Ideology. Marius S. Ostrowski

treating it monolithically prevents detailed analysis of how complex interpersonal and intergroup social dynamics play out through inter-ideological encounters. One side insists that ideology must be understood, first and foremost, as a discrete social domain with dedicated functions, ranked alongside (and sometimes subordinated to) the economic and political domains and sometimes elided with ‘discourse’ or ‘culture’. On this conception, ideas and how they are ‘recounted’ or ‘told’ are epiphenomenal to ideology’s social functions, and differences between ideologies are inconsequential compared to the gulf between them and society’s economic and political ‘drivers’. Insofar as ideology is significantly internally differentiated, it can be modelled as a single spectrum along which people’s positions can be ranked (e.g., liberal–conservative, left–right, radical–reactionary), often using scalar numerical quantifications. The other side argues for a more refined breakdown of ideology that incorporates its extensive range of different social manifestations: its legal, religious, media, and educational aspects as well as its economic and political forms. Likewise, it holds that the precise hierarchy, ordering, juxtaposition, and deployment of ideas is vital to charting simultaneous and intertemporal differences within and between ideologies and their effects on the shape of society. On this granular account, ideology is a collection of many different partly overlapping bodies of ideas – older or newer, larger or smaller, more or less complex and stable – which can be meaningfully sketched out only in multidimensional space.

A further question concerns whether ideology is primarily an individual or a collective phenomenon. This debate is about whether the locus at which ideology’s social effects should be evaluated is human beings’ personal mental and bodily status and behaviours, or whether it is more promising to treat ideology as the expression of various societal group dynamics. One view frames ideology in terms of identity, as a mechanism to impose social salience on our personal biological and demographic features, and to create, recognise, and/or push back against our positions in hierarchies of privilege and discrimination. It sees ideology as a social force operating on our personal psyches – mobilising our unconscious and subconscious, crafting correlations with our personality-traits, fostering certain emotions and forms of reasoning, and influencing our evaluative and epistemological judgments. Moreover, it shapes our social behaviours, from voting and consumption preferences to labour decisions and choices over ‘personal growth’ and self-development (e.g., sport, fitness, leisure pursuits). The alternative view examines ideology as an articulation of social group solidarity based on posited commonalities of contextual situation and experience, motive drives and interests, and social aims and plans. For it, ideology chiefly affects and manifests in the mass psyche, steering the substantive content, direction, and intensity of social attitudes (i.e., public opinion) and collective sentiments (e.g., ‘moral panics’, ‘group feelings’, ‘national moods’) and affecting our conduct in public debate. It defines parameters of toxicity versus acceptability and taboo versus encouraged behaviour in (interpersonal) social interactions, especially where these bridge identity or group divides, and either perpetuates or counteracts power relationships between their participants.

Lastly, ideology analysis divides over whether ideology is principally an explicit or implicit social phenomenon. Here, the substantial issue is whether ideology takes the form of overt and conscious articulations of its constitutive ideas, which are openly and unambiguously ideological in nature, or whether it is (also/instead) to be found in forms that are not consciously ideological – or even specifically claim to be non-ideological – that nonetheless ‘deliver’ ideological content in a subtle, unwitting, even disguised way. The former approach treats ideology as primarily linguistic and textual, found above all in print, digital, online, and broadcast media, where ideas are directly rendered and where their content and delivery can be subjected to lexical, logical, subtextual–contextual–intertextual, or rhetorical analysis. On this account, ideology appears mainly as self-aware programmatic statements and (discursive) behaviour expressly designed to deliver, frame, and thematise specific ideas in a particular ‘telling’ (e.g., manifestos, statements of principle, op-eds, demonstrations, scholarly interventions). By inference, ideological analysis is empirical, measuring ideology’s social effects through observable, (usually) quantifiable data and involving historical and comparative assessments of social phenomena and events according to their frequency of incidence, scale, and popularity. By contrast, the latter approach highlights how ideology can also be symbolic and ‘applied’, non-linguistically embedded or summarised, with sensory (especially audiovisual) cues acting as a ‘shorthand’ for ideas and for the social behaviours and institutions that ‘instantiate’ them. This approach focuses on ‘what is left unsaid’, ‘everyday’ behaviour that reveals unstated, underlying ideological commitments, often presented as ‘natural’, ‘apolitical’, ‘neutral’, or ‘common sense’. Its ideological analysis is correlatively more interpretative, evaluating ideology’s effects using theoretical models that depict various ‘deep-structure’ social forces and generalised trends that are not always immediately discernible from surface-level empirics but require reasoned extrapolation.

      Different traditions and approaches within the study of ideologies have different views on each of these six debates. Some of these views are well known within and even beyond social research: orthodox Marxism’s assessment of ideology as false (an illusion), temporary (a feature of the capitalist present), and singular (the total assemblage of pro-capitalist values and institutions); or the assumption that it is plural (divided into rival families), collective (held by groups of voters and legislators), and explicit (expressed in manifestos and opinion polls) in comparative-political party systems studies. Of course, these differences are a major part of what delineates such traditions from one another, partly because of and partly in parallel to deeper divergences in their methodological assumptions. Yet even where they happen to agree, they may do so for entirely unrelated reasons: for example, a view of ideology as individual may stem from an atomistic conception of the structure of society or a focus on the priority of subjective experience. What makes these questions central, however, is the fact that every tradition finds itself in the position of having to take a stance – whether one-sidedly ‘committed’ or equivocally ‘compatibilist’ – within each one of these debates. This means that these six ‘contrasting pairs’ are best conceived as binary poles at the extremes of six ‘ideologological’ spectrums, with ideology-theoretical approaches falling somewhere in between them on each one: for instance, seeing ideology as ‘more false than true’, ‘largely necessary’, ‘definitely plural’, ‘both explicit and implicit’, and so on. It is thus possible to ‘map out’ traditions of ideology analysis in terms of the constellation of points they occupy on all of these spectrums: for example, social psychology’s view of ideology as (roughly) true–(fairly) necessary–permanent–plural–(mainly) individual–explicit, or critical discourse analysis’s reading of it as false–(reluctantly) necessary–permanent–(more) plural–individual and collective–explicit and implicit, and so on. By the same token, as a heuristic exercise, we may find it useful to ‘map out’ our own views on each of these questions to see whether we find ourselves more sympathetic to some traditions than others, to a hybrid combination of their positions, or to a whole new ‘ideologological’ conception entirely.

§2 From the study of ideology to ideology studies

Aspects of these questions have formed part of the standard material of philosophy and social theory since at least the Renaissance. Epistemology and philosophy of mind, language, science, and religion, and branches of early ethnography and cultural studies have long considered the relationship of abstract ideas to reality as either ‘inner essences’ or mediated representations, whether we can acquire reliable knowledge about the world, whether morality is real or synthetic and absolute or relative, the nature and sources of popular opinions, and so on. But, since around 1800, these questions have been increasingly corralled together under the rubric of addressing a specific social phenomenon. The first to use the term ‘ideology’ for this phenomenon were a group of late Enlightenment philosophers in post-Revolutionary France, who saw in it the promise of a new science of ideas, mental perceptions, and thought processes. But its rise to prominence (and its metonymic