What Is Ideology?

A Guide for the (Somewhat) Perplexed - no 1

The word is being bandied around all the time. Google Trends show web searches for ideology as being consistently high. “Ideological divide” is a by-word for partisan squabbles. But if you try to understand what people mean by saying that something is an ideology, it becomes tricky. Fascism and communism are certainly ideologies, most would agree. But what about “gender ideology”? “Incel ideology”? Even “ideology of convenience”? It seems that politicians and opinion-writers employ ideology as a cudgel against those they disagree with. In other words, your views are an ideology. Mine are just common sense.

But in fact, as Michael Freedan writes, ideology is everywhere:

“ We produce, disseminate, and consume ideologies all our lives, whether we are aware of it or not” (1).

If so, ideology should mean something more than just your party affiliation. So let us look at how thinkers of the past defined this slippery concept.

Ideology is a smokescreen

The word ideology was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy to describe a study of ideas. But it was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who defined ideology in the way we often understand it today, especially on the left: as “false consciousness”, obscuring the truth about the world. In The German Ideology (1846), they described it as a delusion or a hoax perpetrated by the ruling class upon the rest of society. According to them, ideology is a sort of smokescreen that the powerful use to hide the predatory nature of capitalism from the powerless. Once this smokescreen is torn apart, the truth will emerge, and the powerless - the proletariat in their original formulation - will break their chains, dispose of the rulers, and take over.

This claim is based on the idea that economic interests trump everything else - religion, morality, national identity, and ethical values. But is it really true? History provides plenty of examples of people sacrificing not only their livelihood, but their lives, and the lives of their children for some of those intangibles that Marx dismisses as false consciousness. The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th century were fought over issues like transubstantiation rather than markets. And closer to our time, Afghanistan was receiving vast amounts of American aid during the occupation, only to let in the Taliban who promptly focused on depriving women of voice and vision rather than on improving the economic condition of the poverty-stricken people. In fact, how does Marxism explain the phenomenon of Marx himself? After all, neither he nor Engels were working-class dudes. Most prominent Marxists in history belonged to the economic elites. If economic class determined consciousness, Marxism would be impossible.

Marxism has now failed so many times and so spectacularly that anybody who still subscribes to its main tenets is as much a true believer as any Rapture- ready religious fundamentalist. Trying to separate Marx’s economic analysis from his political vision, as some neo-Marxists try to do, is mission impossible. At the heart of Marxism is the belief that it is the final truth about how society works, and that all its elements are inextricably connected. Paradoxically, the philosophy that denies that ideology is real ends up being the most prominent and destructive political ideology of them all.

Ideology is utopia

Despite its failure in the real world, Marxism and neo-Marxism still hold sway in large swaths of the academia. Marx’ philosophy exercises a fateful fascination over the cultural elite. But why? To understand this, let us look at Karl Mannheim’s notion of utopia. In his Ideology and Utopia (1929), he distinguishes ideology, defined as a reflection of the existing political order, from utopia, which is a worldview destined to bring about a change for the better:

“…ideologies, i.e. those complexes of ideas which direct activity toward the maintenance of the existing order, and utopias—or those complexes of ideas which tend to generate activities toward changes of the prevailing order”.

Mannheim endorsed the notion that special individuals, i.e. intelligentsia, could rise above the circumstances of their social and economic milieu and discern the “objective truth” about society. This truth was still geared toward a utopian future, in which economic and social inequality of all kinds would be eliminated. But of course, the notion of a “better future” is, in itself, deeply ideological. Forget about the fact that all utopias ended up in bloodshed (see my forthcoming essay on this topic). But what does “better” even mean? “Changes of the prevailing order” include the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot’s Year Zero, and the Iranian Revolution. All were drastic social upheavals, predicated on the promise of a utopian transformation. But does it really need explaining that the Islamist utopia, the Aryan utopia, and the communist utopia are not only different but incompatible? And yet people killed and died for each of them. Like Marx, Mannheim took it for granted that all people could agree on the ideal state of society and work together to make it real. History must be very tired of proving them wrong.

Ideology is your name

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and Louis Althusser (1919-1990) are two other neo-Marxists whose definitions of ideology had a profound impact on the academic left. Gramsci emphasized that ideology creates “cultural hegemony” - the way for the ruling classes to control the oppressed via cultural institutions. This insight can account for the strange fact that the left today often insists that shadowy forces - be it billionaires, Russia, or Jews - control social media. In Gramsci’s time, ordinary people had almost no voice in the cultural conversation. But today when everybody with a functioning keyboard can yell at the world and be heard, we are confronting an embarrassing (for a Marxist) fact that ordinary people have ideologies that do not align with what intellectuals believe are their best interests. Working-class people are more conservative, more nationalistic, more religious, and more traditional than the cultural elites. It follows that somebody exercises hegemony in ways that are underhanded, opaque, and undetectable. While Gramsci was not a conspiracy theorist, his intellectual heirs have to be if they are to preserve their own ideology. Hence the overwhelming consensus on the left that the sale of the Free Press to Paramount is a sinister plot by billionaires/Zionists/Jews.

Althusser was another highly influential thinker. When I was an undergrad, his name was everywhere. While his star has dimmed due to the embarrassing fact that he killed his wife, let us be brave and not discount a theory because of the theorist’s private behavior (another forthcoming essay will discuss why the left today has abandoned this principle). Althusser basically claimed that ideology is as omnipresent and inescapable as the air we breathe. According to him, ideologies “interpellate” us: that is, we find our identity in being named as the subject of a particular worldview. I am a biological entity but I become a social being when I am named - and name myself - as a woman, a Jew, an American, a liberal, and so on. If you think about it, even actual names bear an ideological load. Not everybody named “Jihad” is a terrorist, of course, but few were surprised when Jihad al-Shamie was identified as the terrorist in the Yom-Kippur Manchester attack.

Althusser still believed that ideology is a tool of oppression, while also claiming that it is inevitable. Ideology represents the real world to us, and being a symbolic species, we cannot avoid such representations. And yet, somehow, there is also the reality of oppression that is disguised and distorted by such representations. Does it not follow that to see this reality we would need to stop using language altogether? If names are brands of oppression, should we find liberty in being nameless? In fact, is it not clear that the ultimate liberation from ideology is death? So perhaps, despite claims of insanity, there was an ideology behind Althusser’s murder of his wife, after all.

Ideology is a dream

Fredric Jameson was a great scholar of science fiction and, almost inevitably, a neo-Marxist. However, his discussion of ideology in The Political Unconscious (1081) departs from the Marxist paradigm by acknowledging that we are shaped by language and narrative above and beyond the brute economic realities of our lives. And language and narrative are permeated by ideology, which is now seen as a range of assumptions, some of them inarticulate or hidden, relating to our understanding of social reality. The more ideology is unconscious or invisible, the more powerful it is. Following Freud and Lacan, Jameson believed - rather naively - that if we become aware of being manipulated or held prisoner by out unconscious biases, we will instantly be liberated from them.

Jameson’s interpretation of literary works hinged on uncovering their hidden ideological content - what he called “the political unconscious” - which, like any unconscious ideation, may be quite different from the author’s intention. It is not that Jane Austin was aware of writing about the Napoleonic Wars but rather that the conflicting ideological narratives about the Napoleonic Wars, swirling in her milieu, found their way into her novels.

This is an interesting way to look at literature, and many of Jameson’s readings uncover hidden dimensions in familiar texts. For example, his discussion of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972) highlights the utopianism of the ending, in which the protagonist reaches for the alien Golden Ball, crying for universal happiness that cannot be granted. Jameson reinterprets Mannheim’s utopia not as a program of social change but as an inchoate desire for something else, something different from what is. But at the same time, Jameson overlooks a much more obvious ideological dimension of the novel - its dissident allegory, in which the alien Zone stands in for the “zone” of the gulags (the actual word used in Russian to denote concentration camps). So, while uncovering the ideological biases of the conservative “establishment”, Jameson is curiously blind to his own - the dynamics that reaches grotesque proportions in the academic left today.

Ideology is everywhere

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), the author of The Postmodern Condition (1984) and The Inhuman (1988), is less quoted today than years ago, which is a pity. This is because with the rise of Critical Theory whose battle cry is “social justice”, only those postmodernists who could be yoked to the chariot of DEI are acknowledged, particularly Foucault (a joke for anybody who has actually read Foucault). But Lyotard was less interested in power relations than he was in what he called “master narratives” - deeply entrenched and culturally dominant stories that organize our perception of reality. He believed that ours is the age of decline of master narratives - and boy, was he mistaken! But that was a common mistake to make when the socialist utopia was falling apart, and the neo-liberal consensus seemed on its way to dominance across the globe. With the hindsight of thirty years, we can see that both Lyotard and Francis Fukuyama were prisoners of their own narrow and Eurocentric worldview, having failed to see the significance of Islamism and nationalism. But the idea of master narrative as a shared perception of the world organized along storytelling lines - with the protagonist, antagonist, conflict, and resolution - is as relevant as ever.

If ideologies are stories, they have several specific characteristics. First, as Freedan points out, they organize space and time. Consider the internal map of anti-Zionism. It is a map in which tiny Israel occupies half of the globe. Other continents, conflicts, and even other Middle Eastern countries barely exist. There are only Israel and Palestine. Then consider the anti-Zionist timeline. History starts in 1948 and continues as an uninterrupted narrative of settler colonialism, with all complexities smoothed out in the familiar plot of good (Palestinians) and evil (Jews).

Second, stories have protagonists and antagonists. In the Marxist narrative, the protagonist is the proletariat and the antagonist - the bourgeois. In the Nazi narrative, they are the Aryan and the Jew. In the woke narrative, they are the POC and white supremacy. Regardless, the players change but the roles remain the same.

And finally - and this is an important distinction between ideology and ordinary storytelling - ideological narratives are exempt from the presumption of fictionality. What I mean is that when we read a novel, we know that it is fiction. Fictions are not lies but neither are they the truth. Fictionality creates a sort of immune barrier which prevents most of us from imposing stories directly upon our experience. No such barrier exists for ideologies. This is why they are both ubiquitous and hidden, omnipresent and invisible. Freddie DeBoer perfectly nails this in his entertaining discussion of therapy as ideology:

Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all.

Jameson’s “political unconscious” on the literal couch!

So, to sum up. What is my definition of ideology?

Ideology is a shared story upheld by a group of people that provides this group with a collective identity. Ideology is always involved in the relations of power. It may, or may not, have an explicitly political dimension with regard to the electoral process, economic structure, or distribution of resources. But it always has an ethical dimension in the sense that it involves deep-seated values and beliefs. And finally, ideology is almost always unconscious because examining one’s values and beliefs with a critical eye can shatter the individual’s sense of self.

One caveat: I do not believe that all ideologies are equal, just as I do not believe that all stories are equal. Some ideologies - Marxism, Nazism, woke - are wrong and destructive. Some - classic liberalism - are positive and uplifting. But nobody is ever free of ideologies. They are everywhere, entangling you in their web of storytelling. Just make sure that the story you become part of does not end with a shootout, mutual destruction, or human sacrifice.

Works Cited

Freeden, Michael. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003)