Political Ideologies I: Liberalism, Socialism, Marxism

An ideology is not a bad theory; it is a theory doing a different job. It connects a picture of human nature to a programme of action, and it is judged as much by what it makes people do as by whether it is true.

This is chapter 8 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Political Theory in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

Ideology: the concept

The pejorative tradition

The word was coined by Destutt de Tracy in the 1790s for a proposed science of ideas, and acquired its negative charge when Napoleon used it to dismiss impractical theorists.

Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology (written 1845–46), gave it its enduring critical sense: the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling class, and ideology inverts reality as in a camera obscura, presenting the interests of a particular class as the universal interest. Ideology in this sense is not lying but systematic misrepresentation of which its bearers are largely unaware. The later concept of false consciousness, the term is Engels’s, from an 1893 letter to Mehring, names the condition of those who hold it.

Karl Mannheim, in Ideology and Utopia (1929), generalised the analysis into the sociology of knowledge and turned it against Marxism too: all thought is situationally determined, including the critic’s. He distinguished ideology, thought that defends the existing order, from utopia, thought that seeks to transform it, and looked to a relatively unattached intelligentsia to achieve a synthesis. The obvious objection, which he never fully answered, is that if all thought is situated then so is his.

Gramsci converts ideology from illusion into a material force organised through civil society, and Althusser into the mechanism by which subjects are constituted. Both are covered in Chapter 7.

The neutral tradition

Twentieth-century political science needed a term for organised political belief systems without the implication that they are false. In Heywood’s standard formulation an ideology is a more or less coherent set of ideas that provides the basis for organised political action, offering an account of the existing order, a model of a desired future, and an explanation of how change is to be achieved.

This is the sense in which liberalism, socialism, conservatism, fascism and feminism are ideologies, and in which the end of ideology thesis, Bell and Lipset in the 1950s, and its successor, Fukuyama’s end of history in 1989, could be advanced and then refuted by events.

Liberalism

Core commitments

Five elements recur across all its variants: the individual as the basic unit of moral and political concern; freedom as the highest political value, though not the only one; reason as the means of settling disagreement and the ground for confidence in progress; justice understood as formal equality and equality of opportunity; and toleration, extended from religion outward, which underwrites pluralism.

Classical and modern

Classical liberalism takes freedom negatively, treats the state as a necessary evil, defends laissez-faire, and derives from Locke, Smith, Bentham and the early Mill. Its nineteenth-century extension into social Darwinism, in Spencer and Sumner, is the point at which it became least defensible.

Modern or social liberalism, from T.H. Green through Hobhouse, Hobson, Keynes, Beveridge and Rawls, holds that freedom requires capacity, that unregulated markets produce unfreedom, and that the state must enable. The welfare state and demand management are its programme.

Neoliberalism is the classical position revived, treated in Chapter 2.

The decline of liberalism

UPSC set this as a short note in 2024, and the answer needs four distinct strands rather than a general lament.

• Philosophical. The communitarian critique of the unencumbered self, from Chapter 3. If persons are partly constituted by attachments they did not choose, the liberal account of autonomous choice is not merely incomplete but wrong about what a person is.
• Epistemological. The post-modern and post-colonial critique of liberal universalism: its allegedly neutral categories carry a particular history, and its claim to speak for humanity was made while excluding most of it.
• Economic. Neoliberalism’s ascendancy hollowed out the social liberalism of the mid-century, so that liberalism came to be identified with market discipline rather than with the enabling state. The inequality this produced eroded liberalism’s political base.
• Political. The contemporary retreat of liberal democracy: constitutional constraints, judicial independence and press freedom weakening in states that continue to hold elections. This is the phenomenon Fukuyama’s 1989 thesis did not anticipate.

The counter-argument worth making is that liberalism has repeatedly survived its own obituaries by absorbing its critics, which is what happened when it absorbed the socialist critique to become social liberalism, and what Rawls attempted with Political Liberalism (1993) in response to pluralism.

Socialism

Core commitments

Community against the atomised individual; cooperation against competition, on the ground that human beings are naturally social and that competition is a learned behaviour; social equality, treated as the guarantee of both stability and freedom; distribution according to need; and common ownership, in some form, of the means of production.

Its account of human nature is the deepest point of difference with liberalism: for the socialist, the acquisitive individual liberalism describes is a product of capitalism, not a discovery about humanity.

Varieties

Utopian socialism, in Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon, proceeded by model communities and moral appeal; Marx and Engels named it utopian precisely to distinguish their own claim to scientific status.

Revolutionary socialism holds that the capitalist state cannot be reformed into socialism because it is structurally tied to capital, so power must be seized and the state transformed.

Evolutionary socialism or revisionism is Eduard Bernstein‘s position in Evolutionary Socialism (1899). Observing that capitalism had not polarised into two classes, that immiseration had not occurred and that the middle class was growing, he concluded that socialism would be reached by parliamentary means and trade union action. His formula, that the movement is everything and the final goal nothing, defines social democracy.

Fabianism, from the Webbs and Shaw, is the British version, resting on permeation of existing institutions and the inevitability of gradualness. It supplied much of the intellectual apparatus of the British welfare state and, through Nehru, a good deal of Indian planning.

Guild socialism, in G.D.H. Cole, sought worker control through industrial guilds rather than state ownership, and is the ancestor of arguments for economic democracy.

Socialism in India

Three variants are examinable. Nehru‘s democratic socialism combined parliamentary democracy, a mixed economy with a commanding-heights public sector, and planning; the Avadi session of 1955 adopted the socialistic pattern of society as the objective. Lohia‘s socialism insisted that a socialism which addressed class while ignoring caste would fail in India, and produced the programme of preferential opportunity for backward castes that shaped north Indian politics after 1967. Jayaprakash Narayan moved from Marxism to Gandhian sarvodaya and finally to total revolution, arguing that party politics itself was the obstacle. All three are developed in Chapter 13.

Marxism

Historical materialism

The foundational claim, stated in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), is that in the social production of their existence people enter into definite relations independent of their will, that the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, and that it is not the consciousness of people that determines their being but their social being that determines their consciousness.

The base comprises the forces of production, meaning labour, tools and technique, and the relations of production, meaning property relations. The superstructure comprises law, politics, religion, philosophy and art. When the forces of production outgrow the existing relations, an epoch of social revolution begins.

Engels’s letter to Bloch of 1890 is the necessary qualification and worth citing, because it concedes that the economic element is determining only in the last instance, and that neither he nor Marx ever asserted more; the superstructure reacts back upon the base.

Class, value and alienation

History is the history of class struggles. Under capitalism the decisive relation is between the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production, and the proletariat, which owns only its labour power. Surplus value is the source of profit: the worker is paid the value of their labour power, which is what it costs to reproduce it, but produces more value than that in the working day, and the difference is appropriated.

Alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), has four dimensions: from the product of labour, which confronts the worker as an alien thing; from the activity of labour, which becomes forced rather than expressive; from species-being, the human capacity for free conscious creation; and from other human beings, who become competitors. This is the humanist Marx recovered in the twentieth century, and it is the register in which M.N. Roy and the Frankfurt School work.

Praxis, and Marxism as a theory of action

UPSC asked in 2024 whether Marxism is a political theory of action demanding strict compliance with its core principles, which requires separating two claims.

Marxism is undeniably a theory of action. The eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) states the programme: philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it. Praxis is the unity of theory and practice, in which theory is validated by its capacity to guide transformative action rather than by contemplation alone. Unlike liberalism, Marxism specifies an agent, the proletariat, a method, revolution, and an outcome.

Whether it demands strict compliance is the contested half. The historical record of orthodoxy and excommunication, from the Second International splits to Stalinist enforcement of doctrine, supports the charge. But the tradition itself is plural to the point of contradiction: Bernstein revised the economics, Lenin the theory of the party, Gramsci the theory of the state, the Frankfurt School the theory of culture, Althusser the theory of causation, and Cohen the theory of justice. A doctrine that generated Trotsky, Mao, Gramsci, Marcuse and Amartya Sen’s interlocutors is not well described as demanding uniformity; what demanded uniformity was the party-state, which is a political fact rather than a feature of the theory.

Neo-Marxism

The twentieth century’s revisions all loosen economic determinism. Gramsci adds hegemony and the war of position. The Frankfurt School, in Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, shifts from political economy to the critique of culture and of instrumental reason; Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) argues that enlightenment reason turned into domination, and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) argues that advanced industrial society integrates opposition by satisfying false needs, producing a society without an agent of change. Althusser replaces the base-superstructure metaphor with structural causation and overdetermination.

Popper against historicism

The open society is one in which individuals confront personal decisions, institutions are subject to criticism, and rulers can be removed without violence. Popper’s reformulation of the central political question is the most quotable thing in him: the classical question, who should rule, invites the answer that the best should rule and hence unaccountable power; the right question is how we can arrange institutions so that bad rulers can be removed without bloodshed. This makes democracy a fallibilist device for error correction rather than an expression of the popular will, and it is the deepest available defence of it.

The paradox of tolerance belongs here: unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance, so a tolerant society must retain the right to suppress the intolerant when they refuse argument and answer with force.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859

The movement is everything, the final goal nothing

Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, 1899

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