Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Freeden Page B
Authors: Michael Freeden
Ads: Link
could emanate from the uneducated masses caused its intellectuals to superimpose a representative democracy on the direct democracy inherited from Greece. The representative model, however, was heavily qualified by restricting the vote to those who had an economic stake in the system, and by preferring the governing class to be trained in certain skills. The future is also subject to the projection of expectations nourished in past and present experience. Collective memory is both accumulative and serves as the basis from which to launch future visions. Thus celebrations of the millennium were shaped by past Christian religious experience and by an inherited method of time-keeping that endows round numbers with ceremonial significance. But it was also a statementof expectations of a new beginning, grounded on 19th- and 20th-century hopes for infinitely self-propelling social and technological progress.
Conceptual historians are less fastidious about the sources they use than are philosophers. The classical texts beloved by political philosophers are only one of their concerns, and they are quite happy to peruse newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, party manifestos, and official publications. This move away from elitist articulations is close to the heart of students of ideologies, who share with conceptual historians the common purpose of comprehending ordinary political speech and thought. This quest for the commonplace and the widespread indicates the important step of normalizing ideologies instead of pathologizing them. It brings ideologies into the ambit of the phenomena one would expect to explore when conducting standard political research.
Conceptual historians have reminded us that time is a crucial dimension for studying concepts (and by extension ideologies). Historians of ideas have done this for a while, but one weakness of their past approach has been to abstract the history of a concept from its context. The history of freedom has all too frequently been presented as if one could trace its evolving meanings from ancient times to the present and rest content with that. The historian Quentin Skinner and others have corrected that view through directing historical research towards the intentions of actors and authors, for which an appreciation of the contexts and discontinuities of ideas is essential. When applied to ideologies, time becomes an interactive factor not only in locating but in constituting them. Time, we now know, is not the remorseless ticking of clocks, but can be bent to the human will and subjected to the human imagination. Various conceptions of time animate different ideological tendencies, as the list illustrates in rough terms.
Social and historical time does rely on some indisputable facts, but one central feature of ideologies is to link both diachronic and synchronic facts selectively in a web of resourceful imagination. The disjointed becomes joined up; the random becomes open-ended and progressive, or closed and oppressive. Conceptual history and the study of ideologies are cognizant of human agency in choosing our futures, but they are aware of the manifold constraints within which such choices operate. One dictum of Marx’s has re-acquired a resonance that analysts of ideology would do well to heed:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
Past packaging limits analysts of ideology in interesting ways, and they have to toe a fine line. The notion of family resemblances enables scholars, as we saw above, to refer to a plethora of socialisms held together by this Wittgensteinian device. Because the monolithic view of ideology at the centre of the Marxist approachwas challenged by the indeterminate meanings ideologies could carry, a richer and more pluralistic view of their internal variations emerged. On
Conceptual historians are less fastidious about the sources they use than are philosophers. The classical texts beloved by political philosophers are only one of their concerns, and they are quite happy to peruse newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, party manifestos, and official publications. This move away from elitist articulations is close to the heart of students of ideologies, who share with conceptual historians the common purpose of comprehending ordinary political speech and thought. This quest for the commonplace and the widespread indicates the important step of normalizing ideologies instead of pathologizing them. It brings ideologies into the ambit of the phenomena one would expect to explore when conducting standard political research.
Conceptual historians have reminded us that time is a crucial dimension for studying concepts (and by extension ideologies). Historians of ideas have done this for a while, but one weakness of their past approach has been to abstract the history of a concept from its context. The history of freedom has all too frequently been presented as if one could trace its evolving meanings from ancient times to the present and rest content with that. The historian Quentin Skinner and others have corrected that view through directing historical research towards the intentions of actors and authors, for which an appreciation of the contexts and discontinuities of ideas is essential. When applied to ideologies, time becomes an interactive factor not only in locating but in constituting them. Time, we now know, is not the remorseless ticking of clocks, but can be bent to the human will and subjected to the human imagination. Various conceptions of time animate different ideological tendencies, as the list illustrates in rough terms.
Social and historical time does rely on some indisputable facts, but one central feature of ideologies is to link both diachronic and synchronic facts selectively in a web of resourceful imagination. The disjointed becomes joined up; the random becomes open-ended and progressive, or closed and oppressive. Conceptual history and the study of ideologies are cognizant of human agency in choosing our futures, but they are aware of the manifold constraints within which such choices operate. One dictum of Marx’s has re-acquired a resonance that analysts of ideology would do well to heed:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
Past packaging limits analysts of ideology in interesting ways, and they have to toe a fine line. The notion of family resemblances enables scholars, as we saw above, to refer to a plethora of socialisms held together by this Wittgensteinian device. Because the monolithic view of ideology at the centre of the Marxist approachwas challenged by the indeterminate meanings ideologies could carry, a richer and more pluralistic view of their internal variations emerged. On
Similar Books
