The article by Prof. Martin McKeever CSsR, published on the Blog of the Accademia Alfonsiana
The English Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe used to say that every serious moral issue is a question about who gets hurt. If we apply this claim to ideology we must conclude that it is an enormous moral issue. If we were to compute the numbers killed and wounded on account of ideologies such as communism, Nazism, fascism, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism etc. we would arrive at an astronomic number of victims. The purpose of this series of articles is to reflect on the complex moral dimensions of various ideologies. In this first article we will ask ourselves a far from-simple preliminary question: what is an ideology?
What is an ideology?
“Any wide-ranging system of beliefs, ways of thought, and categories that provide the foundation of programmes of political and social action: an ideology is a conceptual scheme with a practical application”.
“…a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it”.
“An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic.”
These three definitions of an ideology, taken at random from standard English dictionaries, will serve here to identify a number of key characteristics of an ideology which together should deepen our understanding of this slippery term.
A first characteristic of ideology is that it can be used as a neutral or as a pejorative term. When the term “idéologie” was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy around 1795 it was certainly neutral, indicating simply “the science of ideas”. It was Napoleon Bonaparte who first used the term in a negative sense when he referred to de Tracy and company as “idéologues”, meaning abstract thinkers incapable of effective action in the real world. Karl Marx altered and deepened this negative connotation by denouncing as ideology all forms of thought that, he held, masked the true nature of the conditions of production. Since then the term has preserved both connotations – which is intended is usually clear from the context. It is hard to see the justification of a special term, “ideology”, if all that is meant is a system of ideas. For this reason, in this series the term will carry a negative connotation.
A second characteristic that emerges in these definitions is the link between ideas and actions. Hannah Arendt insists that in all political philosophy, as in all of life, ideas and actions are intimately linked. The difficulty is to explain what is the difference in the way they are linked in ideology as opposed to ordinary political theory. The tendency in ideology (understood in the negative sense) is to take one or more ideas in isolation from others and understand them in a reductive and totalizing fashion. This reductive idea is then placed at the centre of a plan of action, often indeed of a political programme.
A third characteristic of ideology in these definitions is its corporative nature. While it is possible to think of an individual with a personal ideology, it is much more common to find ideology as a binding force within a collectivity (a group, a political party, a people). The ideology often provides the collectivity with its identity, particularly by a common rejection of those who think differently. The collectivity that forms around an ideology will tend to pursue its own interests and thereby enter into conflict with rival collectivities.
On the basis of these characteristics we might hazard the following understanding of ideology, which in future articles we will apply to specific ideologies: An ideology involves the reductive use of certain ideas on the part of a collectivity in pursuing its own interests, often in the form of a political project.
