mother-discipline.
The formation, at the conscious level, of large-scale and group-oriented configurations of ideas for the purposes of advocacy and persuasion; the simplification and sharpening of public discourse for the purposes of mobilizing support; the shaping of, and competition over, the formation of national and sectorial identities; the verbal defence or critique of social arrangements together with programmes of change and improvement, the quests for the ultimate and final say in social affairs, are all core ideological practices. Our understanding of those processes is becoming more elaborate, detailed and knowledgeable, to the extent that we can recognize them even when their practitioners are unaware of the political nature of their thoughts and deeds or, indeed, fully cognizant of their very existence. Concurrently, that has a major knock-on effect on thinking about and thinking through what actually constitutes the political, and on comprehending its intricacies. For those ideological practices are simultaneously what politics itself is all about. Though political thinking is not only ideological, it is also ideological, and most political information and understanding is filtered through ideological prisms. The step beyond focusing on ideology is occasioned by a realization that one does not have to single out the large-scale competition over the control of political language to appreciate that the characteristics of ideologies are unquestionably typical of the rich range of phenomena encompassed in the political sphere in general.
For many of the above reasons, the study of ideology also provides a solid base for those more recently engaged in the investigation of political realism. Currently, much of that genre is taken up by scholars who want to align normative political theory with a more down-to-earth approach that derives from ‘non-ideal’ theory—a critique of the apolitical and abstract tendencies in conventional political philosophy. But the study of ideology as cultivated, among others, in the pages of the JPI has vastly enhanced our comprehension of the political as endemic to social practices, as ever-present, and as located at all levels of human interaction. Though power relationships still run through the political as well as the ideological, neither domain can be reduced to power alone but comprises plans and visions, the articulation of social preferences, the fluctuating rendering of support for diverse social and political endeavours and the intricate balancing attempts between order and disorder. The study of ideology and the study of what is real, in the sense of being shored up by seriously assessed evidence, coalesce in the endeavour to interpret and decode political practices, including the practices of moralizing about and the normative evaluation of the political, which themselves are grist to a interpretative mill. If some will accuse that standpoint of shirking responsibility for social betterment, the answer is that its allegiance is towards the quality of understanding, not of persuading and campaigning. In all that we hope that the JPI has played a small role.
University of Oxford
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