This is the second issue resulting from a conference held to celebrate the first 20 years of the Journal of Political Ideologies under the heading ‘Re-energizing Ideology Studies: The Maturing of a Discipline.’Footnote1 The five contributing scholars are all political theorists, and all illustrate the gratifyingly broad remit of mainstream political theorists in today’s academia. To those who would still wish to bypass ideology studies when teaching or researching political thought, the message is unequivocal: the times, and the discipline, are changing, and any understanding of the political must incorporate the many new insights that students of ideology bring to bear on it.
The injection of a new impetus into the investigation of feminist ideologies is the subject of Michaele Ferguson’s article. Since studies of feminism as an ideology peaked towards the end of the 20th century, there has been something of a lull. Ferguson enters that territory on the crest of a recent ideological phenomenon—neoliberalism—in order to revise the semblance of a ‘golden age’ of feminist political thinking, one of whose ideational impacts appears to lie in painting later feminist ideologies as less significant or worthy, or in thrall to neoliberal domination. This raises the question whether there may well be ideological reasons for pursuing, or desisting from, certain tendencies in academic scholarship that hamper a sensitivity to the mutating manifestations of an ideological family. Yet, whatever reservations researchers may have in respect of neoliberalism should not, argues Ferguson, have any bearing on taking neoliberal feminism seriously.
We are up, of course, against the all-too frequent propensity of political theorists to apply their normative preferences to their subject matter, something that should be minimized in the conduct of ideology studies, even if it can never be eliminated. How could we otherwise construct thoughtful interpretations of the ideologies of the far right or left, or assign proper weight to non-democratic thinking, quite apart from the irrelevant fact for students of ideology that neo-feminism does not even occupy those extremes? We learn from Ferguson to doubt claims by ideologists and their interpreters that they represent some authentic version of political thinking that becomes the measure of all things. But there is also a substantive message here, in identifying the characteristic core features of current neoliberal feminism as a stand-alone ideological variant, exploring and emancipating women’s choices in a deliberately degendered capitalist setting: an ideologically non-differentiated take on human equality. Not least, Ferguson reminds us that ideologies are most typically detected not in academic or philosophical discourse (although they unquestionably exist there, too) but in the everyday expressions, wishes and actions of ordinary people. That may incidentally be a democratic lesson, but it is far more importantly a lesson concerning the ubiquity of both politics and ideology.
Benjamin Martill’s contribution is a welcome indication that the discipline of international relations is beginning to catch up with ideology studies and becoming an indispensable partner in the analyses conducted by students of ideology. But that work, as Martill argues, is still at a relatively early stage, its pursuit is fractured and its impact is scattered. His wide-ranging survey of the field covers a broad spectrum of books and articles that intersect with, or de facto explore, ideologies that have played significant parts in the moulding of thinking about the international politics dimension. Yet, what is still lacking in those disparate analyses and references to topics that should fall within the rubric of ideology studies is an awareness of the direct pertinence of such a rubric to understanding and interpreting international relations.
Unlike with most branches of political analysis, IR scholars have not come to terms with the more recent conceptualizations of ideology and many are still to be found skating around the perimeter of its pejorative meanings. In exploring the multiple methodologies utilized by IR researchers, Martill points to a large number of paths that can lead us to fine-tune and coalesce some of the knowledge, both explicit and implicit, that those scholars already possess. Not least, this requires a reconsideration of two types of boundaries: that between domestic and international politics and that between the different disciplines that engage separately in nonetheless clearly overlapping spheres of interest. It would appear that the ‘state of the art’ has not yet reached its ‘cutting edge,’ which holds out exciting prospects for the cross-fertilization of IR and ideology studies in the future.
Michael Kenny returns us to the intersection between argument and emotion in ideological discourse, and offers another perspective through which its increasing complexity may be illuminated. The role of nostalgia on which he focuses is a double one. It is an emoting memory—a deeply felt melancholic yearning for a lost or receding past—and an instrumental means for quickly cementing a devotion to an ideologically saturated set of nationally or locally embedded socio-political images that can circumvent reflective ratiocination. Kenny sets out to query the negative connotations attached to nostalgia as an indicator of human mawkishness by those who wish to replace it with a clear political head. In so doing, he also reinforces the evidence that any sociocultural concept is liable to contestation and open to multiple meanings, for political analysts and historians can themselves be ensnared in a decontestation that screens alternative understandings. By regarding indulging in nostalgia as a ‘generic thought-practice’ to be ubiquitously found in different settings, and by insisting on drawing nostalgia into the political domain, Kenny alerts us to the wide sway of that domain as a far more open repository of political concepts than conventional political theory would have it.
Tellingly, Kenny avoids classifying nostalgia solely as a feature of conservative or populist thinking. Instead, he prompts an appreciation that all ideologies possess an intricate temporality, in which both past and future are interwoven with the present. On another level, nostalgia can be a power generator for a political system, an emotional and imaginative source and resource from which a reassuring confidence can be extracted at periods of uncertainty or transition. And we may wish to consider how nostalgia operates as a ranking device for the perceived comparative achievements and deficiencies of socio-political periods and spaces, in ascending or descending trajectories.
Kenny completes his analysis with a detailed examination of one of the most striking instances of uncompromising populist nostalgia in recent British history, Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant and anti-European hyper-nationalist campaign. At one level, it illustrates the salience a particular ideologue can attain as a consequence of forceful oratory and sometime outrageous rhetoric, emphasizing that individual agency can still play a key role in attempting to shape the collective mind. At another, it is a lesson in the volatile and limited capacity a nation has in containing ideological extremism. And at a third, it demonstrates the slippery boundary-shifting phenomenon of members of social elites posing as the voice of the unjustly dispossessed populace at large. Above all, it illustrates that every society hosts unstable and unpredictable ideological layers and undercurrents capable of emerging at various speeds and in countless permutations.
In his article on the vicissitudes of a political tradition, Mark Stears too casts an eye on the status of the past in the narrative of ideologies, specifically British socialism. But here it is not nostalgia but amnesia that can impoverish the resonance of past discourses and practices, and whose retrieval may hold out substantial political benefits. Stears combines his own recent role, that of an ideologist-practitioner advising politicians, with an analytical assessment of that experience to produce an unusually insightful blend of the personal and the general—from the coalface and from the street directly to the study, so to speak. His story is to a large extent that of the democratically inspired grass roots of an ideology when filtered through the cumbersome and often counterproductive machinery of a party whose stated aim—though not necessarily its effective practice—is to bring that ideology to concrete fruition. In parallel, it offers a window into the workings of intellectuals equipped with a coherent vision of an ideological future that find themselves bereft of the operational power to mobilize and convert another elite, namely, the hardy career politician—insulated, alienating and de-democratized. Politicians and their entourage are looking the wrong way, argues Stears: ‘up’ to the state rather than ‘around’ to the citizens of the polity. That is blunting, even nullifying, the force of progressive ideologies.
Recent students of ideology have rightly latched onto the vital importance of locating and investigating ideology as inhabiting a broader social, vernacular terrain. Stears sees a corresponding challenge not only for scholars but for the self-proclaimed producers of ideology, a challenge he identifies as their deep disconnect from the rhythms of everyday life. The mundane patterns of family life, of village community, are where ideologies, even if unacknowledged and unrecognized by their adherents, are unassumingly formed in lived practice, and the success of the macro-ambitions of large-scale modernizing and centralizing visions and plans will depend on the incorporation of the former in ideological discourse. Stears shows that such a discourse may also be found in the activities of those writers, poets and painters who produced a commonplace yet resonating socialism that has since been obscured. The identification of the array of buffers that hamper the circulation and implementation of ideologies deserves serious scrutiny in the development of ideological theory. Ideologies need not only be investigated for their content, but tested for their capacity to carry and disseminate their ideas into the political realm—the latter task is after all central to their raison d’être.
Anthony Williams returns us to the theory of ideology itself. He contends that similarities between two ideational practices—ideologies on the one hand and theological discourses and religious beliefs on the other—can assist in refining our understanding of the different voices, or registers, of ideologies. Unsurprisingly, one thread concerns the ostensible dogmatism/flexibility dichotomy that on closer examination turns out in both cases to be a traversable continuum. That aside, there is a distinction between the professionals who participate in formulating and interpreting a belief system and the regular thinkers who express its beliefs. Many religions possess a hierarchy that sets down and adjudicates thought-practices in a manner that only a few ideologies emulate. They are more akin to the arguments of ethicists and moral philosophers who participate in, and endeavour to improve, the ideas they both study and follow. As Williams notes, that is not necessarily the case with the field of ideology. It may well be that part of the problem lies in the ambiguous usage of the term ‘ideology.’ It has fluctuated between being a substantive set of ideas and attitudes towards political entities and acting as the designation for a field of knowledge (ideology studies would be the better phrase).
The challenge to students of ideology is to unravel the layers of authority and formality, and their converse, with which ideologies may be endowed internally. Thus, Williams’ analysis implies a possible divide between what he terms the first voice—established ideological texts (and even super-texts, one could add) in logocentric cultures—and the second voice, the multitude of espoused political languages that swirl around and alongside them. Both are then further channelled into a third, operant, voice, given that ideologies aim deliberately or unconsciously at affecting the implementation of ideas and policies in a given society, as well as their tempo of change. Williams’ argument serves as a reminder to appreciate the multi-dimensionality of, and interrelationships between, the many and simultaneous modes of messaging and communication ideologies employ. The conventional preconceptions built into disciplines may dull our sensitivity to those modes and may fail to recognize the diverse roles they play in the production and dissemination of ideologies. Such dangers are, however, rendered far less likely with the continuous evolution of ideology studies.
Notes
1. The first part appeared in the previous issue of the Journal of Political Ideologies, 22(2) in June 2017.