Introduction

ABSTRACT

This article argues for the analysis of the flow of ideological discourse through society within and across three distinct but interrelated levels: (1) the canonically defined, or macro level, (2) the intermediate or meso level of competitive political appeals, political relevant public discourse and cultural criticism, and (3) the everyday or micro level of conceptual use by non-experts. This differentiation among levels of ideological action and influence helps us to clarify the objects and appropriate methods of ideological analysis. Methods applied in specific cases must facilitate an effective focus on phenomena on one of these levels while still allowing recognition of the complex forms of direct and indirect conceptual influence and connection between the levels. The article also serves as an introduction to the volume, giving a brief account of the analysis and argument of each contribution.

Issue purposes and theoretical orientation

This special issue focuses on understanding how political entrepreneurs, intellectuals and ordinary citizens draw on global discursive repertoires when staking out their distinctive ideological claims. All of these groups are simultaneously consumers of ideology, drawing on pre-existing ideological concepts and narratives in order to make sense of the world, and producers of ideology, adapting, reconfiguring and developing new ideological material to support their own political aims, objectives and desires. Our contributors draw on a range of social science and humanities theoretical and interpretive perspectives¹ to examine how common conceptual elements – an imagination of freedom, order, national identity, community or equality – are deployed in a variety of British, North American and European settings. They show how these elements are activated, rearticulated, recombined, framed, ‘naturalized’ and located in specific political discourses and intellectual traditions for sometimes precise and sometimes rather open-ended ideological purposes.

The core features of a widely shared repertoire of ideological building blocks or imaginaries developing into identifiable ideological patterns emerged in the 19th century. In contemporary politics, they are given context-specific meanings by political actors, in different geographical and political situations, responding to new cultural, historical and institutional settings. Contributors to this special issue demonstrate the value of developing more analytically effective tools for understanding the substantive content, the processes and the often surprisingly distinctive effects, of ideological innovation. This innovation is marked by the adaptation and recycling of ideas across time and space, as well as variations in levels of ideological activity and conceptual specificity, as political discourses are re-purposed and re-imagined by widely varied actors with different objectives.

People use political ideas to interpret the world around them, to account for their own position in it and to form new ideas in the process of arguing about them. Ideas shape political behaviour in ways that cannot be reduced to objective interests or identities, such as class or gender. This became very obvious in 2016, when three major political events – the US election of Donald Trump, the UK ‘Brexit’ referendum and the Austrian presidential elections – produced outcomes that defied expert expectations.² It appears that, in spite of an ever-increasing capacity to analyse ‘big data’, professional pollsters and political analysts are sometimes unable to account for, much less predict, the political views of ordinary people or the political appeals to which they are attracted. The political choices people make at the ballot box do not always correspond in predictable ways to particular milieus. Citizens’ ideas motivate political choices: not just ideas about their own identity, but also about the society they wish to live in, and the political visions they wish to see realized.

And yet, such ideas are rarely analysed by scholars of political thought. Some approaches (such as the Cambridge School’s) have emphasized the role of contexts in shaping iconic political texts.³ Agency within those contexts has remained rather diffuse, however. Anonymous entities, such as economic conditions, cultural conventions and discursive structures are portrayed as shaping major paradigms of political thought, while ordinary people’s political ideas are reduced to expressions of interests or emotions.⁴ Others have approached the problem through the lens of political psychology.⁵ Studies in this field have examined how individuals process political information, using heuristics and other shortcuts to arrive at conclusions. However, while these studies may distinguish broadly ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ positions, they do not analyse the actual ideas that people hold in any detail. The emphasis in such analyses is on the process of political reasoning, and not, generally, on the content of the beliefs held.⁶

Another approach to understanding everyday political ideas has drawn on the concept of ideology. Ideology seems better suited to capturing the emotional and imaginative dynamics of vernacular political thinking than the rarefied practice of ‘political thought’. And yet, the term ideology can easily impede our understanding of the role of political ideas beyond the elites as much as it can draw attention to their import. To date, the analysis of ideology has mostly been conducted relying on strong but problematic a priori assumptions. Much analysis of ideology either builds on the work of Marx and Engels to present ideology as entailing a form of ‘voluntary servitude’⁷ to, and false consciousness⁸ about, capitalist socio-economic relations,⁹ or treats ideologies as an ‘Other’ to clear-headed political thinking, and associating ideologies with inflexible doctrine and (state) power.¹⁰ Both broad approaches view the phenomena of grassroots political thinking through a pejorative lens, which adds little to our incentive or ability to understand it.

A more fruitful approach for understanding the role of political ideas in everyday life is a relatively recent development in ideology analysis, which uses methods such as conceptual morphology and a notion of ‘decontestation’ to uncover ideas that are embedded within political and cultural practices.¹¹ In a parallel development in the field of conceptual history, scholars have located political ideas in broad semantic fields that are co-produced by many actors, and that metamorphose over time.¹² Such work draws on a much broader source base than the writings of ‘great thinkers’ to explore political ideas as rooted in, and part of, political practice. Relevant evidence includes political speeches, party political programmes and pamphlets and a wide spectrum of political commentary and cultural critique in the public sphere. The development of the methods and techniques of discourse analysis with respect to these articles of evidence has produced a sophisticated and expanding body of theory in both political science, broadly conceived, and historical analysis.¹³

Such sources are less elevated than the works of iconic philosophers, but are nevertheless produced predominantly by professionals: politicians, speech writers, spin doctors, journalists, culture critics, think tank employees and academics who double as ‘public intellectuals’. As articles in this issue by Brick, Bates, Farney and Laycock demonstrate, subjecting the ideological content of such products to conceptual analysis allows for a better appreciation of how ideas flow through daily political life. This flow is both in the direction of such intermediate sources’ offerings to citizens, and from foundational texts that define or influentially modify ideological traditions.

Stepping away from the public terrain of ideas self-consciously marshalled for political – if not always partisan – combat, we can also explore the interpenetration of politics with lived experience and a sense of self, which form important dimensions of political thinking at the micro- or grassroots level. Existing work has treated subjectivity mostly as a product of ideology, but ascribed little explanatory power to it.

Understanding the flow of ideological discourse through society, and the translation of political concepts from theoretical articulation to the domain of the everyday requires a recognition that politically consequential ideological action occurs on and between three analytically distinct levels: (1) the canonically defined, or macro level; (2) the intermediate or meso level of competitive political appeals, politically relevant public discourse and cultural criticism; and (3) the everyday or micro level of conceptual use by ordinary people. This differentiation among levels of ideological action and influence helps us to clarify the objects and appropriate methods of ideological analysis. Methods applied in specific cases must facilitate an effective focus on phenomena on one of these levels while still allowing recognition of the complex forms of direct and indirect conceptual influence and connection between the levels.

Making sense of ideological action across macro, meso and micro levels is especially complicated when the main focus is the meso level inhabited by many different types of professional writers and speakers. Such actors draw primarily on non-canonical sources in direct and hence traceable ways. They will also, however, typically draw indirectly on ideas formulated in consciously systematic and conceptually complex written canonical products, which percolate down to the meso level in both readily identifiable and highly mediated, often anonymized and ‘popularized’ forms. Materials from both levels will directly and indirectly impinge on meso level actors’ efforts to convey salient features of ‘the political’ and to otherwise shape, often intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, everyday citizens’ micro level perceptions of and preferences about politics.

The articles in this issue provide good examples of analysis at and between these three levels. Broadly speaking, James Farney, David Laycock, Richard Bates and Howard Brick conduct analyses at the meso level, examining the ideological production, dissemination and conceptual contestation activities of social movement and political party leaders and public intellectuals. These four authors’ cases involve actors situated in diverse positions on the meso level of ideological action, some primarily intending specific political changes (Farney and Laycock) and some more interested in making sense of cultural phenomena, or shaping social practices, each of which have unavoidable political dimensions and relevance (Bates and Brick). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the second set of meso level cases were more explicitly connected to canonical works, of either psychological theory, educational theory or national literature. However, even in the first two cases, major actors drew on canonical works of modern American conservative thought while relying rather more heavily on popularized versions and applications of this thought.

The article by Mathew Humphrey, Maiken Umbach and Zeynep Clulow investigates phenomena located primarily at the ‘everyday’ or micro level of ideological production, modification and use. Their involvement in designing and delivering a ‘Massive Open Online Course’ (MOOC) allowed them to assemble a remarkable collection of data on ‘ordinary’ citizens’ understandings of basic political concepts. However, in their role as instructors and discussion moderators they were themselves meso level actors, consciously performing mediating roles in their educational, dialogical and ex-post observational interaction with their research subjects. And of course this engagement, and the course design, was informed by their understanding of the theoretical relevance of canonical texts in political theory and historical interpretation. Even in this grassroots research, then, multi-level ideological interaction and relations can be readily identified.

Overview of theoretical contributions and innovations

In this issue’s first contribution, Mathew Humphrey, Maiken Umbach and Zeynep Clulow apply morphological analysis to an ongoing discussion amongst non-specialists regarding certain key political concepts. Their source materials for this analysis are the c. 25,000 learner comments from a MOOC on Ideology and Propaganda in Everyday Life, convened in conjunction with The British Library in 2015. In examining how learners discuss notions of freedom, justice, and community both with each other, and with the course facilitators, Humphrey, Umbach and Clulow construct a window into lay discourse in political theory.

Using a combination of Freeden’s morphological approach to ideology with discourse analysis of learner comments, and an examination of images uploaded by learners that ‘represent’ each of these concepts to them, Humphrey, Umbach and Clulow sketch a picture of how learners conceptualize and inter-relate these different political concepts. ‘Freedom’ attracts by far the most learner attention, both discursively and pictorially. Other concepts, such as justice, are frequently assessed in relation to their capacity to protect individual and collective freedoms. Especially in relation to uploaded images, learners portray voluntaristic and somewhat ephemeral forms of community as against more conventionally ‘political’ forms such as ethnic groups or the nation-state.

James Farney begins our set of four ‘meso level’ analyses of ideological activity. He shows that it is possible to address questions of the conceptual morphology of comparable ideological developments employing Freeden’s analytical framework, while also explaining how the ideas of one ideological movement have influenced social, cultural and political actors in another country. Freeden’s approach is familiar to this journal’s readers, but its interweaving with policy analysis is perhaps less so. To achieve the casual explanatory objective, Farney uses a combination of two methods developed to study policy processes and adoption, multiple streams analysis and process tracing. Doing so allows him to demonstrate how articulation of specific core features of American social conservatism by meso level players and movement organizations has recently influenced Canadian social conservatism both directly and indirectly.

By applying Freeden’s morphological approach in tandem with multiple streams analysis and process tracing, Farney adds a causal dimension to a Freedenite account of meso level cultural constraints and institutional factors shaping the influence of American on Canadian social conservatism. Doing so enables him to argue that while key themes in American social conservatism influenced religious and civil society organizations in Canada directly, there was little direct ideological transfer from social conservative American politicians to their Canadian counterparts. In instances of ideological translation and travel, this distinction between direct and indirect influence assists our appreciation of nuanced conceptual adaptation at the meso level. In instances of indirect influence, contextual dimensions of social organization, culture, religiosity and political institutions powerfully mediate conceptual decontestation, and associated policy applications, without rendering original source ideas from the macro level unrecognizable.

As with Farney’s contribution, David Laycock’s article attempts to blend, and achieve enhanced analytical leverage from, the morphological approach and another analytical toolkit imported from outside of ideological studies per se. Laycock relies primarily on Freeden’s guidance on conceptual morphologies, but also explores the added value of Michael Saward’s focus on the ‘representative claim’¹⁴ as a constituting dynamic of representative relations inside and outside legislatures and elections. Used in a complementary manner, these two approaches help us to appreciate the logic holding together tax revolts, direct democracy and right-wing populist appeals in the US and Canada in the last few decades of the 20th century.

One key finding in Laycock’s analysis is that populism, perhaps more obviously than other ideologies, entails mutual reinforcement of strategic appeals, core concepts and other conceptual foundations. Strategic innovation with either endorsement or use of direct democracy occurs at the meso level of ideological activity to revive popular support for core conservative concepts, whose canonical expression in the work of economists like F. Hayek and M. Friedman is seldom encountered by everyday enthusiasts of the tax revolt. This analysis gives us a better appreciation of how populism has enhanced the political appeal of tax cuts, which has been modern Anglo-American conservative ideology’s policy cornerstone from Thatcher and Reagan through the Reform and Tea parties to Donald Trump.

Howard Brick provides another perspective on the operation of ideology in American public life. He drills below the surface of an apparent, officially celebrated ‘consensus’ about American ideology and values during the time that the US achieved pre-eminent status as a world power. Probing the ‘public intellectual’ dimension of meso level ideological activity, he shows that in attempting to understand the foundations of ‘Americanness’, many humanist scholars during the 1950s reflected on how culturally salient self-understandings of American life were a rapidly moving target. As public intellectuals, their ideologically diverse cultural criticism mediated between their engagement with (and construction of) a macro level canonical American literature and an audience struggling, at the micro level, to make sense of the internal dynamics of American society and its place in the world. At a time of government inquiries into ‘Un-American Activities’, the ideological orientations and intentions of American humanists’ literary and cultural criticism belied the homogenous Americanness that Cold War politicians sought to entrench.

Brick defines his theoretical perspective as a critique of historicist attempts to understand and portray specific ideologies as expressions of the Zeitgeist of an ‘age’. Exploring the intellectual origins of the discipline of ‘American Studies’ as it emerged in the late 1940s, Brick takes issue with the ambition to uncover a holistic spirit or animating myth at the core of particular historical moments – something the writer F. O. Matthiessen called ‘myth-symbol’ analysis – which Brick sees as constitutive of that discipline, and the broader ideology of ‘Americanism’. In making this argument, Brick also offers a broader methodological critique of attempts to map distinctive intellectual debates directly onto singular ideological imperatives, in the spirit of the ‘historicism’ of Giambattista Vico or Benedetto Croce. Likening his alternative method to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s,¹⁵ Brick suggests that histories of political thought ought to highlight the contingency, multiplicity, but also the unexpected synergies between competing intellectual positions, to arrive at a more nuanced, complex and anti-determinist view of how ideologies operate at a particular point in time, and, crucially, always also with an eye on the future.

In his original blend of intellectual history with comparative analysis of embedded political ideology, Richard Bates reveals the dramatically different applications and political implications of psychoanalytic theory by American, British and French child-rearing experts in the post-war era. As he argues, Anglo-American experts applied various forms of psychoanalytic theory to guide parents towards democratic child-rearing practices. Their shared anxiety about the political and social risks of conventional authoritarian approaches was, particularly in the case of Dr. Benjamin Spock, matched with a sense of democratic promise. Spock’s activities as a highly influential meso level actor in the American ideological terrain were directly informed by macro level political thinker and educational theorist John Dewey. In effect, Spock read and applied Freudian theory through Dewey’s political vision, thus, bringing a blend of canonical theory from two conceptually abstract intellectual realms to widespread micro level understandings and applications of childcare best practices.

Ironically, post-war child-rearing theory resonant of Rousseau had considerably greater traction in the US and Britain than in France. Not just concepts but whole theories of psychological development were also decontested – translated from the macro to the meso level – to support dramatically different political agendas, as psychoanalytic approaches were interwoven in France with conservative Catholic views on women’s roles and family policy. Bates shows how widely influential children’s development author Françoise Dolto came to shape French childcare by the 1970s. She managed this deft mediation between macro level psychoanalytical theory and meso level applications to childcare guidance even though her decontestation of Freudian theory had social conservative roots in Vichy France and anti-feminist thought. In retrospect, it is striking how such applications of psychoanalytic theory were out of step with most strands of contemporary radical – or even particularly democratic – French social or political theory.

Collectively, then, the focus of the articles in this special issue is on political theory as it operates outside of the realm occupied by professional political theorists. Contributors analyse ideological phenomena on the two interlinking levels: the ‘meso-’ level of those who seek to popularize (or denounce) political ideas in their roles as public intellectuals, political activists or journalists, for example, and the ‘micro-’ level of discussions of concepts such as ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ by the lay pubic. Such distinctions are inevitably somewhat artificial – political theorists can also be popularizers, and journalists can write political theory. Nonetheless, the essays in this issue seek to understand and illuminate how political concepts that can seem highly abstract in isolation are given ‘flesh’ and put to work in practical political contexts.

Notes

1. The range of perspectives across such disciplines has been effectively surveyed and assessed in M. Freeden, L. T. Sargent and M. Stears (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

2. See, for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/09/why-polling-faces-a-moment-of-reckoning-after-the-2016-election/?utm_term=.32d731bba0c6; also http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/2016-politics-brexit-donald-trump-boris-johnson-michael-gove-theresa-may-eu-referendum-review-a7484386.html. Both accessed 6 March 2017.

3. See Q. Skinner ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8(1) (1969), pp. 3–53, for a foundational text in this influential School. Also Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); J. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

4. There are exceptions to this, of course. One such is W. A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Gamson uses focus group research with ‘working people’ discussing topical political issues. He finds that his subjects are ‘quite capable of conducting informed and well-reasoned discussions’ about the topics under consideration.

5. See, for example, S. Feldman, and C. Johnston, ‘Understanding the determinants of political ideology: Implications of structural complexity’, Political Psychology, 35(3) (2014), pp. 337–358; J.T. Jost, B.A. Nosek, and S.D. Gosling, ‘Ideology: Its resurgence in social, personality, and political psychology’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(2) (2008), pp.126–36.

6. D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Macmillan, 2011).

7. See, for example, M. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

8. Even as Marxism has become somewhat less influential in left-wing party politics in western Europe, the ‘false consciousness’ thesis persists in popular forms, as in the recent moral panics about ‘fake news’ and right- (or indeed left-)wing populism.

9. Later thinkers from Gramsci to Foucault refined the analysis of socially and economically embedded ideas, and accorded ideological discourse a greater autonomy from the economic substructure than early Marxists had allowed. And we note that Foucault himself was wary of the term ‘ideology’, due to what he saw as its epistemological baggage. See P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 60.

10. This is, broadly, the view of ideology on offer in D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties: With ‘The Resumption of History in the New Century’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 [1962]).

11. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). This approach to the study of ideology draws some inspiration from some earlier understandings of the concept, in particular the theories of ideology developed by K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge 2013 [1936]) and C. Geertz, ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in D. E. Apter, (Ed.) Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 47–76.

12. This approach was pioneered by R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); R. Koselleck, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

13. Here, we can only indicate a few key readings in these areas. These approaches are discussed in Freeden, Sargeant and Stears, op. cit., Ref. 2. On critical discourse analysis, see N. Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (London: Routledge, 2013); also D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen and H.E. Hamilton, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2015); and on historical discourse analysis, in particular, L. J. Brinton, ‘Historical Discourse Analysis’ in ibid., pp. 222–243. Also S. Shapin, ‘Talking history: Reflections on Discourse Analysis’, Isis 75(1) (1984), pp. 125–30. For a reflection on Koselleck’s contribution, see, for example, J. Zammito, ‘Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History’, History and Theory, 43 (2004), pp.124–135.

14. M. Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); M. Saward, ‘Shape-shifting Representation’, American Political Science Review 108 (2014), pp. 723–36.

15. D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).