Ideology and political theory

Abstract

Ideology, and its study, have been subject to an interpretational tug-of-war among political theorists that, until recently, has devalued their status as an object of scholarship. Disputes have raged over the scientific standing of ideology, its epistemological status, and its totalitarian and liberal manifestations. Many political philosophers have eschewed its group orientation, and the more recent interest of students of ideology in ordinary political language and in the unconscious and the indeterminate. Following an historical survey of changing fashions and more durable features in the analysis of ideology, it is argued that ideology should be explored as the most typical form of political thinking, and that its study conducts political theorists to the heart of the political. Ideology is now seen as ubiquitous, while the methodologies through which ideologies are studied take on board conceptual malleability and ideational pluralism, and offer bridges between identifying 'social facts' and their inevitable interpretation. Ideology: The problem-child of political analysisWe are saddled with a difficult word, 'ideology'. Here is a term once designed to signify the study of ideas, even the science of ideas, yet it has come to denote one area of the domain it is supposed to study (the word 'politics' has, at many UK departments of politics, curiously travelled in the opposite trajectory). Moreover, as a term invoking a subject-matter the word 'ideology' has proved to be very offputting for the general public-the combination of ideas and 'logies' seems to indicate the kind of high abstraction that is remote from the experience and the language of regular people, even though it is the latter on which ideology studies have come to be chiefly focused. In the Anglo-American world, with its naïve

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Remaking the ccp’s Ideology: Determinants, Progress, and Limits under Hu Jintao

“…More particularly, ideology is understood here as a "unified system of meanings for which political actors claim exclusive authority" (Herrmann-Pillath 2005; cf. also Freeden 2006). Similarly, it has been defined as a "cognitive structure with legitimizing functions" (Strath 2006).…”

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