Juliette Faure, Mathew Humphrey, David Laycock

Kow Kwegya Amissah Abraham is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Philosophy at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. His research focuses on ethics, political philosophy, law and public policy. His published works include “The role and activities of policy institutes for participatory governance in Ghana”, in Grimm H. (eds) Public Policy Research in the Global South (2019).

Roxana Alhnaity is a Lecturer at the Business School, University of Jordan. She holds a post-doctoral qualification in Human Resource Management from the University of Lincoln, UK, where she is also an Honorary Visiting Fellow. Her research interests include migration, host country dynamics, native workers’ experiences and perceptions in the workplace, human dignity, well-being and decent work. She is particularly interested in critical perspectives on people’s experiences and aims to contribute to society by uncovering and exploring emerging phenomena.

Joaquín Bahamondes is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile. His research focuses on understanding how diverse ideologies impact perceptions of justice/injustice, with a particular interest in the effects these processes have on the psychological well-being of minoritised populations.

Matthijs Bal is a Professor of Responsible Management at the University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests concern absurdity, hyper-normalisation, dignity and neoliberal ideology. He has published books on the Absurd Workplace (2022), Dignity at Work (2017) and his latest work is the Elgar Encyclopaedia of Organizational Psychology (2024).

Valentin Behr is a CNRS research fellow in Political Science at the CESSP-Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His research topics include history and memory politics, the sociology of political elites, the sociology of intellectuals and intellectual history.

Aditi Bhatia is Visiting Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her main interest is in (critical) discourse analysis, drawing on the Discourse of Illusion theoretical framework, focused on identity-construction and argumentation. She is currently researching the discursive construction of Hindu nationalism and diaspora identity in digital mediascapes.

Mary Angela Bock is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies photojournalistic practice and its impact on media representations. Her recent books include Gender and Journalism: An Intersectional Approach (2023) and Seeing Justice: Witnessing, Crime and Punishment in Visual Media (2021).

James P. Carson is Professor Emeritus of English at Kenyon College, Ohio. The author of Populism, Gender and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, he has published articles in Criticism, The Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Philological Quarterly. His research on animal studies has appeared in edited collections.

Anemona Constantin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Political Science at the IEE-CEVIPOL Free University of Brussels/CEFRES, Prague. Her research focuses on debates around the fascist and communist pasts in Central Eastern Europe, the sociology of political and intellectual elites and the social history of conservative organisations from a transnational perspective.

Christian S. Czymara is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tel Aviv University, Israel and lecturer at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. His research focuses on migration, attitudes, media, ethnic conflict and immigrant integration employing quantitative and computational methods.

Teun A. van Dijk is an honorary Professor of Discourse Studies at Pompeu Fabra University and Founding Director of the independent Centre of Discourse Studies, Barcelona. His research since the 1980s has been on various topics in critical discourse: (anti)racist discourse, ideology, context, knowledge, the radical right and social movement discourse. He is editor of Discourse & Society and Discourse Studies.

Jean-François Drolet is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His most recent co-authored book is The World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and International Order (2024). He is also the author of Beyond tragedy and perpetual peace: Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (2021) and several publications on ideologies of the right.

Juliette Faure is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lille. She is the author of The Rise of the Russian Hawks: Ideology and Politics from the late Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia (2025).

Darren Fleet is a Limited-Term Lecturer at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. His research interests include environmental communication, advertising, faith-based social movements and the cultural politics of fossil fuels in Canada.

Sean Fleming is a Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. His most recent article, “Searching for ecoterrorism: The crucial case of the Unabomber,” was published in the American Political Science Review in 2024. His book on anti-technology radicalism will be published in 2026.

Michael Freeden is Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Oxford. His books include The New Liberalism (1978), Ideologies and Political Theory (1996), The Political Theory Of Political Thinking (2013) and Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking (2022). He founded the Journal of Political Ideologies and was its editor for 25 years.

Axel Gelfert holds the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy at Technische Universität Berlin. His research focuses on issues in social epistemology and the history and philosophy of science and technology. He is the author of A critical Introduction to Testimony (2014) and How to do Science with Models (2016).

Eunice Goes is a Professor of Politics at Richmond American University in London and obtained a PhD in Government at the LSE. Her latest book is Social democracy (2024) and she has published extensively about parties and ideologies in Journal of Political Ideologies, Parliamentary Affairs, Political Quarterly, British Politics and Renewal.

Léo Grillet is a Political Theory PhD candidate at Sciences Po, Paris. His work deals with historical anarchist movements (1870–1920) from an environmental and contextualist history point of view.

Shane Gunster is a Professor at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. His research focuses on the politics of climate and energy in Canada.

Heike Holbig is a Professor of Political Sciences with a focus on Chinese and East Asian area studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her research interests include the role of language and ideology in the legitimation of party rule in China, state-society relations, comparative authoritarianism and China’s ambitions to shape global norms.

Mathew Humphrey is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. Recent Books Include Ideologies In Action: Morphological Adaptation And Political ideas (editor, with David Laycock and Maiken Umbach) and Authenticity: The Cultural History of A Political Concept (with Maiken Umbach).

Guillaume Lamy, PhD in Political Science from Université du Québec à Montréal, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Sherbrooke, Canada. His thesis illustrates the renewal of the war of ideas through research with case studies on the influence strategies of libertarian think tanks in Canada. Covering social sciences in the news, he is the host of Political Horizon at Savoir Média, a TV show dedicated to public policies.

Julien Landry is an independent researcher with a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from l’Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the author of a book on the history of think tanks and social science research expert discourse in Canada (Les think tanks et le discours expert sur les politiques publiques au Canada) and has published a number of articles and book chapters on think tanks, social scientists, intellectuals and the sociology of knowledge. He has also edited a volume on think tanks (Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks. Power, Politics and Knowledge).

Felipe Burbano de Lara is a Professor-Investigator at FLACSO Ecuador (the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Ecuador). His research focuses on populism, state transformations and political process in Latin America. He is the author of several books and articles, recently including La revuelta de las periferias (2014); “Populist waves in Latin America” (2019) in Carlos de la Torre (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Global Populism: 435–450; “La patria ya es de todos: Pilgrimages, charisma, territory and the return of the state” (2020) in Francisco Sánchez and Simón Pachano (ed.) Assesing the Left Turn in Ecuador: 41–66.

David Laycock is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He has authored several books, including Populism and Democratic Thought in the Prairie Provinces, 1910–45 (1990), edited Representation and Democratic Theory (2004) and Political Ideology in Parties, Policy and Civil Society (2019) and co-edited seven previous volumes, most recently Ideologies in Action (2020).

Jonathan Leader Maynard is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at King’s College London, where he studies the role of ideology in international politics and armed conflict. From 2023–2025 he also served as a Parliamentary Academic Fellow advising the International Affairs Unit of the UK House of Commons and he convenes the Contemporary and Historical Ideological Competition Research Network, created with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Robert Neubauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. His research explores the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse, public mobilisation and digital platforms.

Beatrice Okyere-Manu is a Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Programme Director for Applied Ethics, specialising in African Ethics. She is a member of various academic associations and researches African women’s ethical issues, indigenous knowledge, environmental ethics, population ethics and migration and AI technology ethics.

Danny Osborne is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland. His research examines the causes and consequences of inequality, with a focus on personality, ideologies and collective action. Danny is also a co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology (2022).

Teddy Paikin is a PhD candidate in History at McGill University. His research focuses on the history of 19^th-century French capitalism and political economy, with a focus on the Saint-Simonian theory of the developmental state and imperialism.

Niklas Plaetzer is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the University of Chicago and Sciences Po, Paris. He works on democratic theory and the history of political thought, with a focus on the global legacies of revolutionary republicanism. His work has appeared in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Historical Materialism.

Ewan Robertson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He works on Studying Parliaments and the Role of Knowledge (SPARK). His wider research examines the role of ideas in social and labour market policy in high-income countries, especially regarding “making work pay” reforms.

Guillaume Sauvé is a Lecturer in Political Science at Université du Québec à Montréal. His research focuses on Russian politics from the perspective of comparative politics and intellectual history. His main current research project examines the dynamics of public debates in non-democratic settings through the study of petitions in Russia. He is the author of Suffering Victory. Soviet Liberals and The Failure of Democracy in Russia, 1987–1993 (2025).

Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran is a Professor of Sociology with a special focus on quantitative research methods at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. His research focuses on attitudes towards immigration and the welfare state and on the statistical analysis of hierarchical data.

J. A. Scott is a political theorist whose research focusses on populism, popular identity and the history of political thought. Scott’s work also looks at the influence of ideology on contemporary political practice and how theories of peoplehood have shaped democratic constitutionalism.

Apolline Taillandier is a political theorist and historian of political thought specialising in liberalism, technology and feminism in the US and Britain from the mid-20^th century onwards. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, the Department of Politics and International Studies and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge.

Benjamin Tainturier is a sociologist. His PhD focuses on the mediatisation of the French radical right and on the rhetorical strategies developed by this political force to normalise its theories and attitudes. He works at the media lab in Sciences Po, Paris.

Francesco Tommasi is a researcher in Work and Organisational Psychology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Italy. His research interests cover the lived experience of subjects at work and new forms of organising work. In his research, he is particularly interested in contributing to the development of critical perspectives of social and organisational psychology.

Maiken Umbach is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham and works as chief academic adviser at the UK National Holocaust Museum. She is the author of four academic monographs, ten edited volumes and special issues and numerous articles dealing with modern European identity politics and ideologies, National Socialism, Jewish migration history, the conceptual history of authenticity and the use of photographs as historical evidence.

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside. She has published widely on science fiction, including most recently Biopolitical Futures in 21^st-Century Speculative Fiction.

Ralph Weber is Professor for European Global Studies at the University of Basel. He specialises in modern Confucianism, comparative philosophy, Chinese politics and the politics of global knowledge production. He formerly served as book review editor (Europe) for Philosophy East and West and as President of the European Association for Chinese Philosophy.

Clyde Wilcox is Professor of Government at Georgetown University in Washington DC and Qatar. He has authored or edited a number of books and articles on the Christian Right. His other research interests include gender politics, interest group politics, campaign finance, religion and politics and science fiction and politics.

Leonard Williams is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Manchester University in Indiana. His teaching and research interests have focused on political ideologies, contemporary political theory and US politics. He has also constructed crossword puzzles for several publications, including a book entitled Black blocks, white squares.

Michael C. Williams is a Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, Canada and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University in London, UK. His most recent co-authored book is The World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and International Order (2024).

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge assistance with the draft manuscript provided by Alexander Piechowski of the University of Nottingham.

We also greatly appreciate the valuable guidance provided during the volume’s development by editors Andrew Taylor and Sophie Iddamalgoda at Routledge.

Introduction

Juliette Faure, Mathew Humphrey and David Laycock

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-1

Why this volume, now?

With the explosion of “ideology studies” over the past two decades, is there really a need for a new volume on the subject? Our efforts to assemble this volume were motivated by several things. Most obviously, at least every decade, there is a need for an updated collection of “state-of-the-art” analyses on a wide variety of continuing and emerging topics. The last comparable state-of-the-art survey was provided over a decade ago ( Freeden, Sargeant and Stears 2013). More importantly, with this collection, we aim to equip advanced students and researchers with analytical tools to drill into the range of vectors in ideological production and transmission. Our contributors demonstrate the benefits of theoretical and methodological pluralism, from across the social sciences and humanities, as a basis for ideology studies.

While most studies of ideology advocate and/or apply single explanatory theories and reasonably limited analytical methods, we are certainly not the first to stress the importance of methodological pluralism for the study of ideology. Critical discourse theory, as championed by authors such as van Dijk (1998, 2013), Fairclough (1996) and Blommaert (2005), has long stressed the need for multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of ideologies. The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies showcases a wide range of approaches by prominent exponents and analysts (Freeden, Sargeant and Stears 2013). Recent volumes by Ostrowski (2022) and Williams and Franks (2024) underscore the value of multiple analytical perspectives, as do Leader Maynard and Mildenberger in their review article on the study of ideology (2018).

The last 50 years of ideology studies, especially those focused on texts rather than behavioural data, have seen a rather stubborn adherence to a highly logo-centric orientation to understanding ideologies. This was arguably continued by one of the central figures in ideology studies, Michael Freeden, whose Ideologies and Political Theory (1996) presents a highly text-dependent toolkit for making sense of relations between competitively “decontested” concepts, the building blocks of ideologies. Since then, Freeden has devoted increasing attention to the unintentional dimensions of ideological experience, in his Journal of Political Ideologies editorials ( Freeden 2022) and in later articles and volumes ( Freeden 2000, 2013a, 2021). In this acknowledgement of the significance of emotional, unintentional and non-discursive, often visually or artistically symbolic, elements of ideological communication, Freeden has indirectly and directly acknowledged related insights by discourse analysts and others influenced by psychoanalytic theory (such as Essex School theorists Laclau (1996), Stavrakakis (1997), Žižek (2009), Howarth (2000), Glynos (2001) and Norval (2000)).

Our Table of Contents also suggests that we editors (and many contributors) believe that a necessary corollary of bringing varied perspectives on ideology analysis together is to hasten the move away from “the canon” in ideology studies that has been gathering steam over the past two decades. Our collective presentation of ideology as a pervasive concept and presence in diverse contexts outside of classic works of political thought endorses acceptance of a broader range of political, social and cultural practices as sites of the production, transmission and consumption of ideology.

This means not just moving beyond the canon, but also incorporating lessons from the recent “ideational turn” in the social sciences. The ideational turn has entailed exploring diverse methods and theories through which the importance of ideas in policy development, public administration and political competition can be taken seriously. It has also had an impact on disciplines as diverse as geography (Benner 2024), political economy (Campbell and Pedersen 2010; Blyth 1997), public policy (Hall 1993; Schmidt 2010, 2011; Berman 2013), sociology (Bourdieu 1977; Somers and Block 2005) and international relations (Goldstein and Keohane 1993; Checkel 1998; Yee 1996; Beland and Cox 2010; Leader Maynard and Haas 2022). Such incorporation of ideas into mixes of independent variables in social science research have returned ideas to a position of significance in empirical studies (that is, outside of social and political theory), but have tended to strand these ideas from their ideological homes in vernacular speech, civil society organisations and practices and elite-level discourse.

Scholars have been writing about the ideational turn for more than 25 years. Our volume can be understood as part of the literature that asks: “what follows from the ideational turn and how can the notion that “ideas matter” be operationalised in ideology studies?” The sections to follow add up to an implicit answer to this question. As editors benefitting from the process of assembling and reviewing the following chapters, we are prepared to be more explicit. We suggest that to make substantial progress exploring interactions between production, dissemination and reception of ideas, it helps to conceive of these interactions operating at several analytically distinct but functionally interwoven levels, as described below. To extend the value of this “ideational turn” beyond philosophy seminars to the broader social science community, in the following section we argue that applied ideology studies can be usefully contextualised with reference to “ideological ecologies” that have macro, meso and micro levels of experience and analysis.

Ideological ecologies and levels of analysis

In this section we formulate a modest addition to Michael Freeden’s morphological approach to the study of ideology (Freeden 1996; Freeden 2013a), presented to frame and complement the contributions in this volume, with potential application to subsequent research.

Much recent morphological analysis has focused on the distinctive ideological contribution of specific movements, parties, intellectual networks, fashions, or media (e.g. Laycock 2019a; Faure 2021; Goes 2021; Ostrowski 2021; Humphrey, Laycock and Umbach 2020; Williams and Franks 2024; Ritter 2023). In this chapter, we propose an augmentation of the morphological analytical toolkit that situates these focused studies in a broader ideological and social context. Our orienteering work here is aided by two related conceptual tools. One suggests a way of broadly distinguishing among macro, meso and micro levels of ideological production, consumption and transmission, within which specific ideological morphologies operate. We pursue this distinction several pages on.

The other orienteering device is a metaphor, “ideological ecologies”, meant to represent the complex social spaces that contextualise ideological activity across macro, meso and micro levels. We intend these devices to provide openings for contributions by theories, methods and insights from many specialised social science and humanities disciplines to the study of ideology. The remaining chapters in this volume demonstrate numerous advantages of such multi-disciplinarity; in this chapter, we aim to create some useful theoretical space within which this multi-disciplinarity can be appreciated while aiding the movement of morphological ideology analysis beyond the canonical textual terrain in which academics are most comfortable. The supplementary guideposts we propose for this stem from our insistence that ideologies are not simply “top-down” productions emanating from the minds of “great thinkers”, but are equally “bottom-up” affairs in which individuals and groups, channelled by organisations and institutions, innovatively synthesise different ideas and concepts. Our ecological metaphor in this chapter highlights a functional symbiosis in the construction and transmission of ideologies that many formulations of ideology fail to capture effectively when they focus on textual analysis of high theory.

Use of ecological and biological metaphors (these can be far from the same thing) is certainly not new in the study of politics, with origins arguably as far back as Aristotle’s treatment of polities as complex organisms with quasi-biological attributes (The Politics). Hobbes’ response in Leviathan was meant to overturn Aristotelian assumptions and methods, but nonetheless employed core biological and ecological metaphors (Hobbes 1651). Edmund Burke’s idea of a social contract was famously fashioned from an ecological metaphor that saw society as a hierarchically integrated organism (Burke 1790). Petr Kropotkin employed ecological parallels between human and natural communities in his tract in defence of anarchism, Mutual Aid (1902). Theorists of the political right, such as Spengler and Evola, also saw distinct cultures in organicist terms. More recently, Mark Warren has used the ecological metaphor to add a valuable layer of institutional and organisational theorisation to previous normative accounts of democracy. In Democracy and Associations (Warren 2000), his conceptualisation of “associational ecologies” allows Warren to gain extra purchase on the complexity and dynamics of democratic politics. The historical utility of biological and ecological metaphors in political and social theory warrants exploring its potential in ideology studies.

How does our conceptualisation of ideological ecologies add to Freeden’s account of conceptual morphology? At the core of ecological analysis is an attempt to understand the relationship between organisms and their environment, in a multi-directional array of mutual influence and adaptation. This is what we want to stress here in terms of the relationship between political ideas and what we might call the “ideational environment”, in a similar process of mutual influence and adaptation. It is important to note that we are not offering this as a new theory, or approach, to the study of ideologies. Examining the relationship between political ideas and their ideational environment is of course a mainstay of contextual analysis as practised by the Cambridge School, discourse theorists and conceptual morphologists. Rather, in offering the idea of ideological ecologies as a metaphor, we are hoping that this might illuminate matters in the way that metaphors can, offering an alternative way of framing the activity of ideology analysis, and, potentially, helping to spark new research questions, or new ways of thinking about this shared research activity.

Like an ecology made up of flora, fauna, gases, and minerals, an ideological ecology is a functionally differentiated and complex system. Its various elements, processes and dynamics interact in both readily observable and easily overlooked ways. These interactions take both consistently patterned forms and highly contingent, unpredictable and evolving forms. Unlike a non-human biological ecology, however, an ideological ecology must take account of human intentionality, planning of speech and action and strategic use of “speech acts” (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) while still demonstrating a functional symbiosis in the construction, transmission and reception of ideological materials and activities.

As many contributors to this volume demonstrate, this intentionality becomes especially challenging to assess when we attempt to make sense of how a strategic dimension in an openly competitive political environment shapes ideological appeals. This is especially true of appeals made at the meso level by politicians, party operatives and “organic intellectuals”, social movement and organised interest leaders, think tank writers, social media podcasters and commentators in conventional and online social media. The ecological metaphor may end up being useful for investigation of the micro dynamics of ideational adaptation and transmission in specific settings, but we believe that beginning with the application of this metaphor to the largest canvas provides a helpful reminder of why questions about ideology shaping politics and vice versa, have been answered in myriad ways. To make sense of the “shaping” side of the relationships between politics and ideas, it is useful to step back and consider how we can use the metaphor of an ecological system to locate the terrain and broad dynamics of the shaping processes that we wish to explain.

Our use of the ecological metaphor is also intended to accord significance to the unplanned and unintentional dimensions of both causes and effects of ideological activity. These dimensions are – or can be – features of both “analytical” and “holistic” perspectives on ecology, which Donald Worster argues have historically been the two broad options for making sense of “nature’s economy.” (2^nd edition, 1994). We can, similarly, think of our understanding of ideological phenomena as being amenable to both holistic and analytical study (see also Maynard, Chapter 1). We may, for example, want to take the “deep dive” to understand ideologies in terms of their component parts, the discourses and conceptual decontestations that form the “building blocks” of ideological thought. Alternatively, we may want to focus on the supervenient characteristics of whole systems of ideological thought; for example, whether and how a set of dominant ideological paradigms may support, or undermine, democratic forms of governance.

The study of ideologies and ideological change has, arguably, focused too heavily on the writings of high-profile philosophers and the consequences of decisions taken by political leaders. Decisions stemming from deliberate plans have particular appeal to analysts trained in canonical Western thought and conventional political history. Yet we have recognised, since Darwin, that ecological systems evolve by virtue of smaller-scale evolutions and environmental adaptations within species and their (often symbiotic) relations with others. It is worth considering how parallels to such evolution and intra-systemic adaptation can be found in the development of ideologies within and across national and linguistic boundaries. Rousseau may have hinted at the possibility of a similar narrative featuring contingency, adaptation and the unintended ideological power of human contrivances such as agriculture, property and the division of labour (Rousseau 1754).

The concept of ideological ecology can help us to address the question of where we look for evidence about ideologies. With several notable exceptions (Althusser 1971; Bourdieu 1994, 1999; Hall 1996; van Dijk 1998, 2013; Ostrowski 2022; Williams and Frank 2024), the role of institutions, organisations and their practices in constituting ideological activity has been under-emphasised by political and social theorists looking for authorial sources of specific thought systems. We believe that thinking in terms of levels within broader ideological ecologies helpfully inclines us to identify institutional and organisational practices as crucial building blocks and mediating mechanisms in any set of ideological dynamics.

As this volume shows, different levels and types of analysis may be selected depending on the question being asked about a specific instance of ideological activity and the nature of both significant and distinctive phenomena within that activity. In some cases, the theories and methods chosen will focus on activities and institutions operating across analytically distinct but functionally integrated domains. Our conceptualisation of these levels of experience and analysis here is meant to acknowledge the importance of a key theme in this volume: ideology is too complex for its analysis to rely exclusively on one theory or master key. This is so just as the distinct cultural, social, political, technological and productive spheres of social experience – all of which are touched by ideology in some way – are too complex to lend themselves to one theoretical re-construction.

Levels of analysis in the study of ideologies

In his pioneering Ideologies and Political Theory, Freeden theorises ideology as a conceptual morphology arrayed across three realms of activity: the core, adjacent and perimeter realms, within and across each of which concepts are distinctively decontested in any particular ideology (Freeden 1996, Ch. 2). Positing macro, meso and micro levels of experience and analysis, our perspective on ideological ecologies has obvious similarities with this broad categorisation of the ideological terrain. We believe, however, that this conceptualisation of ideological terrain stresses something that Freeden’s account does not explicitly confront: that within and across different ideological ecologies, ideas, positions and proposals for political action are conveyed, enacted and altered following notably distinct logics and dynamics. This recognition of differential logics and dynamics, in turn, provides researchers with a compelling reason to seek out the value of multiple methods of analysis.

In previous edited volumes of “applied ideology studies” (Humphrey, Laycock and Umbach 2020, Laycock 2019a), we realised that most of our contributors had analysed intermediate-level ideological operations. In these studies, analysis focused neither on canonical texts – the high theory of ideological practices – nor on the individual level of citizens’ day-to-day ideological conceptualisation and speech. Yet we also appreciated that these spheres of activity were functionally deeply interactive, even if they were analytically distinct. This led us to posit the existence of macro, meso and micro levels of ideological experience and analysis:

The macro level, populated by the expanding canon of central texts, characterised by their broad political and social visions, logically consistent conceptual structures and extensive, often transnational influence on consequential social and political actors.
The intermediate or meso level of competitive political appeals, politically relevant public discourse and cultural criticism, including political speeches, party political programmes and pamphlets, think tank reports and a wide spectrum of political commentary and cultural critique in the public sphere.
The everyday or micro level of often unconscious, typically setting-specific conceptual use and adaptation by ordinary people in their reception, adaptation, transmission and re-creation of ideology.

In analysing the micro or grassroots level of ideological experience, one aims to explore the interpenetration of politics with lived experience and a sense of self. Analysis of this level of ideological practice requires us to step away from what we, as academics, tend to see as consequential ideology; that is the self-conscious deployment of carefully connected political ideas in a competitive public realm, by both canonical figures and political professionals of many kinds.

Our conceptualisation of macro, meso and micro levels of analysis aims to tease out distinctive sources of ideological thought, identifying them in a descending order from more to less theoretically comprehensive and coherent. Instances of macro thought are canonical for a reason: although often recognised as the output of a single individual, they are macro in that they offer fuller, conceptually richer and theoretically more integrated accounts of the world of social and political behaviour, with correspondingly wider influence, than one finds in meso-level political and civil society organisations, institutions and practices. The latter typically offer briefer, more prosaic and limited, often immediate policy-driven or strategic political appeals, social visions and cultural interpretations than one finds in macro level texts. It is, however, important to appreciate how macro, meso and micro ideological developments all inhabit the same ideological ecosystem. The “high theory” of Millian liberalism or Marxian socialism does not emerge from nowhere. These thinkers pick up, synthesise and develop in new, more sophisticated directions, ideas that already exist in the broader cultural and political milieu. In turn, the macro level texts that they produce and which become seen as the cornerstones of ideological doctrines, are themselves re-absorbed into the meso and micro levels, where agents of change adapt, re-interpret and do battle over their meaning.

Accessing the micro level of ordinary people’s conceptual repertoires and ideological orientations has typically involved either survey-based quantitative behavioural research, as found in chapters by Osborne and Bahamondes or Schmidt-Catran and Czymara (this volume, Chapters 19 and 28), or direct, in-depth encounters between researchers and citizens in ethnographic studies. New techniques for micro-level ideological analysis have emerged recently involving computational analysis of large data sets that reveal ideological orientations and conceptualisations. In Chapter 4, Benjamin Tainturier shows how computational methods can be used to drill down into promising ideological indicators found in mass data from social media communication. Humphrey, Umbach and Clulow’s examination of peer-to-peer political discussions in a “massive open online course” offered a revealing micro-level ideological analysis of ordinary people’s accounts of the meaning of basic political concepts like freedom and justice (Humphrey, Umbach and Clulow 2020). More recently, Peter Levine has shown how various methods of analysing quantitative data, complemented by network analysis, can uncover suggestive features of individuals’ distinctive “idea networks”, even among individuals who would appear politically quite homogenous using standard behavioural models (Levine 2024). Other notable attempts to analyse micro level ideology in recent years include Bailey and Gayle (2003); Volkov et al (2015); Ostrowski (2024); for an earlier example, see Rakoff (1977).

The complications of ideological action across macro, meso and micro levels become especially obvious when the main focus is the meso level. This is inhabited by many different types of professional writers, speakers, video producers and artists, who produce complex political tracts and ideologically configured public discourses and visual or aural enhancements to political messaging. These meso level ideological innovators, entrepreneurs and professionals include politicians of many ranks and state levels, speech writers, spin doctors, journalists, social media podcasters (and platform owners), culture critics, musicians, film-makers, think tank employees and academics who double as “public intellectuals”. Such actors create and respond to others’ creations with reference to non-canonical sources in direct and traceable ways. They also frequently draw indirectly, adaptively and partially on consciously systematic and conceptually complex ideas from canonical texts.

Canonically sourced ideas sometimes percolate down to the meso level in readily identifiable ways, though seldom as clearly as when Margaret Thatcher plopped a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty down on the cabinet table, saying “this is what we believe” (Sotheby’s 2019). More frequently, such idea transfer from the macro to the meso level takes highly mediated, often anonymised and “popularised” forms, with no direct attribution to the inspiring canonical source(s). This is increasingly the case with what Freeden has referred to variously as “thin ideologies,” that rely on a fuller, longstanding ideology for much of their basic conceptual structure, and “fast ideologies” whose key disseminators change crucial features of ideological messaging opportunistically and with little regard to consistency (Freeden 1996, 2013a, 2017). It is also primarily at the meso level that we find the development and transmission of “hybrid ideologies”, as creatively theorised and analysed by Williams and Franks (2024). Making a case for application of both Freeden’s morphological and Essex School discourse analytical perspectives to the study of hybrid ideologies, Williams and Franks approvingly quote Blommaert’s suggestion that the creation and development of hybrid ideologies can be understood as processes “operating in and through polycentric and stratified systems in which different ideologies are at play at different levels and in different ways” (Williams and Franks 2024: 30).

Tracing the ideational lineage of ideological expression is even more challenging at the micro level of citizens’ conceptions and preferences about politics. Such conceptions come initially from family, school and social peers, then increasingly from efforts by a complicated range of meso level actors to shape popular understandings of political and social life. Individuals are thus often not aware of the sources of their personal political ideas and attitudes, or how they have mixed with influences from other sources. These processes of ideological production, distribution, exchange and consumption are all, of course, affected by technological developments and no discussion of these processes would be complete now without some reference to the growth of Web 2.0 and the correlative explosion of social media. These technological changes can operate in ways similar to how an “external shock” can affect a natural ecosystem, in that they can be deeply disruptive and upend existing ecological relationships. The impact of pollution, or invasive species, can have enormous ramifications on the pre-existing stability of an ecosystem and between ecosystems (Dukes and Mooney 2004; Peller and Altermatt 2024). Similarly, changes in communication technologies, such as the rise of Web 2.0, can have a huge influence on processes of ideological creativity and transmission, disrupting previously stable patterns of ideological production, distribution and exchange (Engesser et al 2017). Technologies such as social media also allow ideological actors, who may, in earlier times, have struggled to reach an audience, to gain followers not only in their own countries, but across the globe.

In this context, it is appropriate to recall the tremendous analytical leverage offered by Benedict Anderson’s theorisation and application of his concept of “print capitalism”. Anderson presented this to make sense of connections between technologies of communication, language use, movement building and ideological innovation in the development of nationalisms across the world after the 15^th-century invention of the printing press (Anderson 1983, 2016). His Imagined Communities offers a widely read and stellar example of the work that can be done making sense of historically situated and comparative meso level ideological activity. One can hope that a similarly powerful conceptualisation of social media’s transformative power in the meso and micro levels of ideological practice is soon to emerge. (For suggestive ideas in this regard, see Balbi 2024; Couldry and Hepp 2020).

Drilling down further into individual experiences with the consumption and transmission of ideology, we encounter a wide range of primarily unconscious but nonetheless powerful dispositions, perceptions and emotions that shape individual reception, adaptation and re-transmission of ideological content from a wide range of meso-level sources. Determining how these “nano-level” forces (see Leader Maynard, this volume Chapter 2) operate is also challenging, often because individuals can’t readily identify or articulate how or why these operate within their personal experience, or which meso sources’ messaging has activated their dispositions, perceptions, senses of group identity and emotions. Analysts of this sub-level of micro-ideological experience are typically left with inferential rather than empirically direct data, though political and social psychologists have discovered creative ways of strengthening such data to provide compelling explanations of the intersections between meso, micro and nano level determinants of ideological experience (see Osborne and Bahamondes, Chapter 19).

In his chapter, Leader Maynard takes another approach to the “levels of analysis problem” and deploys the terminology of macro, meso and micro to denote different fields of phenomena than we do here. He is primarily concerned with categorising the range of theories driving contemporary ideology analysis, pointing out their complementarities and incompatibilities and encouraging more productive multi-theoretical approaches to ideology analysis. He conceives and frames four levels of analysis in service of these objectives: the macro, the meso, the micro and the nano.

Leader Maynard refers to the most encompassing scale of data field as the macro level, which sketches the relevant contours of the environment within which any particular ideology operates. And his meso level features the operation of what he refers to as “shared ideologies” and “institutional ideologies”, both operating in group settings. At the individual level of ideological experience, our account of micro activity and Leader Maynard’s practically dovetail. We both see this as the arena of personalised ideological consumption, re-interpretation and individually idiosyncratic communication. Leader Maynard has helpfully proposed a nano level of ideological experience internal to the micro level, involving personally adapted specific ideas about social and political existence, norms and values. We acknowledge the value in highlighting this as an analytically distinct field of enquiry, for which specific methods may be most productive.

For Leader Maynard, the levels of analysis problem is not primarily about identifying distinctive types of ideological source material, as it is for us, but about being clear about the scale of the field of phenomena that analysts are investigating. Doing so, he feels, will push them into broadening their selection of analytical methods and avoiding what too easily becomes a scattershot approach involving no consistently applied methods and theories.

Despite the different purposes we and Leader Maynard have in talking about levels of analysis, his use of the “meso” term doesn’t really conflict with ours. We acknowledge his contention that the ideological products and agents operating at this level stem largely from groups and their organisations and institutions. However, we portray the meso level more expansively, to include not just group-anchored ideological activity, but also more individualised agents and sources – like public intellectuals, cultural critics, influential artists, novelists and journalists and now social media entrepreneurs and podcasters. The nature of the ideological activity that we designate as “meso” is thus more diverse and complex than Leader Maynard suggests is internal to the relevant list of what he calls ideological factors and overlaps with a good deal of what he designates as the macro level of ideological activity. But it is important to stress that we identify these realms of ideological activity differently because our purposes in speaking of levels are distinct from Leader Maynard’s. And both of our approaches share the crucial aim of pluralising the options available to ideology analysts and inviting a recognition of complementarities among approaches to ideology analysis.

Our approach focuses on extending morphological analysis via a fuller account of the vectors involved in production, transmission and consumption of ideology. We are attempting to conceptualise the environment of ideological experience in ways that link morphological analysis to identifiable dynamics among these vectors, thereby pushing morphological analysis further as an inter- and intra-level theory. How might the metaphor of an ideological ecology suggest a way of theoretically bridging the divide between ideological and non-ideological factors and how might our account of levels within these ecologies point towards such bridges? Our goal of “bringing institutions and other context-shaping factors back in” to the work of morphological ideology analysis is animated by the sense that the crucial and often distinctive dynamics of meso-level ideological activity have been under-studied. Remedying this involves looking more closely (as some cultural historians have done, e.g. Griffin 2006) at the ideological work done by state and non-state political, community-building, educational, social welfare and even health care institutions in the analysis of the production, transmission and reception of ideology. However, institutional “recovery” for such analysis is a necessary but not sufficient condition of fruitful exploration of ideological ecologies. Cultural background vectors – discursive and non-discursive – must be taken seriously too. So, for that matter, should ideologically charged social practices and rituals, the range of ideologically significant impacts of different forms of media, the psychological correlates of ideologically salient political and social activity and the reality that most people consider themselves to be un-ideological. Leader Maynard captures this indirectly when he says that “non-ideological factors at the meso, micro and nano level rarely figure in interpretive research” (Chapter 1, this volume – p. 16).

What can be proposed to remedy this under-attention to “non-ideological factors” in the study of ideological change and influence? One place to start is to stress the materiality, discursive and non-discursive (symbolic and non-textually representational) dimensions of ideology, recognising the deep embeddedness of ideology within different types of institutions, organisations and socio-cultural practices. The challenge is to connect textual/conceptual analysis with institutional and organisational analysis to illuminate both the strengths of the morphological approach and the ways in which it requires assistance from other methods of analysis to provide a more complete picture of the dynamics and implications of any particular ideological ecology. Abstractly, this means considering how ideology can be both an independent and a dependent variable, in different dimensions or levels of analysis. Versions of this recognition have been suggested by analysts as diverse as Bourdieu (1999), Hall (1996), van Dijk (1998, 2013), Ostrowski (2022) and Williams and Franks (2024), all of whom draw creatively on different methods and research traditions to explain how ideological and “non-ideological” factors interact in specific settings.

Our conceptualisation of ideological ecologies invites attention to both shared and case-specific factors shaping the operation and character of any particular ideology or cluster of closely related concepts within an ideological morphology. In stressing the significance of the meso level of ideological experience and analysis and its impacts on evolving micro and macro levels of ideological activity, we mean to create theoretical openings for a variety of methods from multiple disciplines to help explain why particular mixes of meso-level factors produce ideological effects and developments that are simultaneously historically continuous and unique.

To take a prominent contemporary example: in many recent cases of authoritarian populist success, party system failures to support reliable governance, plummeting trust in political and other elites following the financial crash of 2008, the advent of the Covid crisis and the rapid emergence of a barely regulated world of social media have opened up avenues of populist appeal and advance, as the so-called “legacy media” loses influence. In the American case, a Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement triumph has also been driven by these cross-national causes as well as a campaign finance regime that places no limits on what the wealthy can spend and a national electoral system built around the Electoral College.

For the analyst asking “what explains support for the MAGA movement/candidate?”, some of this ideological experience can be viewed as the consequence of overlapping independent variables: mostly meso-level factors that are shaping micro-level preferences and orientations. However, it is worth noting that while personal ideological perspectives and commitments seem to be the obvious dependent variable here, this is an artefact of the question. If we think about the range of activities and effects in a multi-level ideological ecology, in which macro, meso and micro level ideas, orientations and emotions move across and shape each other, the distinctive configuration, dynamism and institutional architecture of a specific ideology can be thought of as a dependent variable.

A realistic appreciation of the scope and reach of the meso level takes us well outside conventional political texts and communication. Many chapters in this volume demonstrate how deeply infused popular and/or influential realms of cultural and quasi-scientific production are with ideologies that have discernible and consequential political effects. As Apolline Taillandier notes suggestively later in this volume, critical reflection on the history of “transhumanist” thought “moves the study of ideology further away from canonical history, shedding light on the role of engineering, public science and expertise in the production of political ideas.”

The same could be said of many topics addressed by other contributors to this volume: as we move away from direct encounters with the canonical realm of ideological production in spheres of political and social theory, we find that meso-level production and transmission of ideological – or ideology-shaping – content becomes increasingly embedded in institutions, organisations and specialised practices (many shaped by self-regulating professionals like teachers, academics, lawyers, various medical practitioners and journalists). These institutionalised practices possess their own momentum and dynamics while inevitably being shaped by interactions and spatial overlap with other contemporary institutions, organisations and specialised practices in pursuit of sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting purposes (Schmidt 2011; Freeden 2013b; Williams and Franks 2024).

There is thus no escaping the multi-disciplinary requirements of ideology analysis; mapping an ideological ecology requires a variety of methods to identify and assess the significance of distinct components within the complex social systems, practices, institutions and technologies that constitute such ecologies. One way to enhance the inferential work required for tracing ideological flows between levels is to construct ideological ecologies specific to our analytical purposes. To some extent, this involves adapting Cambridge School techniques for establishing the relevant context of particular political texts. For example, knowing that John Locke considered himself to be a part of a larger political movement (composed of some major and many minor public figures, pamphleteers and writers of the day) to prevent an autocratic Catholic monarchy from gaining power in Britain tells us a good deal about what he was up to in writing his Second Treatise of Government (Ashcraft 1986). Conceptual analysis is still required to understand Locke’s argument there, but careful contextualising research that tracks patterns of conceptual use within the organisational complexities and institutional constraints of the Exclusion movement allows that analysis to head in the right direction, or at least avoid numerous blind alleys.

Adapting the morphological model

How can the morphological model be stretched, with a concept of ideological ecology, to aid our appreciation of this range of factors? In our preliminary conceptualisation of the environment of ideological activity, ideology is both embedded in and distinct from the causal factors that Leader Maynard identifies as broadly non-ideological. Our concept of “ideological ecology” is meant to extend the conceptual- and phenomena-mapping logic of Freeden’s morphological approach. We carry over his emphasis on contested conceptual decontestation in competitive political environments, but also wish to stress the exploratory aspect of his approach, which is not handcuffed by a need to immediately confirm or deny the existence of causal connections between concepts – and the vectors along and through which they travel and evolve – across the core, adjacent and perimeters of an ideological field. By inviting our attention to a broad context within which identifiable concepts interact with each other and with a broader environment shaped by forces, institutions and culture in provisionally indeterminate ways, Freeden’s method generates openings for new hypotheses about these interactions, by provisionally setting aside the problem of causality in order to sketch a map of the terrain on which “the ideological” operates.

In extending the morphological model, our conceptualisation of ideological ecologies is intended to motivate an imaginative mapping of the range of interacting variables, institutions and processes that shape any particular ideological output or lived experience. Leaving out this step of imaginative mapping runs the risk of overlooking potentially valuable methods of analysis and leaving crucial variables out of causal sequences and dynamics. It is important to cast the explanatory net broadly in posing questions about ideological production, transmission, consumption and the feedback loops among these dimensions of ideological experience, giving due importance to factors that are not themselves directly ideological, such as changing technologies and institutional formations. This is quite consistent with one key purpose of the morphological mapping Freeden proposes. In the initial stage of this mapping exercise, the question of precisely how concepts shape one another (that is, with which causal dynamics) is provisionally set aside in favour of developing a fuller, more comprehensive sense of which concepts (and their organisational, institutional and cultural carriers/vectors) might be involved in giving a specific morphology its distinctive shape.

Once that broader map is produced, the analyst can move back to focus on how and perhaps why particular concepts – or clusters of concepts – have taken their distinctive shape (decontestations). Although its focus is primarily textual analysis, the morphological method pulls us into a consideration of “non-ideological” factors in the broader environment because we can’t think of the shape and meaning of adjacent and perimeter concepts without thinking of their carriers: social, political, economic and cultural institutions, organisations, symbols and symbolic events. Thinking about ideological ecologies can encourage further reflection on the significance of ideologies’ embeddedness in key features of their environmental networks; a map of such an ecology aims to clarify the structures and the structuring of ideologies, with the hope that this can shed additional light on the impacts of ideology on politics and social life.

In an era of rapidly expanding social media influence on how citizens understand the interaction between politics, civil society and culture, there is little doubt that analysts need all potential tools to get their bearings in a terrain in which many old assumptions about “how ideology works” will be found wanting. Trump’s triumph in the 2024 election is perhaps the most powerful indicator that social media appears to have displaced conventional media. In at least the US and probably more widely, little resembling a public sphere essential to democratic citizenship remains to mediate rapid, intense yet narrow processes of ideological and political orientation/development (Freeden, this volume). The “transgressive” anti-establishment appeal of Trump and many other right-wing populists (Moffitt 2016) operates optimally in such settings and reminds us that there are limits to the return on conceptualising ideology in narrowly ideational terms. As Williams and Frank observe, “Studying ideology is not simply a matter of thinking about form and structure, it is also very much a matter of thinking about processes and development” and “ponder[ing] how ideologies become material forces during political actions and produce material effects in social organisations and structures” (2024: 126, 145). The world of meso-level ideological activity needs to be directly engaged, with the power and materiality of its production, transmission and consumption reckoned as a part of the conceptual makeup of modern ideological experience, not just as independent variables external to specific ideological or election results.

Volume character and contents

As editors, we recruited contributors to this volume from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. We have asked contributors to speak to a broad audience, update readers on key additions to the recent literature on their subjects, identify lines of theoretical disagreement in these fields, suggest promising directions for future research and somehow still provide readers with distinctive and thought-provoking arguments about the diverse ways in which ideologies operate. This is obviously asking a lot, especially within 7000 to 8500 words. We are confident, however, that our contributors have answered this demanding call.

Readers will quickly discover that while our grouping of the chapters into seven sections follows a loose logic, topics, concerns, themes and arguments from these chapters have inevitably crossed these sectional boundaries. Thus, while a chapter has been located in a section on historiography of ideological change, it may also offer insights and cover theoretical ground that would seem to belong in any of Section 1 (Methods of analysis), Section 3 (Defining and identifying ideologies), or even Section 5 (Exploring places of latent ideologies). And the reverse is also true: chapters from these sections typically contribute insights regarding methods of analysis and so on, even if this is not their principal focus. So we encourage readers to sample chapters widely, especially if they are keen to expand their theoretical and methodological repertoires.

Given the distinctiveness of this moment in political time, readers will not be surprised to discover multiple analyses of radical right ideologies in this volume. We didn’t set out to recruit this range of discussions of right-wing/authoritarian populist phenomena and we have endeavoured to include contributions that remind us that political life and contemporary ideological experience are by no means uni-dimensional. However, this handbook can’t help but reflect a sustained moment in time, during which Western and non-Western societies alike have witnessed an uptick in the popularity – and elected political success – of these ideologies.

And we are proud to offer plural accounts of these right-wing or authoritarian populisms. As the discussion earlier in this introduction stresses, we are confident that many valuable lessons arise from seeing tensions among differing theoretical and methodological approaches to these phenomena.

We also feel it is worth acknowledging that among our chapters readers will find a significant number that deal with ideological experiences and activities of living subjects, research on which often involves the complications of research ethics approvals. Such complications are not frequently found in research on the history of social and political thought and typically call for permissions by some combination of research institutions and research subjects. They are also likely to call for creative responses to data collection by various behavioural or ethnographic methods, as demonstrated by Fleming (Chapter 3), Tainturier (Chapter 4), van Dijk (Chapter 9), Osborne and Bahamondes (Chapter 19) and Schmidt-Catran and Czymara (Chapter 28). In developing such responses, these and other researchers into contemporary ideologies unavoidably navigate their way through various levels of complex ideological ecologies, even if their chosen foci leave them little time to provide a full map of such navigational work.

Our volume begins with theoretical and methodological inquiries into the nature of ideology, its multiple dimensions and the methods appropriate for both different levels of analysis and recently evolved fields of ideological activity. Section 1 thus sets the stage for the multi-disciplinary sections to follow, in which chapters employ multiple methods to elucidate how ideology can be found and understood in its many ecologies. Section 2 takes readers into related questions of theory by examining revealing cases in the historiography of ideology. Its contributors address questions of the comparative socio-economic contexts of rather distinct 19^th-century liberalisms, the often-overlooked working class radical republican ideologies of the 19^th century and the complicated yet largely unconsummated relationship between anarchism and ecological thought over the past century and one half. Section 3 brings us into the modern era with four efforts to make sense of key features of its ideological experience. We encounter populism through an engagement with several of its most influential theorists, anti-racism through a discourse-analytical historical review, antisemitism as a surprisingly full-fledged ideology and the burgeoning international radical right of the post-Cold War era.

14.Sections 4, 5 and 6 provide a wide-ranging account of the institutional, multi-dimensional and technologically mediated conduits and contexts of ideological activity in our time. Section 4 deals with long-standing but often underestimated vectors of ideological production and transmission: think tanks, political parties, the traditional print and broadcast media, transnational intellectual networks and both state and non-state elites in the policy process. Section 5 explores settings of ideological adaptation and transmission whose critical importance is less widely acknowledged or investigated: the workplace, the world of visual arts and commercial images, the micro-level world of individual psychology and the literary representation of relations between humans and non-human animals. Section 6 confronts us with the ideologies of technological modernity and innovation, as seen through the representation of emerging technologies, the history and possible futures of transhumanism and the fascinatingly contested and politically relevant world of science fiction literature.

Section 7 closes off our volume, with penetrating looks into a broad range of what is currently animating key ideological forces and dynamics across the globe. The tour begins with a discussion of Latin American populism, shifts to the current regime in the People’s Republic of China, takes a slight detour through modern Confucianism’s negotiation with the Communist Party regime there and moves across Asia to consider the Hindu nationalist Modi regime in India. From Asia the tour shifts to Europe’s ideological encounter with elite-driven anti-immigrant agendas, heads to Russia and ideological contestation under Putin, crosses the ocean to consider the ideological character and significance of the post-1970 mobilisation of the Christian Right in the US and crosses the ocean again to explore African communalism and its potential value in fighting entrenched state corruption.

Taken together, these sections and chapters cover territory that we hope those mapping past and present ideologies will find not just useful but stimulating for further innovative research into ideologies. We have presented readers with a multi-disciplinary variety of perspectives on and insights into ideology analysis and look forward to future evidence that our contributors have collectively moved ideology studies forward.

References

Anderson, B. (1983; 2016) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread Of Nationalism, New York NY: Verso, revised edition 2016.

Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideological state apparatuses”, in Brewster, B. (transl.) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.

Ashcraft, R. (1986) Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bailey, G. and Gayle, N. (2003) Ideology: Structuring Identities in Contemporary Life, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Balbi, G. (2024) The Digital Revolution: A Short History of an Ideology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1093/oso/9780198875970.001.0001

Béland, D. and Cox, R. (ed.) (2010) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Benner, M. (2024) “An ideational turn in economic geography?”, Progress in Economic Geography, vol. 2, no. 1, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peg.2024.100014

Berman, S. (2013) “Ideational theorizing in the social sciences since ‘Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State”, Governance, vol. 26, no. 2, 217–237.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1994) The Field of Cultural Production, New York NY: Columbia University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1999) “Le fonctionnement du champ intellectuel”, Regards Sociologiques, vol. 17, no 18, 5–27.

Burke, E. (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France, public domain.

Blyth, M. (1997) “Any more bright ideas? The ideational turn of comparative political economy”, Comparative Politics, vol. 29, no. 1, 229–250.

Campbell, J. and Pedersen, O. (2010) “Knowledge regimes and comparative political economy”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. (eds) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 234–270.

Checkel, J.T. (1998) “The constructive turn in international relations theory”, World Politics, vol. 50, no. 2, 324–348.

Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. (2020) “Media and the social construction of reality”, in Rohlinger, D. and Sobieraj, S. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology, Oxford University Press [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.001.0001

Dukes, J. S. and Mooney, H. A. (2004) “Disruption of ecosystem processes in western North America by invasive species”, Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, vol. 77, no. 3, 411–437.

Engesser, S., Ernst, N., Esser, F. and Büchel, F. (2017) “Populism and social media: How politicians spread a fragmented ideology”, Information, Communication and Society, vol. 20, no. 8, 1109–1126.

Faure, J. (2021) “A Russian version of reactionary modernism: Aleksandr Prokhanov’s ‘spiritualization of technology’”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 26, no. 3, 356–379. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1885591

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2000) “Practising ideology and ideological practices”, Political Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 302–322.

Freeden, M. (2013a) “The morphological analysis of ideologies”, in Freeden, M., Sargeant L. T. and Stears, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook Of Political Ideologies, Oxford Handbooks Online ISBN: 9780191749759, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.001.0001

Freeden, M. (2013b) The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2017) “After the Brexit referendum: Revisiting populism as an ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 22, no. 1, 1–11, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2016.1260813

Freeden, M. (2021) “Discourse, concepts, ideologies: Pausing for thought”, Journal of Language and Politics, vol. 20, no. 1, 47–61.

Freeden, M. (2022) Ideology Studies: New Advances and Interpretations, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Freeden, M., Sargeant L. T. and Stears, M. (ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford Handbooks Online, https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-political-ideologies-9780199585977?cc=ca&lang=en&

Glynos, J. (2001) “The grip of ideology: A Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 6, no. 2, 191–214.

Goes, E. (2021) “Ideas and party change: The role of predistribution in labour’s ideological renewal”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 26, no. 2, 180–200. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1894698

Goldstein, J. and Keohane, R. (ed.) (1993) Ideas and Foreign Policy, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Griffin, R. (2006) “Ideology and culture”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 11, no. 1, 77–99.

Hall, P. A. (1993) “Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: The case of economic policymaking in Britain”, Comparative Politics, vol. 25, no. 3, 275–296.

Hall, S. 1996. “The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees”, in Morley, D. and Chen, K.-H. (ed.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 25–46.

Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan, public domain.

Howarth, D. (2000) Discourse, Buckingham UK: Open University Press.

Humphrey, M., Laycock, D. and Umbach, M. (eds) (2020) Ideologies in Action: Morphological Adaptation and Political Ideas, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Humphrey, M., Umbach, M. and Clulow, Z. (2020) “The political is personal: An analysis of crowd-sourced political ideas and images from a Massive Open Online Course”, in Humphrey, M., Laycock, D. and Umbach, M. (ed.) Ideologies in Action, Abingdon UK: Routledge: 9–26

Kropotkin, P. (1902) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, London: William Heinemann.

Laclau, E. (1996) “The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 3, 201–220.

Laycock, D. (ed.) (2019a) Political Ideology in Parties, Policy and Civil Society: Interdisciplinary Insights, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019.

Laycock, D. (2019b) “Tax revolts, direct democracy and representation: Populist politics in the US and Canada”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 24, no. 2, 158–181, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2019.1589962

Levine, P. (2024) “Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 29, no. 3, 464–491.

Maynard, J. L. and Haas, M. L. (eds) (2022) The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Maynard, J. L. and Mildenberger, M. (2018) “Convergence and divergence in the study of ideology: A critical review”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 48, no. 2, 563–589.

Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Norval, A. J. (2000) “The things we do with words–contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 30, no. 2, 313–346.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2021) “Ideology studies and comparative political thought”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1–10. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.2020994

Ostrowski, M. S. (2022) Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2024) “Ideology and the individual”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 29, no. 1, 1–25.

Peller, T. and Altermatt, F. (2024) “Invasive species drive cross-ecosystem effects worldwide”, Nature Ecology & Evolution, vol. 8, 1087–1097.

Rakoff, R. M. (1977) “Ideology in everyday life: The meaning of the house”, Politics and Society, vol. 7, no. 1, 85–104.

Ritter, C. (2023) “Understanding cosmopolitanism: A morphological approach”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 30, no. 1, 98–117. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2023.2275040

Rousseau, J.-J. (1754/1913) “Discourse on the origins of inequality”, in Cole. G.D.H. (ed. and transl.) The Social Contract and Discourses, London: J.M. Dent.

Schmidt, V. A. (2010) “Taking ideas and discourse seriously: Explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ‘new institutionalism’”, European Political Science Review, vol. 2, no. 1, 1–25.

Schmidt, V. A. (2011) “Reconciling ideas and institutions through discursive institutionalism”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. (ed.) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Somers, M. R. and Block, F. (2005) “From poverty to perversity: Ideas, markets, and institutions over 200 years of welfare debate”, American Sociological Review, vol. 70, no. 2, 260–287.

Sotheby’s Auctions. (2019) The man whose powerful critique of socialism influenced Margaret Thatcher [Online], Available: www.sothebys.com/en/articles/this-is-what-we-believe-margaret-thatcher-and-f-a-hayek 16 Dec 2024.

Stavrakakis, Y. (1997) “Ambiguous ideology and the Lacanian twist”, Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, vol. 8, no. 108, 117–130.

van Dijk, T. A. (1998) Ideology: a Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage.

van Dijk, T. A. (2013). “Ideology and discourse”, in Freeden, M., Sargeant, L. T. and Stears, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Chapter 10. Oxford Handbooks Online, Online ISBN: 9780191749759.

Volkov, Y. G., Khunagov, R. D., Kumykov, A. M. and Sagalaieva, E. S. (2015) “Theoretical approaches to understanding the relationship of ideology and everyday life”, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 3, 357–364.

Warren, M. E. (2000) Democracy and Association, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Williams, L. and Franks, B. (2024) Hybridity and Ideology, Routledge: eBook ISBN 9781003142836.

Worster, D. (1994) Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecology Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yee, A. (1996) “The causal effects of ideas on policies”, International Organization, vol. 50, no. 1, 69–108.

Žižek, S. (2009) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

Section I: Theory and methods of analysis

Introduction

The central concern of this volume – how to analyse ideologies – is inherently intertwined with the question of what ideology is. As Michael Freeden notes in Chapter 2, the explanans is always dependent upon the nature of the explanandum. The chapters in this section reflect upon both the nature of ideology itself, and upon the appropriate methods for its study, with differing degrees of emphasis on the former or the latter. Even if we think we know what ideology “is”, significant challenges remain. There is the question of “where to look” to find empirical examples of ideology, and once we know where to look, how to understand our object of analysis. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, this raises questions of:

The “levels” at which ideology operates (Maynard, Chapter 1, Freeden, Chapter 2).
The aspects of ideological discourse that may be deliberately obscured from public view for reasons of avoiding conflict, persecution, or prosecution (Fleming, Chapter 3).
The ways in which technology might reconfigure and refocus the domain of ideological production, distribution and exchange (Tainturier, Chapter 4).

Accounts of the nature of ideology are, of course, legion (for some prominent examples in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, see Mannheim (1936); Larrain (1979); Thompson (1990); Althusser (1971); Freeden (1996); Eagleton (1991); Ostrowski (2022). Legion, but also highly diverse and, at times, seemingly contradictory; can ideology be both a system of thought that allows people to make sense of the world, and also systematically distorted communication? Or both a structured arrangement of political concepts, and the means by which the operations of power and injustice are masked? If not, does that render our accounts of ideology incoherent? This cacophony of differing interpretations of ideology should not lead us to analytical despair. Ideology is itself a concept that can be subjected to morphological analysis, and its meaning is just as contested, and politically freighted, as any other key concept in politics (Humphrey 2018). Just as we can analyse justice, freedom, or democracy, despite their radically divergent political decontestations, so we can analyse the concept of ideology while taking account of the theoretical, epistemological and political contestations within which it operates.

In his chapter, Jonathan Leader Maynard offers an in-depth exploration of the “levels of analysis” problem in the context of three traditions of enquiry, namely the positivist, critical and interpretive approaches to understanding ideologies. Maynard argues that as different modes of enquiry ask different kinds of questions about ideology, they implicitly operate at different levels of analysis. The levels of analysis identified here are the macro, meso, micro and nano. This way of thinking about ideology analysis allows us to form a matrix relating different modes of enquiry to different levels of ideological operation. Yet the tendencies of different approaches to focus on different levels are often “theoretically arbitrary and rooted in disciplinary habits”, which suggests that, if analysts in these traditions were to focus on previously neglected levels, new, and potentially fruitful, avenues of enquiry would open.

Levels of analysis also feature in Freeden’s chapter, and here the focus is on ideology as a “macro phenomenon”. Freeden contends there are several ways in which ideology might be understood as “macro”, and focuses on two historically important examples. These different approaches to the macro level have led to quite radically divergent traditions of ideology analysis. In one sense, ideologies are macro in that they are comprehensive, “thick” constellations of political concepts and thought practices that stand in competition with one another for control of political language and power. In another, “ideology” represents the dominant, and distorting, narrative that disguises the true sources of power and injustice in society. Of course, on the former understanding, the Marxist “unmasking” endeavour is open to analysis as just another form of ideology, stripped of its “scientific” pretensions. The final section of Freeden’s chapter reflects upon how processes of ideological production, distribution and exchange have radically altered since the 19^th and early 20^th-century heyday of comprehensive ideologies, something picked up in the subsequent chapters in this section.

One problem facing the ideology analyst is that ideologies are not always produced in ways easily amenable to the interested researcher. Some political movements remain underground, to avoid persecution. Outputs from such groups may be coded, jocular, or layered in irony, such that ideological interpretation becomes a far from straightforward matter. In “Excavating the underground”, Sean Fleming offers a nuanced guide to analysing the ideologies of radical groups, which may operate with exactly such coded forms of ideological production. Fleming argues that these problems need not be insurmountable, but they will require a significant degree of methodological flexibility and adaptability on the part of the researcher. Publications, online content, interviews and archival research, each with its potential pitfalls, can offer the researcher the opportunity to at least partially break the code of underground ideologies.

Benjamin Tainturier’s chapter deals head-on with the question of how our methods of analysis need to adapt in the face of the technological changes referred to by Freeden. Since the advent of Web 2.0, a great deal of ideological production, distribution and exchange appears to take place online, across millions of individual contributions from “ordinary” citizens who, far from producing canonical works in politics, may be contributing to ideological development a few sentences at a time. This is very much an analysis of the “micro” level of ideological activity, in the sense we spoke of it in the introduction to this volume. Tainturier discusses two approaches to making sense of online ideological discourse, an “ideological inference method” and “cartographic analysis”. While sensitive to the problems of analysing ideological production at this level, Tainturier shows how computational methods allow the analysis of entire corpora, helping us to understand online ideological content and some of the ways in which (in his own example), forms of hate speech, such as antisemitism, both mutate and replicate in online political discourse.

References

Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses”, in Althusser, L. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York NY: Monthly Review Press.

Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Humphrey, M. (2018) “(De) contesting ideology: The struggle over the meaning of the struggle over meaning”, in Talshir, G., Humphrey, M., and Freeden, M. Taking Ideology Seriously: 21^st Century Reconfigurations, Abingdon UK: Routledge: 119–140.

Larraín, J. (1979) The Concept of Ideology, Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia, New York NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2022) Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Thompson, J. B. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication, Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press.

1. The three traditions of ideological analysis and the levels-of-analysis problem

Jonathan Leader Maynard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-3

Introduction

“Ideology” is a troublesome word, infamous for disagreement over its meaning. Yet scholars across the humanities and social sciences have consistently come back to the concept and put it to descriptive, analytical, critical or predictive use, with a growing resurgence of interest in ideology since the mid-1990s (Ostrowski 2022: 13–14). In part because of the multi-disciplinary nature of this resurgence, it has been fragmented between three broad approaches or “traditions” of ideological analysis: positivist, critical and interpretive.[1] These three traditions are internally diverse and shade into each other at the margins. But they constitute three importantly distinct communities of research with shared theoretical and methodological assumptions and goals.

In this chapter, I use the distinction between these three traditions of ideological analysis to reflect upon the levels-of-analysis problem as it applies to ideology. I begin, in Section 2, by trying to clarify what a levels-of-analysis problem is and how it manifests in the study of ideology. Sections 3, Sections 4 and Sections 5 then address each of the three traditions of ideological analysis, first summarising the tradition and then discussing how the levels-of-analysis problem arises for scholars working within that tradition. Section 6 concludes by suggesting directions forward for the study of ideology.

A brief preamble on definitions: I employ a “general” conception of ideology, as the distinctive political worldviews of individuals, groups and organisations, that provide overarching sets of interpretive and evaluative ideas for guiding political thought and action.[2] This presents ideologies – like “identities” or “discourses” or “institutions” – as ubiquitous. This does not make everything ideology, nor tautologically ensure that ideology is significant, as some allege – any more than the fact that all individuals have identities makes everything identity or guarantees that identity explains everything. Ideology can be prevalent without being relevant for understanding various political dynamics. Broad definitions stand in contrast to two narrower understandings: a “pejorative” conception of ideology as distortionary and/or functional for existing systems of domination; and a “doctrinal” conception of ideologies as fixed, well developed and logically consistent belief systems. I believe these conceptions are needlessly restrictive and empirically unsustainable (see, in general: van Dijk 1998; Rosenberg_ 1988; Freeden 1996; Norval 2000; Jost 2006; Levine 2022), but my analysis in this chapter remains applicable to both.

The levels-of-analysis problem in the context of ideology

What is a levels-of-analysis problem? Almost all phenomena – from trees to governments and from neurons to weather fronts – can be understood as systems of parts existing in an environment. This generally recurs “upwards” and “downwards” ontologically: the environment is itself a system of parts existing in a yet wider environment; and parts of a system are themselves systems of smaller parts. This means that we can always analyse a phenomenon in at least three ways (which might be combined), by examining: (i) the parts that make it up, (ii) the organisation of those parts into an emergent (i.e. greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts) system; and (iii) the way that system’s functioning is itself shaped by its environment (Singer 1961; Jervis 1997). The levels-of-analysis problem refers to the challenge of how we render these different kinds of inquiry coherent and how we determine when to focus on one of them rather than the others.

For example, the levels-of-analysis problem has been prominent in international relations (IR), where scholars are typically interested in what “states” – human communities as instantiated in their political institutions – do in global politics. IR scholars might therefore analyse: (i) the individual decision makers within those states who determine what the state does; (ii) the states as whole social units with their own characteristics (which shape what individuals within those states do); or (iii) the international system of states and how it shapes what its constituent states do (Singer 1961). None of these is “correct” – although scholars do make arguments as to why dynamics at one level might predominate (Waltz 1979). Outcomes in international politics are shaped by processes at all three levels, which are mutually constitutive. But analysing all three simultaneously is not easy, because they typically require different methodological tools and theoretical assumptions, creating tricky trade-offs when examining one level over another.

This problem applies to the study of ideologies. But it gets worse. As discussed above, I understand ideologies as distinctive political worldviews, so one can think about the personal ideology of any individual – Adolf Hitler or Woodrow Wilson or Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, say – through this levels-of-analysis framework. We could focus on: (i) the beliefs, attitudes, concepts or values that are parts of these worldviews; (ii) the way those ideological parts function as an interconnected system of ideas for that individual; or (iii) the broader social environment in which that individual ideology is rooted (including the “ideological environment” of other ideologies).

Often, however, researchers working on ideology aren’t focused on individuals’ personal ideologies. Instead, they study various kinds of ideology at the group level: fascism, liberalism, conservatism, feminism and so on. Despite this being an incredibly familiar line of research, what these group-level ideologies are is not self-evident. It is not the case that those we call fascists or liberals have identical personal political worldviews. And there are more fine-grained sub-types of all these ideologies – Nazism vs Italian fascism, classical liberalism vs welfare liberalism vs neoliberalism, one-nation conservatism vs neoconservatism vs paleoconservatism and so on – which, themselves, remain internally heterogenous.

It gets even worse. Part of what we are doing, when we talk about group ideologies, is simply using an analytical construct like “fascism” to generalise about some key similarities across individuals’ personal ideologies. This is analogous to languages. Every individual’s way of speaking English or Urdu or Breton is unique, but these languages describe the shared properties of their systems of speech and the resulting linguistic community they collectively inhabit. Similarly, what we might call shared ideologies describe core similarities in forms of political thinking and communication amongst individuals. Such similarities are frequent, because people who share common socio-cultural influences, life experiences and personalities tend to be drawn towards similar ideological outlooks ( Denzau and North 1994; Jost, Federico and Napier 2009; Jost 2017). Personal ideologies therefore tend to cluster, with these clusters representing the major shared ideologies of a group or society.

Yet there is another way in which we might talk about ideologies at the group level: ascribing beliefs to a group even when most members do not personally subscribe to those beliefs. If the group members nevertheless recognise those beliefs as the beliefs of “the group”, and expect that others will act as though they believe them, then each individual may do likewise despite their lack of private belief (Gilbert 1987; Wendt 1999: 162–3). For example, members of a terrorist organisation may not be personally convinced of their organisation’s official ideology, but still recognise that ideology as providing the operating framework for the organisation’s actions and consequently continue to follow it. A foreign minister may personally disagree with key components of her party’s ideological programme, yet nevertheless feel pressured to espouse and implement those components as that party’s foreign minister. So the institutional ideology ascribed to a group, organisation or society can have effects independent of the personal ideologies of its members. At the same time, that institutional ideology typically interacts with individuals’ sincere personal ideologies: some might sincerely adopt the ideology because of its institutional prominence, or the institutional ideology might decay because of its lack of real support amongst group members (Noelle-Neumann 1974; Kuran 1989, 1995).

This leaves us with four levels of analysis for ideology: the constituent ideas that make up ideologies, the personal ideologies of individuals, the group ideologies (which could be shared or institutionalised or both) and the broader ideological environment comprised of all the shared and institutionalised ideologies of all groups relevant to our analysis. In addition, we generally should not analyse ideologies as “closed” systems operating independently from any other phenomena. So the broader material and cultural features of the social environments, groups, individuals or sub-individual entities might also come into our analysis. For example, a central debate in political psychology concerns the way personality (a feature of individual psychology) and cultural context (a feature of the group or social environment) shapes an individual’s ideological orientation. But individuals also alter their ideological and broader material and cultural environment through political speech and action. I summarise all this in Figure 1.1.

A conceptual matrix diagram titled Ideological and Non-Ideological across the top. It is layered by scale on the left: Environment Macro, Group Meso, Individual Micro, and Sub-Individual Nano. The diagram illustrates relationships between boxes representing various aspects of ideology, including Ideological Environment, Shared Ideologies, Institutional Ideologies, Personal Ideologies, and Ideology’s Constituent Ideas. Directional arrows show influence across scales, particularly within the “Ideological” column and between the Individual Micro rows.

Figure 1.1 The levels of ideological analysis.

Note: Solid black arrows indicate constitutive relationships. All entities depicted in this figure are likely to be linked by various kinds of casual relationships.

Scholars working on ideology rarely distinguish these levels of analysis or the interaction of phenomena and processes across them. Scholars sometimes discuss the issues involved – analysing, for example, the relationship between individual agency and cultural context in shaping the development of ideologies (Skinner 1974; Wuthnow 1989; Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 12) – but generally in passing and without explicit theorisation. Different traditions of ideological analysis, moreover, have contrasting strengths and weaknesses in considering different levels of ideology. By examining how each of the three major traditions implicitly handles this levels-of-analysis problem, I hope to enable scholars to more clearly think through the interaction of entities and processes at each of these levels and the way they shape the influence of ideology on political and social life.

Positivist ideological analysis

Something akin to the positivist tradition of ideological analysis stretches back to the origins of the field.[3] The term “ideology” emerged out of the French Enlightenment and the work of Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who sought to develop a new science of ideas: an idea-ology. But de Tracy and his fellow ideologists fell afoul of Napoleon who, after a brief period of patronage, turned against them as his French Empire came under criticism from liberals and republicans. For Napoleon, the ideologists represented “dreamers and dangerous dreamers” to whom “we must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered” (Kennedy 1979: 359–60). “Ideology” became a pejorative term of critique, laying foundations for its mobilisation by Karl Marx, to which I return in Section 4.

The modern tradition of positivist research on ideology truly took off after World War II, as part of the wider movement to render the study of politics properly “scientific”. While heterogeneous, positivist social science is united by a primary concern with causal explanations, especially “nomothetic” explanations that appeal to generalised regularities and an understanding of scientific rigour as involving the strict minimisation of errors in measurement and causal inference. Positivist ideological analysis thus studies ideology primarily as a variable in causal explanations: a phenomenon whose variance is either explained by other phenomena or used to explain other phenomena. This has led most positivist ideological analysts to employ quantitative methods. A rough divide exists, here, between political science approaches, focused on analysing public attitudes and the ideological relationship between political elites and mass publics (Jennings 1992) and a newer literature in political psychology, focused on the cognitive processes underpinning ideologies (Jost and Major 2001). Over time, these approaches are becoming intertwined.

For decades, positivist ideological analysis tended to favour more “doctrinaire” conceptions of ideology, since these facilitated easy measurement: researchers treated particular combinations of attitudes as fixed, logically constrained representations of “left” and “liberal”, or “right” and “conservative”, ideologies and could then measure how far those combinations mapped onto research subjects’ attitudes or behaviour in expected ways.[4] This understanding led many to see ideology as limited and rarefied. The “end of ideology debate” of the 1950s and early 1960s revolved around the suggestion that the post-war consensus in Western democracies illustrated, in Bell’s (1988 [1960]) words, the “exhaustion of political ideas” and a consolidation around a pluralist and pragmatic democratic consensus against totalitarian alternatives.[5] The influential work of Philip Converse suggested that rigidly structured belief systems were only typically found amongst political elites (Converse 1964). By contrast, the political attitudes of most citizens were so disorganised that they could not be characterised as liberal/conservative or left/right. Many political scientists followed Converse, concluding, as Jennings (1992: 436) puts it, that while elites “speak from a foundation of a reasonably cohesive ideology”, mass publics “speak from a foundation that is – at least in terms of the conventional liberal–conservative dimension – a fractured, fissured ideology” (see also: Glazer and Grofman 1989; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017).

This view never went unchallenged, and even Converse (1964: 256) recognised that it depended on a narrow focus on prevailing elite belief systems, leaving it possible that alternative “folk ideologies” existed amongst mass publics. Qualitative social scientists often found evidence of such meaningful ideological worldviews among ordinary citizens (Lane 1962). Other scholars went further in suggesting that the portrayal of ordinary people as unideological depended on implausibly narrow assumptions about what ideological belief looks like. Some critiques focused on the limits of the traditional left–right or liberal–conservative ideological spectrum. More complex models of ideological belief are possible, and many positivists suggest that, when we use such models, meaningful ideological worldviews appear more widespread (Conover and Feldman 1981; Rosenberg 1988; Zaller 1992; Ellis and Stimson 2012; Carmines and D’Amico 2015; Levine 2022, Lewis and Lewis 2023). Since the late 1990s, these debates have been reinvigorated through work by political psychologists, who have generally rejected the idea that ideologies must involve fixed and well-defined logical connections between beliefs, while continuing to disagree over the relative usefulness of uni-dimensional, multi-dimensional or non-dimensional representations of ideology (Amodio et al 2007; Jost 2017; Haidt 2012; Saucier 2013; Morgan and Wisneski 2017).

The principal focus of this new work in political psychology has been to show how “different ideologies … elicit and express somewhat different social, cognitive and motivational styles or tendencies on the part of their adherents” (Jost, Federico and Napier 2009: 309), suggesting that underlying personality traits are (alongside social influences) a key determinant of ideological orientations (Caprara and Zimbardo 2004). Jost, Federico and Napier (2009) summarise three main categories of psychological need – epistemic needs, existential needs and relational needs – which vary across personalities and create “elective affinities” for particular ideologies. Haidt (2012) similarly suggests that ideological orientations are rooted in different “moral foundations”: the relative weightings of core values of care, fairness, loyalty, sanctity, authority and liberty. Other work links ideological positions to the big “five factors” of personality: agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion and openness. These predict ideological orientation across a wide range of countries, although with the exact effects varying significantly between countries ( Fatke 2017). Individuals’ levels of “right-wing authoritarianism” and “social dominance orientation” have also been correlated with liberal or conservative ideological commitments and with other tendencies relevant to political thinking, such as prejudicial stereotyping (Hodson, Hogg and Macinnis 2009; Jost, Federico and Napier 2009).

Alongside positivist research on ideology itself, positivists also invoke ideology to explain other political phenomena. Ideology’s role has long been an important topic of debate in research on revolutions (Bailyn, 1992 [1967]; Sewell Jr 1985; Jackson 1989; Goldstone 1991; Parsa 2000), social movements (Snow and Benford 1988; Oberschall 1997; Oliver and Johnston 2000; Zald 2000) and totalitarian political systems (Arendt 1976 [1951]; Linz 2000 [1975]; Kershaw 1993). More recently, there has been a surge of interest in ideology roles in IR (Owen 1997; Haas 2005; Gries 2014; Gries and Yam 2020; Giesen 2020; Haas and Leader Maynard 2023); terrorism and armed conflict (Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood 2014; Leader Maynard 2019; Holbrook and Horgan 2019; Ackerman and Burnham 2019); and political polarisation and populism ( Eichengreen 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2019; Urbinati 2019).

In principle, positivist ideological analysis could study ideology at any of the four levels of analysis laid out in Section 2. In practice, however, there is a bifurcation of the tradition.

Political scientists have focused overwhelmingly on the overarching ideological environment and particular group ideologies – i.e. the macro and meso levels – by analysing either: a) how a general social division between left/right or liberals/conservatives structures political competition; or b) how specific organisational ideologies guide processes like policy formulation and political activism. Political scientists have tended to treat individuals’ ideologies at the micro level, by contrast, as “given”, rather than as something whose origins and internal dynamics need explaining. Political scientists are often interested in what demographic information correlates with such affiliations, but the substantive dynamics at the individual level underpinning such affiliations have, traditionally, been left unaddressed. Nor do most political scientists display interest in the detailed internal character of ideologies, generally just stipulating a definition of individual, shared or institution ideologies briefly (e.g. Ellis and Stimson 2012: 3–6). At most, political scientists offer broad generative explanations of ideology with underlying individual (micro-)level roots, such as the idea that ideological orientation is essentially a matter of tribal group membership (Lewis and Lewis 2023).

Political psychologists, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly concerned with the individual (micro-)level and generally with the way non-ideological micro- and or nano-level factors generate individuals’ ideologies. For example, while some prominent political psychologists agree that a basic left–right or liberal–conservative divide is a structural feature of most societies, they stress the roots of that division in underlying individual-level differences in personality (Jost 2017). Political psychologists recognise that social interactions and media communication influence ideological orientations (Jost, Federico and Napier 2009: 315–17). Yet they have tended to leave research on this dynamic to specialists in other disciplines. Political psychologists have also displayed somewhat more interest than political scientists in the internal character of ideologies: for example, by depicting them as coupling underlying value foundations with more contextual narratives (Haidt, Graham and Joseph 2009), or as systems of interconnected affective appeals to certain psychological needs (Obradović, Power and Sheehy-Skeffington 2020). Yet this interest remains shallower than in the critical or interpretive traditions. Political psychologists still typically lean on broad ideological categories – usually left/right or liberal/conservative – more typical of macro-level theorising (Jost 2017). Even scholars who critique such simple uni-dimensional models usually propose marginally more complex schemes, such as two-dimensional models, that still depict just a few broad macro- or meso-level ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, conservatism and libertarianism (Carmines and D’Amico 2015; Morgan and Wisneski 2017). I return to the strengths and weaknesses of these tendencies in my conclusion.

Critical ideological analysis

After Napoleon dismissed de Tracy and his fellow ideologists as “dreamers and dangerous dreamers”, “ideology” became little more than a rhetorical insult. This changed when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed a critique of the ideological positions of their day from the standpoint of their historical materialist economic and social theory. In this classic Marxist usage, ideology was theorised as a system of thought that sustained the existing social and economic order. Historical materialism suggested that social relations were determined by practical human labour under specific historical conditions. This process was not, however, transparent: the human construction of social relations is concealed by illusory ideas that reify the social order and mask how it reflects certain modes of production. This generates distorted understandings – dominant moralities, religions, metaphysics and political beliefs – which conceal their rootedness in contingent material conditions and serve the interests of the ruling classes, but which can be unmasked by critique (Eagleton 1991: 70–91; McLellan 1995: 9–18).

Though plausibly not Marx’s intention, the increasingly materialist character of Marxist thought by the end of the 19^th century risked making this critique of ideology seem pointless: what mattered was material, not ideational, change. From the 1930s onwards, however, Marx’s most influential successors moved away from rigidly materialist arguments, instead seeing the cultural sphere as an important terrain on which class struggles took place (Lukács, 2023 [1923]; Gramsci 1971). After World War II, work by the Frankfurt School (surrounding thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) and other Marxists such as Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas often influenced by psychoanalysis, expanded this cultural dimension of Marxist critique. In addition, social theorists who shared the Marxist’s critical orientation but often rejected Marxism per se – including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida – placed increasing stress on the way language or “discourse” shapes thought and behaviour. Their theories also implied a need to critique the categories and assumptions of conventional positivist “science” – which, they alleged, was far from the neutral, objective enterprise it purported to be. This fuelled the development of “post-positivist” social science and distinguished critical ideological analysis more firmly from positivist ideological analysis (Cox 1981; Smith, Booth and Zalewski 1996). These ideas were taken up by Jurgen Habermas, Raymond Guess, John Thompson and Slavoj Žižek to generate a significant growth of ideology critique from the 1980s onwards ( Geuss 1981; Žižek 2008 [1989], 1994; Thompson 1984).

In the 21^st century, critical ideological analysis can be organised into three main (but overlapping) categories:

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), rooted in sociolinguistics and discourse studies and associated with (amongst many others) Norman Fairclough, Theo van Leeuwen, Ruth Wodak and Teun van Dijk ( Wodak and Meyer 2009).
Post-Structuralist Ideological Analysis, more directly rooted in Marxist and critical social theory and including the work of Ernesto Laclau, Yannis Stavrakakis, David Howarth, Aletta Norval and Slavoj Žižek. Some of these thinkers have been conceptualised as the “Essex School” due to their associations with the UK’s University of Essex (see: Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000; Townshend 2003).
The New Ideology Critique, more centrally tied to normative political philosophy and political theory and associated with figures including Tommie Shelby, Sally Haslanger, Jason Stanley, Rahel Jaeggi and Enzo Rossi (Shelby 2003; Haslanger 2012; Stanley 2015; Aytac and Rossi 2023; Sankaran 2020).

Thus, like the positivist and interpretive traditions, critical ideological analysis is internally diverse. Yet its practitioners can generally be understood as adhering to the following chain of propositions (see Žižek 1994, Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000, Norval 2000, Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000; Wodak and Meyer 2009; Fairclough 2010; Haslanger 2012):

Discourse constructs and constitutes society, producing meanings and frameworks that influence social practices.
Discourse is conditioned by society, taking place under the influence of other social structures.
(1) and (2) are relatively unobvious features of discourse, requiring analysis to reveal.
Discourse is entangled with power relations, being both shaped by power – because of (2) – and a medium of exercising and legitimating power – because of (1).
On both counts, discourse is entangled with ideology, which is communicated and produced through discourse and serves to structure and empower discourse.
The analysis of ideology is evaluative, not “neutral”. Ideology is produced by power and relations of domination and serves to sustain (though sometimes also challenge) those relations. Critical ideological analysts therefore pursue a project orientated around what McNay (2013: 138) terms “the guiding principle of Critical Theory, namely, to produce an account of society that has the practical aim of unmasking domination and, in doing so, revealing possible paths to emancipation.”

There are important differences between different styles of critical ideological analysis. CDA comes closest to the more empirical focus of positivist and interpretive ideological analysis and sees the discursive construction of social reality as less radical in its implications than post-structuralists (Fairclough 2001: 8–9 and 67). CDA tends towards a more formal–linguistic analysis with a heavy focus on syntactic and practical–interactive elements of language use. CDA places front and centre the study of “stress and intonation”, “word order”, “turn-takings”, “strategies of predication”, “tense”, “modality”, “hesitation”, “nominalisation” and so forth (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 28–30).

By contrast, post-structuralists largely abandon the categories of traditional linguistics in favour of concepts (such as “myths”, “imaginaries”, “empty signifiers”) drawn from literary/cultural theory and neo-/post-Marxist innovations. These tools reflect the central post-structuralist claim that all identities and concepts are necessarily open-ended and contestable and that what is significant is the way they are decontested within specific ideological discourses ( Laclau 1997; Norval 2000). As Norval (2000: 326) summarises: “ideology serves to naturalise what is a contingent result of historical practices of articulation ... it suppresses any sign which could destroy the sense of certainty concerning the nature of the social.”

The new wave of ideology critique shares this concern with destabilising established ideological claims, categories and apparent certainties. But, reflecting its roots in philosophy, it focuses less on analysing the distortionary character or social function of discursive devices and more on identifying the rational reasons to reject ideological claims or frameworks. This might be, for example, because an “immanent critique” shows these ideologies to be internally contradictory or self-defeating – in other words, these ideologies fail on their own terms (Jaeggi 2009). It might, alternatively, be because the role of power and interests in generating and sustaining such ideologies makes them prima facie epistemically flawed, such that we should reject them or treat them with suspicion (Aytac and Rossi 2023).

Taken as a whole, critical ideological analysis has a somewhat intriguing engagement with the levels-of-analysis problem. Critical ideological analysts have overwhelmingly focused on society-wide (macro) or group (meso) discourses, often depicted as hegemonic within the social environment. In early, largely Marxist, critical ideological analysis, the core explanations for these discourses were similarly located at the macro-/meso-level and often seen as non-ideological: ideologies were explained by the fundamental economic structure of society and groups’ structural position within it. By contrast, most modern critical ideological analysis adopts a decidedly nano-centric interrogation of the macro or meso level discourses it studies: CDA analyses individual discursive techniques; post-structuralists analyse particular myths/imaginaries/signifiers; and the new ideology critics study particular distortionary meanings and discursive conventions.

Critical ideological analysts do continue to connect such nano-level phenomena to the meso and macro levels, albeit in different ways. CDA and the new ideology critique tend to depict discourses as rooted in strategic action by groups and organisations. For post-structuralists the central dynamics of discourse are often portrayed as inherent in the very nature of social order and the ontological anxiety of society at large. All three approaches tend to stress the heavy weight of past discourse stretching back over the history of the macro social environment in shaping the tendencies and limits of present discourse, without seeking to render this too deterministic. “Subjects,” as Leonardo (2003: 207), writes, “have one foot in tradition and the other foot in self-reflection”.

As that focus on subjectivity makes clear, critical ideological analysts are hardly uninterested in the individual (micro-)level. They stress the need to “capture both the positioning of subjects within a discursive structure ... and to account for the agency of subjects” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 12). Indeed, critical ideological analysis would seem pointless if it couldn’t speak to individuals in emancipatory ways, encouraging critical reflection on and contestation of dominant discourses (Norval 2000). Nevertheless, emphasis tends to be on the way subjectivity is produced and constrained by society: micro-level variation amongst individuals and the divergent ways they engage with collective discourses is usually more peripheral. Even psychoanalytically informed critical ideological analysis has focused more on general psychological needs or tendencies that explain the overarching power of ideology than on the differing needs of particular individuals (Glynos 2001).

Interpretive ideological analysis

In the early 20^th century, interest in ideology diffused outside Marxist scholarship. Without using the term centrally, leading sociologists like Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto formulated ideas that laid foundations for later interpretive scholarship on ideology. Weber also offered a general account of social science and the importance of “Verstehen” – or systematic empathic understanding – in social explanation, which has been seen by many scholars as offering an alternative to the positivist study of ideas (see Hollis and Smith 1990; Jackson 2016; Beckstein and Weber 2022). Explicit work on “ideology” in this tradition began with Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1940). Mannheim distinguished between the narrow pejorative “particular conception” of ideology typical in Marxist analysis, and a broader non-pejorative “total conception” referring to encompassing systems of thought defining the political consciousness of individuals and groups (Mannheim 1940: 49–53). In deploying the latter, Mannheim (1940: 51) advanced the concept of ideology as a means for studying all “fundamentally divergent thought systems and … different modes of experience and interpretation”, which could be analysed historically as the product of the “life-situation of the thinker”.

Various thinkers have followed in Mannheim’s footsteps, understanding ideologies as commonplace political worldviews and approaching them not as variables in causal explanations but as rich frameworks of meaning that demand detailed interpretation to be understood on their own terms. Clifford Geertz advanced a broad, interpretive approach to studying ideologies, conceived of as cultural systems that serve as “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (Geertz 1964: 64). Historians have also overwhelmingly worked within an interpretive approach. Quentin Skinner presented ideologies as broad systems of ideas that characterised groups locked in political competition and which influenced political actors’ behaviour by setting the terms within which actions could be socially legitimated (Skinner 1974). An ideology’s “political vocabulary” (Tully 1983: 495) of key concepts, Skinner (1974: 294) argues, is the most significant object for study, as “it is … essentially by manipulating this set of terms that any society succeeds in establishing and altering its moral identity”. Similarly, Robert Wuthnow presents ideologies as sets of ideas that bind together social movements and are embedded in, but also somewhat autonomous from, specific social settings. Ideologies provide ways to legitimate political action and mobilise political support that, when successful, extend beyond the circumstances where they were initially articulated (Wuthnow 1989). Historians studying topics as diverse as American foreign policy (Hunt 1987), Stalinist terror (Priestland 2007), Communist political orders (Schull, 1992) and international peace movements ( Ceadel 1980: 1987) have similarly engaged ideologies as sets of ideas that must be interpretively analysed if the behaviour and contexts of historical actors is to be understood.

In recent years, Michael Freeden’s morphological approach constitutes the most influential example of interpretive ideological analysis ( Freeden 2013). For Freeden, ideologies fulfil a ubiquitous political need: providing the frameworks for people to understand their political worlds. They are built from concepts which are “essentially contested”, whose content is both indeterminate and disputed (Freeden 1996: 55–60). Given this indeterminacy, ideologies are characterised by the different ways they “decontest” their component concepts. Indeed, rival ideologies rarely disregard each other’s core concepts entirely, so it is the differently decontested meanings of concepts and the significance attached to them which set ideologies apart. Liberals are not wholly unconcerned with “security” for example, nor socialists with “liberty”, nor conservatives with “equality”. But the ways these concepts are understood and the places they occupy in each ideology vary. Analysing ideologies’ competition over “the control of public political language” (Freeden 2013: 117) – their rival efforts to decontest political concepts – is thus crucial. This raises the most distinctive contention of Freeden’s work: that the decontestation of conceptual meanings is best understood by analysing ideological morphology: the structural arrangements of political concepts in ideological systems. Ideologies are thus “distinctive configurations of political concepts [that] create specific conceptual patterns from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations” (Freeden 1996: 4).

Other forms of interpretive ideological analysis, many influenced by Freeden, have emerged over the last two decades. A “rhetorical approach” to ideology associated in particular with Alan Finlayson and Richard Shorten (with precedent in the “rhetorical psychology” of Michael Billig), shares Freeden’s emphasis on interpreting ideologies as rich systems of meaning, but emphasises analysis of the rhetorical techniques that characterise different manifestations of ideology (Finlayson 2012; Shorten 2011; Billig 1991). Finlayson (2012: 14) argues that such rhetorical dimensions of ideology are “not merely how an independently established ideology proves itself” but “part of what that ideology is” and therefore deserve investigation. Various scholars use diagrammatic forms of ideological “mapping” to interpret, model and communicate the complex content and morphology of ideologies. The Cognitive-Affective Mapping methodology, for example, generates “a visual representation of the emotional values of a group of interconnected concepts” (Thagard 2012: 42) in which different symbols denote the varying affective statuses (positive, negative, neutral or ambiguous) of elements in a belief system and the relations between these elements. Levine (2022) has recently advanced a comparable method for constructing “reason networks” that reveal the meaningful ideological character of ordinary people’s thinking in ways ignored by traditional (largely quantitative) methods of surveying mass publics.

To a greater extent than the positivist or critical traditions, interpretive ideological analysis has focused on the study of ideological content itself, especially specific concepts/ideas (nano) and group ideologies (meso). The defining feature of Freeden’s morphological approach is its distinction between holistic ideological systems at the micro/meso level and the mere aggregation of nano-level ideas. The structural configuration of nano-level ideas changes the meaning and effect of those ideas. There is also, embedded within Freeden’s depiction of the role of ideologies in political life, a strong meso-level focus on ideologies as competitive families that organise group politics by decontesting units of public political language and providing packages of interdependent ideas. Sometimes interpretivists focus on the micro-level personal ideologies of individuals, though this has tended to be confined to work by intellectual historians on canonical thinkers (not consistently employing the language of “ideology”). Interpretive ideological analysts appear, by contrast, more sceptical of macro-level ideology: sweeping notions of “the left” or the “national ideology” of a whole society are seen as obscuring too much internal variation and division to have much meaning. Even the classic “big-ism” ideologies need to be broken down into their complex strands before we can talk about real worldviews that people actually hold (Freeden 1996, 2009).

Interpretive ideological analysts may adopt a more macro-level focus when considering how non-ideological factors influence ideologies, typically endorsing a historicist contextualism that sees ideologies as constrained by the cultural resources and political struggles of particular circumstances. As Wuthnow (1989: 3), writes, talking of the Protestant Reformation:

Each sermon, each tract, each disputation was produced in a specific social setting. Each setting was in turn connected with broader social, economic, political and cultural forces. These forces constituted an environment … in which the Reformation could emerge as a concrete collective movement. The opportunities and limitations facing the reformers came from this environment. The reformers could advance their ideas only by securing resources from it.

Likewise, the Cambridge School of intellectual history, influenced by Skinner’s work, has been centrally defined by its stress on the contextual limits on the meaning and function of particular discursive moves and intellectual claims (Tully 1983).

By contrast, non-ideological factors at the meso, micro and nano level rarely figure in interpretive research. A partial exception can be found in work on the group interests and priorities of particular political parties or social movements in shaping the formulation of shared or institutional ideologies (Oberschall 1997). Interpretive ideological analysts tend to reject an overly instrumental view of ideologies as nothing but rhetorical tools. But they do contend that ideologies, to be effective, must formulate and organise political language in advantageous ways within competitive political struggles (Skinner 1974; Tully 1983; Zald 2000). What is typically left unclear here is what makes a particular ideological articulation or morphology “advantageous” (a question to which positivist and critical approaches might be thought to offer clearer answers centred around communicative power and psychological needs).

Conclusion

This chapter surveyed the major approaches to the study of ideology and considered how they address the levels-of-analysis problem. An intrinsic feature of my approach has been to make broad generalisations about positivist, critical and interpretive approaches to ideological analysis and, by implication, their practitioners. There are obviously exceptions to almost all those generalisations. I have not been trying to stamp particular identities onto individual scholars, but to discuss the general tendencies within these communities of research to encourage more explicit consideration of the levels-of-analysis problem.

My central message is that ideological analysis remains rather inchoate in how it thinks about different levels of analysis. There are intuitive distinctions within and between the traditions: the macro/meso lean of positivist political science, the micro/nano lean of positivist political psychology, the macro/nano lean of critical ideological analysis and the meso/nano lean of interpretive ideological analysis. That political psychologists focus on individual psychology, while critical ideological analysts see individuals as heavily constrained by shared discourses, for example, is unsurprising.

Yet many of these focal points are theoretically arbitrary and rooted in disciplinary habits. That suggests significant opportunities for new lines of research. There is a general neglect of the distinctive personal ideologies of individuals, for example, across all three traditions of ideological analysis (with the partial exception of work by intellectual historians). The distinctive dynamics of shared vs institutional ideologies have rarely been examined. Efforts to combine positivist accounts of the factors shaping ideological orientations with an interpretive attention to the rich meaning of different ideological families could offer powerful new insights to deal with the 21^st century’s changing ideological landscape (and some work on populism makes early steps in this direction).[6] More work within critical ideological analysis could disaggregate social orders and analyse ideological discourses of specific group settings and organisational dynamics rather than discourses at work in society at large (e.g. Richardson and Wodak 2009).

Most of all, ideological analysts need to be clearer about the levels of analysis they focus on and the constitutive and causal relationships connecting phenomena across the macro, meso, micro and nano levels. Ideological analysis should aspire to a clear, integrated understanding of how processes and entities across these levels relate. We should be able to explain how broad ideological families relate to individual worldviews, how the social ideological landscape influences the internal organisation of individual ideologies, how underlying psychological traits generate variants of “left” and “right” ideology and how group and organisational processes imbue ideologies with properties distinct from individual-level worldviews. For all the strides made by the study of ideology in the last three decades, we still seem far from that kind of integrated multi-level understanding. To achieve it, we must break down the research habits that lock our attention onto certain ideological phenomena and break through the boundaries between both the four main levels and three main traditions of ideological analysis.

References

Ackerman, G. and Burnham, M. (2019) Towards a definition of terrorist ideology. Terrorism and Political Violence, Early Release Online Version.

Amodio, D. M., Jost, J. T., Master, S. L. and Yee, C. M. (2007) “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism”, Nature Neuroscience, vol. 10, 1246–1247.

Arendt, H. (1976 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism, Orlando FL, Harcourt Books.

Aytac, U. and Rossi, E. (2023) “Ideology critique without morality: A radical realist approach”, American Political Science Review, vol. 117, 1215–1227.

Bailyn, B. (1992 [1967]) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Beckstein, M. and Weber, R. (2022) Modelling Interpretation and the Practice of Political Theory, New York NY: Routledge.

Bell, D. (1988 [1960]) The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Berman, S. (2019) “Populism is a symptom rather than a cause: Democratic disconnect, the decline of the center-left, and the rise of populism in Western Europe”, Polity, vol. 51, 654–667.

Billig, M. (1991) Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology, London: Sage.

Blommaert, J. and Bulcaen, C. (2000) “Critical discourse analysis”, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 29, 447–466.

Brick, H. (2013) “The end of ideology thesis”, in Freeden, M., Tower Sargent, L. and Stears, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Caprara, G. V. and Zimbardo, P. G. (2004) “Personalizing politics: A congruency model of political preference”, American Psychologist, vol. 59, 581–594.

Carmines, E. G. and D’amico, N. J. (2015) “The new look in political ideology research”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 18, 205–216.

Ceadel, M. (1980) Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ceadel, M. (1987) Thinking About Peace and War, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conover, P. J. and Feldman, S. (1981) “The origins and meaning of liberal/conservative self-identifications”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 25, 617–645.

Converse, P. E. (1964) “The nature of belief systems in mass publics”, in Apter, D. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, London: Free Press of Glencoe.

Cox, R. W. (1981) “Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory”, Millenium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 10, 126–155.

Denzau, A. T. and North, D. C. (1994) “Shared mental models: Ideologies and institutions”, Kyklos, vol. 47, 3–31.

Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.

Eichengreen, B. (2018) The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, C. and Stimson, J. A. (2012) Ideology in America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fairclough, N. (2001) Language and Power, Harlow: Pearson Education.

Fairclough, N. (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, Harlow UK: Pearson.

Fatke, M. (2017) “Personality traits and political ideology: A first global assessment”, Political Psychology, vol. 38, 881–899.

Finlayson, A. (2012) “Rhetoric and the political theory of ideologies”, Political Studies, vol. 60, 751–767.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2009) Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Freeden, M. (2013) “The morphological analysis of ideology”, in Freeden, M., Tower Sargent, L. and Stears, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geertz, C. (1964) “Ideology as a cultural system”, in Apter, D. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, London: Free Press of Glencoe.

Geuss, R. (1981) The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giesen, K.-G. (ed.) (2020) Ideologies in World Politics, Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

Gilbert, M. (1987) “Modelling collective belief”, Synthese, vol. 73, 185–204.

Glazer, A. and Grofman, B. (1989) “Why representatives are ideologists though voters are not”, Public Choice, vol. 61, 29–39.

Glynos, J. (2001) “The grip of ideology: A Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 6, 191–214.

Goldstone, J. A. (1991) “Ideology, cultural frameworks, and the process of revolution”, Theory and Society, vol. 20, 405–453.

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gries, P. (2014) The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Gries, P. and Yam, P. P. C. (2020) “Ideology and international relations”, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, vol. 34, 135–141.

Gutiérrez Sanín, F. and Wood, E. J. (2014) “Ideology in civil war: Instrumental adoption and beyond”, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 51, 213–226.

Haas, M. L. (2005) The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789–1989, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Haas, M. L. and Leader Maynard, J. (eds.) (2023) The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics, London: Allen Lane.

Haidt, J., Graham, J. and Joseph, C. (2009) “Above and below left-right: Ideological narratives and moral foundations”, Psychological Inquiry, vol. 20, 110–119.

Hall, S. (1996) “The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees”, in Morley, D. and Chen, K.-H. (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.

Hamilton, M. B. (1987) The elements of the concept of ideology. Political Studies, vol. 35, 18–38.

Haslanger, S. (2012) Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hodson, G., Hogg, S. M. and Macinnis, C. C. (2009) “The role of ‘dark personalities’ (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy), Big Five personality factors, and ideology in explaining prejudice”, Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 43, 686–690.

Holbrook, D. and Horgan, J. (2019) “Terrorism and ideology: Cracking the nut”, Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 13, 2–15.

Hollis, M. and Smith, S. (1990) Explaining and Understanding International Relations, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Howarth, D., Norval, A. and Stavrakakis, Y. (eds.) (2000) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Howarth, D. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2000) “Introducing discourse theory and political analysis”, in Howarth, D., Norval, A. and Stavrakakis, Y. (eds.) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hunt, M. H. (1987) Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Jackson, K. D. (1989) “The ideology of total revolution”, in Jackson, K. D. (ed.) Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jackson, P. T. (2016) The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics, Abingdon: Routledge.

Jaeggi, R. (2009) “Rethinking ideology”, in Bruin, B. D. and Zurn, C. F. (eds.) New Waves in Political Philosophy, Houndmills UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jennings, M. K. (1992) “Ideological thinking among mass publics and political elites”, The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 56, 419–441.

Jervis, R. (1997) System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social life, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jost, J. T. (2006) “The end of the end of ideology”, American Psychologist, vol. 61, 651–670.

Jost, J. T. (2017) “Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political psychology,” Political Psychology, vol. 38, 167–207.

Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M. and Napier, J. (2009) “Political ideology: Its structure, functions and elective affinities”, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 60, 307–337.

Jost, J. T. and Major, B. (eds.) (2001) The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice and Intergroup Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, E. (1979) “Ideology’ from Destutt de Tracy to Marx”, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 40, 353–368.

Kershaw, I. (1993) “‘Working towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the nature of the Hitler Dictatorship”, Contemporary European History, vol. 2, 103–118.

Kinder, D. R. and Kalmoe, N. P. (2017) Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Kuran, T. (1989) “Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution”, Public Choice, vol. 61, 41–74.

Kuran, T. (1995) Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Laclau, E. (1997) “The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology”, MLN, vol. 112, 297–321.

Lane, R. E. (1962) Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes what he Does, New York NY: The Free Press of Glencoe.

Leader Maynard, J. (2013) “A map of the field of ideological analysis”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 18, 299–327.

Leader Maynard, J. (2017) “Ideology”, in Outhwaite, W. and Turner, S. (eds.) Handbook of Political Sociology, London: Sage.

Leader Maynard, J. (2019) “Ideology and armed conflict”, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 56, 635–649.

Leonardo, Z. (2003) “Discourse and critique: Outlines of a post-structural theory of ideology”, Journal of Education Policy, vol. 18, 203–214.

Levine, P. (2022) “Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas”, Journal of Political Ideologies, OnlineFirst, 1–28.

Lewis, H. and Lewis, V. (2023) The Myth of Left and Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Linz, J. J. (2000 [1975]) Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner.

Lukács, G. (2023 [1923]) History and Class Consciousness, London: Verso.

Mannheim, K. (1940) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubney and Co.

Mclellan, D. (1995) Ideology, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Mcnay, L. (2013) “Contemporary critical theory”, in Freeden, M., Tower Sargent, L. and Stears, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morgan, G. S. and Wisneski, D. C. (2017) “The structure of political ideology varies between and within people: Implications for theories about ideology’s causes”, Social Cognition, vol. 35, 395–414.

Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974) “The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion”, Journal of Communication, vol. 24, 43–51.

Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019) Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Norval, A. (2000) “The things we do with words – contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 30, 313–346.

Oberschall, A. (1997) Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests, and Identities, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Obradović, S., Power, S. A. and Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2020) “Understanding the psychological appeal of populism”, Current Opinion in Psychology, vol. 35, 125–131.

Oliver, P. E. and Johnston, H. (2000) “What a good idea! Ideologies and frames in social movement research”, Mobilization: An International Quarterly Review, vol. 4, 37–54.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2022) Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Owen, J. M. (1997) Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Parsa, M. (2000) States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Priestland, D. (2007) Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, J. E. and Wodak, R. (2009) “Recontextualising fascist ideologies of the past: Right-wing discourses on employment and nativism in Austria and the United Kingdom”, Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 6, 251–267.

Rosenberg, S. W. (1988) Reason, Ideology and Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sankaran, K. (2020) “What’s new in the new ideology critique?”, Philosophical Studies, vol. 177, 1441–1462.

Saucier, G. (2013) “ISMS dimensions: Toward a more comprehensive and integrative model of belief-system components”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 104, 921–929.

Schull, J. (1992) “What is ideology? Theoretical problems and lessons from Soviet-type societies”, Political Studies, vol. 40, 728–741.

Seliger, M. (1976) Ideology and Politics, London: George Allen and Unwin.

Sewell Jr., W. H. (1985) “Ideologies and social revolutions: Reflections on the French case”, Journal of Modern History, vol. 57, 57–85.

Shelby, T. (2003) “Ideology, racism, and critical social theory”, The Philosophical Forum, vol. 34, 153–188.

Shorten, R. (2011) “Towards a political rhetoric of wrongdoing: The case of moral equivalence”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16, 195–219.

Singer, J. D. (1961) “The level-of-analysis problem in international relations”, in Knorr, K. and Verba, S. (eds.) The International System: Theoretical Essays, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Skinner, Q. (1974) “Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action”, Political Theory, vol. 2, 277–303.

Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (eds.) (1996) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Snow, D. A. and Benford, R. D. (1988) “Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization”, International Social Movement Research, vol. 1, 197–217.

Stanley, J. (2015) How Propaganda Works, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thagard, P. (2012) “Mapping minds across cultures”, in Sun, R. (ed.) Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Thompson, J. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Townshend, J. (2003) “Discourse theory and political analysis: A new paradigm from the Essex School?”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 5, 129–142.

Tully, J. H. (1983) “The pen is a mighty sword: Quentin Skinner’s analysis of politics”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 13, 489–509.

Urbinati, N. (2019) Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Van Dijk, T. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage.

Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Politics, Boston MA: McGraw Hill.

Wendt, A. (1999) Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wodak, R. And Meyer, M. (Eds.) (2009) Methods Of Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage.

Wuthnow, R. (1989) Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Zald, M. N. (2000) “Ideological structured action: An enlarged agenda for social movement research”, Mobilization: An International Journal, vol. 5, 1–16.

Zaller, J. R. (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Žižek, S. (2008 [1989]) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

Žižek, S. (ed.) (1994) Mapping Ideology, London: Verso.

2. Ideology writ large

Macroscopic compass or flawed totality

Michael Freeden

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-4

Introduction: Substance and method

Ideology may not be as old as the hills, but it is as old as the interacting individuals and groups that comprise humanity, contrary to those scholarly opinions that regard ideology as a modern phenomenon, often associated with the coining of the term in the 1790s by the French intellectual aristocrat Antoine Destutt de Tracy. For from the moment it has been possible to identify group-oriented political debate in mutually competitive, overbearing or cooperative relationships, asserting and justifying political “truths”, “facts” or “knowledge” and vying for support for their ideas and solutions, ideologies have made their mark in the public sphere. Long before they sported a specific label – “ideology” – societies and their rulers devised and advocated plans for combined action or inaction and they battled over the control of political language as a complement to public policy. Whoever exerts linguistic and rhetorical sway over a society can hold it in an iron grip, irrespective of other physical and institutional means at their disposal. Words matter.

Such ideational and discursive designs had numerous origins. Several emerged from religious beliefs, visions and injunctions that sought to direct everyday life and conduct. Increasingly, however, shared secular and national myths also provided the bases for a generalised appreciation of collective identity or for fortifying the more specific power of ruling classes. On a deeper level, ideologies were manifestations – overt or covert – of the cultural and attitudinal apparatuses that underpinned human practices as they negotiated various social environments. That approach typified the once common use of the term “ideology” among historians of ideas and cultural anthropologists, in which ideology was approached as an all-embracing, pervasive singularity held together by folklore, ritual, everyday conduct and shared language (Larrain 1979: 130–171).

The early usages of ideology are hugely instructive, accounting for its initial connotations and setting the tone for much of its future analysis. Two opposing trends, both anchored in the aftermath of the French Revolution, derived respectively from Destutt de Tracy and the aspirant conqueror of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte ( Lichtheim 1967: 3–46). The first trend sought to fashion an empirical and scholarly science tasked with uncovering the distinct patterns of a seminal type of social discourse: ideology as the study of ideas. The second trend converted “ideology” into a polemical and derogatory term, challenging its viability and quashing its development as a science. Whereas Napoleon had initially sympathised with the “ideologues” as purveyors of knowledge, he now excoriated ideology as impractical, illusory and obfuscating – an early precursor of Marxist conceptions of ideology as a distorted mirror-image of the real world (Marx and Engels 1970: 46–8, 64–7), though entirely bereft of Marx’s and Engels’ theoretical buttressing. Those diverse investigative beginnings generated a dual macroscopic focus with influential separate agendas: ideology as a substantively comprehensive scheme of thinking concerning a society and its political practices; and ideology as an all-encompassing, flawed mode of thinking in and about a society that requires root and branch holistic decoding and correction.

In the 1930s the inquiry into ideology obtained a new lease of life through Karl Mannheim’s influential study Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim, 1936). That first major exploration of ideology anchored its macro analysis in a powerful theoretical setting and identified a total conception of ideology as an omnipresent Weltanschauung, deeming it to be integral to the larger body of social meaning and the structure of historical reality. It was “the ideology of an age or of a concrete historico-social group … when we are concerned with the characteristics and composition of the total structure of the mind of this epoch or of this group” (Mannheim 1936: 56, 86–7). Unlike Marxism, Mannheim abandoned the view that the totality of ideology was invariably pejorative and eliminable, retaining its negativity for a narrower and particular mode, psychological and interest-driven. Its full form, however, indicated an extensive, permanent and inescapable immersion in a mutating lived culture and its practices.

The Mannheimian pathway of disinterested exploration has only recently re-emerged, in a nuanced and mature form, as a respectable understanding of ideology’s complex meanings, variants, morphology and pivotally active role in the realm of politics – mapping, analyzing and interpreting. Informed in part by the Weberian dedication to “Verstehen”, it constitutes a qualitative version of the “evidence-based” research beloved by many social scientists and historians. In this instance, however, evidence is supplied by investigating the mutating ideational arrangements that societies produce, disseminate and consume over time and across space ( Freeden 1996).

Alternative macros

Though ideologies are now predominantly accepted as permanent forms of thinking politically – arguably even when subscribing to their derogatory connotations – the means of identifying and tracing their percolation have undergone many transformations. It is still commonplace to consider their default manifestation as a substantial panoply of political ideas harking back to revered and complex texts. That is undoubtedly a salient reason for portraying the phenomenon of ideology as typically macroscopic, due to the high reputational standing of the philosophers from whose opus ideologies are presumed to derive and in general due to the far-reaching range of significant issues ideologies incorporate.

However, an ideology is a macro entity in several further senses. One may alight on its notable public visibility, a visibility not deriving from refined sources but largely reliant on ingrained cultural paradigms or linked to methods used to infiltrate social life, such as the mass media or as a propaganda tool. One may also examine the obverse of that penetration – the capacity of an ideology to mobilise broad support, either as a successful trader in desired social goods or as the provider of enticing collective futures. One may note an ideology’s suturing role in joining fragmented or piecemeal events, recollections and common experiences, mixing facts and imagination – often in a concealed manner (Bourdieu 1977: 167–8; Freeden 2022: 241–268). The gaps and silences present in any nation’s historical account are ironed out, producing a synthetically seamless narrative. Finally, at the level of scholarship the macro status of an ideology also relates to its centrality as an analytical tool through which to decode the most prominent types of political thought. Contemporary scholarship now recognises the omnipresence of ideology, emanating from all sectors of a society, albeit at different levels of articulation, even employing diverse vocabularies: formal, legal, academic, literary, religious or colloquial. That too is an indication of its standing as an integral component of human interaction. These separate facets are all pertinent to the following discussion, even if they have all come under strain in recent decades as meso and micro perspectives increasingly invite the limelight.

At the twin scholarly levels of inventiveness and guidance, influential and deeply ingrained philosophical traditions signposted the way to realising the good communal life. In that sense ideologies have no starting point, just as – despite repeated assertions in the 20^th century – they have no endpoint either. Nonetheless, it was mainly in the 19^th century that the concept of ideology emerged as denoting a relatively organised and coherent body of ideas, principles and doctrines that steered and delimited social thought and choices with which members of a society were imbued or to which they could subscribe. The leading ideological families were macroscopic in their selective sourcing of ideas. Ideologies were almost invariably located in major discourses with philosophical, historical or literary aspirations, not in the everyday vernacular with its staccato streamlining or unsystematic utterances, to which the exploration of ideological expression has eventually become more attuned. Liberalism, conservatism and socialism became ideology’s most conspicuous and eminent incarnations in that period, reaching their heyday as political thought-practices and reinforced by hefty tomes and treatises. None of the other ideologies contending for that commanding space, then or since – whether anarchism, communism, nationalism, fascism, environmentalism or even more recently and more dubiously populism (Moffitt 2020: 12–15; Müller 2016) – has exercised quite such a consistent and durable sway over the public arena.

Confronting complexity

The emphasis on large-scale political creeds allowed some commentators to see societies as persistently in the clutches of a ruling and monolithic ideology. Among social theorists a “dominant ideology” thesis emerged that regarded the paramountcy of one ideology over others as a key distinguishing mark of the genre (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1980), although eyes capable of discerning greater diversity could detect more than one ideology in the shadows or spot ideologies that were simply disregarded or marginalised. Viewing ideologies as separate entities in a tussle for supremacy, however, encouraged the pronounced propensity to conceive of them in the singular, as largely solid and well-knit bodies of political categorisations and prescriptions with concrete and worldly consequences. The notion of a homogenous bundle of ideas that demanded wholesale acceptance contributed to the impression that ideologies occupied parallel discursive and mobilising spaces alongside one another, possessing clear-cut boundaries. That spatial arrangement was reinforced by the heavy dependence of ideologies either on pioneering works or on prominent individuals – in the best-known case, fusing the two simply by adding an “ism” to Marx’s name, a systematised procedure called “gigantomania” by one scholar (Golob 1954: 603). The writings of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill or Edmund Burke were excavated for their creative role in shaping bodies of ideological thinking. That reliance not only imparted unity and visibility to ideological output but conferred an aura of almost unquestionable authority associated with the prestige of retrospectively “founding” figures. Transmitting intimations of divine spiritual will, philosophical truth or commanding voice, such texts and individuals reinforced the certainties they were intended to establish ab initio, often by bestowing charismatic and iconic stature on the leading dramatis personae.

From the viewpoints of their adherents, ideologies were often comprehended as conclusive claims to social knowledge, public virtue and the politically operational paths deriving therefrom. The reformist and radical among them claimed to be universally applicable, potentially consolidating their reach across the globe, impervious to cultural pluralism. Among them could be found communism, some varieties of socialism and even forms of liberalism in its 19^th-century elaborations. They were assumed to be preponderantly overt, with only a few observers alert to their concealed aspects. But that openness never existed. All ideologies contain both deliberate and unintentional preferences and biases. Ideological “exports” believed to secure a standardising and universalising mission were invariably repackaged and consumed differentially at their ports of entry, adding local flavours that recontextualised their contents and rearranged the relative effects of their miscellaneous ingredients, while simultaneously removing several items. Thus, liberals may have intended to universalise a respect for constitutionalism and rights, but liberalism could be redesigned exclusively as the pursuit of free trade or of social and ethnic pluralism. Moreover, universalising aspirations often became a two-way street, particularly in colonial settings. Their unifying impact radiated outwards from an ideology’s central mass but was met by a reverse flow of a linguistic and ideational currency emitted from the subsequent ideological outposts – both strengthening and altering the initial cores on which those ideologies built (Bayly 2011).

Whereas the cores of the well-established macro ideologies contain pivotal and distinctive concepts and values, they branch out to sustain further fluid ideational arrangements, all of which combine to flesh out an intricate socio-political Weltanschauung. They consequently exhibit a thick-centred morphology, in contrast to thin-centred ideologies such as nationalism or feminism that are more issue-oriented. Complexity thus plays an important role in the conceptual vocabulary of the ideologies that have stood the test of time and assimilated an assortment of fundamental beliefs and modes of argumentation. That kind of complexity does not dispense with the decontestation – the attempt to finalise meaning – to be found in all ideologies, namely the choice of one conceptual interpretation from among the many potential conceptions any concept will harbour. But it does offer a more generous palette for preferences and selection. Thick centres enable an ideology to sustain a substantial constellation of ideas while exercising considerable flexibility in assigning different relative weightings to the components nestling within its core. The composite core can concurrently feed an abundance of adjacent and peripheral concepts and policies that afford the given ideology long-term adaptability and clout.

Thin-centred ideologies, however, are far more constrained in their scope. Although the genres of feminism and environmentalism have macro pretensions in endeavouring to speak to and for a society in its entirety, their ideational brief is not comprehensive but deliberately selective and truncated. For balance, they borrow from other ideological families on matters of social justice, wealth distribution or the public-private divide, thickening out de facto (Freeden 1996: 485–7). The notable exception here is right-wing populism, which hardly meets the requirements even for a thin-centred ideology. The category of thin-centred ideologies clearly indicates that there is something beyond the centre, but the populist core is not a potential centre for something broader or more inclusive ( Freeden 2017), rendering it even further distanced from the realm of macro ideologies.

In their modern rather than postmodern guise, ideologies were formidable political entities. Grandiose and ideationally ambitious – whether as templates or narratives – they performed a range of functions: legitimating, reassuring, protecting, transforming or combatting. They postulated a way of thinking intended to unite a society, tying together numerous loose ends into a package that could be aimed at effecting sweeping change or retarding it. For the anthropologist Clifford Geertz ideologies were an invaluable charting device, providing “maps of problematic social reality” (Geertz 1964: 64). They furnished a society with spatially cohesive configurations that bolstered its cultural self-understanding and purposiveness, often smoothing out internal stresses and strains.

In the main, macro ideologies were rationally thought-out master schemes, but they also developed, in varying degrees, as a way of being – a specific sense of anchorage in a defined political space and an allegiance to a set of common values. Furthermore, to an extent underplayed by political philosophers but gradually accepted by students of political language and style, they were repositories of emotion, even passion. Their affective elements assisted crucially in experiencing social life, mobilising public activism, commanding loyalty and committing key social groups to the service of their state (Ahmed 2004). Richly equipped with an abundance of properties and potential, the macro ideologies are always also coordinated and adversarial fighting instruments, channelling power to further their ideals, usually when confronted in fact or fantasy with rival ideological forces. Pointedly, those rivalries have also woven a mesh of mutual interdependence inasmuch as the competition among the major ideologies triggers reactive positions and strategies, as well as feuds involving the semantics of words and concepts, including attempts to appropriate the phraseology and rhetoric of opponents (Finlayson 2013).

The thick ideologies flaunt national and, to a lesser degree, international ambitions. They encompass a double macro role: selecting and injecting purpose into governmental plans at the highest and most inclusive level; and plotting a vade mecum through which people can choose – or at least make out in vague terms – their location and path in the extensive social web they inhabit. Misidentification of the beliefs in which they are wrapped and their subsequent outcomes is not uncommon, exacerbating the boundary problems that ideologies inexorably exhibit. Although the drawing of boundaries is a ubiquitous practice of political thought and action, to insist rigorously on their impermeability distorts the fluid patterns of ideological morphology and the interdependence of the ideas and beliefs it traces ( Freeden 2013: 130–132).

Another phase, between ideational gravitas and inundation by a babble of voices from below, materialised separately. Under the influence of positivistic, empirically based predilections driven by American social science in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of the major belief systems shrank. Rather than attaching ideologies to weighty texts, philosophers and ideologues, they were portrayed by scholars as assemblages of beliefs, attitudes and opinions at grass-roots level, discovered by surveys and statistics, classified chiefly as psychological dispositions (Lane 1962). This approach offered an alternative grand method of identifying ideology and theorising about it. Conspicuously, in the American context it often subscribed to the crude dichotomous categorisation of “liberal versus conservative” (Hanson, O’Dwyer and Lyons 2019). On another dimension, the tendency of some American right-of-centre political commentators to conflate socialism and social–democratic reform with communism has also served to elevate highly generalised ideological constructs. Here too were macro unities in the making, achieved by brushing more revealing nuances under the carpet. In the case of liberalism, that was abetted by its simplistic reduction to individual and market freedoms at the expense of its more elaborate manifestations that elicited profound cultural or intellectual allegiance.

Internal diversities

Liberalism thus offers an instructive case of internal diversity within macro ideologies. It has been host to gravitational forces that rotated around diverse ideational stalwarts, addressing alternative currencies of universalisation. Among the more established ones, three of the most significant were rights, the nation-state and markets. Human rights were intrinsically defensive of life, liberty and (in different versions) estates (Locke) or the pursuit of happiness (the American Declaration of Independence). Those rights were shored up by ascribing to them a natural or inalienable status. Liberty in particular became the bedrock of an enhanced individualism, protective of the spaces in which people were free to act and develop, provided that none was harmed in the process. The notion of a constitutionally and ethically constrained government became an inseparable feature of liberalism (Starr 2007: 21–27).

On the other hand, the universalism of nation-states and of markets pulled in different directions. A central political element of the nation-state is its exclusive claim to sovereignty over territory, a claim whose pedigree patently predates liberalism. But the liberal, universalising component was to predicate that territorial claim on the universalised right to national self-determination. The Italian Risorgimento of the 19^th century stands as an illuminating fusion of a movement with both unifying and exclusivist ends: liberal and humanist on one dimension, revolutionary and combative on another (Mazzini 1907). Yet sovereignty is not only the ultimate control over space: tellingly, it has also been used to underscore the ultimate control over time – the arrogation of a nation’s history by the self-proclaimed guardians of an ethno-national monopoly. That has become pronounced in recent assertions of right-wing populists, repositioning sovereignty beyond the liberal orbit. As for the market, within the family of liberalisms it drew on the creativity of individual entrepreneurship but channelled it into economic and commercial transactions. Self-interest, material flourishing and a potentially unlimited domain of mutual benefits were grist to that ever-grinding mill, nonetheless holding out the promise of a benign world order (Cobden 1846).

However, in the latter part of the 20^th century a further set of features began to find its way into liberal discourse, accentuating the multitude of cultures and ethnicities that could harbour under a tolerant and welcoming humanism. It tore up the old liberal rulebook that postulated a seemingly compacted social universe, yet did so by introducing an alternative order of commonality. The new structural universalism was not predicated on shared values and practices, on ostensibly unified histories or on contracts and transactions, but lay in the ubiquity of plural ethnicities and lifestyles as features common to all societies (Baumeister 2000). The awareness of liberals that multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity were not only settled facts of social life but attributes to be assimilated and even welcomed into liberal values was gradual. But the distinction between the two terms is equally significant in understanding the transformation liberal universalism was undergoing. For liberals, basic multi-culturalism entailed the normality of variety – individual diversity now projected onto inter-relationships of groups and communities in a departure from the unifying, monolithic tendency of older liberalisms. An early foreshadowing was implicit in the tolerant embrace of the Hapsburg Empire. It was also a break with the left-liberals who had rediscovered society as an organically inter-related community, enabling individuals to flourish and cooperate. Multi-ethnicity, however, entailed a shift of gear, heralding the normality of ingrained and less pliable socio-cultural differences. It gambled on the acceptance and eventual extolling of group divergence above diversity as the integrating mechanism that permitted dissimilar, even mutually suspicious, social amalgams to co-exist under a common aegis ( Freeden 2023).

Marxism: The ideology to end all ideologies?

All the while, the semantic power of ideologies was challenged by Marxisant interpreters applying their self-proclaimed scientific tools of analysis and steering a disparate and highly effectual route. They retained a macro perspective of their own, denouncing ideology as a single, undifferentiated phenomenon suffusing society, lacking any pedigree of normality or inevitability. Marx and Engels ignored all internal minutiae within or across ideologies and resolutely tarred all instances of ideology with the same brush, as a deplorable, unearthly and temporary product of human alienation emanating from defective material and social circumstances (Ollman 1976: 227–33). The older universalist reading of ideology was understood not as a vade mecum for societies in general – namely, as a beacon of light, an acknowledgement of the momentum of ideational proliferation or at least a cumulative fusion of past achievements and practices – but as a socially induced malaise that required eradicating. Once purged of alienating mystification and its ensuing exploitation, Marxists anticipated the recovery of scientific truths embedded not in revered scriptures or world historical figures but in authentic human communal nature. Marxist universalism was grounded on the success of the bourgeoisie, whose proliferation ensured the standardising of the oppressive material conditions suffered by the proletariat. By dint of its spread as well as size, the proletariat were on the cusp of becoming both a numerical and material nigh-totality – hence terminating the notion of class itself. The importance of the famous pronouncement in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers (Marx and Engels 1848) lay precisely in the abolition of social divisions and otherness, restoring society to its state of wholeness.

The ironic outcome of this first major attempt to secure the “end of ideology” was the intention to install Marxism as the anti-ideology. Notwithstanding, Marxism was undeniably a major secular ideology in its own right, bearing many of the characteristics of its ideological predecessors and rivals: the presumption of truth (now presented by Marxists as scientific), an indisputable confidence in its cosmopolitan validity, an agenda of large-scale social activation and the prospect of human redemption, a drive shared with varieties of social democracy, anarchism and later with fascism as well as environmentalism. But Marxism also displayed some of the structural attributes of ideologies – in this case their vital role as filters of information and evaluation, blocking out or silencing evidence or interpretation that could undermine preferred narratives.

Before long, under the mantle of communism, Marxist practitioners abused the ideals that had typified their Weltanschauung, resurrecting some of ideology’s ill-reputed and adverse features. The inclusive Marxist vision was transformed from a totalism into a totalitarianism brooking little, if any, dissent, often on pain of lengthy incarceration if not death. A dogmatic set of beliefs was buttressed by enhancing its cultish personalisation, resurrecting the role of the omniscient individual as the apparently unchallengeable avant-garde of their society. That shift was accomplished not by the religious veneration of sages, the hold of hallowed tradition or the force of philosophical argument. It was epitomised by the iconic eminence initially assigned to Marx himself, partly transferred to Lenin and Stalin who sought charismatic status as Marx’s putative successors and soon to be superseded by the stultifying consolidation of powerful communist hierarchies of domineering bureaucracies (Brown 2009: 105–8). The socio-economic class oppression that Marx had denounced was crudely replaced by a physically violent tyranny, reinforcing the perception of ideology as an undifferentiated and unyielding macro bloc, one in which previous appeals to human virtue were irrelevant and in which unelected cadres assumed constricting control.

In the shadow of philosophers

The story of ideological mutation needs amplification by exploring the history of ideology studies. Perceiving and understanding ideology always occurs through the practices and expectations that fashion its reception and that bear selectively upon the salience of its features. Notably, the fate of ideology is inextricably linked to the respected tradition of political philosophy, under whose inhibiting shadow ideology has until quite recently laboured to gain acknowledgement as a serious object of research. Among others, the macro ideologies were assessed through conventions adopted by philosophers for whom fluidity and indeterminacy were an epistemological and heuristic weakness.

Consequently, the application of analytical depth to the grand ideological families was impeded not only by Marxist dismissal and professed unveiling, but by the disdain for ideological thinking expressed by some philosophical purists. Unlike ordinary language philosophers, they have disavowed ideology’s standing as well as that of ideology studies, contending that to study what they regard as “inferior thinking” can only produce “inferior work”. The problem here lies with the intellectual collapsing of space between the object of study and the method of studying it, the explanandum and the explanans, both of which are expected in much mainstream philosophical thinking to conform to largely shared criteria centring on the pursuit of ethical truth, reasoned precision, logical acuity and articulatory lucidity. Ideology studies, by contrast, are methodologically closer to disciplines such as history or anthropology. They expect slackness, contingency and ambiguity as entrenched in the subject-matter that attracts their attention, while applying robust conceptual tools of their own to process the normality of such “messiness”.

A corresponding difficulty runs through the history of political thought. It has long been colonised by the past proclivities of political and moral philosophers in training a rarefied focus on a couple of luminaries per century. That marginalises the attentiveness of ideology scholars to typical, not abnormally superior, thought and to the socially imbricated nature of ideological thinking as a multifaceted set of transactions criss-crossing a society. Constricting the lenses through which ideologies are presented sends scholars to the wrong neck of the source-rich woods. These considerations do not make ideologies less “macro”. To the contrary, they augment their rootedness in, and relevance to, society as a whole.

While philosophical stringency is sporadically to be found among the macro ideologies, other criteria of ideological achievement are far more pertinent. As a socio-political thought-practice, ideologies need to be assessed for their communicability to broad groups, their imaginative resourcefulness, their impact in furthering or blocking social choices and policies, their skill in eliciting and recruiting social support, their flexibility under pressure or in changing contexts, their disruption of prevailing ideational orders, their espousal of comprehensive projects to secure a thriving polity and their openness to a palette of sources – not only the “great books”, but newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, conversations and performance in the public domain ( Freeden 2003). On this latter point, granted that ordinary language philosophers consult a much broader spread of sources and are more relaxed about the variable quality of discursive expression, they still ask questions that differ from those posed by students of ideology.

Although these criteria of ideological success were coveted ends of the macro ideologies, they frequently fell short of their realisation. Above all, the macro ideologies evinced a threefold elitism: in the political language they used, in the still-narrow groups involved in their formulation and in the breadth of society they targeted. Tellingly, even Marxism – despite its long-term political aspirations – was not articulated as the voice of an oppressed class but was ideationally superimposed in the name of that class by a highly exclusive and engagé intelligentsia. The recipient publics of many macro ideologies were assumed to possess a relatively high level of education that was – initially – rarely available to large segments of the population. It was not until the extension of the franchise and the decidedly unhurried introduction of a participatory democratic culture that the purveyors of programmatic ideologies descended from the almost exclusive use of complex and literate reasoning to a greater reliance on messages that could rub shoulders with the vox populi. They increasingly resorted to simplified arguments and slogans, prominently through the rise of the popular press abetted by the growth of the political cartoon – itself already a highly efficient 18^th-century product with its pithy and comical social criticism. The slow ideational cooking typical of the ideological titans had to concede space to the fast food of the concise message, whether invigorating or menacing. That process reached its apotheosis only in the 21^st century, fuelled largely by slick advertising techniques that would have been frowned on by old-style purveyors of ideologies. The sources marshalled by the macro ideologies were also limited in comparison to today’s most recent ideological manifestations, especially the sheer dominance of visual communications and the pervasiveness of social media at the expense of the printed (though not necessarily the spoken) word (Gershon 2010; Durante 2018; Harrison 2024).

The notion of ideology’s inner completeness emerged not only from its actual discursive practices or the polished treatises from which several ideologies traced their lineage, but from other intellectual strategies that filtered ways of experiencing and understanding what an ideology was. Numerous theorists and commentators continued to ignore the inventive minutiae of ideological argumentation, preferring to debunk the category of ideology altogether. Many such critiques were devoid of a Marxist underpinning. Ideologies were accused of being closed and abstract, instruments of crass political power with no redeeming features – a standpoint born of a deeply conservative suspicion of theorising about politics, as well as resistance to the radical social rethinking emanating from both left and right. Typically, conservatives making the anti-ideology case rejected any suggestion that theirs was an ideology, referring to it as a disposition or an account of human experiences in a social and historical context – in Michael Oakeshott’s terms, the “goings-on” of habitual conduct (Oakeshott 1975: 89–92, 103).

Convergence, triumphalism and superimposition: three misreadings

Far from withering away – as Marxist critique expectantly envisaged – the grand ideologies saw themselves as permanent fixtures, comprehensively mapping and fostering the concerted political ideas at the disposal of a society. But in some circles that assurance began to waver. In the mid-20^th century a non-Marxist “end of ideology” was mooted, not by transcending ideology’s causes but by the predicted real-world convergence of contending ideologies on a shared agenda. In effect, that merely implied the triumph of a single, all-embracing ideology of modernism, pragmatism and piecemeal measures, carried by a wave of prosperity and consumerism (Bell 1962: 13–17; 393–407). The “end of ideology” reflected an weariness with the great “isms”, as the macro ideologies somewhat disparagingly became known, while appearing to usher in a semi-concealed mega ideology. Questions concerning an ostensible consensus on constitutionalism, welfare and the economy seemed to draw on scientific knowhow and cultural intersections. But that “endism” failed to take account of the resilience of existing ideological families and their deep-seated rhetorical sway, as well as the discursive propensity of human thought to spawn new ideologies that defy the apparent immutability of established ones.

By the end of the 20^th century a further upsurge of scepticism about ideology was prompted by contentions popularised by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama. This time the endism projected onto ideology was not one of convergence but of replacement. When Fukuyama mooted the end of history, in effect he implied the end of ideological diversity. Liberalism, he claimed, was the winning ideology, terminating the pluralism that, at least intermittently, had been ascribed to the worlds of ideological coexistence and plasticity (Fukuyama 1992). Whatever subtleties were extant in Fukuyama’s argument, they were lost in the typically loose interpretations and simplifications that carry the day in cultural politics.

In contradistinction to the convergence theme, a usurping creed-cum-ideology – neoliberalism – has been superimposed on an established liberalism, forcefully augmenting some attributes of its predecessor while eliminating many of its key features. Its promoters maintain that a globalising neoliberalism will flourish under the unencumbered competitive conditions of self-interested individualism and a free market (Peck 2010: 1–38). That too is a mythologised and ideological viewpoint, yet it has tenaciously persevered and been accorded highly exaggerated weight by liberalism’s critics and opponents. The neoliberal attempt to reclaim liberalism by shrinking its complexity and limiting it to free competition, privatisation and the fantasy of self-regulating markets renders the label “liberalism” easy prey to communitarian and statist detractors taken in by that semantic tug of war (Boas and Gans-Morse 2009). The stickiness of ideological characterisations, whether accurate or pointedly abridged, is part of the rough and tumble of political disputation. It boosts and streamlines the macro fusing evident in processes that give vent to ideational disapproval.

Change and upheaval

Macro formations have also been typical of emerging forms of radical ideological reformism. Ecological and green ideologies have trodden their own paths as their advocates dismissed several foundational assumptions broached by conventional approaches. They endeavoured to reground social beliefs on ascertainable facts concerning the fragility of the environment and the imperative of enabling nature to flourish free of human harm. That scientific validation of globalisation was accompanied by the ideologically rushed evocation of a sweeping “globalism” (Steger (ed.) 2004). It underplayed crucial disagreements over the impact of environmental damage and the fractured ideational responses to socially induced destruction. The persistent drive of the macro ideologies to mirror “irrefutable” facts or truths – habitually buttressed by religion, philosophy or custom – was undercut by that major act of decentring anthropocentric viewpoints. New environmental gurus such as James Lovelock emerged (Lovelock 1979), combining solid and even doom-laden argument with a quasi-romantic mystique that appealed to the emotions as much as to the calculating mind.

Historically speaking, one could differentiate between first- and second-generation ideological families. During the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, varieties of liberalism and conservatism – including versions of Christian Democracy on the European mainland ( Pombeni 2000) – derived their standing from a close linkage, real or perceived, with identically named political parties. Socialism was at the temporal tail end of what became a triumvirate of power-seeking as well as of belief consolidation and advocacy. Subsequent second-generation ideological groupings lacked the institutional clout that could raise their programmes to pole position in the struggle over minds or provide the public exposure capable of drawing in mass support. The limited attraction of anarchism – not as a philosophical argument but as a worldly practice – follows from its combative political agenda, which is inimical to its own objections to the organisation and running of a polity. Green political thought and ecologism have increasingly been supplanted by environmentalism as a nametag focused largely on deleterious climate change. Although for many it is the overriding issue of the times, Green/environmental activism also sustains a single-issue ideology that thickens out by extracting ideas from other progressive or radical ideologies, while there is a clear conservative tint in the semantic emphasis on conservation policies. The growing amplification of environmentalism is demonstrated by the co-opting of its crusading energy and lifestyle ambitions across a wide spectrum of ideological families. Those ambitions have attained greater weight and centrality within the latter’s morphologies (Eckersley 1992; Humphrey 2002).

Italian fascism and German Nazism bucked such progressive proclivities, but their endorsement of thuggery, violence and in the German case the extermination of minorities put their long-term prospects on a precarious footing from the outset. Nor did they aspire to universal diffusion or acceptance. On the contrary, they were entrenched within their societies, while the territorial belligerence of the Nazis was meant to ensure the gathering of white “Aryan” people under one sovereignty and their complete dominance over other ethnicities. Fascists were predominantly inward-looking ultra-nationalists, uninterested in the proselytising goals cherished by liberals and socialists and devoid of the broad appeal of conservatives to a unifying cultural and civilisational heritage. They claimed to espouse a radically regenerative agenda of the “new man”, a palingenesis or national rebirth (Griffin 1991). Both fascism and Nazism fostered a leadership cult that imposed an enforced and hermetically sealed unity on permitted beliefs – the latter with sinister and horrific success, especially through the mass genocide of Jews, Roma and others.

The dual assaults of fascism and communism on democratic culture in the lead-up to World War II left heavy marks on the way ideology in general was imagined. Was democracy an ideology, a procedural facet of some ideologies or a shortcut for “liberal democracy”? Even more pressingly, was not the totalitarianism experienced in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union – a modus operandi forged by Mussolini (Mussolini 1932) but carried to extreme and dehumanising lengths by the other two – the ultimate ideological divide, with its restoration of a stark binary between political monism and pluralism? Macro ideologies still seemed to be eminently visible but in a new guise. Totalitarianism ushered in another type of holism, not of moral solidarity but bent on demolishing the protective barriers that curtailed undue interference in personal life and could clear a space to advance individual liberty and cultural expression. It also strove to do away with social groups – the Jews or the bourgeoisie – that could be scapegoated for the real or invented inadequacies of their nations. The devastating wielding of suppressive state power was the hallmark of an all-penetrating and co-ordinated hegemony expressed in the German phrase Gleichschaltung. It was further sustained by the spinning of a shared destiny and the concoction of a falsified history suturing past, present and future (e.g. the “thousand-year Reich”) in a socio-political bloc promising unassailable permanence. The end-product was the ultimate in ideological macro pretentions – freezing time and cordoning off space.

Paradigms of ideology critique

An entirely different school of thought, Ideologiekritik, developed on the European mainland, principally but not solely in Germany, comprising a hybrid combination of macro and micro viewpoints. Ideologiekritik is directly influenced by the Marxist intellectual heritage in continuing to regard ideology as a unitary, undifferentiated set of ideas. A fundamental distinction in ideology studies is that between what ideologies do and what they are. What Ideologiekritik claims ideologies do is to conceal, mystify or falsify. Little effort is expended by that school on what ideologies are, especially in the sense of their construction and semantic potential. Yet in contradistinction to classical macro ideological scholarship, Ideologiekritik accepts that ideology is immersed in everyday speech and scripts, eschewing the grand narratives. Indeed, its offshoot – critical discourse analysis (CDA) – is even more so disposed, being noteworthy for focusing on metaphors, repetition, the choice of topics, styles and modifiers, as well as visual evidence (Fairclough 2003: 202–211). Nonetheless, Ideologiekritik and CDA are heavily inclined to evaluate ideology through holistic, macroscopic lenses and to emphasise its ephemeral pronouncements as hegemonic, doctrinaire and overbearing. These branches of scholarship profess allegiance to an agenda of equality and accountability as requisites for acceptable research and for the shoring up of social values. Hence they duly pursue correctives to biased speech and writing and are united in cautioning against the ethical precarity that – in their view – saturates ideological language in toto.

Alongside the critical ideology approach, discourse theory – particularly under the influence of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – has ploughed its own furrow, be the two approaches ever so contiguous. Notably, discourse theory’s adherence to macro analysis is predicated on its ascription of ontological totality to discourse itself, identifying concealed patterns and uncovering obfuscating devices and techniques that reduce the transmission of nuanced meaning. Here too, the apparently substantive solidity of grand ideology as a comprehensive system of political ideas was brushed aside and replaced by exposing it as a network of discrete and quasi-haphazard distortions that superimposed a singular and overarching unity of misrepresentation ( Forchtner and Wodak 2018). This reduction of ideology to a very specific macro edifice is an analytical assertion regardless of content and value-advocacy, quite dissimilar to the holism of the traditional ideological families. It zooms in on power as constricting, it discounts its enabling attributes and it operates at a high level of generality that underlies the widespread manipulation of signifiers.

Put differently, those qualities involve a set macro method, in that discourse theorists chiefly regard ideology as performing a counteracting role, holding disparate elements together, manufacturing bespoke social identities that furnish a temporary and largely supportive unity for the powers that be. Unlike classic Marxism, they employ the minutiae of close inspection, armed with their own pejorative account of ideology (van Dijk 1998). Discourse theory is alert to the pervasive suggestiveness of (political) language and to the small-scale components of ideology that attest to ideology’s multiple discursive features – its antagonisms, binary divisions and dislocations. Laclau detected the ideological effect as persistently denying those features by superficially bringing about the “closure and transparency of the community.” The “fullness of the community”, he maintains, is an “impossible object”. An ideology exists “whenever a particular content shows itself as more than itself” ( Laclau 1996: 206).

For discourse theorists, in incorrectly centring on space and sovereignty, the orthodox ideological imagination is yet again wedded to definable and durable boundaries that disguise its centrifugal particulars. The very macroscopic drive of an ideology is hence inevitably misleading. The wholeness evoked by discourse theory is consequently not the Marxist healing abolition of alienation but itself another kind of mystification. Laclau and Mouffe single out what they term articulatory equivalences that create relational chains among linguistic signs while blurring their distinctive gradations (Laclau 1996: 208), e.g., the conceptual chain linking welfare, wellbeing, happiness and prosperity. That injection of overlapping meaning into empty signifiers propels some discourses to a manufactured position of hegemony ( Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 105–114).

In heuristic terms discourse theory has something in common with the morphological approach to ideologies in prioritising the art of interpretation and recognising the malleability of linguistic ambiguity. But the morphological perspective differs in three senses. First, it also allows for the ideological features of co-operation, mutual support and esprit de corps, while fully cognisant of the capacity of ideologies not only to sustain extant institutions and their practices but to defy or modify them. Second, it is engaged with the dynamics of re-aggregation and the ephemerality of decontestation; that is, with the small print of adjustable details, not with their triumphant supersession by a semantic closure as an end state. Third, in breaking out of rigid spatial confines, it sends shoots in various directions in a process of extension and decentring that produces not a fullness, but a web of alternative and endlessly pliable spaces, whether macro, meso or micro (Freeden 2013: 128–30).

Pluralist societies have until recently been thought to be sites of logocentric jockeying and confrontations among full-blown, resolute and eloquent visions of the socio-political world. Ideologies, however, are now more liable to be fragmented, ruptured, messy, even incoherent. These traits are just as likely to prevail as those emanating from book, pamphlet, party or the literati. They also hamper the appreciation of performativity that at long last is valued as an alternative route of expressing force or desire in a communal setting. Ideologies are practices and their messages are not only accessible through word and speech – i.e. through logos. They are also transmitted visually and performatively as lived and bodily behaviours and enactments ( Freeden 2011; Kissas 2020; Martel et al 2025). Furthermore, they stem from the affects, heightened emotions and stochastic chatter of a host of individuals and their support groups, facilitated by the ubiquity of the social media. Indubitably, the means of ideological production and dissemination have undergone an upheaval that requires us to rethink the forms that ideologies inhabit and – no less importantly – the methods for discerning them (Engesser et al 2017; Bright 2018; Freeden 2020). Can phone messages, memes and emoji outweigh the loss of gravitas and constructive imagination delivered by the macro ideologies?

Conclusion

Ideology has undergone major changes since it was identified as a distinct phenomenon well over 200 years ago. First, it has mutated substantively from a relatively coherent and comprehensive set of grand political ideas that impact on the arrangements through which a society organises itself, to include meso and micro ideologies alongside the heavyweight macro ideologies such as liberalism or conservatism. One major aspect of that development was the recognition that multiple ideologies competed over the comprehensive meanings they bestowed on their social environments. That discovery revealed an innate ideological pluralism and diversity that belied many ideologies’ claim to universalism.

Second, the study of ideology has undergone methodological transformation away from a powerful analytical macro approach inspired by Marxist theories. For a long while it unremittingly regarded all ideologies as bundled into a single phenomenon termed “ideology”: a monochrome, unyielding and distorting representation of the existing social world that simply needed to be eliminated by the inevitable ending of human alienation or – as argued by critical discourse scholars – exposed and corrected by transparency and ethical argument. Instead of that drive to unmask ideology, ideology studies now insist that ideologies are normal and ubiquitous types of political thinking and have honed various tools for decoding their distinct patterns that both separate and connect them. The dual oversimplification of the macro view of a world inhabited by a few ideological titans and the critical detraction of ideology as expendable and pernicious that frequently permeate vernacular discourse has given way to the recognition of ideological complexity and fluidity in tandem with the fine-tuned subtleties demanded of scholarly and responsible investigation.

It is premature to declare that macro ideologies are a thing of the past. Admittedly, pitted against an array of immediate verbal, pictorial and behavioural stimuli that are far more accessible to large swathes of the population, their substantive weight has been seriously depleted. Yet intimations of their demise are probably exaggerated. The lure of a commanding script and the narrative drive to ideational inclusiveness may still find ideologies to be a pliable receptacle. The two seeds of the macro ideology phenomenon continue to sprout intermittently but independently as its legacy, illustrating its expansionary capture of great detail and finesse while, conversely, practising its methodological filtering and ironing out of intriguing specifics.

References

Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B. S. (1980) The Dominant Ideology Thesis, London: George Allen and Unwin.

Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Baumeister A. (2000) Liberalism and the ‘Politics of Difference’, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bayly, C. A. (2011) Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bell, D. (1962) The End Of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, revised edition, New York NY: Collier Books.

Boas, T. C. and Gans-Morse, J (2009) “Neoliberalism: From new liberal philosophy to anti-liberal slogan”, Studies in Comparative International Development, vol. 44, 137–161.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bright, J. (2018) “Explaining the emergence of political fragmentation on social media: The role of ideology and extremism”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 23, 17–33.

Brown, A. (2009) The Rise and Fall of Communism, London: HarperCollins.

Cobden, R. (1846) Speech in Manchester on 15 January, The Cobden Centre, [Online], Available: www.cobdencentre.org/2024/09/speech-by-richard-cobden-in-manchester-on-january-15-1846 29 Jan 2025.

Durante, T. (2018) “Visual ideology and social imaginary: A new approach to the aesthetics of globalization”, Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and Extra Urban Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 15–34.

Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory, London: UCL Press.

Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse, London: Routledge.

Finlayson, A. (2013) “Ideology and political rhetoric”, In Freeden, M., Sargent, L. T. and Stears, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 197–213.

Forchtner, B. and Wodak, R. (2018) “Critical discourse studies”, in Forchtner, B. and Wodak, R. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Politics and Language, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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

Freeden, M. (2011) “The politics of ceremony: The Wootton Bassett phenomenon”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16, 1–10.

Freeden, M. (2013) “The morphological analysis of ideology”, in Freeden, M., Sargent, L. T. and Stears, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 115–137.

Freeden, M. (2017) “After the Brexit referendum: Revisiting populism as an ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 22, 1–11.

Freeden, M. (2020) “Democracy dis-integrated: The current conceptual confusion”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 25, 1–10.

Freeden, M. (2022) Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2023) “Ideology: Picking up the pieces?”, Historia y Política, vol. 50, 133–155.

Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, New York NY: Free Press.

Geertz, C. (1964) “Ideology as a cultural system”, in Apter, D. E. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, New York NY: The Free Press: 47–76.

Gershon, I. (2010) “Media ideologies: An introduction”, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 20, 283–293.

Golob, E. O. (1954) The ‘isms’: A History and Evaluation, New York NY: Harper and Brothers.

Griffin, R. (1991) The Nature of Fascism, London: Routledge.

Hanson, K., O’Dwyer, E. and Lyons, E. (2019) “The individual and the nation: A qualitative analysis of US liberal and conservative identity content”, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, vol. 7, no. 1, 378–40.

Harrison, G. (2024) The Internet Left: Ideology in the Age of Social media, Bristol UK: Bristol University Press.

Humphrey, M. (2002) Preservation Versus the People: Nature, Humanity and Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kissas, A. (2020) “Performative and ideological populism: The case of charismatic leaders on Twitter”, Discourse and Society, vol. 31, no. 3, 268–284.

Laclau, E. (1996) “The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, 201–220.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso.

Lane, R. E. (1962) Political Ideologies: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does, New York: Free Press.

Larrain, J. (1979) The Concept of Ideology, London: Hutchinson.

Lichtheim, G. (1967) The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays, New York NY: Vintage Books.

Lovelock, J. (1979) Gaia, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia, New York NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Martel, J., Parsley, C., Ertür, B. and Mansoori, N. (2025) “Ideology reframed: The lived experience of ideology”, in Martel, J., Parsley, C., Ertür, B. and Mansoori, N. (eds) The Lived Experience of Ideology, Abingdon UK: Routledge: 1–19.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) The Communist Manifesto, [Online], Available: www.marxists.org › archive › marx › works › 1848/ communist manifesto[29 Jan 2025].

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1970) The German Ideology [ed. Arthur, C. J.], London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Mazzini, G. (1907) The Duties of Man, London: Dent.

Moffitt, B. (2020) Populism, Cambridge: Polity.

Müller, J.-W. (2016) What is Populism? Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mussolini, B. (1932) The Doctrine of Fascism, San Jose State University [Online], Available: https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/Readings[30 Jan 2025].

Oakeshott, M. (1975) On Human Conduct, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ollman, B. (1976) Alienation, 2^nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peck, J. (2010) Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pombeni, P. (2000) “The ideology of Christian Democracy”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 5, no. 3, 289–300.

Starr, P. (2007) Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism, New York NY: Basic Books.

Steger, M. B. (ed.) (2004) Rethinking Globalism, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

van Dijk, T. A. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage.

3. Analysing the ideologies of radical groups

Sean Fleming

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-5

Introduction

Studying the ideologies of radical groups presents unique methodological and practical challenges. Whereas political parties have published platforms, recognised leaders and authorised spokespeople, radical groups tend to operate in clandestine ways, under heavy cloaks of anonymity or pseudonymity. Many radical groups do not have well-defined principles, organisational structures or memberships; some are only loose collections of cells. How is it possible to study the ideologies of groups that are so shadowy and ephemeral?

This chapter provides a brief how-to guide for studying the ideologies of radical groups, drawing in part from my own experience researching anarchism, radical environmentalism and anti-technology radicalism. The first section examines the features of radical groups that make them difficult to study. The second section surveys the advantages and disadvantages of four kinds of source: radical publications, online content, interviews and archives. The challenge for researchers is to excavate and reconstruct the ideologies of radical groups from limited and fragmentary evidence.

The study of radical groups’ ideologies is itself quite fragmentary and the existing scholarship is scattered across political theory and terrorism studies. Yet there are some discernible clusters of work with methodological affinities. First, there are intellectual–historical approaches, which aim to uncover the sources and origins of radical ideologies (e.g., Tait 2019; Fleming 2022). This kind of work typically focuses on manifestos and other texts produced by influential proponents of an ideology. Second, there are thematic approaches, which aim to identify the characteristic motivations, thought patterns and rhetorical strategies of radical groups (Macklin 2022; Loadenthal 2022; Hughes, Jones and Amarasingam 2022). This kind of work tends to rely on a broader range of “vernacular” ideological content produced by radical groups, including social media posts, memes and videos as well as communiqués and manifestos. Third, there are social-movement approaches, which aim to understand the social milieus and networks from which radical ideologies emerge (e.g., Gordon 2007; Lubarda 2023). This kind of work tends to rely on interviews and participant observation in addition to textual evidence. Each approach has advantages and limitations. Although my own work on radical groups is primarily intellectual–historical, my plea in this chapter is for methodological pluralism and humility. The best way of studying a radical group’s ideology depends on both the characteristics of the group and the questions that the researcher is trying to answer.

The underground

By “radical” groups, I mean groups that use illegal tactics such as violence, sabotage or disruptive protest. A group is “radical” if it uses means that the state deems to be out of bounds.[7] By this definition, environmentalist groups such as Earth First! and Extinction Rebellion are “radical,” but so are far-right groups such as Atomwaffen Division and so too are many separatist and political dissident groups. This broad, means-based definition of “radical” admittedly assumes the perspective of the prevailing political order, but it is not intended to be prescriptive or pejorative. It assumes nothing about the content of radical groups’ ideologies or about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their causes. To use one of the Unabomber’s euphemisms, radicals are those who use “methods more potent than the mere advocacy of ideas” (Kaczynski 2020: 101), whatever their objectives might be. Groups that use methods of this sort must, of necessity, operate wholly or partly underground. Since illegal tactics inevitably invite repression or negative attention from the authorities, radicals are forced to conceal some or all of their activities from public view.

Radical groups tend to be fairly small and marginal, which raises the question of why they warrant scholarly attention in the first place. Although they rarely have much hope of gaining political power, radical groups are consequential in other ways. Through the “radical flank effect”, the presence of a radical group can increase support for more “moderate” groups with similar aims (Simpson, Willer and Feinberg 2022). In addition, the radical fringe is an important space of ideological innovation. Ideologies that are now mainstream – environmentalism, feminism, even liberalism – were once revolutionary. While many of today’s radical groups are destined for the dustbin, some may be antecedents of tomorrow’s mainstream political parties and movements. The growing antagonism between anti-technology radicals and radical techno-optimists might foreshadow a new division in modern politics, which cuts across the old division between left and right. The growing hostility toward green energy among radical environmentalists could prefigure a shift in the mainstream environmentalist movement. Looking at the radical fringe can give scholars of ideologies a sense of what the future might hold. It can help us anticipate emerging ideological trends and coming shifts in the ideological landscape.

Decentralised structures

States, political parties, unions and corporations all have more or less centralised structures, with clear leaders and explicit chains of command. Their decision-making procedures are described in statutes, charters, constitutions and organisational charts, which makes it fairly straightforward to determine who speaks and acts for the group. If the goal is to understand the ideology of the British Labour Party, for example, then its official communications – its platform, its leaders’ speeches and its spokespeople’s statements – are obvious places to start (see the chapter by Eunice Goes in this volume). But many radical groups do not have recognisable leaders; some do not even have spokespeople or statements of principle. Radical groups tend to have decentralised structures, because a tight chain of command is a liability for those who are involved in illegal activity.

The structures of radical groups are decentralised in different ways and to different degrees. Most radical groups act in decentralised ways, through independent operatives or cells, but some radical groups nonetheless communicate in centralised ways. For example, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) carried out its “covert direct actions” (e.g., arson attacks against industry) through independent, underground cells. Yet the ELF had an above-ground “press office” and a spokesperson tasked with publicising the group’s ideas and justifying its attacks. Anyone could carry out “direct actions” in the name of the ELF provided that they adhered to the guidelines published by the ELF Press Office:

To cause as much economic damage as possible to a given entity that is profiting off the destruction of the natural environment and life for selfish greed and profit.
To educate the public on the atrocities committed against the environment and life.
To take all necessary precautions against harming life (ELF 2001: 15).

By maintaining a strict separation between its above-ground and underground divisions – between legal communication and illegal action – the ELF was able to present a more or less coherent message while mitigating the risk of infiltration by law enforcement (Joosse 2007).[8]

Insurrectionary anarchist groups such as the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) are even more decentralised. Unlike the ELF, the FAI does not have above-ground spokespeople, nor even a definitive statement of principles. Independent individuals and affinity groups carry out attacks and attribute them to the FAI as they see fit (Lubrano 2024; Marone 2015). Antifa speaks and acts in similarly decentralised ways (Rilla 2024). Some cells seem to be little more than throwaway monikers. After a single attack in Argentina, “Antagonist Nucleus of Anger” disappeared, never to be heard from again. Other cells recur or reappear, though there is no way of knowing for certain whether two communiqués written in the name of the same cell actually have the same authors. The pseudonymity and ephemerality of insurrectionary anarchist cells create problems for scholars and law enforcement alike.

Table 3.1 Group structures

	Centralised action	Decentralised action
Centralised communication	Labour Party	Earth Liberation Front
Decentralised communication	Facebook[9]	Informal Anarchist Federation

It can be difficult to find any semblance of a coherent ideology in the cacophony of communiqués. Different cells operating under the broad banner of the FAI have different motivations and concerns. Some are preoccupied with the role of technology in surveillance and social control, while others do not even mention technology in their communiqués. Some identify with the anti-capitalist left and the labour movement, while others denounce “workerism” as counter-revolutionary. Even the ELF sometimes failed to produce a consistent message, despite the fact that it had a central press office. In its 2001 FAQ, the ELF disavowed violence against human beings: “If an action similar to one performed by the ELF occurred and resulted in an individual becoming physically injured or losing their life this would not be considered an ELF action” (ELF 2001: 28). But the following year, the “Pacific ELF” announced that “segments of this global revolutionary movement are no longer limiting their revolutionary potential by adhering to a flawed, inconsistent ‘non-violent’ ideology … we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice and provide the needed protection for our planet” (ELF 2002). Of course, the ideology of a group need not be perfectly consistent. Most ideologies contain internal contradictions and it is to be expected that groups contain factions with different views. Yet some radical groups have so many internal factions and disagreements that it is difficult to discern their ideological “core”, if there is one to be found.

Fuzzy memberships

A related problem is that radical groups rarely have well-defined memberships. This is obviously true of cell-based groups such as the ELF and the FAI, but it is also true, to lesser degrees, of many other groups. The radical environmentalist group Earth First! is a good example.[10] Earth First!’s de facto leaders and prominent personalities operated “above ground”, and the editors of the Earth First! Journal were identified by name inside the cover. But other Earth First!ers, especially those who were involved in “monkeywrenching” (i.e., sabotage), kept a low profile. While the group’s above-ground membership was clear enough, its underground membership was opaque. In addition, the line between “members” and “sympathisers” is difficult to draw. The Unabomber was allegedly a regular reader the Earth First! Journal – does that make him an Earth First!er? For the purpose of ideology analysis, the line between members and non-members has to be drawn somewhere, because judgments have to be made about whether particular statements, attitudes and actions are attributable to the group. Did Earth First! unequivocally condemn violence against human beings? The answer depends on who counts as an Earth First!er.

One tempting response to this problem is to forget about “groups” and to shift the focus to the ideologies of broader “movements.” The indeterminate boundaries of Earth First! seem less troubling if the aim is to analyse the radical environmentalist movement. But this response is inadequate for two reasons. First, it comes at a steep price in terms of granularity and specificity. There are many ideological differences between the groups that comprise the radical environmentalist movement – for instance, between Earth First! and Deep Green Resistance. Although it may well be possible to make some worthwhile generalisations about the movement as a whole, these generalisations are probably best made in a bottom-up way, based on more fine-grained analyses of particular radical environmentalist groups. Further, shifting the focus from groups to movements only pushes the problem back a step, because the boundaries between movements are also fuzzy. The radical environmentalist movement bleeds into the green anarchist movement and the green anarchist movement bleeds into the insurrectionary anarchist movement.

Another tempting response to this problem is to focus on the ideas of specific individuals instead of the ideologies of collectivities. Instead of studying the ideology of Earth First!, scholars of ideology could study particular environmental activists such as Dave Foreman and Judi Bari. There is much to be said for a turn toward the individual in ideology studies (Ostrowski 2024). I am admittedly partial to this turn, because much of my work focuses on the ideas of particular thinkers (Fleming 2021; Fleming 2022; Fleming 2024). But to jettison the study of collective ideologies would be a mistake. First of all, it would be naïve to try to study the ideologies of particular thinkers without reference to the groups in which those thinkers are embedded (fuzzy and ill-defined though they may be). The ideologies of Dave Foreman and Judi Bari can be fully understood only against the backdrop of Earth First! as a group – its internal dynamics, culture and discourse, its rifts and rival factions. Second, in the turn toward the individual, prominent figures and canonical writers receive the lion’s share of the attention. What tends to get lost is the study of the “vernacular” ideologies that motivate and underpin the everyday practices of political actors. While studying the ideologies of prominent anarchists and radical environmentalists is undoubtedly important, it is equally important to understand how their ideas have been received, appropriated, adapted and applied by activists on the ground – and in the underground.

Although radical groups are troublesome entities, there is no way to eliminate them without eliminating or obscuring a great deal of valuable content. Scholars of ideology had best face the difficulties head-on, armed with the only effective weapon against vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty: evidence.

Types of evidence

The problems with studying the ideologies of radical groups are, in part, epistemological. How is it possible to know who counts as a member or who speaks and acts for the group? How it is possible to discern an ideology from a cacophony of contradictory claims? However, the main difficulties are methodological. If one were a fly on the wall, privy to all the internal workings of Earth First!, the ELF or the FAI, analysing their ideologies would not be much more difficult than analysing the ideologies of political parties. Their structures would be clearer and their memberships less fuzzy if only we could peel back the layers of anonymity and pseudonymity to reveal the concrete relationships underneath. The challenge is to piece together the ideologies of radical groups from limited and fragmentary evidence. The crucial questions, then, are what kinds of evidence to use to how to use them. There are four main sources of evidence about radical groups, each of which has advantages and drawbacks: 1) radical publications; 2) online content; 3) interviews; and 4) archives.

Radical publications

Most radical groups produce publications of some sort – pamphlets, ‘zines, journals and newsletters. These publications serve as vehicles for spreading ideas, as recruiting tools and as forums for debate among group members. Many radical publications feature extensive discussions of theory, strategy and tactics. They often contain detailed programmatic statements, akin to the platforms of political parties. While their content might seem low-grade and amateurish to political philosophers, radical publications are goldmines for scholars of ideologies.

One problem with relying on radical publications is that they may not accurately represent the views of the groups with which they are associated. Many publications are edited or otherwise dominated by prominent personalities and prolific writers. The Earth First! Journal was under the editorial control of different factions at different times. The anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate was long dominated by a few writers, including David Watson (“George Bradford”), Peter Lambourn Wilson (“Hakim Bey”) Andy Smith (“Sunfrog”) and Peter Werbe.[11] It is often difficult to know whether a group’s prominent writers accurately represent the views of its rank-and-file members and this problem is compounded by the fact that many radical groups have neither ranks nor files.

The Letters to the Editor sections of radical publications can provide a broader sample of opinion. This is especially true of anarchist and radical environmentalist publications, which tend to have an ethos of openness. Fifth Estate, Green Anarchist and the Earth First! Journal would print most letters from readers, no matter how rude or critical. Although most anarchists and radical environmentalists probably never published a full-length article, many read radical literature and many sent an occasional letter to the editor – most often, it seems, when they disagreed with the publication’s editors or leading writers. The Letters to the Editor thus provide helpful gauges of dissent and disagreement within radical groups, which scholars of ideology can use to identify gaps between a group’s leading figures and its ordinary members.

However, Letters to the Editor sections have to be read with a critical eye. Letters are often published under throwaway pseudonyms. A letter that appears to be from an ordinary reader might, in fact, be a pseudonymous letter from a prominent writer and letters with different by-lines might actually be written by the same person. Further, not every letter-writer is a regular reader or a committed member of the group. Some letters to radical publications are sent by “raiders” from related or rival groups, often for the purpose of promoting their own views or their own journals. For instance, many green anarchists wrote letters to the Earth First! Journal in the 1990s, arguing that Earth First!’s uncompromising commitment to non-violence was misguided. Although the boundary between green anarchism and radical environmentalism is fuzzy at the margins, it would be a mistake to assume that these letters from green anarchists represented “rank-and-file” Earth First!ers. More likely, they represented the fringe of Earth First! or adjacent radical groups. Letters to the Editor sections of radical publications serve not only as venues for their readers’ opinions, but also as “trading zones” (Ashworth 2012), where members of different groups trade ideas and criticisms.

Many radical publications also include communiqués, which are relatively short, pseudonymous statements released after attacks. Insurrectionary anarchist publications serve primarily as repositories for communiqués. A typical communiqué has three components: 1) a claim of responsibility; 2) a justification; and 3) a statement of solidarity. For example, in May 2012, a nuclear energy executive was shot in the leg in the Italian city of Genoa. The “Olga Cell” of the FAI later released a communiqué titled Against the corporations of death. The communiqué began with a claim of responsibility: “We have crippled Roberto Adinolfi, one of so many sorcerers of the atom” (Olga Cell 2012: 1). It then offered a justification for the attack. Adinolfi was targeted because he “designed and renovated nuclear plants that have caused and are causing deaths around the world” (Olga Cell 2012: 1). Finally, the communiqué expressed solidarity with other anarchists, including the cell’s namesake, an imprisoned Greek anarchist named Olga Economidou (Olga Cell 2012: 2–3). Between the opening claim of responsibility and the closing call to arms, this communiqué is packed with ideological content – claims about human nature, the relationship between capitalism and technology, the necessity of violence and the place of Adinolfi and others like him in the larger system of power. Loadenthal’s (2017) pioneering book, The Politics of Attack, shows how valuable communiqués can be to scholars of ideology. Reading “communiqués as political theory,” Loadenthal provides the first in-depth analysis of insurrectionary anarchists’ ideas and motivations.

In sum, radical publications are useful to scholars of ideology in at least four ways. First, they contain programmatic statements from the group’s leading writers and intellectual figures. Second, they contain letters from ordinary readers, which provide a broader survey of opinion within the group. Third, they contain letters from members of related or rival groups, which help to illuminate the connections and divisions between radical groups. Fourth, radical publications often contain post-attack communiqués, which tend to be rich in ideological content.

Online content

Radical publications used to be DIY paper pamphlets, ‘zines and journals, which were available only locally or by mail order. But the internet has made this sort of literature much more widely available. Many radical journals are now published online as sleek and professional-looking PDFs and some radical literature from past decades has now been scanned and digitised. Most of the back issues of Green Anarchist and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed are only a click away.

In addition to making radical publications more widely available, the internet has given rise to a multitude of new forms of communication. Radical groups now use blogs, message boards, social media platforms, YouTube videos, Discord channels and Telegram and WhatsApp groups to spread their ideas and find new recruits. At first glance, much of this content seems flippant and frivolous. Ironic memes and anonymous “shitposts” hardly seem worthy of scholarly attention. But there is often serious ideological content beneath the façade of unseriousness. Radicals tend to drape their online communications in thick layers of irony, absurdity and humour, in part to maintain plausible deniability. Online content can rarely be taken at face value, but to dismiss it entirely would be to ignore a significant portion of the content that contemporary radicals produce.

Traditional approaches to ideology analysis can be used to analyse online content. For example, Tait (2019) critically analyses the blog posts of neoreactionary writer “Mencius Moldbug” (Curtis Yarvin), much as historians of political thought have critically analysed the works of Carl Schmitt. The pseudonymous streams of content from social media platforms can also be useful to scholars of ideology. In his work on the ecofascist sub-culture, Macklin (2022) analyses the texts of influential writers – Ted Kaczynski, Savitri Devi and Pentti Linkola – alongside pseudonymous posts from far-right Telegram channels. Visual analysis of online content is also useful, because a significant portion of this content consists of images and memes. Loadenthal (2022) analyses both the textual and visual content of far-right accelerationist Telegram channels. Similarly, Hughes, Jones and Amarasingam (2022) use images and text from Telegram and Twitter to identify the dominant themes in the ecofascist sub-culture. Online content can be analysed morphologically or genetically, textually or visually, qualitatively or quantitatively. There are surely many fruitful methods and approaches that have yet to be tried.

There are two main problems with online material. First, since most of it is anonymous or pseudonymous, there is usually no way of verifying information. Posters may not be who they claim to be and some may not even be human. Some radical content is generated by poseurs and provocateurs who really have little to do with the groups or causes that they purport to represent. Other content is generated or disseminated by “bots”. For these reasons, the volume of material may be a misleading indicator of opinion within online sub-cultures. Further, online sub-cultures may be disconnected from offline radical groups. Although some research has found that “intensifying expressions of grievances online predict participation in offline violence” (Bailard et al 2024), the relationship between online content and offline action may be tighter or looser depending on the group. Radical environmentalist Telegram channels may not accurately represent the views or motivations of the activists who are engaged in “direct action”.

The second problem with online material is that it is ephemeral. Websites and blogs may be taken down, message boards may become defunct, images are frequently deleted and posts often become buried within days or even hours. Using online material thus requires a great deal of foresight and planning. Scholars have to quickly and systematically archive material before it disappears.

Archiving online material has to be done with caution, however, because downloading “extremist” material is a criminal offence in some countries. Under Section 58 of the UK’s Terrorism Act (2000), it is unlawful to collect, record or even access “information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. This could be something as simple as, for example, downloading an anarchist journal that contains instructions for making Molotov cocktails. Although the Act lists “academic research” as a “reasonable excuse” for possessing or viewing this sort of material, this excuse does not give researchers free rein. Academic research is not a valid defence against the charge of disseminating terrorist material (Universities UK 2019). It is better to seek permission from an ethics board than to beg forgiveness from a judge.

Interviews

One obvious problem with relying on written sources, physical or digital, is that not everything important is written, let alone published. The advantage of written sources is that they are durable, but the disadvantage is that they are inevitably incomplete. Interviews are invaluable for gaining in-depth understandings of radicals’ motivations and worldviews (Ellinas 2021; Damhuis and de Jonge 2022).

However, interviewing radicals comes with a multitude of problems. Active radicals, like politicians who are still in office, are often unwilling to give candid interviews. While the above-ground spokespeople of radical groups tend to give carefully curated answers, much like party politicians, underground members of radical groups can be difficult to contact. Underground members will sometimes give anonymous interviews or communicate through pseudonyms, but the testimony of unknown sources is of questionable value to scholars. Anonymous “radicals” might, in fact, be imposters or provocateurs and they might give deliberately misleading information. Unless their testimony can somehow be independently verified, it is little better than a rumour or an anonymous post on a message board. Yet “retired” radicals can be valuable sources of information. Like politicians who have left office, radicals who are no longer active – and who no longer fear arrest – are often eager to talk about their experiences. For example, several former members of the ELF have given candid interviews since they were released from prison ( Sotille 2022).

“Retired” radicals can tell us only about the past. In order to understand the current dynamics of a radical group, it is necessary to interview people who are actually involved in it. Lubarda’s (2023) work on far-right ecologism provides an excellent demonstration of how to do this, as does Gordon’s (2007) “movement-driven” research on contemporary anarchism. As Gordon argues,

an authentic picture of a movement’s ideological articulation can only emerge from attention to the verbal medium in which the bulk of it takes place. Thus, while books, pamphlets and websites should not be ignored, the primary material for interpretation is the continuous and polyphonic conversational activity that takes place among the participants.

(Gordon 2007: 30–31)

The only way to access this “conversational activity” is to become part of the conversation, through “first-hand participant observation of the vernacular culture of activists” (Gordon 2007: 30–31). Further, Gordon (2007: 32) argues, “Only embeddedness in activist networks can afford a sufficiently literate approach to activists’ written expression.” In other words, in order to develop a fine-grained, contextual understanding of radical publications, it is first necessary to immerse oneself in the radical sub-cultures that produce them.

Although first-hand experience with radical groups is undoubtedly valuable for understanding their ideologies, it is not without problems, nor unquestionably superior to other types of evidence. First and most obviously, anthropological approaches raise ethical and legal issues. Whatever its merits, a project that involves participant observation of groups that are involved in illegal activity is difficult to sell to an ethics board. Merely associating with groups such as the FAI or the ELF would be against the law in many countries. To some degree or another, these ethical and legal issues confront anyone who wishes to interview members of radical groups.

Second, interviews and participant observation are much more useful for answering some questions than others. If one’s goal is, like Gordon’s, to understand contemporary radical groups, then there is no substitute for first-hand, insider knowledge. But if one’s goal is to understand a radical group’s origins or ideological formation, then asking active radicals might not be the best approach. People may intentionally distort or simply misrecall their intellectual influences. As Burkhardt (2005: 13–14) says, “memory is a tricky resource in itself, inevitably involving considerable selection and reconstruction”. Not many people can accurately recall what they were reading five years ago, let alone five decades ago. But when asked they are likely to produce an answer, which may be little better than a wild guess. In general, written sources are more reliable than interviews for excavating a radical group’s intellectual influences. John Zerzan, the grandfather of anarcho–primitivism, probably cannot remember everything he read in 1988. He will likely remember some of what he read, though his assessment of what was important at the time may well be distorted by the prism of hindsight. It is better to ask Zerzan’s “past self”, so to speak, by looking at the footnotes from the books and articles he wrote at the time. After several years have elapsed, written sources can often tell us more, and more reliably, about the past than the flesh-and-blood author can.

Conclusion

The best kind of evidence for studying a radical group depends largely on the question that the researcher aims to answer. If the question is a historical one, about the group’s intellectual influences or ideological formation, then radical publications and archives are usually the best sources. But if the question is about a radical group’s current dynamics, then interviews and online material are invaluable. There are no hard-and-fast rules. Sometimes online material constitutes historical evidence, and sometimes archives can answer questions about contemporary movements. For instance, websites and newsgroups can tell us a lot about the reception of the Unabomber’s ideas in the 1990s, and his prison correspondence can tell us a lot about today’s anti-tech movement. The main lesson is that scholars of ideology should be evidential omnivores. They cannot afford to be too picky or method-driven, because the available evidence about radical groups is so limited. Studying the ideologies of radical groups is a matter of piecing together incomplete and ill-fitting fragments while blindfolded by anonymity and pseudonymity. By using as many kinds of evidence as possible and by cross-checking each against the others, it is possible to find gaps in the blindfold.

Although my starting supposition was that radical groups are fundamentally different from other political groups, the differences are smaller than they initially appear. “Above-ground” political groups, such as governments and political parties, are often more clandestine than people in democratic societies like to believe. WikiLeaks has thrown this fact into sharp relief. While governments pay lip-service to transparency and openness, they frequently engage in espionage, propaganda campaigns and covert actions (Cormac 2023). Political parties publish their platforms, but they also make backroom deals and carefully guard their campaign plans. Even the members of mainstream political parties have been known to organise in secret (van Duyn 2020). The public communications of governments and political parties are valuable sources of evidence for scholars of ideology, but there is a risk of putting too much stock in this carefully curated material. Scholars should bear in mind that above-ground political groups have basements, bunkers and dungeons, which have to be “excavated” just like the shadowy chambers of radical groups.

References

Arnold, R. (1997) EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature: The World of the Unabomber, Bellevue WA: Free Enterprise Press.

Ashworth, L. (2012) “The poverty of paradigms: Subcultures, trading zones and the case of liberal socialism in interwar international relations”, International Relations, vol. 26, no. 1, 35–59.

Bailard, C. S., Tromble, R., Zhong, W., Bianchi, F., Hosseini, P. and Broniatowski, D. (2024) “‘Keep your heads held high boys!’: Examining the relationship between the proud boys’ online discourse and offline activities”, American Political Science Review, vol. 118, no. 4, 2054–2071.

Barnett, B. A. (2015) “20 years later: A look back at the Unabomber Manifesto”, Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 9, no. 6, 60–71.

Brown, J. M. (2020) “Notes to the underground: Credit claiming and organizing in the earth liberation front”, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 32, no. 2, 237–256.

Burkhardt Jr, R. W. (2005) Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and the Founding of Ethology, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cormac, R. (2023) How to Stage A Coup: And Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft, London: Atlantic Books.

Damhuis, K. and de Jonge, L. (2022) “Going nativist: How to interview the radical right?” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, vol. 21, 1–11.

ELF. (2001) Frequently Asked Questions About the Earth Liberation Front, Portland OR: North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office.

ELF. (2002) Pacific ELF Communiqué, August 11. Irvine PA.

Ellinas, A. A. (2021) “The interview method in comparative politics: The process of interviewing far-right actors”, Government & Opposition, vol. 58, no. 4, 661–681.

Fleming, S. (2021) “The two faces of personhood: Hobbes, corporate agency and the personality of the state”, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 1, 5–26.

Fleming, S. (2022) “The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 27, no. 2, 207–225.

Fleming, S. (2024) “Searching for ecoterrorism: The crucial case of the Unabomber”, American Political Science Review, vol. 118, no. 4, 1986–1999.

Gordon, U. (2007) “Anarchism reloaded”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 12, no. 1, 29–48.

Hughes, B., Jones, D. and Amarasingam, A. (2022) “Ecofascism: An examination of the far-right/ecology nexus in the online space”, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 34, no. 5, 997–1023.

Joosse, P. (2007) “Leaderless resistance and ideological inclusion: The case of the Earth Liberation Front.” Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 19, no. 3, 351–368.

Joosse, P. (2012) “Elves, environmentalism and ‘Eco-terror’: Leaderless resistance and media coverage of the Earth Liberation Front”, Crime Media Culture, vol. 8, no. 1, 75–93.

Kaczynski, T. J. (1995) “Industrial society and its future”, The Washington Post, September 19, with September 22 corrections, [Online], Available: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm[9 Feb 2024].

Kaczynski, T. J. (2020) Anti-tech Revolution: Why and How, 2^nd edition, Scottsdale AZ: Fitch & Madison.

Lee, M. F. (1995) Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse, Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press.

Loadenthal, M. (2014) “Eco-terrorism? Countering dominant narratives of securitisation: A critical, quantitative history of the Earth Liberation Front (1996–2009)”, Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 8, no. 3, 16–50.

Loadenthal, M. (2017) The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence, Manchester UK: Manchester University Press.

Loadenthal, M. (2022) “Feral fascists and deep green guerrillas: Infrastructural attack and accelerationist terror”, Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 15, no. 1, 169–208.

Lubarda, B. (2023) Far-right Ecologism: Environmental Politics and the Far Right in Hungary and Poland, New York NY: Routledge.

Lubrano, M. (2024) “Hidden in plain sight: Insurrectionary anarchism in the anti-government extremism landscape.” Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 18, no. 1, 37–61.

Luke, T. (1996) “Re-reading the Unabomber Manifesto”, Telos, vol. 107, no. Spring, 81–94.

Macklin, G. (2022) “The extreme right, climate change and terrorism”, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 34, no. 5, 979–996.

Marone, F. (2015) “The rise of insurrectionary anarchist terrorism in Italy”, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, vol. 8, no. 3, 194–214.

Millett, S. (2012) “Technology is capital: Fifth estate’s critique of the megamachine”, in Purkis, J. and Bowen, J. (eds.) Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age, Manchester UK: Manchester University Press: 73–98.

Olga Cell (Informal Anarchist Federation). (2012) “Against the corporations of death: CEO Roberto Adinolfi Shot in Genoa by FAI/Nucleo Olga”, Dark Nights, vol. 19, no. May, 1–3.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2024) “Editorial: Ideology and the individual”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 29, no. 1, 1–25.

Pirro, A. L. P. (2023) “Far right: The significance of an umbrella concept”, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 29, no. 1, 101–112.

Rilla, J. (2024) “What kind of group is Antifa?” New Political Science, vol. 46, no. 1, 81–100.

Sale, K. (1995) “Unabomber’s secret treatise: Is there method in his madness?” The Nation, 25 September.

Simpson, B., Willer, R. and Feinberg, M. (2022) “Radical flanks of social movements can increase support for moderate factions”, PNAS Nexus, vol. 1, no. 3, 1–11.

Sotille, L. (2022) “Burn Wild.” Apple podcasts, August-November.

Tait, J. (2019) “Mencius Moldbug and neoreaction”, in Sedgwick, M. (ed.) Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 187–203.

Taylor, B. (2008) “The tributaries of radical environmentalism”, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 2, no. 1, 27–61.

Terrorism Act 2000, c. 11. [Online], Available: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11[19 Jan 2024].

Universities UK. (2019) Oversight of Security-Sensitive Research Material in UK Universities: Guidance, London: Universities UK.

Van Duyn, E. (2020) “Mainstream marginalization: Secret political organizing through social media”, Social Media + Society, vol. 6, no. 4, 1–13.

Woodhouse, K. M. (2018) The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, New York NY: Columbia University Press.

4. Tools and debates in computational studies of online circulation of ideology

The case of the French radical right

Benjamin Tainturier

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-6

Introduction

The immersion of the public in an information space that is not exactly true but plausible doesn’t, as politicians consistently believe, accentuate the credulity and instinctive passions of ordinary people. Something is in fact taking place at the heart of this chaotic swarm of fragmented knowledge, something firm and certain, which is quite simply the right to know and to judge, the right to expect the king to divulge the secret. The fact that noises and rumors then fuel each person’s natural taste for the incredible and the marvelous does not in any way prevent the construction of a feeling according to which political knowledge is legitimate, necessary to claim.[12]

(Farge 2013: 290)

Thus Arlette Farge relates, in Dire et mal dire: L’opinion publique au XVIIIème siècle, the effects on individual behaviour of “something” which led the people, at the dawn of the French Revolution, to “exist in politics”. Related to the work of Jürgen Habermas on Öffentlichkeit, Dire et mal dire constitutes a study of new discourse practices, new rites of speech, which are highly critical of the royal power in place, concomitant with the affirmation of a new political subject. Arlette Farge manages to study a set of very disparate words as a whole, defending the idea that the right to say these words was gradually consolidated in the 18^th century as a legitimate right. Thus, even though these words may well be contrary, “chaotic”, they all signal that “public opinion” is becoming reality, because even if these words do not necessarily agree, they recognise each other, sharing a relative autonomy in relation to the state.

In the 21^st century, spaces of conversation credited with a certain autonomy in relation to the institutions responsible for public speech have also emerged. New information and communication technologies have indeed given rise to new scenes online in which internet users can discuss, share information or exchange arguments when the conversation lends itself to it. These spaces also have their history. Forums, chats, blogs, socio-digital networks: their form has varied since the invention of the web in 1989, as has the collective behaviour they provoke among internet users. Blogs created by anonymous users, forums initiated by major media with an already long editorial history, and private Facebook “pages” make up relatively different scenes. As in the 18^th century, these new spaces for discussion give rise to intense political debates and the circulation of ideological content.

This new role played by digital spaces in the lives of individuals justifies study by the social sciences, rethinking its methods and paradigms. These spaces are very numerous and frequented by an immense number of contributors. These people are, for the most part, neither intellectuals, nor political figures, nor journalists. Thus, studying the content produced by these internet users allows us to have another look at the circulation of political discourses and ideologies by studying individuals who have been little considered until now. Indeed, most studies of the circulation of political and ideological content only consider the discourses of professional actors such as activists or scholars.

How can the social sciences study the use made of social networks and new digital technologies for the circulation of ideological content? These new fields of investigation make it possible to analyse data and content produced by actors who have no public reputation or little notoriety. These actors have received little attention, until now, in the analysis of ideology. To illustrate the methods that we present, our case study is the French radical right. Many works have shown how this particular political force has become particularly present online ( Schradie 2019).

The chapter is structured as follows: after presenting the main methodological challenges posed by these methods, we mention the main results that these works lead to. Then we present two complementary methods for mapping ideological dynamics. The first, an ideological inference method, allows us to reposition speakers who express themselves in political spaces. This operation aims to make attitudinal variables reappear, while these attitudes are not normally always transparent in the content written by individuals online. Knowing the political positions of internet users is a necessary first step in analysing their link with ideological discourses. The second method, a cartographic analysis, allows us to position digital content and actors in relation to each other. These networks are essential for studying forms of the circulation of digital content.

Social sciences and the study of ideology online

Challenges of digital contents for research

Even though digital methods are recent, they are already often used to study the web and social networks (Edelmann 2020). The role that digital spaces now have in the lives of individuals justifies their study by social sciences, rethinking its methods and paradigms. These spaces are very numerous and frequented by an immense number of contributors. To use the terms proposed by the editors of this volume, the new methods for studying activity in digital spaces allow us to examine the micro level of ideological experience, not just the meso and macro levels.

The analysis of this data presents certain difficulties. First, we must be aware that it is hosted by platforms such as X (Twitter) or YouTube whose goals are primarily commercial ( Ollion and Boelaert 2015). This data reflects digital uses that are influenced by the commercial strategies of the companies that own the platforms.

Furthermore, digital scenes pose certain problems of representativeness. It is not easy to know what a platform like X “says” about the entire information ecosystem. Should X be studied as a scene with its own logic, or as a distorting mirror of more global information dynamics? We opt for the first answer: X is a scene in itself, but we consider that what happens there is today so important for the global information ecosystem that it is worthy of interest (Barnard 2016).

A third limitation concerns the low interpretability of online behaviours (Boyd and Crawford 2012). What does a “like” really mean? It is an operation on a platform by which an internet user signifies appreciation of the content posted by another internet user. But there are many reasons to like content: because we love it, because it has simply caught our attention, or because we know the author of the content and we want to acknowledge his work to encourage him. The same individual behaviours online do not therefore seem really comparable. However, when we analyze large volumes of data and aggregate all these individual behaviours of “like”, comment, retweet, we arrive at coherent results that are easily interpretable by qualitative investigation. Overall, numerical methods proceed from a particular statistical philosophy. Imprecision and simplification are the price to pay for being able to analyse very large volumes of data. What is lost in precision is gained in statistical robustness and quality of representation.

Digital data is also not very “granular”, that is to say that it is rare to have information on the age, gender or social class of the internet users who wrote the texts that are collected as data. But these texts exist in very large quantities. It is this abundance that makes it possible to characterise the authors of the content from which the data is drawn. It is not a question of individual and “absolute” characteristics of the authors of the content, such as their religion or their income level, but of information resulting from the relative positioning of the data in relation to itself. Very often, in the study of digital data, the actors are defined by the networks in which they are inserted. By considering, in an aggregated way, how the actors cite each other, it becomes possible to reconstruct, step by step, notoriety indicators for each of the actors or to isolate coherent sub-groups within the overall networks. After this intermediate step, a qualitative analysis can be conducted, guided by more classical theories in social sciences on the reputation of individuals or homophily within groups.

Sociological studies have now agreed on a set of methodological precautions to take in processing and interpreting these large volumes of digital data, mitigating the biases linked to their conditions of production. One of these precautions consists in fixing a sociological meaning to certain digital practices. Thus, the “retweet” on X can be considered, under certain methodological conditions, as an indicator of the adhesion of the internet user who retweets to the retweeted content (Metaxas 2015; Marsili 2021). The retweet therefore becomes a sociological link between two digital actors. From there, it becomes possible to construct cartographic representations of networks of X users, some of whom have retweeted the tweets of others. Following the same model, we find later in this article a map of a digital network bringing together YouTube channels. In this network, two channels appear all the more linked as the contents they broadcast are commented on, and therefore consumed, by the same internet users. This time, it is the sharing of the same audience that becomes the criterion for bringing the channels together in the network.

Computational sociology and ideology: Examples of work

The many fields that use digital methods have one thing in common: the data to which these methods are applied is textual data. These are the texts that need to be analysed to trace ideological content. The tools of computational sociology therefore automate content analysis in a certain way, by applying it to large corpora of data. Most of this data is collected on digital scenes, but not all. Some comes from speeches of political figures or academic texts. It can nevertheless be analysed using computational methods of automatic language analysis, as can all other digital data.

Sometimes, studies attempt to describe this content and its specific characteristics. For example, some studies show that populism is a style rather than an essence (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016). Political figures can use populist rhetoric online in certain contexts, and oppose it in others. More than a real political movement, populism therefore appears as a discursive strategy (Mudde 2007).

In addition to analysing the meaning of content, computational sociology has sought to describe the circulation of this content and the ideologies to which it relates in spaces of communication or knowledge. This circulation can be explained by the intrinsic characteristics of this content. Chris Bail and his co-authors, for example, wonder how the speeches of advocacy groups could broaden their audience: is it by mobilising rational arguments or by playing on language registers that favour the emotions of the public? (Bail et al 2017). Similarly, Chris Bail questions the diversification of the content of messages: do these advocacy groups generate more support by tirelessly repeating the same slogans or by diversifying their speech (Bail 2016)?

Other studies on the circulation of ideological content have adopted more structural approaches, asking, for example, how academic discourses on the Arab Spring were produced. These studies show that symbolic hierarchies between academics were largely reproduced to explain the uprisings: specialists well established in American universities benefited from a wider audience and a certain credit premium over researchers close to the field, who observed the events from the Arab world but were less inserted in international academic networks (Al Maghlouth et al 2015). These studies thus reconnect with the social history of political ideas (Matonti 2012), which replaces the circulation of ideological content within the structures of the academic, editorial or political worlds.

The study of ideological content is therefore not necessarily opposed to the study of the structures on which this content is based. Also, some work in computational sociology has sought to describe the way in which digital technology, as a new structure for communication and information exchange, has complicated the global media ecosystem. This work highlights a transformation in the role of the audience of media content. internet users are no longer just passive receivers of media messages, but constantly reinterpret them in humorous, diverted forms, and then broadcast these messages on digital platforms such as X. These multiple diversions take the form of “memes”, for example – images accompanied by text producing a humorous effect. During televised political debates during an election campaign (Wells et al 2016), this diverted content circulates in real time on X or Twitch. It is these dynamics produced by internet users that computational sociology can study to enrich the analysis of the circulation of ideology.

These studies describe the effect of media discourse on digital scenes. Other studies study the opposite effect, taking as their object the effect that digital structures have on public debate. In particular, a large number of studies have been devoted to the phenomenon of ideological polarisation of this debate. Is it true that the recommendation algorithms that guide internet users’ navigation lock them into sets of content that tend to confirm their political opinions (Terren and Borge-Bravo 2021)? Other studies have challenged this idea by asserting that internet users with very strong points of view on certain subjects, when confronted with points of view opposite to their own, felt confirmed in their initial points of view (Bail 2018). These works give per se effectiveness to digital tools in the circulation of ideology.

Many methods exist to map this circulation, seeking to position internet users or content in relation to each other in a space, and seeking to orient these spaces according to known ideological scales. This chapter details two cartographic options. The first is based on ideological coordinates established offline and takes as its starting point users whose ideological preferences are known: members of parliament ( Barberá 2015). The second reveals political preferences from the behaviour of internet users themselves, without postulating a prior reading grid.

A first cartographic method using ideological inference

In this sub-section a first cartographic method and a first method of analysing the circulation of ideological content are presented. The first step of our method is to politically classify X accounts. The operation used to obtain these scores is called an ideological inference operation: depending on their choices on X, the accounts studied are assigned a score that reflects their political identity. This score varies between 0 and 12, with 0 being assigned to accounts that are on the left of the political spectrum, while 12 is assigned to the accounts that are furthest to the right. An account that obtains a score of 12 is therefore an account located “absolutely to the right” of the ideological space, while an account that obtains 0 is located “absolutely to the left of this space”.

This operation is based on the fact that left-wing users on X do not make the same choices as right-wing users. For example, they are not subscribed to the same accounts, because they are not interested in the same content. It is from these subscriptions that we infer the ideological positioning of the accounts. On X, being subscribed to an account – being a “follower” of this account – makes it easy to see the content produced by this account. This content is interesting for the follower; he wants to have access to it. Since we are interested in the ideological preferences of the users we are studying, we look at whether they are subscribed to accounts of political figures whose preferences we know well. We set the condition that to infer the ideology of an account, it must be subscribed on X to at least three different accounts of members of parliament in France. Indeed, parliamentarians have X accounts and subscribers who follow the content they produce (Jackson and Lilleker 2020). To build our database of X users, we selected all the 368 831 accounts that have subscribed to at least three members of the French parliament X accounts in France. The political preferences of these members of the French parliament are easy to know. The 368 831 X users of our database, since they are subscribed to members of parliament on X, have a taste for politics: they follow the debates, often take a position and are interested in current events. We can assign an ideological positioning score to these 368 831 accounts, knowing which members of parliament they follow.

The procedure for assigning an ideological positioning score to these different accounts is a dimensionality reduction operation. We know that these 368 831 accounts are subscribed to members of the French Parliament (MPs), deputies or senators, on X. Intuitively, we understand that if two accounts are subscribed to exactly the same eight MPs, positioned on the right, the ideological score of these two accounts must be the same. If a third account is subscribed to seven of the same MPs, but also to an eighth MP on the left, its score must be lower than that of the other two accounts (because in the scale of scores, low scores are assigned to left-wing accounts).

How can we translate into a single ideological note all these possible subscriptions to the 831 X accounts of MPs that serve as our reference? We must imagine that the 368 831 accounts that we are seeking to position ideologically are immersed in a very large space, with several hundred dimensions, in which the accounts that are subscribed to the same sets of MPs are closer to each other. Then, we apply a geometric method that allows us to “crush” this space of several hundred dimensions into a space that only has a few. Within these few dimensions, we identify the one on which the MPs are “in order”: the MPs of the radical right parties have higher coordinates than the MPs of the moderate right, who themselves have higher coordinates than the MPs of the centre, who themselves have higher coordinates than the MPs of the moderate left, etc. This dimension is that of the ideological positioning of the accounts on an axis that separates the right and the left. We then just need to read the coordinate that the 368 831 accounts that interest us have on this dimension. We have just inferred the ideological positions of all the accounts in our database based on their choices on X ( Ramaciotti Morales et al 2022).

Thanks to the operation of ideological inference, we were able to give an ideological label to 368 831 X accounts. It is within the tweets of these highly politicised X users that, via the application programming interface (API)[13] of X, we have kept all the tweets in French using the bigrams “cancel culture”, or “cancel-culture” or “ cancelculture ” from May 2020 to January 2022. API is used by programmers to dialogue with X to get data and develop further applications.

Figure 4.1 illustrates the proportion per region of the ideological latent space of X accounts using the term “cancel culture” in France from May 2020 to January 2022. Each sub-graph represents one week. The lighter the shade, the higher the proportion. The three points position three major accounts in the French political sphere: Marine Le Pen (MLP), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (JLM) and Emmanuel Macron (EM). The X-axis represents the political dimension from left to right. The Y-axis represents attitudes to institutions, from radical opposition to institutional support.

A large grid of small grayscale square plots, each showing a concentration or intensity map with light and dark areas. The plots are arranged in an incomplete 9 times 10 array. To the right of the grid, a vertical grayscale bar acts as a color scale, ranging from white at the top to black at the bottom.

Figure 4.1 Week-by-week evolution of the ideological positions of Twitter users mentioning the expression “cancel culture” in their tweets.

Source: Data collected by the author through the X and YouTube application programming interfaces.

Week after week, the accounts of our sample which used the expression “cancel culture” in one of their tweets during the considered week are projected on a two-dimensional ideological space. The sub-graphs represent, for different regions of the total ideological space, the percentage of accounts that use the expression over the week. This correction makes it possible in particular to remove certain selection biases in our sample of initial X accounts, which tend to contain more right-wing than left-wing accounts. In each of the 93 sub-graphs, the regions that appear lighter are those where the X accounts tweet more frequently using the expression “cancel culture” during the week in question.

This first example presents a methodological tool to study the circulation of concepts in a political space: in this case, the concept of “cancel culture”, imported from the US into French debates in the second half of the 2010s. This term, as well as others, such as “wokisme”, “islamo-gauchisme” or “great replacement”, reflect the growing influence of the radical right in French public debate. Studying the circulation of these concepts makes it possible to understand the public figures, influential in the political space, who have helped these concepts to gain visibility and legitimacy. The most common analysis of the mainstreaming of radical right themes, often historical or qualitative, underlines the role of government parties in the phenomenon, a much more decisive role than the one played by the radical right allies. Government parties would be the first to use terms encapsulating new forms of racism, which the radical right would then take advantage of (Mondon and Winter 2020). This method provides a means of confirming or invalidating these results through quantitative operations. These dynamic maps also allow us to see how the forces of the left defend themselves in controversies and debates.

This map represents only a first step in a larger study. Here it illustrates a first set of methods that aims to find ideological positioning measured outside digital spaces on the web. Marks of membership or homophily such as retweets make it possible to complete the mapping and extend it to many accounts. Secondly, this mapping invites a more detailed study, week by week, of the micro dynamics that are at work: during the weeks where the term “cancel culture” is particularly used, who are the key actors who normalise the use of the term?

Emergentist and agnostic methods

Digital mapping of uses and the emergence of intrinsic ideology

The intention of the mapping presented in Figure 4.2 is the same: to use membership markers, such as likes, follower–followee patterns or retweets, to postulate affinities between internet users. On YouTube, media and political figures or internet users run channels. The channels share videos that can be commented on by internet users. For each of the two million comments we collected for this digital mapping, it is possible to identify its author or “commentator”. When two channels in our corpus produce videos that share a large group of common commentators, then we establish a link between these two channels. The sum of all these links makes it possible to build a channel network based on homophily criteria.

A grayscale cluster diagram composed of numerous nodes and connecting lines of varying thicknesses. Several large, bolded labels highlight the major clusters within the network, including Alternative Health, Identitarian Radical Right, National-Populist Right-wing, Yellow Vests Social Movement Channels, Mainstream Media, Science and History, and Opinions.

Figure 4.2 Mapping of 628 YouTube channels broadcasting content about politics and entertainment.

Source: Data collected by the author through the X and YouTube application programming interfaces.

This inductive approach to creating a network circumvents any a priori categorisation imposed by researchers. The operation is based on the hypothesis that, when the volume of data is sufficiently large, two channels commented on by the same audiences have certain similarities: the videos of these channels are in fact viewed by the same audiences, since it is necessary to see a video to comment on it. In such an approach, the statistical aggregation of internet users’ actions produces, in a stable and homogeneous manner, an ideological and thematic representation of the media space.

YouTube channels’ ties are proportional to the relative overlap of their commentators: the closer two channels are on the map in Figure 4.2, the more the videos that these channels produce are commented on by overlapping groups of commentators. The size of the nodes is proportional to the visibility of the channel on YouTube (calculated as the geometric average between the number of views of the channel and its number of subscribers).

Structural analysis of the network makes it possible to distinguish several communities, called here “territories” or clusters isolated from each other by the so-called “Louvain” clustering algorithm, which forms groups of channels maintaining a strong proximity between them. This method divides the network according to the partition that optimises modularity, i.e. a measure of the density of edges that connect nodes together within communities, in comparison to the edges that connect communities together. This clustering method is classic for treating such networks (Blondel et al 2008). The more opaque the node, the higher the centrality of this node in its cluster. The number of territories, 12 here, depends on the parameters of the algorithm. This number, validated qualitatively, allows a sufficiently detailed description of the different sets of channels and their theme of interest, while being relatively easy to manipulate.

For the clarity of the map, only relevant clusters have been labelled here. The labels used to designate communities make it possible to interpret the cartography from an ideological point of view. These labels are found by the qualitative analysis of the content of the clusters: the interpreters of the mapped network must be familiar with YouTube to be able to name the clusters. These clusters bring together channels whose content has certain affinities. This relative unity within the clusters demonstrates that the aggregation of individual behaviours; here, the comments make it possible to create, on a meso scale, analytical groupings that make sense from an ideological point of view.

Hate speech detection: From lists of words to the training of an algorithm

The second step of the methodology consists of identifying, in the different clusters, those in which the comments use the most hate speech. It is a method based on the training of neural networks, which makes it possible to detect hate speech and anti-Semitism in particular.

Because this hate speech often manifests itself in diverted and concealed forms, the great diversity of which Baider and Constantinou (2019) have highlighted, the automatic detection of such speech represents a real challenge. However, in sociology works that are interested in digital phenomena and use digital methods, the automatic detection of hate speech is a subject already well covered (Fortuna and Nunes 2018). The most common strategy in detecting this speech consists of relying on the lexicon of hatred (Davidson et al 2017) the algorithms recognising terms frequent in these types of speech target sexist, racist or homophobic insults.

These keyword methods have two problems. First, they impose a suspicion of toxicity on all texts containing a term linked to hate speech, to the Jewish religion or to Islam. Should we, for example, retain the term “racaille” (“scum” in English) in the lists of French targeted words? The expression is used to designate a certain population from ethnic minorities demonstrating delinquent activities, or to denounce “la racaille politique” in a form of complaint that does not strictly relate to hate speech. The same problem is posed by a word like “elite”, sometimes used by populists to designate the existence of a global conspiracy hatched by Jewish populations. Symmetrically, keyword approaches are not very conclusive in highlighting hidden or covert hate speech ( Parvaresh 2023).

Compared to the numerous studies relating to the automatic detection of hate speech, online racism ( Badjatiya et al 2017) or sexism (Parikh et al 2019), little work is devoted to the automatic detection of antisemitism on the internet (Chandra et al 2021). Existing research focuses in particular on detailing the wide variety of statements that can connote antisemitic judgments, and the complexity of the object of study requires great caution in the methods adopted. Also, to detectsmany analysts favour the use of keywords such as “Jews” or “Israel”, making it possible to locate certain specific content ( Zannettou et al 2020). This chapter seeks to investigate in which semantic networks words referring to Jewish culture are used, and how the statistical association of these words with other derogatory or positive words varies. The study of variations over time of such statistical associations thus makes it possible to measure, in different historical contexts, different states of conversations linked to Israel or the Jewish population on the internet. This work, targeted on specific content, also studies the circulation of antisemitic cultural content – such as certain well-known antisemitic caricatures – in digital spaces.

These remarks invite the development of approaches for automatic detection of antisemitic speech that not only rely on lists of keywords, but that could take advantage of more recent and more efficient methods. Models trained on very large corpora have, in the same way, allowed certain well used methods to evolve, to take into account more dimensions or to provide analyses of greater “thickness”. For example, Kozlowski, Taddy and Evans draw on the words used to talk about social classes in a very large historical corpus in order to study social stratification (Kozlowski, Taddy and Evans 2019). This chapter takes into account more dimensions than analysis resulting from geometric methods (Bourdieu 1979), which summarised the thickness of the social world in two or three dimensions. These new methods thus aim to show and measure multi-dimensional phenomena, such as intersectionality, which remained invisible to previous analysis tools. This example clearly illustrates how more sophisticated digital methods can re-appropriate structuring sociological questions for the discipline and deepen the analyses.

In this chapter, the use of language models like Bert (Devlin et al 2018), capable of learning information about contexts, syntax and sentence forms, makes it possible to understand antisemitism in the diversity of its forms better than an analysis based on lists of words would do. Bert captures processes of euphemisation, periphrasis, and approaches certain recognition of irony. In the hate speech detection tool developed here, Bert complements a more traditional “bag of words” method.

To date, only a handful of studies have used algorithms based on Bert to recognise statements making antisemitic judgments. A recent study (Miller et al 2023) focuses, for example, on the resurgence of antisemitism on X before and after the purchase of the platform by Elon Musk. The analytical method works in two stages. First, the tool used relies on several algorithms already established for detecting online hatred or speech toxicity, such as Perspective API[14] or Detoxify,[15] combined to provide a single indicator of latent antisemitism in certain statements. These different algorithms are based on language models inspired by Bert, but are not equivalent. Both present strengths and weaknesses: some detect irony better, others the implicit or proper nouns frequently associated with antisemitic content.

Also, in this chapter, a preliminary meta-annotation procedure aims to establish which combination formula of the different algorithms results in the synthetic indicator that is best at detecting antisemitic content. However, this methodology is not fully convincing, because the hate detection algorithms initially employed were not specifically trained for the task. The recent evaluation of the performance of Detoxify or Perspective API on antisemitic content hand-labelled by researchers reveals that these programs, trained to detect toxic speech, display poor performance in the task of recognising antisemitism. This is the conclusion of the Decoding report on anti-Semitism: An AI- driven study on hate speech and imagery online, from the Technische Center for Research on Antisemitism, Universität Berlin, published in March 2024.[16]

Rather than using existing hate detection algorithms, other researchers train their own classifier (Chandra et al 2021). After a data collection phase, teams of trained coders consult and agree on a definition of anti-Semitism. The definition given by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance[17] often serves as a basis. Then the coders annotate a large number of texts and establish whether or not these contents resemble antisemitic statements.

Antisemitic discourse is complex, and its lexicon is renewed very quickly by being enriched with numerous references, sometimes implicit (Schwarz-Friesel and Reinharz 2017). As a result, certain works fail through use of an overly restrictive definition of the phenomenon. Also, the works that propose a binary classification in which the annotated texts are antisemitic or not (Chandra et al 2021) cause the object of study to lose many nuances. Aware of this problem, other works rely on an ordinal scale in five levels (Jikeli et al 2019), ranging from the label “this text is very negative with regard to Jews, Judaism or Israel” to “this text is very positive about Jews, Judaism or Israel” to establish degrees of hostility of statements; however, these are limited to texts referring to Jewish populations, Judaism or Israel. As a result, the authors struggle to grasp a more latent anti-Semitism or an antisemitic “imprint” which would be carried by other content with broader themes.

Online hate speech and radical right ideology

It is important to mention conclusions derived from our use of another method: detecting statements with antisemitic connotations in a large set of comments by internet users on videos posted on YouTube. This method was used in research carried out for the Consultative Commission on Human Rights in 2020.[18] It requires an annotation phase of several thousand comments, which consists of establishing whether or not each of these comments has an anti-Semitic imprint. Among all comments left on videos on these channels, only comments containing one of the words from a long list of keywords are retained for annotation. This step, which makes it possible to establish a corpus of comments that the coders will be able to classify, is of practical interest. Antisemitic comments constitute a minority of the comments on YouTube. So, without a pre-filtered list of comments, the coders would have had to label many comments without any link to the phenomenon they wish to study, which does not allow the classifier to be properly trained. A list of keywords is therefore used first to select a training corpus, but the whole method is not limited to this list.

The annotation process in this method begins with a consultation phase between the coders, some of whom are specialists in the subject. A constructivist-inspired definition of anti-Semitism was chosen, which allows us to better understand the discursive complexity of this hate speech. In doing so, the researchers recognise an antisemitic imprint of the content rather than obvious anti-Semitism, as could be captured by the binary annotations discriminating antisemitic content from non-antisemitic content. It is this imprint, and the difficulty in deciding on the antisemitic character of a statement, that indicate that the very definition of antisemitism, in certain discursive arenas, is blurry. An ordinal scale in five categories, ranging from “positive speech” to “very strong antisemitic imprint”, was chosen by the coders. Annotation, preceded by a phase of consultation and collective definition of the annotated phenomenon, allows researchers to work with their own categories and not to impose prior definitions on material that does not belong to them (Christin 2020).

Figure 4.3 shows the clusters into which comments with an antisemitic imprint are distributed. For each cluster, the X-axis represents the percentage of comments presenting an anti-Semitic imprint according to the algorithm. Radical right clusters concentrate more antisemitic comments than others. It also appears that the cluster containing channels on alternative health is also characterised by the presence of antisemitic commentators in its audience. At this stage, computational analysis stops and qualitative analysis must take the lead: this involves, in particular, looking at the antisemitic comments detected to qualify the form of antisemitism to which they relate. In the report for which this method was developed, it appears that antisemitic conspiracy theories were particularly present in national–populist right-wing and alternative health-related channels. The identitarian radical right tends instead to present the Jews as the people responsible for the death of Jesus, a very old antisemitic rhetorical move.

A horizontal bar chart comparing seven labeled categories on the horizontal axis, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 and slightly beyond. The categories listed on the vertical axis, from top to bottom, are: Identitarian Radical-Right, Alternative Health, National-Populist Right-Wing, Yellow Vests Social Movement Channels, Mainstream Medias, Radical Left, and Science and History. The bars are a uniform gray-brown color, with Identitarian Radical-Right having the longest bar, exceeding 1.0, and Science and History having the shortest bar, around 0.3.

Figure 4.3 Scores of the prevalence of antisemitic comments in some YouTube territories represented in Figure 4.2.

Source: Data collected by the author through the X and YouTube application programming interfaces.

Conclusion

In this chapter we described two methods for taking advantage of the volumes of data produced on digital spaces. On these spaces, many internet users express themselves: the messages they leave make it possible to study more systematically the circulation of more ideological content. These internet users constitute new objects of study for the social sciences, because the analysis of ideology has long been an analysis of “specialists” of public spaces such as activists or intellectuals. Digital spaces make it possible to see how everyone appropriates ideological content. We described the preliminary step that allows us to map large corpora of web data. Analyses of the circulation of ideological content must then analyse these maps in more depth.

The first method, an ideological inference method, allows us to reposition speakers who express themselves in political spaces. This operation aims to make attitudinal variables reappear, while these attitudes are not normally always transparent in the content written by individuals online. Knowing the political positions of internet users is a necessary first step in analysing their link with ideological discourses. The second method, a cartographic analysis, allows us to position digital content and actors in relation to each other. These networks are essential for studying forms of circulation of digital content.

Computational methods differ from many statistical methods used previously. In particular, computational methods are applied to exhaustive corpora: when studying the circulation of an expression on X, we collect all the tweets containing this expression and not just a sample. In classical statistical methods, we did not have the entire corpus. It was necessary to draw samples and infer theoretical models for these samples, and test that these models were indeed relevant when confronted with the data as a whole. Computational approaches are said to be more agnostic (Grimmer, Roberts and Stewart 2021) because they refuse to systematically find intrinsic models that the data should follow. For example, when looking for regression models, we look for the best ways to synthesise statistical laws that the data in the sample would obey, hoping to verify these laws on even larger samples. In computational approaches modelling is no longer necessary, because the entire data set is already considered and statistical tools capable of managing this large amount of data are used.

Computational methods therefore pay more attention to the diversity of data than more conventional statistical methods. They aim instead to map uses of terms, such as ideological content, and circulations. Then more qualitative methods are often used to articulate these cartographies with knowledge of the field. These methods are reminiscent of the “thick descriptions” (Geertz 1998) that anthropologists carry out by going back and forth between the field and theories. Similarly, the two computational examples mentioned above, which allow us to analyse the circulation of ideological content on social networks, require a very early qualitative return to the data in order to interpret the algorithmic results.

To summarise: digital methods make it possible to analyse ideology by studying more actors and speakers than other methods, they apply to exhaustive corpora, they do not use modelling, which is sometimes imprecise.

“Mussolini had no theory: he only had rhetoric,” said Umberto Eco in his 1995 article How to spot a fascist. It is a good sentence to remember when studying online corpora of data from the radical right. On digital scenes, the tools for analysing political and ideological streams are first applied to recognising precise words and rhetorical forms. Whether by word list or by training an algorithm, online methods of analysing ideology are reduced to the detection of language elements. It is the knowledge of the field, of the actors, and of all these “entrepreneurs” of ideology that makes it possible to restore the language marks detected in sociological worlds, suitable for interpretation like any other form of public discourse.

References

Al Maghlouth, N., Arvanitis, R., Cointet, J. P. and Hanafi, S. (2015) “Who frames the debate on the Arab uprisings? Analysis of Arabic, English, and French academic scholarship”, International Sociology, vol. 30, no. 4, 418–441.

Badjatiya, P., Gupta, S., Gupta, M. and Varma, V. (2017) “Deep learning for hate speech detection in tweets”, Proceedings of the 26^th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 759–760.

Baider, F. and Constantinou, M. (2019) “Discours de haine dissimulée, discours alternatifs et contre-discours. Définition, pratiques et propositions”, Semen. Revue de sémio-linguistique des textes et discours, vol. 47, 9–22.

Bail, C. A. (2016) “Cultural carrying capacity: Organ donation advocacy, discursive framing, and social media engagement”, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 165, 280–288.

Bail, C. A., Brown, T. W. and Mann, M. (2017) “Channeling hearts and minds: Advocacy organizations, cognitive-emotional currents, and public conversation”, American Sociological Review, vol. 82, no. 6, 1188–1213.

Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W., Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Hunzaker, M. F. and Volfovsky, A. (2018) “Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 37, 9216–9221.

Barberá, P. (2015) “Birds of the same feather tweet together: Bayesian ideal point estimation using Twitter data”, Political Analysis, vol. 23, no. 1, 76–91.

Barnard, S. R. (2016) “‘Tweet or be sacked’: Twitter and the new elements of journalistic practice”, Journalism, vol. 17, no. 2, 190–207.

Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J. L., Lambiotte, R. and Lefebvre, E. (2008) “Fast unfolding of communities in large networks”, Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, vol. 2008, no. 10, P10008.

Bonikowski, B. and Gidron, N. (2016) “The populist style in American politics: Presidential campaign discourse, 1952–1996”, Social Forces, vol. 94, no. 4, 1593–1621.

Bourdieu, P. (1979) La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, Paris: Éditions De Minuit.

Boyd, D. and Crawford, K. (2012) “Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon”, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 15, no. 5, 662–679.

Chandra, M., Pailla, D., Bhatia, H., Sanchawala, A., Gupta, M., Shrivastava, M. and Kumaraguru, P. (2021) “‘Subverting the Jewtocracy’: Online antisemitism detection using multimodal deep learning”, Proceedings of the 13^th ACM Web Science Conference 2021, 148–157.

Christin, A. (2020) “The ethnographer and the algorithm: Beyond the black box”, Theory and Society, vol. 49, no. 5–6, 897–918.

Davidson, T., Warmsley, D., Macy, M. and Weber, I. (2017, May) “Automated hate speech detection and the problem of offensive language”, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 11, no. 1, 512–515.

Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K. and Toutanova, K. (2018) “Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805.

Edelmann, A., Wolff, T., Montagne, D. and Bail, C. A. (2020) “Computational social science and sociology”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 1, 61–81.

Farge, A. (1992) Dire et mal dire: L’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Seuil.

Fortuna, P. and Nunes, S. (2018) “A survey on automatic detection of hate speech in text”, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), vol. 51, no. 4, 1–30.

Geertz, C. (1998) “La description dense. Vers une théorie interprétative de la culture”, Enquête. Archives de la Revue Enquête, no. 6, 73–105.

Grimmer, J., Roberts, M. E. and Stewart, B. M. (2021) “Machine learning for social science: An agnostic approach”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 24, 395–419.

Jackson, N. and Lilleker, D. (2020) “Microblogging, constituency service and impression management: UK MPs and the use of Twitter”, Journal of Legislative Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 86–105.

Jikeli, G., Cavar, D. and Miehling, D. (2019) “Annotating antisemitic online content. Towards an applicable definition of antisemitism”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01214.

Kozlowski, A. C., Taddy, M. and Evans, J. A. (2019) “The geometry of culture: Analyzing the meanings of class through word embeddings”, American Sociological Review, vol. 84, no. 5, 905–949.

Marsili, N. (2021) “Retweeting: Its linguistic and epistemic value”, Synthese, vol. 198, no. 11, 10457–10483.

Matonti, F. (2012) “Plaidoyer pour une histoire sociale des idées politiques”, Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine, vol. 59, no. 4bis, 85–104.

Metaxas, P., Mustafaraj, E., Wong, K., Zeng, L., O’Keefe, M. and Finn, S. (2015) “What do retweets indicate? Results from user survey and meta-review of research”, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 9, no. 1, 658–661.

Miller, C., Weir, D., Ring, S., Marsh, O., Inskip, C. and Chavana, N. P. (2023) “Antisemitism on twitter before and after Elon Musk’s acquisition”, London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Mondon, A. and Winter, A. (2020) Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream, London: Verso Books.

Mudde, C. (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ollion, É. and Boelaert, J. (2015) “Beyond big data. Social sciences and the proliferation of digital data”, Sociologie, vol. 6, no. 3, 295–310.

Parikh, P., Abburi, H., Badjatiya, P., Krishnan, R., Chhaya, N., Gupta, M., and Varma, V. (2019) “Multi-label categorization of accounts of sexism using a neural framework”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.04602.

Parvaresh, V. (2023) “Covertly communicated hate speech: A corpus-assisted pragmatic study”, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 205, 63–77.

Ramaciotti Morales, P., Cointet, J. P., Muñoz Zolotoochin, G., Fernández Peralta, A., Iñiguez, G. and Pournaki, A. (2022) “Inferring attitudinal spaces in social networks”, Social Network Analysis and Mining, vol. 13, no. 1, 14.

Schradie, J. (2019) The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, Princeton NJ: Harvard University Press.

Schwarz-Friesel, M. and Reinharz, J. (2017) Inside the Antisemitic Mind: The Language of Jew-hatred in Contemporary Germany, Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press.

Terren, L. T. L., and Borge-Bravo, R. B. B. R. (2021) “Echo chambers on social media: A systematic review of the literature”, Review of Communication Research, vol. 9, 99–118.

Wells, C., Van Thomme, J., Maurer, P., Hanna, A., Pevehouse, J., Shah, D. V. and Bucy, E. (2016) “Coproduction or cooptation? Real-time spin and social media response during the 2012 French and US presidential debates”, French Politics, vol. 14, 206–233.

Zannettou, S., Finkelstein, J., Bradlyn, B. and Blackburn, J. (2020, May) “A quantitative approach to understanding online antisemitism”, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 14, 786–797.

Section II: Historiography of ideological change

Introduction

The study of ideological change requires an approach that moves beyond viewing ideologies as fixed, static doctrines. A major shift in this direction came with the Cambridge School’s historiographical methods: rather than assuming the consistency of concepts such as “liberalism” and “conservatism” throughout history, it emphasises the need to study how their meanings vary across time and historical contexts. J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner’s studies on figures like Machiavelli (Pocock 1975) and Hobbes (Skinner 1996) reveal how socio-historical conditions shape the evolution of conceptual meanings. Randall Collins’ Sociology of Philosophies (1998) also offers a method for analysing intellectual change, emphasising the need to study the social locations and intellectual networks in which philosophical ideas are formed. In the field of ideology studies, Michael Freeden has linked ideological recombination with the processes of mutation within the groups from which ideologies emerge. His works, Ideologies and Political Theory (1996) and The Oxford Handbook Of Political Ideologies (2013), are seminal contributions to this area, demonstrating that ideologies are dynamic, contingent frameworks shaped by historical contexts and the agency of social groups.

The chapters in this section build upon these insights to refresh the historiography of three major 19^th-century ideological traditions: liberalism, republicanism and anarchism. Each contribution shares a commitment to avoiding biased, teleological accounts of ideological development. Niklas Plaetzer warns against a historiographical focus on a “victor’s history” and instead seeks to recover the ideas of the dominated. Léo Grillet critiques ideological histories that attempt to retrospectively attribute the origins of ecological thought to anarchism in an effort to “green” anarchism. Meanwhile, Teddy Paikin contrasts the varying meanings of liberalism across national contexts, challenging historiographical approaches that treat liberalism as a monolithic discourse based solely on a priori discursive similarities.

In addition to these historiographical approaches, the chapters share several characteristics and innovative approaches to the study of ideological change:

Methodological innovations: All three chapters offer alternative methodological approaches to the conventional focus on single-case historical contexts: a comparative, cross-case study approach (Paikin), a transnational, bottom-up perspective (Plaetzer) and an environmental contextualist approach (Grillet).
Beyond the canon: Both Plaetzer and Grillet highlight the need to pluralise and decentre the focus of ideology studies away from a few canonical, dominant figures to encompass the role of a variety of popular movements, neglected authors and marginalised actors in ideological construction.
Material conditions of ideological production: The relationship between ideology and material structures, particularly class relations, is a central theme in both Plaetzer’s and Paikin’s contributions.

Beyond these commonalities, each chapter develops a distinctive empirical case study and methodology.

In Chapter 5, Teddy Paikin traces the divergent meanings of 19^th-century English and French liberalism to differences in the “social–property relations” (Wood 2012) that characterised their respective societies. While liberalism may share apparent semantic commonalities across countries, his comparative context analysis demonstrates that varying socio-economic structures have shaped its divergent meanings and social functions within each national tradition. More specifically, his chapter links the distinct trajectories of liberal thought in each country to their respective social–property relations and class structures. He argues that British liberalism developed in close affinity with capitalism, emerging in a context where capitalist social–property relations were already established. By contrast, French liberalism arose in a non-capitalist setting, where it was primarily shaped in opposition to the absolutist state.

In Chapter 6, Niklas Plaetzer investigates how mid-19^th-century transnational social movements of dominated groups reimagined republican ideals. In doing so, he challenges the dominance of nation–state frameworks in democratic theory, revealing an alternative tradition of radical republicanism that transcends national borders. Through the concept of “plebeian internationalism”, he highlights how working-class actors appropriated and redefined notions of freedom, equality, fraternity and civic virtue, reshaping their meanings within distinctly emancipatory and transnational institutions and registers. This chapter not only uncovers an overlooked tradition in political thought but also introduces an important methodological approach to renewing ideological historiographies: a bottom-up analysis of ideas in action, focusing on how the power struggles of the dominated leave their imprint on political concepts ( Koselleck 2004 [1979]).

In Chapter 7, Léo Grillet explores the intersection of anarchism and ecologism, challenging efforts to over-emphasise ecological elements in 19^th-century anarchist thought. To do so, the chapter develops an alternative method that shifts the focus from a “history of environmental ideas” to an “environmental history of political ideas” (Charbonnier 2021). In particular, Grillet draws on the concept of “environmental reflexivity” ( Fressoz and Locher 2012), which seeks to grasp the historically contextualised ways of conceiving the effects of human actions on the environment. Beyond the canonical figures of Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, Grillet uncovers the specific environmental reflexivity of a more marginal anarchist movement, the Montmartre naturiens. Rather than categorically establishing or denying anarchism’s paternity over ecologism, Grillet highlights the need to examine the various, pluralistic and competing forms of environmental reflexivity within the militant anarchist field.

References

Charbonnier, P. (2021) Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Collins, R. (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Freeden, M., Stears, M. and Sargent, L. T. (ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook Of Political Ideologies, Oxford; New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Fressoz, J. B. and Locher, F. (2012) “Modernity frail climate: A climate history of environmental reflexivity”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 3, 579–598.

Koselleck, R. (2004 [1979]) “The historical-political semantics of asymmetric counterconcepts,” in Koselleck, R. (ed.) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York NY: Columbia University Press, 155–191.

Pocock, J. G. A. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, revised edition, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Skinner, Q. (1996) Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wood, E. M. (2012) Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, London: Verso Books.

5. Liberalism and capitalist development

Outline for a comparative intellectual history

Teddy Paikin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-8

Introduction

Liberalism is typically understood as a doctrine that champions fundamental economic freedoms – private property, low taxes and trade free from both monopolies and tariffs – and political liberties – civil equality, the rule of law, freedom of the press, responsible government and meritocracy. The happy marriage of the economic and political aspects of liberalism was first supposedly imagined in early modern Europe, ushering in the modern epoch as both the primary force for representative democracy and the necessary political ancillary to modern economic development. This wide-ranging conception, however, has tended to distort the historical development and character of different national liberal traditions by neglecting the substantial socio-economic differences between European societies – differences which are of paramount importance for understanding the nature of liberalism and its relationship to social change. While it is certain that French and British liberalism developed in constant interaction with one another, they differ radically in the concrete contexts which structured their engagement with political problems and their primary points of concern.

In this chapter, I offer an interpretation of the nature of early 19^th-century French and British liberalism by way of comparative socio-intellectual history that contextualises the two traditions within each society’s respective social–property relations.[19] I show that in order to grasp the ideological specificity of different national traditions of liberal thought, one must consider their development in tandem with the dynamics, tendencies and antagonisms generated by the social–property relations – and corresponding forms of the state – of the societies in which liberalism emerged. While it may have been the case that in both France and Britain liberalism was primarily an ideology for the limitation of the state with respect to civil society, I argue that the reasons behind such limitation are obscured when one neglects the different class structures of England and France. The failure to consider social–property relations, I argue, conceals significant differences in the conceptual content of different national traditions and homogenises the ideological role liberalism played in each society’s development.

British liberalism developed in a context of already-existing capitalist social–property relations supported by an aristocratic parliamentary–constitutional political order. Given that the political conditions for economic development had already been established in the early modern period, the liberal tradition at the beginning of the 19^th century did not seek to fundamentally undermine the aristocratic order in the name of market society. It was primarily oriented toward compelling the state to cast off its pre-capitalist characteristics – namely its mercantilist foreign policy – in order to fully embody its public character and better establish the conditions of sustained economic development. In the liberal struggle to create a laissez-faire state, the efficiency, predictability and universality of market society was to serve as the model for political administration. The state – especially the central bank and judiciary – was to take on an increasingly public character. Its enforcement of the law of property assured that all members of society were subject to the impersonal forces of the market. Early 19^th-century British liberalism remained a fundamentally political ideology, but one that justified the subordination of politics to the requirements of continued development. Its conceptual logic was most purely expressed in the utilitarianism of Bentham and J. S. Mill and the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo.

French liberalism, on the other hand, developed in a non-capitalist context and its primary antagonist remained the absolutist and centralising post-revolutionary states. Unlike in Britain, early 19^th-century liberalism was characterised by a split between the political and economic branches of liberalism. On one hand, political liberals sought to bring the Revolution to an end by establishing a constitutional geometry which would safeguard political moderation and the achievements of the Revolution. But they remained dubious of the process of rapid capitalist development that might undermine the conditions of political stability. On the other hand, economic liberals – while certainly more favourable to certain aspects of market society than their political counterparts – remained wedded to republican notions of a society of industrious petty commodity producers and continued to promote a British-style laissez-faire state incapable of jumpstarting the process of economic development. French liberalism’s objection to government interference ultimately contributed to the reproduction of a segmented – and therefore non-competitive – national economic space. Liberals sought to limit the state, extolling a gouvernement à bon marché because of the moral virtues of work, while remaining ambivalent about establishing the conditions for rapid industrial development. I argue that it was only the political economy of Saint-Simonian Bonapartism that was capable of overcoming these limits and ideologically supporting capitalist development in the Second Empire.

I first examine the long-running historiographical debate on the history and nature of liberalism by reconstructing three different theoretical orientations: the conceptual, classical social and revisionist–discursive. I then explain the way a social–property relations perspective can contribute to this literature by offering a situated reading of the British and French liberal traditions in the early 19^th century. I conclude with reflections on how the social–property relations framework can ground further research into the historical and comparative analysis of political ideologies.

Dominant views in the literature

The conceptual interpretation

The dominant approach to the analysis of the history of liberalism can be labelled the “conceptual interpretation.” It generally consists of positing some shared ontological or epistemological assumption lying at the foundation of all liberal thought and revealed through close textual analysis of canonical liberal thinkers. Its most prominent exponents are Pierre Manent_ (1994), Anthony Arblaster (1984), Lucien Jaume (1997) and more recently Andrew Sartori (2014). These scholars have tended to focus on the central role granted to the concept of the individual as what is essential to the birth of liberal thought. For the conceptual interpretation, it is the liberal tradition’s representation of the individual as inherently autonomous from social and historical relations which allows it to serve as the theoretical grounds for its subsequent derivation of normative political propositions regarding the appropriate forms of the state and civil society. Consequently, liberal theories uphold certain fundamental limitations on the state, particularly relative to interference with individual action in their domestic sphere, but especially in the marketplace. This approach historically locates the birth of liberalism in the early modern period, namely in problems surrounding political legitimacy in 17^th-century Western Europe in which both religious and absolutist institutions came to be increasingly criticised for their arbitrary exercise of power. In this context, liberalism offered an alternative ground for political authority, one in which man was entitled to rights regardless of his position within the traditional hierarchy of feudal orders. Individual and collective self-determination based on natural rights is therefore the essence of liberal thought and its true progenitors are Hobbes and Locke.

Insofar as they use liberalism as a foil for the reconstruction of the early modern republican tradition, the scholars of the Cambridge School such as Quentin Skinner (1998), J.G.A Pocock (1975) and Philip Pettit (1997) also belong to the “conceptual interpretation” of liberalism. According to Pettit (1993: 180), while republicanism conceived of freedom as “the status of being fully enfranchised, fully incorporated within the body politic”, liberalism consisted in “the doctrine according to which the state should assume such a form that negative liberty is maximally advanced”. Liberalism should therefore be understood as a model or concept of freedom premised on the – primarily economic – self-interest of the individual. Even though they place the birth of liberalism in the 19^th century rather than the early modern period, the primary scholars of the Cambridge School duplicate the conceptual interpretation’s identification of liberalism with individualism.

The conceptualist position has been criticised for positing individualism or freedom as non-interference as the theoretical foundation of liberalism, as such a definition risks excluding large swathes of avowedly liberal thinkers from the tradition (Levy 2015: 49) This is especially problematic for thinkers in the French liberal canon whose work is not grounded in any ahistorical individualism. As Siedentrop (2013: 13) argues, conceptualists generalise the thought of certain significant liberal English philosophers of mind to the essential features of liberalism as such. This neglects thinkers of the French tradition of liberal thought such as Guizot, Constant, de Staël and de Tocqueville, whose philosophies may have been more individualistic than those of the French republican tradition, yet who in no way grounded their social analyses in an abstract methodological individualism. For instance, even though Pettit (1993: 163) explicitly argues that Constant is the father of French liberalism, he neglects to mention the fact that Constant was in no way committed to an individualistic concept of freedom as non-interference. For much of the French liberal tradition, as we shall see, individualism was the primary social blight brought about by modern democratic culture, a phenomenon which tended to undermine political moderation and engender the conditions for tyranny (Rosenberg 2020).

Additionally, the limited attention given to the distinct socio-economic developments of England and France in the early modern and modern periods limits the capacity of such theories to grasp the nature of liberalism as a historically situated ideology. The socio-material basis for the emergence or unprecedented expansion of individualism remains unspecified, as well as its concrete ideological meaning, given the different class structures of Britain and France. Freedom as non-interference and individualism – while certainly being at the logical or epistemic foundation of much liberal political philosophy – do not in themselves explain the ideological content of liberal thought because they do not specify the way in which liberal thought relates to the basic social structures of the societies in which it emerged. As we shall see in the second section, to argue for “freedom as non-interference” in a society structured by capitalist social–property relations, and one which is not, has radically different ideological implications.

The classical social interpretation

A more traditional approach to understanding liberalism – and the dominant view throughout the 20^th century – placed it within the context of the political and economic transformations brought about by the French, American and Industrial Revolutions (Laski 1936; Seidman 1983; Bellamy 1992) In this more marxisant tradition, liberalism was interpreted as the ideology of a nascent bourgeoisie intent on challenging the rule of landowning aristocracies and laying the economic and political foundations for a new capitalist market society. For Laski (1936) – a major proponent of the classical social interpretation – liberalism was a doctrine which sought “to limit the ambit of political authority, to confine the business of government within the framework of constitutional principle”. This limitation on the state stemmed from the individualist character of the new emerging capitalist society: “what produced liberalism was the emergence of a new economic society at the end of the middle ages. As a doctrine, it was shaped by the needs of that new society”.

The classical social interpretation has the merit of attempting to explain the basis of liberalism through fundamental transformations in the socio-economic structure of European society. But it has been criticised for depending on the question-begging theory of bourgeois revolution (Skocpol 1979; Wood 1991; Lafrance 2019). As much of the revisionist literature on the French Revolution has shown, the French revolutionary bourgeoisie was neither a capitalist class as traditionally assumed, nor did its policies transform the economy in the direction of capitalist property relations. As we shall see in Section II, the French liberal tradition enshrined the continued reproduction of small peasant property and the putting into law of strong worker protections against the real subsumption of labour under capital, thereby hindering any compulsion toward the systematic implementation of the most efficient technology available in production. As Theda Skocpol puts it, the French Revolution “by virtue of both its outcomes and processes … was as much or more a bureaucratic-military, mass-incorporating and state-strengthening revolution as it was (in any sense) a bourgeois revolution” (Skocpol 1979: 179). Therefore, to interpret the French liberalism of 1789 as a force for capitalist development risks misrepresenting both the aims of liberalism and the socio-economic outcome of the Revolution itself. While the social interpretation rightly strove to ground the emergence of the liberal tradition in fundamental socio-economic transformations in European society, it cannot explain why liberalism emerged in both capitalist England and non-capitalist France simultaneously if liberalism is only the ideological expression of capitalist development.

The revisionist–discursive interpretation

A more contemporary approach to the study of liberalism emerged from the discursivist methodology of the Cambridge School and has established itself as a novel revisionism. Its main proponents are Bell (2016), Rosenblatt (2018) and Vincent (2011). Broadly speaking, it is cognisant of the underlying philosophical diversity of the liberal tradition – especially regarding the comparative lack of individualism in the French liberal tradition – and argues that liberalism is best understood as a partisan–political orientation that emerged at the beginning of the 19^th century. What is most significant in defining the liberal tradition for the revisionists is what it means to polemically call oneself a liberal within one’s specific historical context.

In her Lost History of Liberalism, Rosenblatt (2018) proposes what she calls a “word history of liberalism”, in which the liberal tradition is best understood through the meaning and use of the term “liberal” at the end of the 18^th century, a term which initially didn’t mean “freedom as non-interference” but rather referred to “a giving and a civic-minded citizen; it meant understanding one’s connectedness to other citizens and acting in ways conducive to the common good” (Rosenblatt 2018: 4). Along with Vincent (2011), Rosenblatt considers Constant and de Staël to be the true progenitors of the liberal tradition, because they were the first to explicitly call themselves liberals. Similarly, Bell (2016: 70) elaborates a “summative” definition in which liberalism is “the sum of arguments that are liberal and recognised by other liberals.”

This revisionist approach does certainly have the merit of paying greater attention to historical detail and political context. Liberalism is also correctly grasped as an intellectual tradition with a fundamentally political orientation. It also correctly places French liberals at the intellectual core of the tradition. But while the revisionist interpretation has made considerable advances in the scholarship on the history of liberalism, it has in my view established a false opposition between itself and the social interpretation of liberalism. For the discursivists, if the classical social interpretation is flawed then no social interpretation is possible as such. Despite their limitations, the conceptual and traditional social interpretations pursued a worthy aspiration in striving to explain the reasons behind liberalism’s emergence by relating it to long-term developments in modern European history. Despite providing crucial insights into the content of liberal thought and liberalism’s self-understanding throughout the 19^th century, the revisionist interpretation has unfortunately abandoned the attempt to connect the historical evolution of liberalism as an ideology to the coeval transformations occurring the forms of civil society and the state in the early modern and modern periods. Such a connection, I argue, can help us better understand liberalism’s historical mission and the content of canonical liberals’ thought.

The social–property relations perspective

What is required is a resuscitated socio-intellectual history of liberalism, one that avoids the pitfalls of the traditional social and conceptual interpretations while preserving their explanatory intentions. This is precisely the objective of a social–property relations interpretation of 19^th-century French and British liberalism. My social–property relations perspective on political ideology is indebted to the late Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Social History of Western Political Thought (Wood 2011, 2012). Wood argues that political and economic thought is best understood when contextualised within the field of antagonisms generated by a social formation’s property relations. Unlike some “orthodox” Marxist accounts that claim that ideology only represents or mirrors a society’s material foundation, Wood argues that ideology should be understood to emerge and develop within specific class contexts, contexts which by their very nature constitute the field of antagonisms and – most crucially – problems with which political and economic thinkers must contend. While some have argued that Wood’s perspective is guilty of ideal-typicality and functionalism in its consistent effort to ground conceptual activity in social–property relations ( Chibber 2005; Rioux 2013), she would reject the idea that political ideology only emerges to more adequately reproduce the ruling social order. As the thought forms which legitimise or conceal established – or prospective – relations of power, ideology constitutes the conceptual, normative and subjective aspect of social structures. Just like those very structures, political ideology is a space of conflictual and divergent interests.

The objective of a social–property relations perspective is to contextualise political and economic ideology as active positions within broader social structures like feudalism, absolutism or capitalism. Wood herself mobilised this framework to differentiate the early modern English culture of capitalism from the political thought of the French Enlightenment, producing situated readings of political thinkers like Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Condorcet (Wood 2000, 2012). Similarly, David McNally (1988) developed novel interpretations of the history of early modern French and English political economy, culminating in social–property relations readings of the physiocrats and Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The purpose of this chapter is to further develop their theoretical orientation by extending it to the analysis of the British and French liberal traditions of the first half of the 19^th century.

Liberalism and social property relations

My argument is grounded in the work of comparative economic historians and historical sociologists of modern Britain and France, including Robert Brenner (1976, 1986), Stephen Miller (2020), Xavier Lafrance (2023), David Parker (2002) and William Beik (1989), who argue that in the 17^th century England began to develop a radically novel form of social organisation based on capitalist market principles which put it on the path of self-sustaining economic growth. In France, on the other hand, economic development remained stunted by the feudal dynamics of political accumulation and peasant possession, culminating in an absolute monarchy. The presence or absence of capitalist social–property relations and economic development is of crucial importance for providing the context for the respective development of French and British liberalism. Liberalism should not necessarily be construed as a doctrine of individualism or an ideology of capitalism, but rather as a justification for the limitation of the state. Crucially, the ideological meaning of this limitation differs depending on the specific class contexts and forms of the state upon which liberalism makes its demands.

British liberalism and capitalist development

In the early modern period England began to develop an increasingly capitalist class structure, one in which a significant portion of the landowning aristocracy lost their access to political modes of surplus appropriation and came to depend for their income on the competitive rents of the capitalist tenant farmers working on their demesnes and employing rural wage-labour (Brenner 1976, 1986). The market dependence of these tenant farmers increasingly forced them to engage in systematic capital investment, profit maximisation and cost cutting with the support of a landowning class which “[depended] largely upon the operation of ‘impersonal’, ‘economic’ processes – the exploitation by capitalist tenants of free wage-labourers and … the operation of intra-capitalist competition for their reproduction” (Brenner 1986: 299). This logic of expanded reproduction in agriculture and the putting-out system engendered the conditions for self-sustaining growth along capitalist lines, setting the stage for Britain’s late 18^th-century industrialisation (Jones 1968).

This economic process had political pre-conditions. Compared to its continental counterparts, the extent of state centralisation and intra-lordly cohesion were greater in England (Brenner 1986: 255–256). The Norman Conquest had consolidated a relatively united ruling class that acted as both governing power and as a class of great landowners (le Patourel 1978). In the late medieval and early modern periods, state centralisation would be a cooperative project shared by the landed aristocracy and the monarchy (Hilton 1966: 2). This unity allowed for a division of labour between the state and the ruling class in which the latter primarily depended on purely economic forms of exploitation for their income, while the former’s legislation and jurisdiction were increasingly centralised and supportive of the political framework required for capital accumulation (Brenner 2003: 657–658). That is, the lords no longer depended on “politically-constituted” forms of property, such as direct lordly levies or state offices based on taxation, for their income. Given that their reproduction did not depend on ownership of a “piece” of the state, what they required was the protection of their absolute private property rights. In direct contrast to the continental absolutist monarchies in which landowning classes resisted political incorporation, English landowners cooperated in the construction of a state with a monopoly of force that could best protect private property.

These longue durée processes had three crucial implications for the character of the British liberal tradition. First, the expansionary tendencies of the capitalist mode of production not only commercialised daily life to an unprecedented extent, but unleashed a process of economic development and self-sustaining growth in which trade no longer necessarily operated on a zero-sum basis (Wrigley 2006: 20) Instead commerce could be ideologically represented as not only beneficial to all parties of exchange, but as part of a larger impersonal process that tended to enrich society as a whole. Second, the British state became a more public entity, one that was no longer the direct possession of certain individuals or families, but rather of those institutions which secure the interests of capital accumulation in general (Wood 1981: 40; Clarke 1988: 130–133). As such, Britain began to experience a separation of the economic and political spheres of social life in contrast to the organic unity of sovereignty and property that characterised their continental contemporaries (Anderson 2013: 19; Wood 1981: 81). And third, as opposed to the continental monarchies in which the structure of extra-economic appropriation by the landed nobility constituted the major impediment to capitalist development, the process of British capitalist development began in the countryside and with strong aristocratic and state support (Anderson 2013; Brenner 2003). The English gentry were already capitalist – relying on market mechanisms for surplus appropriation – and the state was already guaranteeing the socio-political and juridical framework required for capital accumulation by the time liberalism began to take shape. There was thus no need for a radical restructuring of the constitutional and parliamentary framework of the British state in order for it to become suitable for capitalist development.

The historical development of liberal thought in England should be placed against this background of a society having already undergone the transformation of its social property relations into those characteristic of capitalist society with a state already geared toward development. This explains why – especially when compared to the French liberal tradition – the British liberal tradition was relatively united with respect to its political and economic programmes. Britain’s early capitalist transition and its sidestepping of Stuartist absolutism ensured that nothing fundamental about the state needed to be transformed by an emerging capitalist class, because the commercial landlords who ruled the state were already favourable to development. This also explains why British liberals were not overly concerned with constitutional matters (Clarke 1988: 60). What was called for after Waterloo was the reconfiguration of the British state around the principle of “good government”, i.e. government whose fundamental duty is the freedom and security of property. As Hume and Smith had previously argued – and as became political orthodoxy throughout the Victorian period – good government could be achieved through a number of different constitutional arrangements. Given that the early modern British parliamentary system seemed to ensure political stability and protected private property rights, it made little sense to radically uproot it (Clarke 1988: 61–2). No liberal political economist therefore fundamentally challenged the patrician–parliamentary order.

Yet as the fiscal–military state reached its apotheosis in the Napoleonic Wars, it came under increasing criticism from a utilitarian standpoint as being inefficient and wasteful. While the British state was certainly distinctly capitalist relative to its continental counterparts from the 17^th century onwards, throughout the 18^th century it remained fundamentally a fiscal–military state; that is, first and foremost a machine of war (Brewer 1989). The core of the government’s duties remained the raising of taxes for the defence of the realm. Consequently, the task of liberalism as an ideological social force in Britain was to discipline those aspects of the state which remained pre-capitalist on behalf of an existing capitalist class, while simultaneously preserving the state’s aristocratic and constitutional–parliamentary form, which was deemed suitable for continued economic growth and political stability. The landowning class which dominated Parliament – of both Tory and Whig persuasion – increasingly demanded that the state be turned into a vehicle of laissez-faire. The fiscal military state robbed the “productive” classes of their wealth and favoured the speculators and sinecurists who benefited from the massive growth of credit that accompanied British war-making (Harling 1993: 93). This perspective was shared from Bentham to Mill passing through Ricardo (Clarke 1988: 47–64). Liberal political economy focused on a utilitarian transformation of the state, a state which was no longer to be identified with the particular interests of a class – namely the landowners – but with the general interest. The latter was to be represented by the rule of money and the law which secured the formal equality and freedom characteristic of market exchange.

The principles of political administration were to be based on the analogy with the market. Just as the efficient and predictable rule of the market should apply to all actors in the economic sphere, public administration should support the market in a similarly predictable and efficient manner. This implied limiting the discretionary power of public administration and making the ideal form of intervention the impartial application of regulation and law. There ensued a bureaucratisation and professionalisation of the British civil service, a rationalisation of public finance and reforms of the magistracy, all of which enshrined the increasingly public character of the state (Clarke 1988: 68–79). Administration was separated from parliament and policy was increasingly crafted by experts. The assault on “Old Corruption” eliminated the remaining sinecures of the fiscal–military period (Harling 1996). The passage of Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 ensured that the discretionary power of the Bank of England would be limited and that the gold-based money supply would be only regulated by autonomic market principles (Fetter 1965: 183; Helleiner 2019: 82).

Ultimately, until the 1880s the British state remained close to what Adam Smith had prescribed at the end of the 18^th century. Liberalism’s fundamental orientation was to further establish a public state which served to better represent the general interest. But in the context of the separation of the political and economic inherent to the capitalist social–property relations, the general interest denoted the impersonal power of money and the law. The British liberal tradition – especially liberal political economy – was the ideological form through which the identity of the general interest and this subordination was theoretically expressed. The impersonality of the liberal state in Britain was derived from the impersonal character of capitalist society. And indeed, liberalism as an ideology subservient to capitalist property relations both expressed and actively reinforced this impersonality.

French liberalism: Late development and political accumulation

If in England the early modern period witnessed the beginning of a transition from feudalism to capitalism, France experienced a transition from feudalism to absolutism (Anderson 2013; Brenner 1976, Brenner 1986, Wood 2012). The French monarchy emerged as one feudal dynasty among many, attempting to assert its authority in the context of parcellised sovereignty, strong regionalism and claims to independent privileges by corporate entities and local aristocracies. As monarchical centralisation progressed throughout the early modern period, the dominant landowning class continued to depend on lordly levies and rents for their income. But they increasingly reproduced themselves through the tax-office structure of the absolutist state, i.e. by owning pieces of the state (Parker 2002; Anderson 2013). Simultaneously, peasant communities in the 13^th and 14^th centuries capitalised on lordly competition to secure non-market access to their lands and the right to pay fixed monetary dues for their use (Miller 2009: 4; 2012: 142). Consequently, by the 18^th century, small peasant agriculture still dominated production and an improving landlord class remained extremely marginal (Crouzet 1966: 271–272).

By the end of the 18^th century, capitalist development had not taken off in France and no corresponding capitalist class existed (Miller 2009; Miller 2012; Lafrance and Miller 2023). France’s flourishing urban economy expanded within the bounds of its pre-capitalist agrarian economy. As the absolutist state came into increasing political competition with its European rivals, it was pushed into cooperation with merchant classes, classes whose reproductive strategies co-existed with the absolutist state through the exchange of money for weapons and luxury goods. The degree of state centralisation thereby increased the dependence of the state on merchant and interest-bearing capital, further stimulating commercialisation and bringing wealth and status to commercial groups who were capable of exchanging economic resources for political recognition. Yet those who engaged in commerce generally did not operate in an economic context which compelled systematic capital accumulation. As the physiocrats were well aware, this form of commercialisation in no way generated the conditions for capitalist development, as rural wealth continued to flow into the cities for luxury consumption, further starving the agrarian sector of its much-needed funds for investment.

By the time of the Revolution, the majority of “bourgeois” were office holders, intellectuals and liberal professionals (Wood 2012). As such, they often were inclined to buy an ennobling office or invest in landed property rather than accumulate capital for competitive production. Throughout the revolutionary period, this non-capitalist bourgeoisie did not strive to generate the socio-economic conditions for the systematic development of the productive forces as that would have undermined safe profits from a non-competitive context. Instead, it sought to enhance its own access to state office, thereby unintentionally continuing its absolutist predecessor’s penchant for patronage, nepotism and quasi-venality well into the 19^th century ( Daumard 1993: 832–833). Instead, the Revolution enshrined the continued reproduction of small peasant property and the putting into law of strong worker protections against the real subsumption of labour under capital, further jeopardising the economic prospects for self-sustained growth through capitalist social–property relations ( Cottereau 2006: 104). Consequently, the growth of French industrial capital remained comparatively timid in the first half of the 19^th century with respect to British industry (Trebilcock 1982: 139–155). The First Industrial Revolution passed through France, leaving pockets of the most advanced technology without fundamentally transforming the underlying social relations of production.

This lack of endogenous economic development provided a radically different social context for French liberalism with respect to its British counterpart. French liberalism could not seek to subordinate the state to an already-existing dynamic of capitalist development because no such dynamic existed. That, however, did not stop the French liberal tradition from espousing many of the same liberal principles as British liberalism. French political economy in the Industrialist tradition of Destutt de Tracy and Jean-Baptiste Say still represented exchange as a non-zero sum and fundamentally equal social relation – despite the fact that in pre-capitalist France commercial activity still relied predominantly on the age-old and zero-sum practice of buying cheap and selling dear. Nor did France’s non-capitalist social–property relations impede liberals like Charles Dunoyer of the liberal Censeur Européen from criticising Restoration France’s “amour des places”, its novel form of venality and sinecure. French liberals – like their British counterparts – thought the state should be a fundamentally public institution and that it should represent the interests of society at large rather than the particular interests of the landowning aristocracy.

Yet, crucially, the particular ideological meaning and implications of these demands were different from British liberalism because they did not represent a disciplining of the state on behalf of capital. Just as French manufacturers borrowed British machinery without being exposed to the underlying property relations which brought about capitalist development, anglophile French liberals in the Restoration commandeered concepts from British liberal thought to apply to their own intellectual and political circumstances. But those circumstances did not consist of grappling with the problems of a specifically capitalist society, but rather in finding a solution to the contradictory social results of the French Revolution. For French liberals, this implied the need to overcome the Ancien Régime as well as establish the necessary socio-political safeguards against the re-emergence of republican–populist despotism and Napoleonic imperialism. In both the more political liberal traditions of the Doctrinaires and those surrounding Constant in the Mercure, or in the more economically inclined Industrialist tradition, it was the need to finish the Revolution that took the pride of place, not capitalist development. Both remained wedded to the virtues of the market, but supported principles which directly impeded the generalisation of market society through self-sustaining economic growth. To thereby label French liberalism – or liberalism as such – an ancillary to capitalist development is misleading.

On one hand, the more conservative-liberal Doctrinaire tradition of the Restoration – led by Pierre Royer-Collard, Prosper de Barante and Guizot – was convinced that the solution to the problems posed by the Revolution lay in the transformation of the way France was governed by the creation of a political elite. Despite the granting of the supposedly liberal Charter of 1814, Restoration France remained dominated by a monarchy and landowning class nostalgic for the Ancien Régime and unenthusiastic about the protection of freedom of speech, the press and the political and juridical achievements of the Revolution. It was in this context that the Doctrinaires advanced British parliamentarianism as a model for France to emulate, as it was perceived as both aristocratic and modern, as well as a political system in which the monarchy respected the opposition (Girard 1985: 19–45).

Yet even progressive political liberals like Constant shared with the landowning ultras their concern with the dissolution of the intermediary bodies brought about by absolutist and republican centralisation. The elimination of the corporate structure of society – those intermediate bodies which had hierarchically organised the social order of the Ancien Régime – during the Revolution generated a pervasive sentiment of social dissolution during the Restoration ( Rosanvallon 2004: 13–22). Liberals feared the uniformisation endemic to an increasingly democratic and republican political culture (Rosenberg 2020). As opposed to the British liberal tradition, which recognised the destabilising effects of the increasing commercialisation of daily life yet justified them on the basis of economic development, French political liberals like Guizot considered the benefits of trade to be primarily in stabilising the moral character of the nation by creating gentle mores and by establishing an intermediary class between political authority and civil society that would be capable of preserving political moderation and replacing the lost natural aristocracy (Rosenberg 2020). In short, the primarily political attitude to the market indicates that liberals did not wish to limit the state in order to promote capitalist development, but rather to use the market to engender the conditions of political stability and moderation, to avoid despotism, the excesses of republican nationalism and cravings for social unity; that is, to ground the Revolution within sustainable and modern political institutions.

On the other hand, the Industrialist tradition of liberalism – personified in thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Jean-Baptiste Say, Destutt de Tracy, Adolphe Blanqui, Charles Dunoyer and grounded in the work of the Philosophes and the Idéologues – argued that France would only achieve political stability through economic prosperity, i.e. by emulating English industriousness. Like their political counterparts, the Industrialists sought to complete the French Revolution. But they believed that the excessive focus on constitutions and the state had blinded France to the true source of social stability. It was only through industriousness and the elimination of society’s idlers that the problem of social dissolution could be resolved (Whatmore 2000). Drawing on classical political economy’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour, the Industrialists advanced an interpretation of the Wealth of Nations not as a theory of capitalist development, but rather as a defence of work against the feudal remnants of protectionism and mercantilism. Smith’s labour theory of value was read as a defence of the liberal values of the Revolution: like Sièyes, praising the Third Estate because it was the only order in society which truly worked ( Démier 1983: 30).

Industrialism, however, could never detach itself from being a republican theory of civic-minded industrious citizens engaging in petty commodity production and exchange (Whatmore 2000). Jean-Baptiste Say’s republican–liberal tradition of political economy was not committed to rapid industrial development along capitalist lines. Say’s continued hegemony in the French economic liberal tradition of the 19^th century ultimately had two consequences. First, it shaped the inability of the liberal tradition to grapple with the comparative backwardness of France’s agrarian sector, continually referring to it as a more progressive or democratic allocation of land compared to a British aristocratic model despite the fact that concentration and market dependence would have permitted superior economies of scale and the greater implementation of novel techniques. Second, regarding the state, the fear of despotism – from the experience of the Ancien Régime, the Terror and the Napoleonic period – ensured that liberals could never conceptualise the state developmentally. The British laissez-faire state remained the gold standard: the one most capable of guaranteeing liberty, but one which proved to be incompatible with the late-developmental requirement to siphon investment away from speculation in outlets which have high private returns, but little to no social returns.

It was only in the Second Empire that Napoleon III ushered in a state-led capitalist transformation of French industry to maintain France’s geopolitical position in Europe (Lafrance 2019). Along with the exposure to British competition following the Anglo-French treaty of 1860, the formation of the national market finally dissipated the guaranteed incomes which flowed to regional monopolies and compelled industrial firms to systematically cut costs, introduce the best available technology and maximise profits (Lafrance 2019: 225). Ultimately French capitalism would not get off the ground with the same laissez-faire attitude of the liberal British state. Given its relative backwardness, state intervention in the economy became crucial to expose manufacturers to competition while also providing the political framework through which British competition would not entirely wipe out French industry ( Gerschenkron 1962: 11–20).

This movement was ideologically accompanied not by the laissez-faire liberalism of Sayian classical political economy embodied in the free trade lobby Société d’économie politique, nor by the political liberals who dominated the July monarchy such as Thiers and Guizot. Rather, it was business-friendly Bonapartist Saint-Simonianism which was most significant in jumpstarting rapid economic growth (Anceau 2008). It was Saint-Simonians’ exhortations for material improvement, their emphasis on economic organisation, their radical attacks on feudal idlers, their authoritarian politics – in short, their political illiberality – which proved to be the ideology most appropriate to a state-led transition to capitalism (Lafrance 2019: 215–230). Saint-Simonians strove to address the concrete limitations of the French economy, while a liberal political economy rooted in the discourse of the moral and political sciences preferred to wax lyrical about the merits of property and markets rather than confronting the material causes of French comparative decline. The Saint-Simonians broke with the liberal political economy over the question of whether economic organisation was required to overcome a society overrun by feudal idlers (Steiner 2006). It was former Saint-Simonians like Michel Chevalier and the Péreire Brothers whose programme – much to the chagrin of the economic liberal orthodoxy – for the development of France’s railway infrastructure, the extension of state debt and creation of modern industrial banking was most significant in bringing about self-sustaining growth in France’s late developmental context.

Conclusion

Even though British liberalism was both daughter and handmaiden of capitalism and French liberalism was, primarily, the standard-bearer of political moderation against tyranny and egalitarianism, it should not be understood that the French orientation was entirely political, while the British was entirely economic. British liberalism, as an intellectual tradition, defended the rule of law, civil equality and freedom of the press to the same extent as its continental counterpart and France’s liberalism had just as long a tradition of political economy as England’s, going back to Boisguillebert through the physiocrats. What I have emphasised in this chapter is how a social–property relations perspective can help clarify the way the very same ideas may play radically different roles in the historical development of each society given their specific social–property relations. In Britain, liberal discourse was primarily an ideological legitimation of the power relations inherent to capitalist society, whereas in France it served entirely different social interests. The new wave of revisionist histories of French liberalism should combine their cogent analyses of the distinctive content of 19^th-century liberal thought with the worthy ambition of the social interpretation to develop a framework for further research into the place of the liberal tradition in France’s peculiar path to capitalism. More detailed textual analysis of comparatively neglected French liberals like Dunoyer, Chevalier and Royer-Collard could help provide a more complete and nuanced picture of the French liberal tradition and liberalism as a whole.

This chapter outlined a specific orientation for further research into the comparative history of British and French liberalism in the early 19^th century. I encourage scholars of liberalism to make use of the social–property relations perspective in their analyses of liberal traditions across the globe and engage with the ideological transformations of the tradition well into the 20^th century. Intellectual historians and political theorists could also find such a perspective useful in pursuing further research in the comparative analysis of historical movements like socialism and fascism, whose ideological forms are certainly in part shaped by their society’s underlying social–property relations. Even though ideas travel faster than social structures, ideology analysis should strive to connect political concepts and discourses to the underlying social forms in which they appear to properly grasp their objective content and effect. A social–property relations perspective has much to contribute to that endeavour.

References

Anceau, E. (2008) Napoléon III. Un Saint-Simon à cheval, Paris: Tallandier.

Anderson, P. (2013) Lineages of the Absolutist State, 2^nd edition, London: Verso Books.

Arblaster, A. (1984) The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, New York NY: Wiley-Blackwell.

Beik, W. (1985) Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bell, D. (2016) Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bellamy, R. (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society: An Historical Argument, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brenner, R. (1976) “Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe”, Past & Present, vol. 70, no. 1, February, 30–75.

Brenner, R. (1986) “The social basis of economic development”, in Roemer, J. E. (ed.) Analytical Marxism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 23–53.

Brenner, R. (2003) Merchants and revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, London: Verso Books.

Brewer, J. (1989) The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the British State, 1688–1783, London: Unwin Hyman.

Chibber, V. (2005) “Capital outbound”, New Left Review, no. 36, November, 151–159.

Clarke, S. (1988) Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State, Aldershot UK: Edward Elgar.

Cottereau, A. (2006) “Sens du juste et usages du droit du travail: une évolution contrastée entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle”, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, vol. 33, 101–120.

Crouzet, F. (1966) “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle: Essai d’analyse comparée de deux croissances économiques”, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol. 21, no. 2, 254–291.

Daumard, A. (1993) “La hiérarchie des biens et des positions”, in Labrousse, E. and Braudel, F. (ed.) Histoire économique et sociale de la France: L’avènement de l’ère industrielle (1789-années 1880), Paris: Presses universitaires de France, Vol. 3, Coll. Quadrige.

Démier, F. (1983) “Libéralisme à la française et synthèse républicaine”, in Lavau, G., Grunberg G. and Mayer, N. (eds) L’univers politique des classes moyenne, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po: 27–46.

Fetter, F. (1965) Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy, 1797–1875, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Gerschenkron, A. (1962) Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Girard, L. (1985) Les libéraux français: 1814–1875, Paris: Aubier.

Harling, P. (1996) The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economic Reform in Britain, 1779–1846, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harling, P. and Mandler, P. (1993) “From ‘fiscal-military’ state to laissez-faire state, 1760–1850”, Journal of British Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, January, 44–70.

Helleiner, E. (2019) The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Hilton, R. (1966) A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, London: Past and Present.

Jaume, L. (1997) L’Individu effacé: Ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français, Paris: Fayard.

Jones, E. L. (1968) “Agricultural origins of industry”, Past & Present, vol. 40, no. 1, July, 58–71.

Lafrance, X. (2019) The Making of Capitalism in France: Class Structures, Economic Development, the State and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1750–1914, Leiden: Brill.

Lafrance, X. and Miller, S. (2023) The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France: Primitive Accumulation and Markets from the Old Regime to the Post-WWII era, London: Routledge.

Laski, H. J. (1936) The Rise of European Liberalism, London: Allen and Unwin.

Le Patourel, J. (1978) The Norman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levy, J. T. (2015) Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Manent, P. (1994) An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mcnally, D. (1988) Political Economy and The Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Miller, S. (2009) “The economy of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Market opportunity and labour productivity in Languedoc”, Rural History, vol. 20, no. 1, 1–30.

Miller, S. (2012) “French absolutism and agricultural capitalism: A comment on Henry Heller’s essays”, Historical Materialism, vol. 20, no. 4, 141–61.

Miller, S. (2020) Feudalism, Venality, and Revolution: Provincial Assemblies in Late-Old Regime France, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Parker, D. (2002) Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? London: Routledge.

Pettit, P. (1993) “Liberalism and republicanism”, Australian Journal of Political Science, 28(4), 162–189.

Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pocock, J. G. A. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rioux, S. (2013) “The fiction of economic coercion: Political Marxism and the separation of theory and history”, Historical Materialism, vol. 21, no. 4, 92–128.

Rosanvallon, P. (2004) Le modèle politique français, Paris: Editions De Seuil.

Rosenberg, D. (2020) Anatomy of Eminence: French Liberalism and the Question of Elites, Boston MA: De Gruyter.

Rosenblatt, H. (2018) The Lost History of Liberalism, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sartori, A. (2014) Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History, Oakland CA: University of California Press.

Seidman, S. (1983) Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Siedentop, G. (2013) “Two liberal traditions”, in Geenens, R. and Rosenblatt, H. (ed.) French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 15–35.

Skinner, Q. (1998) Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skocpol, T. (1979) States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steiner, P. (2006) “French political economy, industrialism and social change”, in Stathakis, Y. and Vaggi, G. (ed.) Economic Development and Social Change, London: Routledge: 232–256.

Trebilcock, C. (1982) The Industrialisation of the Continental Powers 1780–1914, London: Routledge.

Vincent, K. S. (2011) Benjamin Constant and The Birth of French Liberalism, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Whatmore, R. (2000) Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wood, E. M. (1981) “The separation of the economic and political in capitalism”, New Left Review, vol. 127, 66–95.

Wood, E. M. (1991) The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Historical Essay on Old Régimes and Modern States, London: Verso Books.

Wood, E. M. (2000) “Capitalism or enlightenment?”, History of Political Thought, vol. 21, no. 3, Autumn, 405–426.

Wood, E. M. (2011) Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages, London: Verso Books.

Wood, E. M. (2012). Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, London: Verso Books.

Wrigley, E. A. (2006) “The transition to an advanced organic economy: Half a millennium of English agriculture”, The Economic History Review, vol. 59, no. 3, July, 435–480.

6. Plebeian internationalism

Building the “Universal Republic” in 19^th-century social movements

Niklas Plaetzer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-9

Introduction: Sea changes in the republican Atlantic

The “republican revival” (Sunstein 1988) since the 1970s renewed interest in a tradition that runs from ancient Rome to Machiavelli and the American founders. The “Machiavellian moment” (Pocock 1975) of what came to be called “the Cambridge School” marked a watershed for political theory, as historians turned to the past to unearth a “liberty before liberalism” (Skinner 1998). What they revealed was a tradition that understood freedom not only as a matter of protection from interference but of public institutions to liberate citizens from “exploitation and dependence” and prevent state agents “from behaving arbitrarily in the course of imposing the rules that govern our common life” (Skinner 1998: 119). Historical investigations retrieved an idea of freedom that encompassed a critique of arbitrary rule, decidedly more demanding than the familiar, liberal lens of protective rights. Moving to an analytical register, Philip Pettit’s seminal work (1997) formalised these republican commitments under the name of a “freedom as non-domination”. Yet the relationship between republicanism and democratic politics remained fraught, as republican theorists often joined the critique of tyranny to a suspicion of popular classes. From ancient oligarchs to canonical writers “on the Western shores” of the “Atlantic republican tradition” (Pocock 1975: 330), the weapons of “mixed government” have been wielded by aristocrats, slave owners and patriarchs to contain rather than empower “the people”. In a recent turn to the Roman concept of “the plebs” – the dominated many against the dominating few – divisions within the res publica have come into view more clearly and with them, a plural and contested history of republicanisms from below.

Following Machiavelli’s claim “that in every republic are two diverse humours, that of the people and that of the great,” and that “one will see great desire to dominate in the former and in the latter only desire not to be dominated” (1996 [1531]: 16, 18), plebeian republicans envision institutions from the standpoint of the many. John McCormick (2011; 2018: 177) has notably charged Pocock and Skinner with “inattention to the inherent oligarchic bias of traditional republicanism”. Against their elite republicanism, he has found in Machiavelli a reservoir of proposals for democratic participation, from plebeian tribunes to the “active, ferocious, populist defence of popular liberty that is pursued through directly participatory, extra-electoral devices and practices” like popular trials (2018: 204). Camila Vergara (2022) has likewise argued for an “anti-oligarchic constitutionalism” that involves “institutionalised tribunician power” (164) to keep elites in check, even if, unlike McCormick, she remains sceptical about class-specific institutions (227–231; Harting 2023: 850). For plebeian republicans, there is much to be gained from the idea of freedom as non-domination; yet they warn that such freedom remains a philosophical pipe dream if it is not extended into the economic domain and secured against elites through participatory institutions.

How do republican concepts relate to “the experience of resistance of the common people” (Vergara 2022: 43) in the history of political thought? Even if the Haitian Revolution is today recognised as foundational for modern politics (Scott 2018; Alexander 2022), political theorists have been much slower than their historian colleagues to view dominated groups as authors of political ideas. In recent years, however, this has begun to shift, as theorists have turned to historical methods to extend the scope of what counts as political thought in the first place. Rather than focusing on a small list of canonical writers, the examination of a wider array of sources such as pamphlets, manifestos, letters, diaries or even police reports as sites of conceptual innovation has widened the circle of actors who are also recognised as political thinkers (Stuurman 2000). Recent scholarship has built on the Cambridge School’s insistence on historical context while pushing beyond the confines of its primarily Anglocentric view of a neo-Roman tradition. Novel histories of republicanism “uncover the often neglected riches of our intellectual history and display them once more to view” (Skinner 1998: 118–119) – except this time, these riches are the ideas of the plebs: forms of republican freedom that were not only theorised but demanded, enacted and reworked by dominated groups themselves.

Where Skinner’s and Pocock’s recoveries as well as Petitt’s conceptual innovations have helped produce “a clear and powerful framework for articulating what is wrong about relationships of arbitrary power and dependency” (Lovett 2022:257), the analysis of popular republicanisms turns its focus to the ways in which power struggles leave their imprint on political ideas. A fuller understanding of the past requires careful attention to “theory in action,” which implies a “double move” ( Tomba 2019: 2): away from “great leaders and theorists” and towards “the practice of insurgents” as a site at which concepts are put to the test and critically revised. With Reinhart Koselleck (2004 [1979]: 155–191), one might add that such historical work underscores how political ideas operate as “counterconcepts.” Republican ideas of freedom, order or civic virtue do not derive their meaning from context-independent norms, nor from a limited problem space shared by elite writers and their interlocutors; they should rather be understood as “techniques of negation” (Koselleck 2004 [1979]: 191), whether situated in struggles of the dominated or in the entanglements of republicanism with imperial rule (Blachford 2021). Real-world conflicts are part and parcel of concept formation, not external to a realm of ideas that could be kept at a safe distance; social movements of dominated groups are hence neither a field of application nor a reservoir of case studies, but themselves a terrain of theory. By recovering the ideas of the dominated many, one simultaneously gains a more accurate picture of “victors’ history” insofar as “the negation of the defeated” on which it relies is brought back into view (Koselleck 2004: 158). In Stuurman’s apt description (2000: 162), “this is not to say that the universalistic notions of equality and liberty should simply be used as a yardstick to measure and to find wanting the sordid, exclusionary realities of history.” Rather, the bottom-up analysis of ideas in action allows for “a better understanding of the historical meaning and significance of universalistic ideas” precisely because “considerations of social hierarchy, gender and extra-European ‘otherness’ do not have to be imported from outside but will be part of the very syntax of the conceptual language of politics.”

Recent scholarship that investigates such a substantive link between republican theory and political practice notably includes a growing literature on labour republicanism. Alex Gourevitch (2015: 16), for instance, has shown how 19^th-century workers in the US aspired to a “republic of free labor” that would translate civic freedom into egalitarian relations of production, turning a republican critique of slavery into a weapon against the “wage slavery” of nominally free workers. Lineages of popular republicanism have similarly received sustained attention, especially in the context of Latin America (Sanders 2014; Biglieri and Cadahia 2021; Chang 2023). New histories of republicanism have also redrawn the map of the socialist tradition. No longer squeezed into the gap between Enlightenment dreams and the rise of Marxism, a vast space of socialist republicanism has opened up in the mid-19^th century. The history of early socialism might be retold as a “heretical or deviant variant on the ‘Machiavellian Moment’” (Claeys 2014: 897), a suggestion that finds support in re-interpretations of Karl Marx as a socialist republican (Roberts 2016; Leipold 2024) and an edited volume that has aimed to recover republicanism’s “extensive history of radicalism” (Leipold, Nabulsi and White 2020). Last but not least, anniversaries of the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1848 Revolutions were accompanied by ground-breaking studies on their transnational dimensions ( Deluermoz 2020; Clark 2023). The Cambridge School picture of a neo-Roman Anglo-Atlantic has thus been giving way to a “polycentric” vision of republican history (Thibaud 2018).

Although mid-19^th century republicans in various locations were connected through acts of solidarity, their internationalism often remained a matter of mutual support for national self-determination. For this “internationalism of great common causes” ( Moisand 2018: 248), “popular sovereignty” was the watchword of an alliance between workers and middle classes, united in enthusiasm for Greek, Polish and Italian liberation as well as the Union in the American Civil War. But if the “globalization of democratic nationalism” nationalised republicanism while cosmopolitanising its practice, it would be mistaken to view the nation–state as its institutional telos. Just as the 1848 Revolution in France saw the confrontation between two republics – the “republic of order” against the “universal democratic and social republic” (Hayat 2023) –, national republicanism was opposed and exceeded by movements for a république universelle (Duong 2020: 83–92; Deluermoz 2020: 29–49). Both a utopian dream and a horizon of institutional transformation, the “universal republic” was meant to combine the intensive universality of a classless society with the extensive universality of a world without borders (Balibar 2014: 170). At the same time as popular sovereignty became understood as the normative ground of national institutions, plebeian internationalists envisioned an alternative subject of democratic government, at once more expansive and antagonistically placed against ruling classes: “the people” not as the populus of the nation, the sovereign people of a bordered territory, but as the plebs of the world, the dominated, wherever they may be.[20] In the words of Félicité de Lamennais (1839: 26), “with the exception of a privileged few who are buried in mere enjoyment, the people are the human race.”

Though later construed as separated by nation–states, plebeian internationalists not only imagined the “universal republic”; they began to build it. Their most ambitious project was “the union of all the national and international associations into a single universal association which is none other than the great International Workingmen’s Association,” (IWMA) the First International of 1864 (Bakunin 1869: 162). The IWMA (1864–1872) united around 150 000 workers in over ten countries throughout Europe, North and South America (Musto 2014: 7) who understood “the International” as a vehicle for claim-making as well as a universal republic in the making (Bensimon, Deluermoz and Moisand 2018). But the IWMA was only one link within a long chain of institutional experiments (Lehning 1970). Plebeian internationalism can be traced back to the 1792 declaration of the “universal republic” by the Prussian-born French revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots, passes through the invocation of the plebs by Gracchus Babeuf and the “babouvist” clubs, was picked up by English Chartists and carried forward by the League of Outlaws (Bund der Geächteten), the League of the Just (Bund der Gerechten), Bakunin’s International Fraternity, the Communist League of Marx and Engels and the International Association (1855–1859) (Lehning 1970 [1938]: 150–162). As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2013: 24) have shown, sailors and enslaved workers carried “plebeian commonism” across the Atlantic in multiple directions. “Much of this landscape [and seascape], like maps of old, is terra incognita and awaits a new generation of cartographers” (Claeys 2014: 901). Yet much as map-making is bound up with imperial rule, dreams of the “universal republic” also remained entangled with hierarchies of race and gender.

While commentators on plebeian republicanism have begun to speak of a “second republican revival” (Mulvad and Popp Madsen 2022), broader implications of this scholarship for the history of political thought remain to be spelled out. This chapter attempts to take a step in that direction by offering an outline of plebeian internationalism as a research programme. A first part situates the origins of “internationalism” in the cosmopolitan republicanism of the mid-19^th century before sketching three distinct understandings of “the plebs”: as class, event and counter-power. These three frameworks are not mutually exclusive, but each one throws light on a different aspect of the past: the dynamic relation between shifting ideas and economic change; the contingency of political action and subjectivation; and alternative forms of popular power. While scholarship in the history of political thought can only benefit from dialogue between these approaches, this chapter makes a tentative case for the third sense of “plebs”: “plebeian” as a descriptor of institutionally mediated counter-power against domination rather than the name for an identifiable social group or a fleeting moment of transgression.

The second part specifies some methodological implications regarding source material and the study of collective action. Instead of viewing movement actors as “putting into practice” a set of prior commitments, the thought of the vanquished reappears from underneath dominant narratives if collective action is recognised as a site of intellectual co-production.[21] Marx’s quip (Engels 2010 [1882]: 356) that “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist” here contains a lesson for the “social history of political ideas” (Matonti 2023): it draws attention to the distance between the name of a theorist and the infinitely wider field of movement participants who are forgotten or, at best, remembered as acting according to someone else’s thought. Yet if the gap between Marx and innumerous Marxisms is understood as a matter of course, “the neglected riches” (Skinner 1998: 118) of plebeian internationalism are to be found within analogous distances that separate the Saint-Simonians from Saint-Simon (Riot-Sarcey 1994), the Fourierists from Fourier (Pilbeam 2005) and the Proudhonians from Proudhon (Hayat 2018), alongside other projects of emancipatory politics whose contributions have been assessed (and often dismissed) by way of the narrow corpus of a male master thinker. Part two sketches modalities by which plebeian internationalism travelled from migration to journalism to solidarity networks, which might serve as starting points for future analyses of social movements as spaces of intellectual co-production.

An internationalism of the plebs? From class and event to institution

The neologism “international” was coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780 (Bensimon 2014: 53; Mazower 2012: 19–23) to denote “the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations.” “Internationalism” only entered the lexicon decades later. Its first English use goes back to an 1852 British parliamentary debate where the Great Exhibition of 1851 was described as “encouraging internationalism” (Whitty 1854: 133). The first German use of “Internationalismus” can be found in 1864, in the conservative Historical-Political Pages for Catholic Germany, which denounced a “flat and powerless internationalism”, originating in Protestant universities, “which cosmopolitically destroyed all civic feelings and patriotism ... and brought about the downfall of the entire Reich” (Jörg and Binder 1864: 261). The earliest mention of “internationalisme” in French likewise goes back to 1864, although internationalism was here enthusiastically described as “the sentiment of fraternity and tolerance” at the International Congress for the Progress of the Social Sciences in Bern (Sève 1865: 276). In most of its early uses, however, the term “internationalism” was associated with revolutionary politics. A meeting of workers in Geneva on 8 April, for instance, declared that “’socialism without a cooperative economy [Gemeinwirthschaft] and internationalism [Internationalismus] is nonsense” (Der Vorbote 1871: 40).[22] As Peter Friedemann and Lucian Hölscher have noted (1982: 370), the origins of internationalism were thus characterised by a “peculiar semantic ambivalence between multi-lateral and universalist uses” as its meaning oscillated between the field of inter-state relations and a working class variety of republican cosmopolitanism.

Over the 20^th century, internationalism largely lost its connection to the workers’ movement: a loss reflected in Halliday’s (1988) distinction between revolutionary internationalism and the hegemonic internationalism of imperial rule as well as the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. This does not mean, however, that internationalism would have initially been reducible to the relations between national units. Perry Anderson’s assertion (2002: 5) that “the meaning of internationalism logically depends on some prior conception of nationalism” because “it only has currency as a back-construction referring to its opposite” is historically inaccurate. The cosmopolitan republicanism of organised workers that went by the name of internationalism was both contemporaneous with nationalism and prior to a globalised model of nation-states to which it offered radical alternatives. Contrary to the idea that internationalism posed a challenge to pre-existing nation-states, a bottom-up analysis suggests the inverse, revealing the 19^th-century consolidation of the nation–state system as a “product of the breakup of republican internationalism” (Ishay 1995: xxii).

If one attends to the abandoned paths of what Adom Getachew (2019) has called “worldmaking,” hidden traditions of internationalism can be recovered for which the nation–state by no means appeared as a “modular developmental endpoint” (Goswami 2012: 1462–1463). In a comparable move to Goswami (2012) and Getachew (2019), who challenge the backwards projection of the nation-state as the preordained destination of anti-colonial struggles in the 20^th century, Étienne Balibar (2022) has argued for the need to disentangle the “cosmopolitics” of 19^th-century workers from their retroactive framing as precursors to a Marxist-Leninist proletarian internationalism. For Balibar (2022: 104), the “tragedies of proletarian internationalism” were shaped by the “disavowal of the cosmopolitanism on which it had built itself.” The concept of “proletarian internationalism”, Balibar (2022: 74) explains, was only created after World War I “by the political and pedagogical apparatus of the Comintern (the ‘Third International’) in order to ground its legitimacy and authority on a dual retrospective projection”: the self-identification of the Soviet Union with opposition to bourgeois nationalism as well as the association of the Leninist party with revolutionary politics as such. This “discursive operation” (Balibar 2022: 74) – a chain of equivalence between “world class, world party, world revolutionary movement” (Halliday 1988: 194) – retroactively concealed a contested space of “vernacular” cosmopolitanisms (Balibar 2022: 104).

Once dominant models of state and party no longer circumscribe our field of vision, plebeian internationalist visions can be brought back to light. Yet the qualifier “plebeian” stands in need of explanation, as it could seem like an anachronistic term, even if the Roman plebs were referenced by 19^th-century counter-revolutionaries like Ballanche (1829: 120) and revolutionaries like Proudhon (1849: 26). Such invocations of ancient Rome speak to continuities between the “Machiavellian moment” and the socialist tradition; but they do not exhaust the meaning of plebeian internationalism. One can distinguish three ways of understanding what is plebeian about this internationalism, figuring “the plebs” as 1) a social class within a developing capitalist economy; 2) an event in which those excluded from dominant institutions lay claim on freedom and equality, constituting themselves as political subjects; and 3) an institutional counter-power against oligarchic domination.

The plebs as social class

For Marx and Engels (2002 [1848]: 219), the antagonism between “patricians” and “plebeians” typically names a pre-capitalist form of class struggle: “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” Yet at least on occasion, Marx (2010: 318) also applied the term to his own time, such as in his 1850 discussion of a “plebeian rather than proletarian irritation” among Parisian workers “at the habits noirs”, by which he meant socialist intellectuals responsible for the “theoretical enlightenment of the proletariat about their class interest.” Marx’s discussion of a “plebeian” irritation in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung is instructive: he associates the term with a declining, proto-proletarian class while also pejoratively labelling a type of politics. “Plebeian,” in Marx’s 1850 review of Chenu and de la Hodde, denotes a refusal to be educated by leaders and a mode of organisation through secret societies. For Marx (2010: 316–317), secret societies emerge from “the precarious livelihood” of “democratic bohemians”, coupled with “the propensity of the Latin peoples to conspiracy,” which found its expression in the 1839 uprising of the Société des saisons around Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès. Plebeian conspirators were both “officers of the insurrection” and “the alchemists of the revolution” (Marx 2010: 318): “characterized by the same chaotic thinking and blinkered obsessions as the alchemists of old”, and, as alchemy gave way to science, destined to disappear in a subsequent stage of development.

What does it mean to understand plebeian internationalism as the ideology of a class? One example can be found in Perry Anderson’s (2002: 10) periodisation of internationalisms and their “social bases”. For Anderson, early internationalism, from the 1848 Revolutions to the First International, had its base “in a pre-industrial artisanate: its exemplary figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose father was a small fisherman and who began life as a sailor” (Anderson 2002: 10). This internationalism of artisans becomes superseded by that of industrial workers whose forms are the modern party and the Second International: economic development involves shifting class relations which correspond to the sequential evolution of political ideologies. Labour migration is foregrounded as a process through which ideas crossed borders and the prominence of certain professions (like typesetters, carpenters and tailors) among socialists is taken as formative for early internationalism. The strength of this approach is that it places ideas within socio-economic realities: far from philosophical abstraction, internationalist ideologies track processes of trade, labour migration and communication. However, in Anderson as in Marx’s 1850 review, the idea of linear progress undergirds political analysis: action is judged from the standpoint of a process of which the outcome is posited in advance. Whether alchemist or artisan, “the plebeian” is either becoming a proletarian or a leftover from previous times.

But following E. P. Thompson (1966 [1963]), one can understand “plebeian” as more than an index of economic development while holding onto the concept of class: internationalism, like the working class itself, “did not rise like the sun at an appointed time” (1966: 9). If English workers of the early 19^th century actively made “class” by linking their life worlds to popular Christianity or French Jacobinism, the internationalists of the mid-19^th century, too, were agents of political transformation. By refusing to map ideas onto a narrative of linear progress, Thompson (1966: 13) insists that “the plebeian movement”, even if defeated, can still point to alternative futures: “in some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure.” In order to understand plebeian internationalism as the ideology of a class, it is neither necessary to reduce ideas to the reflection of “social bases” nor to measure them against subsequent developments.

The plebs as event

An alternative approach rejects the association of “the plebs” with any class or process. For Martin Breaugh (2013: xv), “plebs designates neither a social category nor an identity but rather a fundamental political event: the passage from a sub-political status to one of a full-fledged political subject.” Where Marxist historians of capitalism see the plebs emerge from structures of domination, post-foundationalist political theorists insist on the self-constitution of the plebs against the order of identities: “plebeian” is here the name of a rupture without a pre-given content. Breaugh (2013: 144) thereby radicalises Thompson’s emphasis on agency by framing plebeian politics as an event beyond economic determinants: “the plebs” emerge through revolt. This performative reading allows Breaugh (2013: xxii) to connect the riotous politics of the sans-culottes during the French Revolution with English workers and the 1871 Paris Commune as chapters within one “discontinuous history of political freedom”.

Breaugh’s account of a “plebeian principle” – a non-linear history of emancipatory ruptures – draws on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of subjectivation. For Rancière (2019 [1985]: 37), “‘plebeian’ denotes a symbolic relationship, not a class within relations of production. The plebeian is the individual excluded from the speech that makes history.” Rancière developed this “symbolic” interpretation through a reading of Ballanche’s 1829 account of the plebeian secession in ancient Rome (493 bc): an “inaugural scene” by which the poor forced the “patrician power” to recognize that “the sounds uttered from the mouths of the plebeians were speech” (Rancière 2019: 37–38). This scene of dissensus is staged wherever the dominated interrupt hierarchies to enact their equality: the self-making of a plebeian subject shifts the “division of the perceptible”, which is not to be confused with “the positivity of a material condition” nor “the superficial conceit of an imaginary” (Rancière 2019: 14–15). In Proletarian nights (2012 [1981]), Rancière compellingly brought this approach to bear on workers’ writings from the 1830s and 40s. Their ideas were not the reflection of socio-economic forces; instead, workers constituted themselves as political subjects by refusing the position that the dominant symbolic order had assigned to them.

The strength of this approach consists in its refusal to ground politics in certitudes about collective identities or structural developments, throwing their contingency into sharp relief. What would it mean to study plebeian internationalism along these lines? A post-foundationalist sensibility sharpens our attention for moments in which internationalists stepped out of inherited frames: for instance, as Michèle Riot-Sarcey (1994) has shown, when the Parisian textile workers Marie-Reine Guindorf and Désirée Véret refused to follow Saint-Simonian leaders, founding the first feminist journal La Femme Libre in 1832. Véret’s travels between Paris, London, Geneva and Brussels and her letters, in which she challenged global capitalism as much as the patriarchal organisation of socialist organisations (Rancière 2012: 754), become visible as sites at which an International of working women interrupts the androcentric history of working men. For critics, like Ella Myers (2016), the Rancièrean emphasis on transgression leads to the romanticisation of revolt at the expense of durable forms. But while it is true that Rancière, Breaugh and Riot-Sarcey are not primarily interested in institutional order, the status of institutions in their accounts remains ambiguous. Rancière’s own aim (2019: 10) is not “to extol the virtues of spontaneity, but rather to undermine this very opposition by subverting the idea of time that underlies the contrast between the supposedly continuous ‘process’ of revolution and the scene of ‘rebellion’ that is said to be momentary”. To write a history of plebeian internationalism for which “the plebs” names an event does not automatically glorify scenes of revolt; its object is “the rumble of battle beneath the history of institutions” (Rancière 2019: 17) – like the erased projects of working women beneath the IWMA and the dreams of a “universal republic” that both accompanied and challenged the consolidation of nation-states.

The plebs as counter-power

For a third approach, “plebeian” does not denote a group – neither given in the materiality of social relations, nor performatively enacted in an event – but rather a mode of institutionalisation. Organised power can be said to be plebeian insofar as it gives form to the enactment of freedom and equality against domination: “plebeian” is a qualifier of institutional counter-power. In his reading of the plebeian secession, McCormick begins where Rancière “‘cuts away’ from the scene” (Myers 2016: 61), namely with the institution-building that class conflict produced in ancient Rome. Side-stepping the dichotomy of class and event, McCormick (2018: 136) shifts emphasis to configurations of power, from the tribunate to the plebeian assembly, which institutionalised “two polities within one”. Breaugh (2013: 4), too, associates “the plebs” with attempts “to set up, by means of concerted action, an alternative power”. Yet unlike McCormick, who explicates mechanisms by which counter-power can be (and was) organised, Breaugh (2013: 242) remains focused on the “temporality of the gap that leaves traces”. This arguably makes him less susceptible to the conflation between plebs and populus, the dominated and the sovereign people, which sometimes slips back into McCormick’s writings, for instance in his defence of national plebiscites (2011: 184). At the same time, it makes it more difficult for Breaugh to appreciate the specificity of organisational forms beyond interchangeable enactments of one ultimately transhistorical “plebeian principle”.

But it is the combination of both aspects – the plebs as counter-power and the plebs as distinct from the populus – that could shed new light on the history of internationalism. For French socialist Constantin Pecqueur (1842: 287), global institutions were needed to organise a plebeian counter-power. This was not a matter of applying identical cosmopolitan norms for all but rather a question of institutional safeguards against oligarchic domination, “to organize an international justice that forces the unjust ... to respect the laws of reason, morality and equity”. In De la paix (1842), Pecqueur envisioned a universal republic with an elected assembly to impose global taxes; a “Directory of Nations” for economic planning; and an International Labour Court (“Prud’hommes de nations”). While Pecqueur’s proposals, unlike the Roman tribunate, were never realised, workers’ associations drew on them as sources of inspiration (cf. Rancière 2012). Understanding plebeian internationalism as a project of institutionalising counter-power shifts the emphasis from the search for a collective subject of politics to organisational practices and forms. Internationalist experiments on different scales – from the municipal Commission of Work, Industry and Exchange during the Paris Commune, led by Hungarian socialist Leo Frankel (Breaugh 2013: 236–237), to the planetary networks of the IWMA – would be misconstrued as tools for claim-making on state authorities. Rather, plebeian internationalists proposed and enacted new modes of “political, financial and infrastructural support to form workers’ associations that would link to the International” (Khuri-Makdisi 2013: 18) with the aim of building global counter-power against ruling classes.

Building “the Universal Republic”: Travel, translation, tribunician power

How did plebeian internationalism move between geographically remote and culturally distinct spaces of action? One does not need to adopt an exclusive definition of “the plebs” in order to specify ways in which internationalist ideas were transmitted. These can be sketched along three axes: migration and travel; newspapers and translation; and institutions (or perhaps, in reference to the Roman tribunate, tribunician power).

Migration and travel

An important factor for the transnational emergence of plebeian internationalism was the migration of workers during the 1830s. This process is well documented for the context of London, the mid-19^th century’s “capital of political exile” (Bensimon 2018: 22), which became a hotbed of socialist mobilisation among migrants. The latter included refugees from France, Germany, Italy and, importantly, Poland in the wake of the 1830–31 Polish uprising. Plural traditions of radical republicanism were brought into articulation, building solidarities and constituting new transnational organisations. As Fabrice Bensimon (2018: 24) notes, the London Working Men’s Association’s 1836 Address to the Belgian working classes “may have been the first statement of working-class internationalism”, and the presence of German workers’ Deutscher Bildungsverein für Arbeiter prepared the ground for the Communist Workers’ Educational Society and, ultimately, Marx and Engels’ Communist League in 1847 ( Lattek 2006). The Society of Fraternal Democrats, founded in 1845 around George Julian Harney, similarly associated migrants from various countries at a moment when “the meaning of internationalism” was evolving “from a form of universal brotherhood to a working-class war cry” (Bensimon 2018: 27). In addition to these collective efforts, individual activists undertook travel campaigns. Such movement entrepreneurs included the Peruvian-born French socialist feminist Flora Tristan (1803–1844), who, in 1843, envisioned “the universal union of working men and working women” and who in 1844 went on a “tour de France” to spread international solidarity among workers like a gospel ( Chaïbi 2014); or the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Fanelli, whose visit to the republican clubs of Madrid and Barcelona is regarded as foundational for the Spanish anarchist movement (Musto 2014: 27).

Plebeian internationalism travelled by many routes, connecting cities of refuge from Geneva and Paris to New York and Buenos Aires. But it also crossed the waters of the Atlantic, when Black internationalists invoked the memory of Haiti (Alexander 2022); of the Eastern Mediterranean, when radical reformers in Alexandria or Beirut placed French socialism in dialogue with Islam during the 1860s and 70s (Khuri-Makdisi 2013); and the Sea of Japan, when Russian anarchist Lev Mechnikov followed the invitation of Saigō Takamori in 1874, at the “juncture of the Meiji Ishin and the Russian revolutionary movement” (Konishi 2020: 45). Political actors and thinkers beyond the Euro-American Atlantic were denied the status of participants in the making of internationalism and this denial has subsequently been re-enacted in dominant narratives about the past. Historians of plebeian internationalism must not only attend to the racialised boundaries of its “universal republic” ( Plaetzer 2021); they should also recognise how marginalised spaces – among workers as well as those refused standing by the workers’ movement – became generative sites at which republican ideas were tested and transformed against multiple forms of domination.

Print media and translation

Movement journalism played a fundamental role in the formulation and dissemination of plebeian internationalist thought. Some of these journals called themselves “tribunes”, like La Tribune des Femmes (1832–34), co-founded by Désirée Véret, or La Tribune Ouvrière (1865) around Henri Tolain, or simply La Plebe, in Lodi, Italy, edited by Enrico Bignami, which during the 1870s published articles by Bakunin and communard Benoît Malon in Italian translation. Bensimon (2022: 244) points to a transnational network of “IWMA publications”, including The Beehive, which served as an “official organ”, alongside De Werker in Antwerp, Der Vorbote in Geneva and Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly in New York. Activists affiliated with the IWMA also occupied central places within the broader landscape of progressive journalism. In workers’ journals, linguistic translation went hand in hand with a political translation between local and global struggles, as in the case of the socialist feminist Helen Macfarlane who, in 1850, published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto in London’s The Red Republican alongside writings by British Chartists (Black 2004). Translation became productive of new political ideas by way of shifting meanings across contexts and, frequently, through the bricolage of translated texts into original contributions.

Tribunician power

Plebeian internationalism, though far more widespread than elite-centric histories have assumed, never achieved institutional durability in the way of the Roman tribunes, which lasted for over three centuries (McCormick 2011: 32). But if one discards its experiments with counter-power as negligible defeats or glorious moments of interruption, what drops out are the substantive contributions that plebeian internationalists made to a rethinking of republican institutions. Organised forms of tribunician power enacted a cosmopolitan republicanism from below in at least three senses. First, republican uprisings experimented with denationalised models of citizenship, such as in the self-governing councils of the 1871 Paris Commune, which included foreigners from dominated groups but excluded members of dominant classes (Deluermoz 2020: 99–116; Breaugh 2013: 173–199). On a second level, institutional experiments, even if short-lived, generated a hidden form of durability through the force of examples, which bypassed the medium of nation–state law. In the words of Johann Philipp Becker (Der Vorbote 1871: 38) “all imperial wisdom only lives from one day to the next …, not knowing that good examples ruin bad customs and not suspecting that the small movement of the Commune carries within it a great world movement.” Jeanne Moisand’s study (2023) of the 1873–74 Canton of Cartagena offers rich illustration of Becker’s point, tracing how the transmission of examples animated institution-building practices of “cantonalism” between Spain, Cuba and the Philippines. Third, beside local experiments and their circulation, movement actors built forms of tribunician power with a transnational scope. As Nicolas Delalande (2023) has meticulously shown, the IWMA organised mutual aid from punctual solidarity campaigns to routinised money flows between national sections. The IWMA enacted a plebeian counter-power for which its six congresses (London 1864, Geneva 1866, Lausanne 1867, Brussels 1868, Basel 1869 and the Hague 1872) as well as its permanent General Council produced nodal points within the network of a transnational movement.

Conclusion: Possible worlds of a plebeian international

During the mid-19^th century, dominated groups mobilised and transformed republican ideas to remake the world from the bottom up. This chapter proposed to study a specific current of radical republicanism – its cosmopolitan and anti-oligarchic variety – under the name of “plebeian internationalism”. The return to the concept of “the plebs” can at this juncture inform new histories of political thought, revealing defeated alternatives underneath naturalised assumptions about institutional order. Most importantly, plebeian internationalism did not assume a world of already constituted nation–states. By moving from definitions of “the plebs” as a class or an event to an alternative framework that foregrounds plebeian counter-power, the collective action and fragmented writings of republican workers re-emerge not just as examples of “agency” but as contributions to political theory in their own right.

The study of plebeian internationalism repositions the institution-building projects of organised workers as critical alternatives to a world order of nation–states at the very moment of its consolidation. Understanding transnational social movements as spaces of intellectual co-production thereby paves the way for perhaps unexpected dialogues between radical republican theory and new histories of international law ( Koskenniemi 2001; Mazower 2012; Orford 2021). But beyond a revised understanding of the making of international order in the 19^th century, plebeian internationalist visions resonate with the urgent questions of the 21^st to which nation–states are unlikely to offer adequate solutions: from migration to financial crises, pandemics and climate change. Plebeian internationalist thought differs sharply from varieties of left populism that have reached for the legal container of the nation–state in their efforts to renew democracy ( Mouffe 2018). Against the populist assumption that national electoral institutions should form the centre of emancipatory politics, the plebeian internationalists of the mid-19^th century argued for the primacy of transnational organisations and began to enact a global anti-oligarchic counter-power from within the spaces of their movements.

“For as long as peoples cultivate a national, state–civic [staatsbürgerliche] and pious rather than an international, cosmopolitan and free-spirited attitude, put to proof in action [sic], freedom and enjoyment will be for the lords and order and hardship will be for the people” (Der Vorbote 1871: 25). Johann Philipp Becker’s warning still rings true in our own time as social movements continue to face the question of how to achieve durability without reaffirming the institutional order they set out to challenge. If Becker (Der Vorbote 1871: 26) envisioned a “social and universal republic” that would enact “the fraternisation of peoples on the principle of equal birth [Ebenbürtigkeit] and equal rights [Gleichberechtigung]”, such dreams were violently defeated by the order of a global capitalist economy that continues to find its political form in the system of sovereign nation–states.

During the 1870s plebeian internationalism was repressed, its leaders killed or deported across the globe (Deluermoz 2020; Moisand 2023). Where its associations were not outlawed, internal divisions led to similar outcomes after the Hague Congress of 1872. But rather than focusing exclusively on external causes, future research must attend to the ways in which plebeian internationalism’s anti-pluralist features contributed to its defeat: through an inability to hold together divergent viewpoints within one International, the racialisation of a white working class and the exclusionary move from the socialist feminism of the 1830s (Pilbeam 2000) to the androcentric organisation of “international working men” (Schrupp 1999). If a gendered and racialised anti-pluralism is recognised as a feature of even its most emancipatory projects, plebeian internationalism can speak to the present in its limits as much as its promises.

References

Alexander, L. (2022) Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press.

Anderson, P. (2002) “Internationalism: A breviary”, New Left Review, no. 14, March–April, 5–25.

Bakunin, M. (1869) “The policy of the international”, in Dolgoff, S. (ed.) Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, New York NY: Vintage Books: 160–174.

Balibar, E. (2014) Equaliberty. Political Essays, trans. Ingram, J. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Balibar, E. (2022) Cosmopolitiques: Des frontières à l’espèce humaine. Écrits III, Paris: La Découverte.

Ballanche, P.-S. (1829) Essais de palingénésie sociale: Orphée, Tome Deuxième, Paris: Jules Didot Aîné.

Bensimon, F. (2014) “L’Internationale des travailleurs”, Romantisme, vol. 1, no. 163, 53–62.

Bensimon, F. (2018) “The IWMA and its precursors in London, c. 1830–1860”, in Bensimon, F., Deluermoz, Q. and Moisand, J. (eds) “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth!”: The First International in a Global Perspective, Leiden: Brill: 21–38.

Bensimon, F., Deluermoz, Q. and Moisand, J. (eds.) (2018) “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth!”: The First International in a Global Perspective, Leiden: Brill.

Bensimon, F. (2022) “The International Working Men’s Association (1864–1876/7)”, in van der Linden, M. (ed.) (2022) The Cambridge History of Socialism, vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 232–260.

Biglieri, P. and Cadahia, L. (2021) Seven Essays on Populism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Blachford, K. (2021) “The Eurocentrism of neo-Roman republicanism and the neglect of republican empire”, Thesis Eleven, vol. 166, no. 1, 136–150.

Black, D. (2004) Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist and Philosopher in mid-Nineteenth-Century England, Lanham MD: Lexington.

Breaugh, M. (2013) The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom, New York NY: Columbia University Press.

Chaïbi, O. (2014) “L’internationalisation de la question sociale au cours du premier XIXe siècle: de l’internationalisme des ‘utopistes’ à l’association internationale des travailleurs”, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, no. 124, 25–44.

Chang, A. (2023) “Restoring Anáhuac: Indigenous genealogies and hemispheric republicanism in postcolonial Mexico”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 67, no. 3, 718–731.

Claeys, G. (2014) “Early socialism as intellectual history”, History of European Ideas, vol. 40, no. 7, 893–904.

Clark, C. (2023) Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849, New York NY: Crown.

Delalande, N. (2023) Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity, New York NY: Other Press.

Deluermoz, Q. (2020) Commune(s), 1870–71. Une traversée des mondes au XIXe siècle, Paris: Seuil.

Der Vorbote (1871), March 1871, no. 3, Geneva.

Duong, K. (2020) The Virtues of Violence: Democracy against Disintegration in Modern France, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Engels, F. (2010 [1882]) “Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 2 and 3 November”, in Marx and Engels: Collected Works, vol. 46: Letters 1880–83, London: Lawrence & Wishart: 353–358.

Friedemann, L. and Hölscher, P. (1982) “Internationale, International, Internationalisme”, in Brunner, O., Conze, W. and Koselleck, R. (eds) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 3, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta: 367–397.

Getachew, A. (2019) Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Goswami, M. (2012) “Imaginary futures and colonial internationalisms”, The American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5, 1461–1485.

Gourevitch, A. (2015) From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press.

Halliday, F. (1988) “Three concepts of internationalism”, International Affairs, vol. 64, no. 2, 187–198.

Harting, V. (2023) “An egalitarian case for class-specific political institutions”, Political Theory, vol. 51, no. 5, 843–868.

Hayat, S. (2018) “The construction of Proudhonism within the IWMA”, in Bensimon, F., Deluermoz, Q. and Moisand, J. (eds) “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth!”: The First International in a Global Perspective, Leiden: Brill: 313–331.

Hayat, S. (2023) Revolutionary Republicanism: Participation and Representation in 1848 France, London and New York: Routledge.

Ishay, M. (1995) Internationalism and its Betrayal, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Jörg, E. and Binder, F. (1864) “Zur Universitätsfrage”, Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland, vol. 54, Munich: Literarisch-Artistische Anstalt: 245–279.

Khuri-Makdisi, I. (2013) The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Konishi, S. (2020) Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Koselleck, R. (2004 [1979]) “The historical-political semantics of asymmetric counterconcepts”, in Koselleck, R. (ed.) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York NY: Columbia University Press: 155–191.

Koskenniemi, M. (2001) The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lamennais, F. (1839) Le Livre du Peuple: The People’s Own Book, Boston MA: Charles C. Little & James Brown.

Lattek, C. (2006) Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860, London and New York NY: Routledge.

Lehning, A. (1970) From Buonarotti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism, Leiden: Brill.

Leipold, B. (2024) Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Leipold, B., Nabulsi, K. and White, S. (eds) (2020) Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. (2013) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston MA: Beacon Press.

Lovett, F. (2022) The Well-Ordered Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Machiavelli, N. (1996) Discourses on Livy, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Marx, K. (2010 [1850]) “Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu, ex-capitaine des gardes du citoyen Caussidière. Les Sociétés Secrètes; La Préfecture de Police sous Caussidière; Les Corps-Francs, Paris, 1850. La Naissance de la République en Février 1848, par Lucien de la Hodde, Paris, 1850”, in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, no. 4, in Marx, K. and Engels, F. (eds) Collected Works, Vol. 10: Marx and Engels 1849–51, London: Lawrence & Wishart: 311–325.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2002 [1848]) The Communist Manifesto, ed. Stedman Jones, G., London and New York: Penguin.

Matonti, F. (2023) “Plea for a social history of political ideas”, in Geroulanos, S. and Sapiro, G. (eds) Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology Of Ideas, London and New York: Routledge: 69–84.

Mazower, M. (2012) Governing the World: The History of an Idea, London and New York: Penguin.

McCormick, J. (2011) Machiavellian Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McCormick, J. (2018) Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements and the Virtue of Populist Politics, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Moisand, J. (2018) “Revolutions, republics and IWMA in the Spanish empire (around 1873)”, in Bensimon, F., Deluermoz, Q. and Moisand, J. (eds) ‘Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth!’: The First International in a Global Perspective, Leiden: Brill: 238–252.

Moisand, J. (2023) Federación o muerte: Los mundos posibles del Cantón de Cartagena (1873), Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata.

Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism, London and New York: Verso.

Mulvad, A. M. and Popp Madsen, B. A. (2022) “From neo-republicanism to socialist republicanism: Antonio Gramsci, the European council movements and the ‘second republican revival’”, Theoria, vol. 69, no. 171, June, 97–118.

Musto, M. (ed.) (2014) Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Myers, E. (2016) “Presupposing equality: The trouble with Rancière’s axiomatic approach”, Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 42, no. 1, 45–69.

Orford, A. (2021) International Law and the Politics of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pecqueur, C. (1842) De la paix, de son principe, et de sa réalisation, Paris: Capelle.

Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Pilbeam, P. (2000) French Socialists before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France, Teddington UK: Acumen.

Pilbeam, P. (2005) “Fourier and the Fourierists: A case of mistaken identity?”, French History and Civilization, vol. 1, 186–196.

Plaetzer, N. (2021) “Decolonizing the ‘universal republic’: The Paris Commune and French Empire”, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 49 no. 3, 585–603.

Pocock, J. G. A. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Proudhon, P.-J. (1849) Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire, pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution de Février, Paris: La Voix du Peuple.

Rancière, J. (2012 [1981])* Proletarian nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France*, London and New York: Verso.

Rancière, J, (2019 [1985]) “Heretical knowledge and the emancipation of the poor”, in Rancière, J. (ed.) Staging the People, London and New York: Verso: 34–56.

Riot-Sarcey, M. (1994) La démocratie à l’épreuve des femmes. Trois figures critiques du pouvoir, 1830–1848, Paris: Albin Michel.

Roberts, W. C. (2016) Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sanders, J. (2014) The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Schrupp, A. (1999) Nicht Marxistin und auch nicht Anarchistin. Frauen in der Ersten Internationale. Königstein im Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag.

Scott, J. (2018) The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, London and New York NY: Verso.

Sève, E. (1865) “Congrès international pour le progrès des sciences sociales. Quatrième congrès, Berne 1864”, Revue Trimestrielle, series 2, vol. 8, no. 4, 212–279.

Sinha, A. (2024) “The global coproduction of ideas”, paper presented at the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia PA, September 6.

Skinner, Q. (1998) Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stuurman, S. (2000) “The canon of the history of political thought: Its critique and a proposed alternative”, History & Theory, vol. 39, no. 1, 147–166.

Sunstein, C. (1988) “Beyond the republican revival”, The Yale Law Journal, vol. 97, no. 9, 1539–1590.

Thibaud, C. (2018) “Pour une histoire polycentrique des républicanismes atlantiques (années 1770 – années 1880)”, Revue d’Histoire du XIXe Siècle, vol. 56, no. 1, 151–170.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Thompson, E. P. (1966 [1963]) The Making of the English Working-Class, London: Vintage Books.

Tomba, M. (2019) Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vergara, C. (2022) Systemic Corruption: Constitutional ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Whitty, E. M. (1854) The Derbyites and the Coalition: Parliamentary Sketches, London: Trübner & Co.

Zimmerman, A. (2017) “Global Capitalism and Trans-Atlantic Revolution: An interview”, April 19, Toynbee Prize Foundation.

7. Towards an environmental and contextualist history of anarchist ideology

Preventing the (over)greening of anarchism

Léo Grillet

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-10

Introduction: The ideological hybridisation between anarchism and ecologism

In the second half of the 20^th century, two marginal political ideological families – ecologism and anarchism – influenced each other, sometimes to the point of hybridisation. This unique inter-ideological permeability led to two joint (but distinct) phenomena: first, the anarchisation of ecology and second the greening of anarchism.

The anarchisation of ecologism comes as a surprise, given that the first wave of ecologism sought to autonomise political ecology as a distinctive, original and fully coherent ideology. This autonomist approach means to endow ecologism with an arsenal of values, concepts and political representations that would be intrinsically identifiable as well as irreducible to other modern ideologies. This approach is rooted in a singular historical context opened up by the Great Acceleration (McNeill and Engelke 2014), when the first environmental alerts and mobilisations occurred, inaugurating the onset of “reflexive modernity” (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994). While political ideologies such as socialism and liberalism were developed in response to the democratic and social issues of the 19^th century, the second half of the 20^th century – marked by the nuclear threat, increasing pollution of the natural environment, loss of biodiversity and global warming – found its historically organic ideology in ecologism. From a disciplinary point of view, this construction of an ideologically coherent and autonomous ecologism also coincides with the collective effort to legitimise an emerging field of work, Green Political Theory (GPT), which will find its original object in ecologism (Dobson 1990). This approach presents traditional ideologies as outdated, on the basis of their complicity in the emergence of environmental catastrophes: “Industrial societies have, of course, featured many competing ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, Marxism and fascism. But, whatever their differences, all these ideologies are committed to industrialism” ( Dryzek 2013: 14).

However, as Michael Freeden points out, green ideology suffers from a lack of coherence and would be better classified as a “thin-centred ideology”. Its morphology remains incomplete; it possesses no great unifying thinker and is structured like a gaseous social movement. Above all, ecologism thinks only at the margins of concrete matters of social intervention and does not propose a strong or concrete utopia. These kinds of “thin-centred assimilative ideologies … thicken by ingesting the patterns of other ideologies” ( Freeden 1996: 485) and anarchism functions as its major “host ideology”. However, many other traditional ideologies sought to consolidate ecologism and then carve out a hegemonic position for themselves in the struggle to monopolise the (current) legitimate definition of ecologism (Hay 1988). Conservatism, liberalism, socialism and Marxism have all claimed a more or less direct historical continuity with contemporary environmental struggles: “Red, anarchist, or conservative classifications are a genealogical method of imposing order on green ideology” (Freeden 1996: 529). All the traditional ideologies have tried to turn green by exhuming traces of proto-ecologism from their own historical canons.

In this fierce competition, akin to a paternity test for ecologism, anarchism seems to be in the lead, so much so that it is credited with a high ecological capital. Three factors could explain the anarchisation of ecologism:

Morphological compatibility: Anarchism is an ideology with soft contours, especially due to its involvement in social movements (Gordon 2007), thus capable of rapidly absorbing ecologist demands and thereby claiming the title of the fastest-greening ideology (Woodcock 1968).
Conceptual convergence: Anarchism and ecologism converge because both share common concepts, values and representations, such as economic decentralisation, self-government or a non-anthropocentric value system, or even ecological limits to growth (Dobson 2000).
Genealogical paternity: Most anarchist scholars and activists have argued that historical anarchist movements produced the first environmental activists in the 19^th century, in the heart of the century of fossil-fuel industrialisation. This aspiration to be the green avant-garde led to the second phenomenon mentioned above: the greening of historical anarchism through the production of a green legend.

In this process of hybridisation, the host ideology has much to gain. While anarchism has been described as a “loose umbrella” that “straddles more than one ideological family” (Freeden 1996: 311) and is sometimes even disqualified as an ideology (Miller 1984), its status as the greenest ideology has strengthened considerably.

The first part of this chapter examines the process of thickening a “thin-centred ideology” by focusing on how and why ecologism was (partially) anarchised. Modern anarchism functioned as the best “hosting ideology” whose morphology is fluid enough while sharing central concepts with ecologism. The second and third parts of the chapter focus more on the methodological issues and their biases, which anarchists made anarchism a more amenable host ideology by greening its historical canons to win the prize for the best ecologically avant-garde ideology. We use contextualist and environmental history methods to prevent the over-greening of classical authors. Finally, by employing the conceptual–morphological method, we consider anarchist ideology as a whole to renew the study of green concepts within anarchism. Are the convergent core concepts derived from historical anarchism, or are more recent concepts developed in the wake of new environmental struggles? Is anarchism the father of ecologism? On this last point, we argue that there is a need for a methodological shift to terminate the race for greenest traditional ideology and instead question their relative indifference to environmental issues at a time of “environmental reflexivity”, alarms and struggles.

The anarchisation of ecologism through morphological compatibility and conceptual convergence

Anarchism’s morphological iconoclasm

Why was ecologism specifically inspired by anarchist ideology? To understand this, we refer to the early philosophers of the GPT who based their analysis on Murray Bookchin’s works. According to this author, it is not so much its concepts as its morphological fluidity that characterise anarchism as the best “hosting ideology” for ecologism. To get an idea of this, we can go back to Murray Bookchin’s 1964 essay Ecology and Revolutionary Thought. He argues for a crossbreeding between anarchism and ecologism: “an anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a pre-condition for the practice of ecological principles” (Bookchin 1970: 98). In his paper, he praises the unique capacity of anarchist ideology to question itself and to adapt rapidly to new social and political contexts. He later writes that anarchism is a “movement whose very life-blood is a fervent iconoclasm, not only with respect to authority in society at large, but in itself” (1970: 29) and must live up to its “historical responsibility” (1970: 33). It is thus its anti-dogmatic morphology, which is more permeable to changing contexts, that allows anarchism to stand apart from more rigid ideologies such as Marxism. Another theorist of anarchism, George Woodcock (2017: 30), explains: “Anarchism, with its cult of the spontaneous, has always shown a strikingly Protean fluidity in adapting its approach and methods to special historical circumstances.”

Bookchin was not the first to comment on the openness of anarchist morphology, declaring that he was inspired by the student movements he observed and “the explosive growth of intuitive anarchism among young people today” (1970: 16). He did not remain a mere observer, but went on to become “a New Left guru by creating a school of political thought called ‘social ecology”’ (Woodhouse 2009: 74–75). Throughout the 1970s, numerous anarchist and ecologist theorists or activists actively promoted this hybridisation, including Leopold Kohr, Paul Goodman, Theodore Roszak and Edward Abbey. The success of the anarchisation of ecologism rests on the intellectual and militant contexts that noted anarchism’s morphological iconoclasm.

Minimal conceptual convergence ? On “intuitive anarchism”

But Bookchin used an intriguing term to describe the ideology of the young activists who inspired him: intuitive anarchism”. One historian of these movements, Keith Woodhouse (2009: 66), puts it this way: “The anarchist ethos of the New Left was only sometimes explicit; student radicals were rarely well-versed in anarchist thought and their affinity for anarchist values was more intuitive than studied.” The anarchism of these younger generations is neither inherently scholarly nor genuinely militant: it simply provides them with a helpful interpretive grid to apply to their situation and an effective repertoire of contention (direct action). This argument could also concern Bookchin himself, as his references to classical anarchism are scarce in this text. His interest in anarchism is such that he doesn’t need to open the grimoires of classical anarchism (1860–1930) but can draw inspiration from them quite freely. He explains: “What disquiets me, for the present, is the word ‘classical’ as applied to anarchism ... It is vitally important that anarchists grasp the changing historical context in which these ideals have been applied, lest they needlessly stagnate because of the persistence of old formulas in new situations” (1970: 29). He warns anarchists not to be rigidly attached to classical and historically outdated conceptions and to reinvigorate their iconoclastic reflexes. The anarchisation of ecologism appears to be mainly circumstantial.

But while the New Anarchism Bookchin calls for should reinvent itself according to what the unprecedented and urgent environmental context demands, it must borrow some of the guidelines of historical anarchism. The host ideology cannot be reduced to a palimpsest and must provide conceptual baggage.

The identification of converging concepts

It would be reductive to claim that the anarchisation of ecologism was based solely on its morphology. Bookchin and other philosophers from the 1970s and 1980s onwards emphasised the conceptual convergence between ecologism and anarchism. Bookchin writes “the future of the anarchist movement will depend upon its ability to apply basic libertarian principles to new historical situations” (1970: 28). Which anarchist concepts are converging with ecologist ones?

In the period up to the early 1980s, in the wake of student mobilisations and (re-)editions of Bookchin’s texts, or those of other eco-anarchists such as the bio-regionalist Kirkpatrick Sale, this question was at the heart of a group of intellectuals: the GPT theorists. A seminal work of this group, Environmentalism, was published in 1976. Its author, the British geographer Timothy O’Riordan, explicitly refers to the eco-anarchist option outlined by Bookchin as a solution or rather “‘the’ solution: the anarchist solution” (O’Riordan 1976: 307), which he virtually conflates with eco-centrism. Drawing on Environmentalism and Bookchin’s essay, it is possible to identify four significant concepts inherent to anarchism on which the anarchisation of ecologism had been built, following Bookchin’s work:

“Ecocentrism provides checks to the headlong pursuit of ‘progress’ ... it talks of limits” (O’Riordan 1976: 11). Without discarding the founding ideals of the Enlightenment, anarchism opposes an overly restrictive (yet hegemonic) conception of limitless scientific and material progress that knows no obstacles. By highlighting the pernicious effects of brutal industrialisation, the degradation of living and working conditions and the disfigurement of nature, anarchism aims to expose the “regress” (régrès) (Reclus 1905) and disturbing dehumanisation associated with modern life. By rehabilitating non-state or minimal-state societies through history or anthropology, anarchists pave the way for a revision of the notion of progress by replacing it within natural limits.
Bookchin emphases the very eco-centric principle of “organic differentiation” that lies squarely within ecologist and anarchist programmes: “Both, in their own ways, regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the creative potential of a natural and social situation” (1970: 24). O’Riordan adds: “It provides a natural morality ... it talks in ecosystem metaphors of permanence and stability, diversity, creativity, homeostasis and protection of options” (1976: 10–11). Anarchists would be the bearers of an ethic with strong eco-centric overtones (Pepper 1984; Eckersley 1992), thus resisting anthropo-centrism, i.e., human domination of nature. Infused with an ethical naturalism, anarchism insists on man’s inescapable embeddedness in nature, an assertion based on the thorough study of biology or ethology. It follows that man should reconcile himself with himself through the mediation of natural elements, encourage mutual aid within the animal world and advocate harmony and unity through diversity.
Third, “it raises questions about ends and means, particularly the nature of democracy, participation, communication among groups holding conflicting yet legitimate conviction, the distribution of political power” (O’Riordan 1976: 11). Anarchism is celebrated for its vigorous charge against authoritarian and impersonal political arrangements, especially the state. Here, anarchist democratisation is combined with the imperative of social justice, considered the sole basis for political legitimacy. Ecologism can only emerge as a mass social and, according to Murray Bookchin, through a “spontaneous” repertoire of contention: direct action. All interests must be taken into account while decision-making forms and procedures are horizontalised. The anarchists largely inspired GPT to resolve the paradox of the democracy proceduralism/the consequentialism of ecology (Goodin 1992). As Dobson (2000: 103) writes: “It is often argued that greens have no reasons of their own ... for arguing for one particular political form rather than another. This is wrong: all greens of whatever tint will argue that political institutional design should be guided by environmental and/or ecological realities”.
Finally, the most salient concept that positively sets anarchism apart lies in its advocacy of the relocalisation of political, economic and technological activities: the rehabilitation of the “decentralised society, based on the communal ownership of the means of production” (Bookchin 1970: 29). GPT advocates for “communities” as opposed to the market and the state (Barry 2014). O’Riordan (1976: 11) explains it this way: “Anarchist environmentalists aim to develop decentralised institutional arrangements to facilitate flexible and adaptable responses to changing circumstances by individuals and communities alike and to avoid the vulnerability of dependence upon trade, food supplies, large corporations, or key occupational groups”. Radically reducing the size of the political unit is an essential condition for achieving face-to-face democracy and peer-to-peer relationships but also for reconnecting the political collective with its nearby environment or bio-region, on which it depends. By relocating its economic activities, the self-governing commune counteracts the capitalist model of the internationalisation of goods (and the externalisation of ecological costs). Many anarchists then argue that this arrangement inevitably leads to a drastic reduction of needs and the eradication of luxuries. Finally, when relocating political and economic activities, technological infrastructures are also being extensively redesigned: instead of the gigantic equipment that supports trade circuits, there is a preference for “appropriate technologies” (Schumacher 1973), which are less energy intensive, more adapted to a human scale and dependent on the surrounding environmental resources.

Anarchism as the best hosting ideology

As seen above, morphological, strategical (direct action) and conceptual factors led to the anarchisation of ecologism. These converging concepts, identified by Bookchin and Timothy O’Riordan, were broadly taken up by most GPT theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. As several prominent GPT authors who have embraced the green legend put it: “This ‘typical’ set of environmentalist social values has obvious compatibility with contemporary anarchist theory” (Hay 1988: 22); “the closest approximation to the center of gravity of a sustainable green society is the last option called the ‘anarchist solution’” (Dobson 1990: 83); “not only is anarchism the political philosophy most compatible with an ecological perspective, but also anarchism is founded on or inspired by ecology” (Eckersley 1992: 145); “most green writers and commentators seem to agree that its general anarchist complexion is one of its unifying characteristics” (Barry 1999: 80); “all this to say that greens are fundamentally libertarian–anarchists” (Goodin 1992: 152).

But how can one explain the simultaneous adherence of GPT to the horizons offered by anarchism – the “anarchist solution” – and its attempt at defining the contours of a profoundly original ecological ideology, irreducible to the ideologies of the past? Anarchism functions as a legitimising ideology, the only one capable of countering the competing models in vogue.

What primarily seems to explain the anarchisation of ecologism is its absolute opposition to the authoritarian theories, often with neo-Malthusian overtones, that flourished and circulated widely during the 1970s. GPT authors agreed on the need to reinvest democratic and liberal frameworks which render any attempt to rehabilitate an ecological Leviathan ( Ophuls 1973) impossible. Thus, GPT (re-)mobilises anarchism for its visceral attachment to radical forms of direct democracy and to the empowerment of political bodies through collective decision-making.
Second, the essential feature of ecologism is its radical “anti-statism”. The technocratic state option had already been strongly condemned by O’Riordan. But it is Dobson, following Bookchin in particular, who completed its elimination. Indeed he distinguishes democratic, non-sectarian ecologism from managerial environmentalism, which he links to economic liberalism: “Environmentalism argues for a managerial approach to environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production and consumption and ecologism holds that a sustainable and fulfilling existence presupposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world” (Dobson 2000: 2). Unlike environmentalism, which prefers the status quo and intends to manage environmental problems in a sectorised manner, ecologism is mainly inspired by eco-anarchist principles and implies a complete overhaul of political, cultural and economic systems.
The third option paradoxically rejected by GPT in mobilising the anarchist tradition is Marxism. In a context of Red/Green “mutual suspicion” (Benton 1989: 55), Marxism led fierce attacks on political ecologists, accusing them of bourgeois environmentalism, of defending the middle classes of the industrialised countries and of altogether omitting class conflicts: “The depoliticisation of the ecological question is now complete. Its social components and consequences have been entirely eliminated” ( Enzensberger 1974: 26). While GPT is highly concerned with social justice, as evidenced by the number of theorists coming from the ranks of socialism (Pepper 1984; Ryle 1988; Bahro 1982), Marxism seems to be too closely associated with promethean techno-industry. By rehabilitating anarchism, socialism’s poor cousin, theorists can deflect accusations of embourgeoisement and promote a tradition that more intrinsically combines eco-centrism with the need for structural social change (Eckersley 1992).

GPT thickened ecologism through anarchisation, which became its last-resort host ideology. It is also worth noting that this is a strategically profitable venture, given that anarchism obviously lacks any regulating organisation serving patents in anarchism.

Oversimplification of concepts prior to the autonomisation of ecologism

However, since the mid-1990s there has been a phase of autonomisation of ecologism towards anarchism, marked by the multiplication of severe criticisms addressed to eco-anarchism and then by its marginalisation: “It is no longer as plausible to claim that greens are mostly anarchistic” (Doherty and de Geus 1996: 3).

Why do GPT theorists now seek “the transformation rather than the abolition of the state” (Barry 1999: 79) and disqualify the “anarchist solution” of decentralisation? The arguments used to explain this shift are manifold. A faction wants to move away from the anarchist essentialisation of the state apparatus, which is seen as authoritarian and environmentally destructive. In urgent decision-making, they rehabilitate the state as an already-existing instrument that is indispensable to economic planning. State planning could, moreover, implement (egalitarian) redistribution of goods in economic or energy scarcity situations and overcome the aporias of international justice that localist thinking ignores. Others insist on the scale of decision-making: environmental degradation is global and knows no borders. Rather than taking direct action or fleeing into the wilderness, the strategic choice is to integrate institutional decision-making spheres to build transregional and international arenas with the support of states (Barry 1999).

The mid-90s and 2000s saw a slow marginalisation of anarchism, an ideology that had become incompatible with the demands of the urgent political and environmental agenda. This movement follows Murray Bookchin’s disanarchisation in the 1990s when he criticised anarchists for their individualistic impulses, which he described as “lifestyle anarchism”, and the rise of the anarcho–primitivist movement, which advocates a drastic return to nature (Zerzan 1994), completing the final marginalisation of anarchism. Some GPT thinkers, however, still lay claim to the anarchist tradition (Carter 1999). At the beginning of the 21^st century, anarchism is still reduced to a few rigidified characteristics: rigorous bio-regionalism, advocacy of strict self-sufficiency, a drastic reduction of needs and the abolition of international exchange.

The over-greening biases of classical anarchist “environmental heroes”

We can now consider a joint phenomenon: the greening of anarchism in order to increase its hosting capacities. Indeed, the inter-ideological race for green paternity seemed to have a winner: anarchism. Some anarchist writers have revisited the history of anarchism to trace an eco-anarchist genealogy. But are the historical anarchists the founding fathers of green thought? And on what historical corpus of texts are their research based? This section considers the methodological biases that led to the greening of classical anarchist authors and, drawing on contextualist methodology, it offers some tools to prevent over-greening.

Exhumation of “environmental heroes” (Kropotkin and Reclus)

The (over)greening of classical anarchism

In March 1974, The Ecologist ran the headline Anarchists or Ecologists? and devoted a section to the subject, penned by George Woodcock, which began with these lines: “With remarkable, even prophetic insight, many 19^th-century anarchists and their followers foresaw the severe social and environmental problems … Anarchists such as these were, therefore, the forerunners of contemporary environmentalists” (1974: 84). Successive re-editions of Kropotkin’s texts (Ward 1974); and the simultaneous exhumation of a long-neglected socialist current with romantic overtones embodied by William Morris (Thompson 1955; Gould 1974) and a broader tradition known as “back-to-nature socialism” or anarcho-naturism (Gould 1988) led to the advent of a properly socialist and anarchist account of a pre-ecologism. A tendency towards hagiography within anarchist studies has undoubtedly fuelled this narrative. David Goodway (1989: 7) wrote as early as 1989: “Anarchist historiography is a frustrating field, which traditionally tends to be hagiographic … When it comes to their own past … anarchists have not subjected it to radical analysis”. This observation should alert us to the often “over-simplified” (Duckett 2006: 10) readings of alleged fin-de-siècle eco-anarchism.

Kropotkin and Reclus, from canonical heroes to environmental heroes

How was this genealogical paternity introduced? Primarily by exhuming from the anarchist canon two pre-ecologist figures: the geographers Peter Kropotkin (Goodman 1968; Woodcock 1974) and a little later, Élisée Reclus (Giblin 1976; Dunbar 1978). To paraphrase the ironic phrase coined by Val Plumwood about Marx, or rather eco-Marxist commentators, one could say that anarchism found its “environmental heroes” (Plumwood 1981). Since the 1960s, a vast literature in philosophy, geography and anthropology has been devoted to the eco-hagiography of Reclus and Kropotkin (Marshall 1992; Purchase 1997; Clark and Martin 2004; Morris 2012).

Their character as pioneers of eco-centrism is detectable notably in the Reclusian expression “humanity is nature becoming self-conscious” (see Clark and Martin 2004). This hagiography has given rise to lively debate (see Guest 2017). In Kropotkin’s case, what attracts attention is his study of the mutual aid of species, drawn from biology, in which human beings are considered one animal species among others. As trained geographers, Kropotkin and Reclus emphasised the impact of natural environments and climates in human activities. Reclus developed a science known as “mesology”. They also devoted themselves to the study of the globe as a whole, with a particular focus on non-Western societies. In the wake of his reading of Perkins Marsh, Reclus condemned the degradation of natural environments due to man’s actions. As early as 1864, he wrote: “they (humans) became by force of circumstances real geological agents and, in a variety of manners, they transformed the surface of the continents, changed the course of flowing waters and modified the climate” (Reclus 1995: 5). This must be remedied by fostering “the feeling for nature” (Reclus 1866): a romantic, aesthetic but also political form of preserving the natural spaces that the authors seek to revitalise. Finally, both insist on the communal form and advocate the relocation of productive activities, as Kropotkin (1901) outlined in his Fields, Factories and Workshops.

Clearly, there is room for methodological improvement in this analysis of classical anarchism. We examine some of these methodological biases and conclude with new perspectives to be developed in the study of anarchist ideology. This chapter supports a deeply inter-disciplinary dialogue combining environmental history, the history of ideas (contextualism) and political philosophy (morphological approach).

On broadening the studied corpus

Eco-anarchist re-readings of Reclus and Kropotkin sometimes suffer from being a little hasty and rather selective. One possible remedy is the research programme of an “environmental history of ideas”, as has been proposed by, for example, Pierre Charbonnier. Indeed, the latter advocates moving away from the “history of environmental ideas”, which “relies on an intellectual separatism for which a certain tradition of thought is laid out in successive strokes on the canvas, distinct from a common fund of moral and political thought that is implicitly considered irrelevant” (Charbonnier 2021: 15). By studying canonical authors on the basis of a limited number of their texts considered to be ecologically compatible, one risks distorting their thought and eluding possible internal inconsistencies. It is also a matter of shifting the focus of environmental studies, from a specialisation in ethics to a questioning of the political and material issues on which philosophical theories are based.

Several authors have already pointed out Kropotkin’s techno-optimism and critique of anti-machinism (Adams 2014; Jarrige 2014), a perspective also shared by Élisée Reclus, though in a more tempered manner. Other texts by Kropotkin seem to be under-studied and we can group certain dissonances around three main themes. First, while insisting on the role of climate in human activities, he also intended to “defy the climate” (Kropotkin 1901: 85) in order to produce more, thanks to “our means of obtaining from the soil what we want, under any climate and on any soil” (Kropotkin 1901: 103). Second, he also called for the removal of as many natural barriers (mountains or seas) as possible because, as a fervent internationalist, he envisaged the material unification of humanity, made possible by the internationalisation of industrial and agricultural processes and the exchange of knowledge. He wrote, for instance:

Knowledge and invention, boldness of thought and enterprise, conquests of genius and improvements of social organisation have become international growths and no kind of progress – intellectual, industrial or social – can be kept within political boundaries; it crosses the seas, it pierces the mountains; steppes are no obstacle to it.

(Kropotkin 1901: 41)

As Pascale Siegrist (2022: 59) rightly notes: “Understanding anarchist geographers as cosmopolitans serves as an important corrective to those accounts that treat anarchism – or indeed geography and even space – as parochial and concerned only with small-scale particularisms.” Finally, as for the presumed radical anti-consumerism and desire to return to frugal intentional communities, some of their writings rather testify to a will to achieve authentic material “abundance” through a massive (and not parochial) revolution, in order to provide everyone with a minimum of comfort and material “luxury” (Adams, 2014: 166).

Recontextualising original intentions

These texts often operate within an approach dictated by the “ecclesial matrix”, the “revealed text” (Pudal, 2006: 186. our translation). This principle of revelation – which paradoxically brings blindness – has a tendency to overlook the intellectual and socio-political contexts in which these texts were produced. To take just one example, let us focus on Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops, considered to be the first economic treatise on relocalisation. Matthew Adams warns us: this text is less of a real treatise on political economy than a supplement to his The Conquest of Bread, in other words it should be seen as another response to his famous “Bread! It is bread that the revolution needs” (Kropotkin 1892). His aim, according to Adams, was to sharpen the logic of his revolutionary strategy to ensure that the revolution would not collapse as a result of agricultural scarcity. In imagining this process of relocalising agricultural activity around the cities, he wanted above all to ensure that the coming revolution could be sustained by providing for the immediate needs of the revolutionaries, to prevent the reactionary forces from gaining the upper hand (Adams 2015). One can, of course, imagine that in addition to this strategic purpose, the perspective of relocalisation could also be economic (or even ecological), but does the latter come first?

Historising the environmental context through “environmental reflexivities”

While the tools of the Cambridge School make it possible to historicise the political and intellectual context, what about historicising the environmental one? How can one establish a (non-genealogical) historicisation of the environmental issues of the past, when global warming or knowledge of ecosystems were unknown? What methodology can be used to escape from the anachronistic genealogical categories of pre-ecologism or the roots of green thought? Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, an environmental historian, has offered a useful analytical tool for this purpose: “environmental reflexivities”. He defines this concept as “the complex, historically determined ways – very different from our own – of conceiving of the consequences of human actions on the environment” ( Fressoz and Locher 2012: 580). This concept serves three purposes:

It helps to prevent a depoliticising of environmental issues, as the 21^st-century fable of the awakening of environmental awareness has done. Past societies were obviously not blind to the impact of human activity on the natural environment. Fressoz’s conclusion is unequivocal: “The history we have proposed may seem depressing, i.e., that our ancestors destabilised the Earth and its ecosystems despite knowing what they were doing” ( Fressoz and Bonneuil 2016: 240).
Then one needs to excavate the environmental grammars specific to past societies, while taking into account the scientific knowledge of the time (meteorological climate theory, etc.) so as not to anachronistically impose our modern environmental analysis grid on them.
Finally, one needs to take a closer look at the discourses and struggles led by subaltern people who tried to warn against environmental destruction.

Environmental reflexivity requires us to take an interest in the state of scientific knowledge and the struggles for greater environmental prudence and thus to move away from the often overly charitable readings of certain authors considered to be the fathers of ecologism. To shed light on the eminently political nature of the environmental context of an epoch, we need to take an interest in the plurality of environmental reflexivities that sometimes come into sharp conflict.

Exposing the naturiens controversy

This environmental contextualist approach aims to recover the original intentions behind every author’s text in highlighting the militant and environmental context of intervention: “we should try to recover the questions to which the texts we study can be interpreted as answers” (Skinner 2002: 47). This will make it possible to examine the environmental reflexivities in conflict within the militant anarchist field. It is first necessary to resurrect certain texts by often neglected (anarchist) authors to which Reclus and Kropotkin seek to respond. While Kropotkin rejects the model of self-sufficient intentional communities, as seen above, an analysis based on letters addressed to an anarcho-naturalist group could complete the picture. Long marginalised by the anarchists themselves and then ignored by historians, the Naturiens of Montmartre (1894–1903) have recently been rehabilitated by the environmental historian François Jarrige (2016; see also Coste 2019). The Naturien movement is of interest to us as it seems to fit perfectly into the image of eco-anarchism: at the heart of its activism lies the fight against the “artificial”, industrial pollution, gigantic cities, deforestation causing floods, workers’ diseases and machine slavery.

In pamphlets and magazines the Naturiens set out to regain full autonomy, free from modern techno-industrial slavery, by returning to the forests, the pure air and a healthy lifestyle. Based on the observations made by foresters and scientists of their time, they called for a return to the natural state “in opposition to industrial, social and commercial Civilization”. They distinguish it from “the anarchised, harmonious natural State, but not the primitive natural state of the first ages of mankind, the return to which would be absolutely impossible and which in this sense could not constitute social progress” ( Zisly 1896: 42, Our translation). Despite these clarifications and the fact that some Naturiens’ positions were openly primitivist, influential anarchists of the time, such as Ernest Girault and Jean Grave, saw them as a severe attack on the progressive anarchist ideal and did not hesitate to disqualify them or even strip them of the title of anarchist.

Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus also addressed two letters to Naturiens and highlighted their naive primitivism. Kropotkin began his letter by stating that he would have preferred for “naturism” as a movement not to exist. Apart from the fact that Naturiens were advocating “desertion from the cause of humanity” by withdrawing like “monks living on roots”, they were not “sincere socialists”, forgetting the fate of the “millions of Indians” (Kropotkin 1911: 59–60 our translation) who did not have enough to eat. Whereas the anarchist ideal proposes the active development of the production process, a hypothetical return to nature would only lead to more famine. In his letter, Reclus is less violent, praising in particular the “simplification of life”, but he continues: “It may suit the majority of us to develop man’s power indefinitely by means of machines and thus to expand in ever-increasing proportions the resources possessed by mankind”. He concludes that only machines and the development of the earth’s infrastructure will make it possible to satisfy human needs, thanks to the “locomotive for transport, (and) ships in the case of local shortages”, so as not to “return to the uncertainties of yesteryear”, those of the “redskins” (Reclus 1911: 60–61 our translation.)

By re-establishing the context of Reclus and Kropotkin’s writings and their partial or total condemnation of Naturiens’ writings, one can better understand the intentions behind their productions, which were quite different from those put forward by the green legend. Their anarchism advocated the use of machines, industrialisation and even the (at least minimal) internationalisation of trade.

To sum up the methodological contributions, one must be careful to not fetishise certain authors by attributing intentions to them without having systematised the analysis by considering all their writings. It is also important to place them in the historical context of their time, particularly in terms of environmental knowledge, and to make a point of analysing controversies to prevent hagiographical attitudes. One needs to pay attention to the (plural) environmental reflexivities in order to prevent (over)greening anachronisms.

The methodologically biased over-greening of classical anarchism

While the previous section focused on the contextualisation of selected writings by authors who have become environmental heroes, the following section focuses on the entirety of historical anarchist ideology. In line with Freeden’s conceptual approach, it proposes new conceptual tools to better assess the greenness of an ideology.

Pluralising anarchisms to prevent a green radiation effect

To study an ideology in its global perspective, one needs to abandon the pick-and-choose strategy, which consists of sorting out authors whose writings are supposedly highly environmentally reflexive. By proudly displaying their “environmental heroes”, anarchist proponents seem to want to create a radiation effect that would then green the entire anarchist tradition: if two anarchists were pre-ecologists, it is understood that all of anarchism is a pre-ecologism. That is a typical production of the green legend, as identified by Ted Benton (1996) in his book The Greening of Marxism.

Recent contributions to the history of anarchism seem to lean towards a less distorting option for anarchism and instead intend to “blow the canon” (Adams 2013) in order to prevent over-reductive readings of this ideological current based on a few “ideas of a few great men” (Kinna and Evren 2013: 4). This approach offers two main advantages: first, it allows us to study the hitherto neglected plural variants of anarchism (non-Eurocentric, feminist, individualist, Naturiens etc.), to the extent that some even speak of “anarchisms” ( Bantman 2007; Levy 2010). Second, the study of anarchism from a pluralist perspective allows us to establish a dialogue between its various variants (mutualism, collectivism, syndicalism, pacifism, individualism etc.) and to identify more clearly certain of their characteristics (for example, the anarcho-naturism mirrored in Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism), without, however, setting them in stone (Manfredonia 2021). One needs to confront all the environmental reflexivities of all known forms of anarchisms, as we did through the Naturiens controversy. Special attention should be also paid to the receptions, circulations and re-appropriations (sometimes distorting) of these “environmental reflexivities” within other groups of anarchists and militants (Chartier 2010). For example, the proto-ecological texts of Reclus and Kropotkin were almost only re-appropriated by anarchists in the mid-20^th century.

Are “converging green concepts” derived from classical anarchist core concepts?

One question remains unresolved: Does historical anarchism share the converging concepts identified in the 20^th century? Are the converging concepts part of the core concepts of historical anarchism? In other words, how can the conceptual approach of ideologies incorporate the contextualist framework of environmental reflexivity?

If one applies the conceptual–morphological method developed by Michael Freeden and often used in recent anarchist studies, one finds that none of the “core concepts” inherent within classical anarchism seem to point in the direction of a particularly green concept. In a book dedicated to anarchism from a morphological approach, no identified “core concepts” (anti-hierarchy, prefiguration, freedom, agency, direct action and revolution) have anything to do with green thought. “Eco-centrism” is only mentioned as a peripheral concept but with a focus on contemporary eco-anarchists (Franks, June and Williams 2018). While some have pointed to the overhanging nature of the academic gesture that proposes to identify concepts a posteriori, there is nothing (for now) to suggest that classical anarchist ideology has such a core concept, or at least one that is “proportionally” strong enough or has “priority” within its morphology ( Freeden 2003). However, the fluid morphology of anarchism thus led to the integration in the 1960s of concepts close to ecologism, which seem to have been absent from old anarchism. A reservation must be made about the operationalisation of the conceptual approach: which concept could function as an index of greenness, given that the concept of “nature” was far too unstable in the 19^th century (Latour 1993)? If it is particularly clear that anarchist ideology does not offer a stable concept around which to reflect on environmental issues, does this mean that it never refers to them?

Rematerialising adjacent and peripheral concepts as green proxies

Despite the absence of a green core concept, anarchist ideology can be analysed using an environmental grid. Rather than insisting on ethical concepts (bio-centric, eco-centric or anthropo-centric), the idea would be to confront the core, adjacent and peripheral concepts of an ideology with the environmental context of its time. What were the environmental alarms that this ideology generated? Or how did it respond to such warnings? What scientific theories did the authors use to decontest these concepts? More importantly, what are the environmental, material and institutional implications of these concepts?

The methodology proposed here can go even further to rematerialise the approach. As Pierre Charbonnier proposes, proxy concepts such as “subsisting” or “dwelling” (2021: 17) can provide a more sensitive examination of past environmental reflexivities. Michael Freeden also explains that ideologies “exhibit a series of ideas concerning socio-political issues that constitute a reasonably inclusive blueprint and a programme of action” ( Freeden 2021: 158). These concepts are not ethical, but rather refer to economic and institutional design and have often not been considered within the conceptual morphology. Some anarchist concepts, such as “self-sufficient commune” or “economic federalism”, can themselves be seen as adjacent or peripheral and be examined from an environmental history perspective. This approach highlights the various and often competing environmental reflexivities within anarchisms: on the basis of these concepts and the controversies they generate, one can distinguish between currents of anarchism that are more productivist and abundantialist and others that are more localist and frugal. While historical anarchism cannot be described as an ideology with green roots, it nonetheless includes variants with stronger environmental reflexivities. But why have the variants most attentive to environmental issues failed to impose the introduction of a green core or adjacent concept within anarchist ideology?

Conclusion: Terminate the race for the green paternity

The process of the anarchisation of ecologism can be explained first by the loose morphology of anarchism, which can adapt quickly to new socio-political contexts, and second by certain “converging concepts”. On the other hand, many authors have tried to green historical ideologies and establish an alleged genealogical paternity: this is how the green legend of anarchism was born. However, this chapter claims to shift the investigative methods. It is only by systematising the analysis of all the authors’ writings (internalist approach) and recontextualising their original intentions (contextualist approach) that we will avoid the over-greening heroisation of a few figures. The environmental context approach also allows us to nuance the exceptionality of their writings: all societies in the past have reflected on their relationship with their natural environment, as past environmental alarms and struggles demonstrate (environmental history). Therefore, to better assess the greenness of an ideology, one needs to consider the lack of green core concepts and the fact that certain anarchist authors or activists, such as the Naturiens, failed to impose a conceptual grammar on an ideology that was less predatory towards the natural environment. The idea is not to explain that anarchism is not an ecologism at all (it has certainly become one!), but to rather excavate the plural and often competing environmental reflexivities within historical anarchisms.

Rather than seeking to designate a winning ideology in the race for the paternity of ecologism, the aim for any environmental history theorist should be turned on its head: Why were environmental reflexivities so poorly represented within traditional ideologies? And why and how have ideologies failed to relay the environmental alarms of their time and even helped to “over-ride” them by neglecting them ( Fressoz 2024)?

References

Adams, M. (2013) “The possibilities of anarchist history: Rethinking the canon and writing history”, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, no. 1, 34–63.

Adams, M. (2014) “Rejecting the American model: Peter Kropotkin’s radical communalism”, History of Political Thought, vol. 35, no. 1, 147–173.

Adams, M. (2015) Kropotkin, Read and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bahro, R. (1982) Socialism and Survival, London: Heretic Books.

Bantman, C. (2007) Anarchismes et anarchistes en France et en Grande-Bretagne, 1880–1914: Échanges, représentations, transferts. PhD Thesis. Paris XIII-Villetaneuse.

Barry, J. (1999) Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue and Progress, London: Sage.

Barry, J. (2014) “Green political theory”, in Geoghegan, V. and Wilford, R. (eds.) Political Ideologies: An Introduction, London: Routledge: 153–178.

Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994) Reflexive Modernization, Stanford CT: Stanford University Press.

Benton, T. (1989) “Marxism and natural limits: An ecological critique and reconstruction”, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 178, 51–86.

Benton, T. (ed.) (1996) The Greening of Marxism, New York NY: The Guilford Press.

Bookchin, M. (1970) Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, New York NY: Times Changes Press.

Carter, A. (1999) A Radical Green Political Theory, New York NY: Routledge.

Charbonnier, P. (2021) Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chartier, R. (2010) Forms and Meanings, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Clark, J. P. and Martin, C. (2004) Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Élisée Reclus, Lanham KY: Lexington Books.

Coste, T. (2019) Le naturisme libertaire de la fin du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle (France, Royaume-Uni, Allemagne). Master’s Thesis. Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Dobson, A. (1990) Green Political Thought, London: Routledge.

Dobson, A. (2000) Green Political Thought, 3^rd edition, London: Routledge.

Doherty, B. and de Geus, M. (eds.) (1996) Democracy and Green Political Thought, London: Routledge.

Dryzek, J. (2013) The Politics of the Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duckett, M. (2006) Ecological direct action and the nature of anarchism: Explorations from 1992 to 2005. PhD Thesis. Newcastle University.

Dunbar, G. (1978) Elisée Reclus: Historian of Nature, Hamden UK: Archon Books.

Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach, New York NY: UCL Press.

Enzensberger, H. M. (1974) “A critique of political ecology”, New Left Review, vol. 84, 3–34.

Franks, B., Jun, N. and Williams, L. (2018) Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, London: Routledge.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

Freeden, M. (2021) Ideology Studies: New Advances and Interpretations, London: Routledge.

Fressoz, J. B. (2024) Happy Apocalypse, London: Verso Books.

Fressoz, J. B. and Bonneuil, F. (2016) The Shock of the Anthropocene, London: Verso Books.

Fressoz, J. B. and Locher, F. (2012) “Modernity’s frail climate: A climate history of environmental reflexivity”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 3, 579–598.

Giblin, B. (1976) “Géographie et anarchie: Élisée Reclus”, Hérodote, no. 2, 30–49.

Goodin, R. (1992) Green Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Goodman, P. (1968) “Kropotkin at this moment”, Dissent, no. 6, Nov–Dec, 519–522.

Goodway, D. (ed.) (1989) For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice, London: Routledge.

Gordon, U. (2007) Anarchy Alive!, London: Pluto Press.

Gould, N. (1974) “Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince”, The Ecologist, vol. 4, no. 7, 261–264.

Gould, P. (1988) Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land and Socialism in Britain, 1800–1900, New York NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Guest, B. (2017) “Environmental awareness and geography: Reading Reclus ecocritically?”, in Specq, F. (ed.) Environmental Awareness and the Design of Literature, Boston MA: Brill: 69–89.

Hay, P. (1988) “Ecological values and western political traditions: From anarchism to fascism”, Politics, vol. 8, no. 2, 22–29.

Jarrige, F. (2014) Technocritiques, Paris: La Découverte.

Jarrige, F. (2016) Gravelle, Zisly et les anarchistes naturiens contre la civilisation industrielle, Neuvy-en-Champagne: Le Passager Clandestin.

Kinna, R. and Evren, S. (2013) “Blasting the canon”, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, no. 1, 1–6.

Kropotkin, P. (1892) La Conquête du pain, Paris: Tresse et Stock.

Kropotkin, P. (1901) Fields, Factories and Workshops, London: G. P. Putnam and Sons.

Kropotkin, P. (1911) “Lettre du 8 février 1897 à H. Zisly”, La Vie Naturelle, no. 5, décembre 1911, 59–60.

Kropotkin, P. and Ward, C. (Eds.) (1974) Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, New York NY: Harper Torchbooks.

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Levy, C. (2010) “Social histories of anarchism”, Journal of the Study of Radicalism, vol. 4, no. 2, 1–44.

Manfredonia, G. (2021) Anarchisme et changement social, Lyon: Atelier de création libertaire.

Marshall, P. (1992) Nature’s Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking, London: Simon & Schuster.

McNeill, J. and Engelke, P. (2014) The Great Acceleration, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Miller, D. (1984) Anarchism, London: J.M. Dent.

Morris, B. (2012) Pioneers of Ecological Humanism, Brighton UK: Book Guild Publishers.

O’Riordan, T. (1976) Environmentalism, London: Pion.

Ophuls, W. (1973) “Leviathan or oblivion?”, in Daly, H. (ed.) Toward a Steady State Economy, San Francisco CA: W. H. Freeman.

Pepper, D. (1984) The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, London: Croom Helm.

Plumwood, V. (1981) “On Marx as an environmental hero”, Environmental Ethics, vol. 3, no. 3, 237–244.

Pudal, B. (2006) “De l’histoire des idées politiques à l’histoire sociale des idées politiques”, in Cohen, A. (ed.) Les formes de l’activité politique, Paris: PUF: 185–192.

Purchase, G. (1997) Anarchism and Ecology, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Reclus, É. (1866) “Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes”, La Revue des Deux Mondes, no. 63, 15 mai 1866, 352–381.

Reclus, É. (1905) L’Homme et la Terre, Paris: Librairie Universelle.

Reclus, É. (1911) “Lettre du 6 février 1897 à H. Zisly”, La Vie Naturelle, no. 5, décembre 1911, 60–61.

Reclus, É. (1995) Man and Nature, Petersham Australia: Jura Books.

Ryle, M. (1988) Ecology and Socialism, London: Century Hutchinson.

Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful, London: Blond and Briggs.

Siegrist, P. (2022) “Cosmopolis and community: Élisée Reclus and Pëtr Kropotkin on spatial and moral unity, 1870s to 1900s”, Global Intellectual History, vol. 7, no. 1, 47–64.

Skinner, Q. (2002) “Quentin Skinner on encountering the past”, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, vol. 6, no. 1, 34–63.

Thompson, E. P. (1955) William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Woodcock, G. (1968) “Anarchism Revisited”, Commentary, vol. 46, no. 2, 54–60.

Woodcock, G. (1974) “Anarchism and ecology”, The Ecologist, vol. 4, no. 3, 84–88.

Woodcock, G. (2017) Contemporary Anarchism, New York NY: Routledge.

Woodhouse, K. (2009) “The politics of ecology: Environmentalism and liberalism in the 1960s”, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 2, no. 2, 53–84.

Zerzan, J. (1994) Future Primitive and Other Essays, Brooklyn NY: Autonomedia.

Zisly, H. (1896) “Les Naturiens”, L’Enclos, n°10, December.

Section III: Defining and identifying ideologies

Introduction

Ideology analysis has taken many forms historically, with theoretical and methodological pluralism informing such analysis more expansively now than even one decade ago. At the centre of this pluralism is the challenge of definition and identification, which can be addressed in many productive ways, all of which take their cues from analysts’ primary purposes. Following Freeden, we can say that these fall under three headings: ideology analysis can stress answers to genetic questions, functional questions or semantic questions ( Freeden 1996: 3).

In their efforts to shed new light on four ideologies that have taken new forms and achieved new (or renewed) prominence over the past several decades, authors in this section identify these new forms by blending genetic, functional and semantic analysis.

In Chapter 8, J. A. Scott tackles a definitional challenge thrust upon social scientists, humanists and journalists since the 1980s. In the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump’s first presidential victory, we have seen an explosion of attempts to make sense of the effects of populism in Europe, the Americas, South Asia and the Antipodes (see Diehl and Bargetz 2024 and Rovira Kaltwasser et al 2017 for a sense of the burgeoning field of populism studies). Scott takes us through three influential approaches to understanding these populist phenomena, focusing on how each approach understands the role played by concepts of democracy, political action and “the people” in creating something that is variously conceived as primarily a distinctive ideology, a distinctive pattern and logic of discourse, or a distinctive strategy for mobilising support.

Over 40 years ago Teun van Dijk pioneered discourse analysis, one of the most influential and meaningfully multi-disciplinary approaches to ideology studies (van Dijk 1977, 1998, 2019). In Chapter 9, van Dijk builds on his recent Antiracist Discourse: Theory and History of a Macromovement (2021) to focus primarily on the relations between social cognition and discourse in “utopian” anti-racist ideology (Mannheim 1936). He posits a dialectical relationship between this ideology and its constitutive, evolving evaluative beliefs about specific issues. At the individual level, and in its organisational expressions, anti-racism operates in conjunction with other ideologies such as feminism or socialism. Van Dijk explains how individual acquisition and use of ideology draws on numerous aspects of discourse, including lexicon, syntax, semantics and rhetoric. His review of the anti-racism literature and key themes in its discursive history shows the relative novelty of anti-racist ideology and its practical discursive focus on attitudes towards local or national issues rather than core normative commitments.

In Chapter 10, Maiken Umbach contends that antisemitism possesses not just a virulently negative focus and “emotional economy” but enough other core features to qualify as an ideology. Her chapter shows how genealogical and functional approaches to understanding antisemitism are necessary to a proper appreciation of its semantic structure and import. Umbach’s examination of antisemitism’s centuries-old common themes and of its frequent contemporary reliance on anti-colonial ideologies shows that for its adherents, it has a coherent, even a positive vision at its core. She contends that this is especially evident if we focus more on its highly emotional expression in everyday vernacular speech. Umbach’s analysis provides a bridge to chapters on populism in this volume by Scott and Burbano de Lara, since she claims that antisemitism shares with many populisms a paradoxical hatred of the Other, portrayed as both inferior and yet dangerous to the virtuous people.

In Chapter 11, Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael Williams introduce us to a world of illiberal views, anti-democratic sentiments, anti-globalist visions and radical right thinking that suddenly became anything but academic once the second Trump administration had been in office for just one week. Their analysis of post-1990 radical right thought by European, Russian and North American intellectuals here draws on their World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and International Order (2024). Drolet and Williams show that this international radical right is devoutly nationalist and anti-cosmopolitan at the local level but strategically and organisationally internationalist in practice. A gloss of anti-elitism that opposes a “new class” of managerial elites entrenched in modern administrative states provides a politically useful bridge to various right-wing populisms and even techno-futurists in Europe and North America. This ideological support for authoritarian regimes and projects from Moscow to Budapest to Mar-a-Lago is also illuminated in Chapter 15 by Behr and Constantin: “From the library to the party. The International of Conservative Intellectuals”.

References

Diel, P. and Bargetz, B. (eds.) (2024) The Complexity of Populism: New Approaches and Methods, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Drolet, J.-F. and Williams, M. (2024) The World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and International Order, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, New York NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Rovira Kaltwasser, C., Taggart, P., Ochoa Espejo, P. and Ostiguy, P. (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Populism, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

van Dijk, T. (1977) Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse, London: Longmans..

van Dijk, T. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

van Dijk, T. (2019) Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction and Cognition, London: Routledge.

van Dijk, T. (2021) Antiracist Discourse: Theory and History of a Micromovement, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

8. Ideology, discourse, strategy

What exactly is populism?

J.A. Scott

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-12

Introduction

In the 1860s and 1870s, inspired by European concepts of emancipation, equality and democracy, the Russian Empire witnessed a mass exodus of the young bourgeoisie to the rural villages. This campaign, to “go to the people”, led by the narodniki (“men of the people”), came to be known as narodnichestvo, and is the first recognisably modern populist movement, inspired by European ideas yet holding to a particularism that glorified the Russian peasants – Slavophilism.

In the same generation, yet halfway across the world and in an almost diametrically opposed socio-political context, the American People’s Party formed across the Southern, Great Plains and Western states. Consciously taking on the label “Populist Party”, this nascent movement exhibited similar levels of particularism and veneration for the agrarian masses as its Russian counterparts.

To this day, the “spectre of populism” (Arditi 2007) persists in settings as diverse as Thailand (Thaksin Shiniwatra’s Pheu Thai Party), Chile (Alberto Fujimori), Venezuela (Hugo Chavez and Chavismo) the US (Donald Trump), Hungary (Viktor Orban’s Fidesz) and the UK (Brexit). Indeed, the idea that political actors appeal to the support of, and therefore draw their legitimacy from, either the elites or the people, reaches as far back as Republican Rome, in the optimates and the populares respectively (Straumann 2016), implicitly in recognition of the moniker by which the Roman polity was known: “the Senate and the People of Rome” (Holland 2023).

What draws together these multi-various strands of “populism”? If they can exhibit themselves in settings as diverse as tsarist autocracy, Latin American libertarianism and socialism, and the subject of de Tocqueville’s seminal works on democracy, is there a necessary political context from which they (or it) emerge(s)? Or is “populism” something forever lurking in the background of political systems, ready to erupt – or be summoned – at any moment?

The story of populism as a phenomenon is well told; from its beginnings in late-19^th century America and Russia, through its flowering in post-colonial Latin America, to the contemporary debates that have seen, “for the first time”, populism in power (Gandesha 2018; Mansbridge and Macedo 2019), the typical developments of populism are well known. What has become more common in the literature recently, however, is the story of the theorisation of populism. Now, more than ever, political theory is turning in on itself to examine what the theorisation of populism reveals for wider commitments to democracy, political action and the concept of the people (Espejo 2011; Urbinati 2019).

This chapter, therefore, focuses not directly on specific theories of populism, but rather on how theorists and theorisations of populism have brought forward salient questions on the nature of politics and put into question previously well-established norms and assumptions, in order to frame and present the different theorisations of populism. The chapter begins by looking at how populism has been theorised alongside “democracy” as a concept, and the difficulty in defining exactly what the relationship between the two is. For example, arguments such as those put forward by Margaret Canovan, that populism is the “ideology of democracy”, or Ernesto Laclau, that populism is simply part of the democratic logic, are evidently not in agreement with those such as Nadia Urbinati (1998), who sees populism as being fundamentally anti-establishment, or Saskia Ruth-Lovell and Sandra Grahn, whose quantitative analysis concludes that populist governments “tend to erode the levels of electoral, liberal and deliberative democracy” (2023). In fact, so complex is the relationship between populism and democracy that Mudde and Kaltwasser’s edited volume of 2011 was sub-titled Threat or Corrective for Democracy?, stressing that populism “stands in tension with (liberal) democracy” (2011: 205) – a judgement that is continually discussed (Ruth-Lovell and Grahn 2023).

Following this, Section II considers how theories of populism have led to questions over political action, questions that inevitably involve issues of legitimacy and authenticity, fuelled by discussions on the relationship between populism and democracy, yet spilling beyond them to encompass ideas of mass politics and what is now commonly known as “identity politics”. Theories of populism have led to questions about the people’s relationship to power, both “through” formal, usually “liberal” political structures and “outside” of them; how such action can be coordinated and directed; and the role of “charismatic” and “inspiring” individuals in relation to these aspects of populism. This chapter, therefore, looks at theories of populism by asking how it understands political action, and looks at theories that present populism as a “discourse” and a “strategy”.

This is inevitably tied to one of the most central principles at the heart of populism: “the people”. Indeed, renewed interest in the concept of the people has been one of the most obvious consequences of the electoral success of populist leaders and movements in recent years, and the constant invocation of “the people” as a legitimating and organising factor in that success. Finally, this chapter closes by considering how different theorists have understood populism’s approach and relationship to the people, as a concept and as the actually-existing constituency of democracy.

Section I: Populism and democracy

The relationship between populism and democracy has been central to theorisations since the famous 1967 conference that failed to conclusively define populism but raised stimulating questions that have eluded satisfactory answers since (Ionescu and Gellner 1969), so much so that Canovan described populism as the “ideology of democracy” (2002). While Canovan used the language, and methodology, of ideological analysis drawn from Michael Freeden, almost simultaneously Ernesto Laclau made the extraordinarily bold claim (using a different lexicon and intellectual structure entirely) that populism, hegemony and democracy are one and the same (2001; 2005a). This section will explain the different methodological commitments Canovan and Laclau used in making such assertions in order to understand how political theorists have conceptualised the relationship between populism and democracy. In doing so, the section reconstructs some “background” theories of politics that have been drawn on to explain populism, especially two that have become significantly influential in the field: Freeden’s morphological theory of ideology in the context of the work of Canovan and other theorists, and Laclau’s discourse theory of politics.

One of the foremost approaches to the study of populism is the assumption that, as an “ism”, it is an ideology (Pauwels 2016: 18). Such an assumption is typically a consequence of the democratic context of contemporary politics, in which the demands of a large electorate require that ideas should be packaged in an accessible way; at least, so argues Canovan. In order to understand how the different concepts at the heart of populism interact with each other, Canovan draws from Michael Freeden’s morphological theory of ideology (1996). In this theory, ideologies are structured around concepts in two ways: first, in the way concepts interact with each other to create inter-dependent definitions; and second, a core-adjacency-periphery matrix that organises and ranks the importance of those concepts. In this theory, concepts that are central to the ideology, and therefore cannot be removed without ceasing to be of that “family” of ideology, belong in the core, while less important concepts hover in the adjacency, and minor concepts are relegated to the periphery. However, while the concepts at the core of an ideology are fixed – “ineliminable” – it is the way they interact that helps to define them from vague, ambiguous terms into concepts with concrete meaning.[23] For example, in liberalism, democracy might be more accurately understood as the institutions that channel the productive power of mass politics while retaining commitments to rights and norms that provide a substantive vision of the political community (such as human rights).

It is in this context that Canovan describes populism, taken as an ideology, as the ideology of democracy itself. However, populism is a specifically “thin-centred” ideology, with a cluster of core concepts: the people, democracy, sovereignty and majority rule, “each defined through its links to the others” (2002: 29–34). The foremost of these – “the people” – is dealt with below. Here we can focus on the concept of democracy, as it inevitably interacts with the subsequent concepts of sovereignty and majority rule in a more obvious way than “the people” does (although, as I show above, the inter-dependence of all four concepts for concrete meaning is a necessary consequence of Freeden’s theory from which Canovan draws). While the interaction between the different concepts is important, what is more urgent for understanding populism specifically is to understand what Canovan means by “democracy” in this context, and why it matters for understanding populism.

For Canovan, democracy means a specific configuration of contemporary politics that lies at the intersection of two “faces of politics” – the redemptive and the pragmatic – and it is the tension between the two in which populism emerges. The “redemptive face” of politics in this understanding means that promise of “achieving perfection or salvation” through mass mobilisation and power – typically government power – and ensuring that such power is held by real, living humans (specifically “the people”, which I turn to below). The redemptive face maps onto the classic formulation of vox populi, vox dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”, subjecting all institutional power to the “will of the people” – what President Abraham Lincoln summarised as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”). Democracy, under the redemptive face of politics, is thought of as the use of political means to achieve the betterment of human civilisation; the promise of “power to the people” that accompanies democratisation wherever and whenever it is found. On the other side of the coin, the “pragmatic face” of politics means suspicion of power in excess, scepticism over how far government action can ever be successful and a belief in the rule of law. This second approach to politics sees democracy, specifically, as government by institutions and mediating mechanisms for two reasons: one, to channel and shape the creative power of the people into practical action, rather than leaving it as a vague and indeterminate force; and two, to ensure such creative power does not go beyond the realms of reasonability and begin crossing normative lines – what we might call, for example, the tyranny of the majority ( Canovan 1999: 8–10). Importantly then, this means that democracy requires both faces to actually work: the “halo of legitimacy” that accompanies the people as the sovereign actor is conferred on institutions that would become unresponsive and irresponsible without such creative power (Canovan 2002).

Where populism comes into this is that it is a direct product of the interaction between, and tension arising from, these two faces. While these two faces are inseparable – “insofar as democracy’s promise of popular power is made good, this can be done only through institutions that make power effective and lasting” – populists lean heavily on one side of this two-faced coin, exalting the redemptive face over the pragmatic face (Canovan 1999: 14). In doing so, they “appeal past the ossified institutions to the living people, proclaiming the vox populi unmediated”, and use mechanisms that more “directly” express the people’s immediate concerns, as “so-called ‘direct democracy’ (the use of popular initiatives and referenda) has a much better claim than representative institutions to be the real thing” (Canovan 2002: 33). Mechanisms like national plebiscites (the direct election of political leaders) and referenda are considered to capture the spirit of the moment through a clear statement of the majority, and provide ultimate authority and legitimacy to that majority in regard to whichever question is being asked: “the point of voting is to declare the will of the people” (Canovan 2002: 33–34). We can see here how, in Canovan’s understanding, populism uses majority rule and sovereignty in tandem with a specific interpretation of democracy as the power of the (living) people to provide concrete meanings to each concept. In contradistinction, a defender of the “pragmatic face” of democracy might ascribe sovereignty to the institutions being circumvented – the rule of law, the monarchy, Congress etc. – but populism claims that these institutions are interfering with the true expression of the people’s will. Populists thus claim that sovereignty belongs directly to the people, not to their agents in various governing institutions.

While Canovan’s approach to populism and democracy draws from the morphological theory of Freeden alongside a specific configuration of politics to explain the emergence of populism, the other major competing theory of populism begins from a different theoretical framework entirely. This theory, proposed by the radical democrat Ernesto Laclau (and often in association with Chantal Mouffe), argues that populism and democracy are essentially synonymous due to the ways in which contemporary democratic politics requires the discursive construction of identities. The motivation behind Laclau and Mouffe’s radical approach to democracy is a desire to move beyond what they consider to be a tendency in democratic theory to presume that either individuals (as in liberalism) or group- or class-based identities (as in socialism) are the central principle in democratic politics. This is because each approach involves a number of assumptions about individuals or groups and how those identities interact with one another, to the extent that “the very notion of ‘individual’ does not make sense in our approach” ( Laclau 2005b: 35). Especially in the context of increasingly pluralistic societies ( Mouffe 1993: 20), a new theoretical approach must therefore be constructed to understand how political and social identities form ( Laclau 2005a: x-xii).

This matters for understanding populism and its relationship to democracy because, for Laclau, populism is not simply a consequence of democracy, as Canovan argues, but the two are actually synonymous (Laclau 2005b: 47). To understand this exceptionally bold claim, we must first understand how Laclau and Mouffe’s attempt to radically challenge the basic assumptions of democracy provides the basis for such a claim. Laclau and Mouffe begin with an alternative understanding of the structure of politics as one in which identities are conditioned and structured by power first and foremost, through the “articulation” of identities (2014: 57, 79). In other words, politics takes place between a plurality of actors, the identity of which is not fixed or predetermined but produced by how they interact with power ( Mouffe 2000; Laclau 2001). Politics does not take place between individuals, since “politics always consists in the creation of an ‘us’ versus a ‘them’” but instead involves “the creation of collective identities” ( Mouffe 2005: 55). There is no singular “people”, therefore, but a multitude of identities that do not make sense outside of the structure of power that they exist within and are bound by – and it is the process of politics that creates these identities.

The point of “creation” here is important: while Canovan’s concept of democracy is one of two faces that interact but remain distinct, Laclau and Mouffe’s claims rest on the idea that democracy, as a form of politics, is a process of identity formation itself. Therefore, it is not a process as simple as a singular people as the “redemptive” power being channelled and concretised by the “pragmatic” institutions; instead, those institutions themselves play a role in the way that those groups are identified. Crucially, this process is itself shaped by power. Whereas liberal democracy might claim that the institutions that help to channel the creative power of the people do so neutrally, Laclau and Mouffe – as radical democrats – claim that institutions are shaped by and therefore preferential to the powerful in society. As a result, some demands that arise within society and outside of these institutions are ignored or frustrated because they do not align with the interests of the powerful who have shaped those institutions (Laclau 2001; Mouffe 2005, 2013, 2018).

This is where populism comes in for Laclau. Because the formal structures of democracy are not neutral institutions, but shaped in favour of the powerful and play a role in shaping the identities of the groups that are governed by them, every identity in society can be defined by its relation to power and – crucially – if it benefits from, or is oppressed by, power. These “subject-positions”, as Laclau and Mouffe refer to the relationship between the citizen and the institutions of power (Laclau and Mouffe 2014: 98), are organised and “simplified” into two groups within society, according to whether they benefit from or are oppressed by power. As those who are oppressed by power cannot have their demands addressed through the formal institutions of democracy, they must begin to confront them, and in doing so question the structure of power that created them in the first place. Laclau argues that, as the different subject-positions that are oppressed by power begin to realise their similarities – in the form of not having power – they will group together to confront power collectively, rather than in an isolated manner – giving birth to a populist movement ( Laclau 1996: 40; 2001).

This process has implications for how “the people” come to emerge in Laclau’s understanding of politics, populism and democracy, explained below. To summarise here, Laclau necessarily imagines populism as synonymous with democracy and politics. With populism, the structure of politics is questioned and challenged, not simply the workings of formal political systems: populism must be the clearest expression of democracy. To put this in Canovan’s terms, for Laclau the two faces of democracy are not distinct, and the “redemptive” face is the logically superior, as it is the force that shapes the “pragmatic” face.

Clearly, there are different theories about the relationship between populism and democracy, yet what remains consistent is the agreement that populism challenges the presumptions of democracy in contemporary politics. Whether this challenge is an opportunity or a threat is based on the normative commitments of the theorists themselves. As mentioned above, Mudde and Kaltwasser (2011: 205) recognise that populism might be considered both a corrective and a threat, depending on “specific factors that might be well more pressing in certain world regions”, while simultaneously promoting “the repoliticisation of certain topics, which either intentionally or unintentionally are not being addressed by the establishment”. It was this relationship between populism and democracy, of potentially both resolving and exacerbating the problems of democracy itself, that led Simon Tormey to refer to populism as democracy’s pharmakon – a medicine that, if delivered in too high a dose, can kill the patient (2018). It is this intentionality that differentiates Canovan and Laclau: for Laclau, the lack of action on behalf of the establishment to address “certain topics” is always intentional, because of the role of power in shaping the institutions; for Canovan, this is an irresolvable tension in democratic politics due to the inability of the “pragmatic” face to completely meet the expectations of the “redemptive” face. Either way, populism is inevitable in a democratic setting; but the extent to which populism is allowed to transform that setting is up for debate.

Section II: Populism and political action

After considering the relationship between populism and democracy, the focus inevitably turns to a related, and perhaps more important, question; what does populism mean for political action? Clearly, Canovan and Laclau – and other theorists considered in this section – have similar answers to questions about how populism and populists energise the people and convert their demands into action. This section considers Canovan’s points regarding populism appealing “past the ossified institutions”, as well as Laclau’s claims that populism acts to unify divided or isolated demands to challenge existing power, and finally Benjamin Moffitt’s alternative approach that proposes understanding populism as strategy. These different approaches address how populism as a form of political action is theorised, often but not necessarily in relation to democracy.

As discussed above, Canovan considers populism to be a consequence of the inevitable tension between the “redemptive” and “pragmatic” faces of politics. We might also call these faces the “creative” and “moderating” powers of democracy; where the “moderation” is too strong for the “creative” power to overcome, populism emerges as an attempt to circumvent the forms of moderation, which are typically institutions. Yet when populism emerges in this manner, the question then becomes: in what way does this convert into political action? Importantly, Canovan does not think that populists argue the people should simply abandon those institutions – if they did, they would cease to be “a people” and the political entity would collapse (Canovan 1999; 2002). Instead, populists do two things simultaneously: one, appeal “past” those institutions to “the living people” (as above); and two, invoke the history of the people those institutions are intended to represent. As I have already explained the first of these above, the focus here should be on the second.

While populists attempt to circumvent the moderating powers of democracy to privilege the creative powers of the people external to those institutions, “proclaiming the vox populi unmediated” (Canovan 1999: 14), the institutions themselves are considered to be corrupted and deprived of the “halo of legitimacy” provided by the creative power of the people (2002). What is important here is that, in Canovan’s understanding, the institutions are not inherently illegitimate, but have become so due to their mediation of the people’s demands upsetting the balance between the two faces and losing the legitimacy conferred on them by neglecting the need for continual interaction between the two (Canovan 1999: 12 and 2002: 26). However, the broader political world that these two faces represent is not abstract, but a genuine historical community that has created those specific institutions as the best method through which the creative power of the people can be channelled. This is used by Canovan to explain the differences between, say, the UK and the US in their formal political structures. As a result, it is important to recognise that in Canovan’s theory, these institutions have become corrupted, but do still represent a shared political world.

Consequently, populists speak past these institutions, but often with the simultaneous claims that these institutions no longer represent the people whose power they mediate, but that they should be restored and can only be so through their circumvention. It is the shared history of membership within, or ownership of, these institutions that gives specific shape to the people in order for them to act, and while this shape is explored in Section III, here the emphasis is placed on the capacity for that people to act. Populists, for Canovan, “are highlighting fundamental assumptions of contemporary politics: that the ultimate source of authority is the sovereign people; that all legitimate political power is based on the consent of the people, and that the people are capable on occasion of withdrawing legitimacy from one regime and bestowing it another” (2005: 84). In this approach to populism, the people acts as a singular entity that, because of the “populist mood” leads to a “tendency for heightened emotions to be focussed on a charismatic leader” (Canovan 1999: 6). The logic here is simple: if institutions risk becoming disconnected from the people, and mediate their creative energy, yet there is still a need for this creative energy to be channelled to become effective, then only a direct relationship between the people, their creative energy, and the method of channelling that energy can be acceptable.

Thus we arrive at an answer to the question: the “populist mood” converts into action through a) a denial (or withdrawal) of the legitimacy of the institutions of political power; b) a recognition that those institutions do at least reflect a shared history of a “shared political world”; c) the choice to continue that shared political world; d) the necessity of a method through which the creative energy of the people can be channelled; and finally e) the requirement of a direct relationship between the people and such a method, which can only be achieved through a living person. Hence the significance of “the leader” in converting a populist mood to a populist movement.

Laclau’s account of why and how populism leads to political action is very different, largely because of the way he theorises the political system in general. Recalling that Laclau argues that the concept of “an individual” does not “make sense” in his theory, the political is a constant place of contest between “subject positions” to challenge and renegotiate their relationship with power, represented through institutions but acting through discourse. As a result, the way that populism (which, as explained above, in Laclau’s theory means any political action in a democracy) translates to political action is through this “renegotiation” of institutions and in turn, an effort to change the discourse. There are two components to how this renegotiation takes place: first, the formation of a coalition between different identities within a political system; and second, the emergence of one of those identities to lead the coalition.

The process by which a populist sentiment – which, as above, emerges when subject-positions that are on the “losing” side of power group together to confront institutions of power – translates to action is more complex than the simple frustration of demands. While each subject-position is unique, they can be organised into groups of similarly defined interests, which might be based around race, sex, gender, class, religion or any particular identity. However, the identity into which they are grouped is dependent on the conditions of power within the political context. While these groups have different interests and identities, they are at least united in their exclusion from power: “all of them are seen as related to each other, not because their concrete objectives are intrinsically related but because they are all seen as equivalent in confrontation with the repressive regime” (Laclau 1996: 40). This shared condition of exclusion from power then allows these different groups to form a coalition in pursuit of change by challenging the structures of power (Laclau 2005a: 39).

Within this coalition, says Laclau, there will be a contest over which group claims to lead, which occurs both through natural consequences of coalition and shared but undefined political aims, and through necessity in order to positively direct the coalition to challenge the structures of power. Compared to Canovan, who positions the leader’s role in populism as a consequence of the repudiation of institutional politics, Laclau argues that as the coalition’s “demands cannot be dealt with in isolation from each other” any longer, every group attempts to align its interests with the others, out of which one identity will be able to do so more successfully than the others. This identity then becomes the “hegemon” of the coalition and leads it in confrontation with institutions of power (Laclau and Mouffe 2014: 152). This is why the leader in populism becomes so central – it is not merely a movement “led by” the leader; rather the movement-as-the-leader – “the symbolic unification of the group … is inherent to the formation of a “people’” (Laclau 2005a: 100). The quintessential example remains Hugo Chavez, who famously declared “I am not myself, I am the people” (de la Torre 2013). But since these groups are now united behind a single leader, the tension with the existing power structure cannot be resolved without fundamentally changing those structures – through renegotiation. This, for Laclau, is the process by which a populist sentiment leads to political action.

However, a third approach to understanding populism is through its relationship to political action entirely. This is the theory of populism as a strategic performance of “political style”, put forward by Benjamin Moffitt in The Global Rise of Populism. In Moffitt’s theory, “populism” is characterised by an appeal to “the people”, which “can take many forms, from invocations of ‘the people’, ‘the mainstream’, ‘the heartland’, or other related signifiers, to performative gestures meant to demonstrate populists’ affinity with ‘the people’” (Moffit 2016: 43). This theory develops an understanding of populism and political action by focussing on two particular aspects of populism: first, the “political style” of populism; and second, the specific role of “the Leader” in populism.

Moffitt defines the concept of “political style” as “the repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance made to audiences that are used to create and navigate the fields of power that comprise the political, stretching from the domain of government through to everyday life”. For Moffitt, this differentiates a focus on “style” from Laclau’s focus on “discourse” by incorporating both the “rhetorical” – such as spoken and written language – and the “aesthetic” – such as fashion and self-presentation. Similarly, Moffitt draws similarities and differences with Canovan in recognising that political style is a necessary component of the contemporary form of politics shaped by such phenomena as mass-scale communication and the 24-hour news cycle to mean that “contemporary politics are intensely mediatised and ‘stylised’”. Importantly for Moffitt, however, a focus on political style means that the “content” of ideology is not the focus, and so populists across the political spectrum can be understood for their similarities in style and performance rather than commitments to any specific ideological programme, such as socialism or conservatism (Moffitt 2016: 38–39).

As for what the populist political style is, Moffitt argues that there are three key features: appeal to “the People” versus “the Elite”; bad manners; and a sense of crisis or threat. Insofar as Moffitt includes the well-established appeal to the distinction between “the people” and “the elite” as a key component of populism, the notable contribution of including “bad manners” as essential to populism as a way of understanding populist political style is significant. This frames populism as a form of political action that challenges the norms of acceptable ways of “doing politics” (Moffitt 2016: 43–45). Importantly, as Moffitt’s definition shows, this goes beyond formal political structures that both Canovan and Laclau emphasise, to consider “everyday life” and how populism acts to challenge acceptable political style in everyday behaviour as well as expectations of, for example, responsible government. “Populism”, therefore, is not only a question of inherent tensions within a democratic political system, either as a result of tension or as an inescapable necessity of renegotiation, but a method of identifying and appealing to “the people” defined in a negative relationship to “the elites” through performance. Where Moffitt arrives at a similar conclusion to Canovan and Laclau is that populism is distinctly anti-institutional, but builds on those theories to argue that populism’s anti-institutionalism is expressed in leaders’ language, contrasting themselves with the “technocratic political style” of expertise and specialisms. This “bad manners” is not necessarily of “the people”, but allows populists to “set themselves apart from other types of political actors” while “appealing to the socio-cultural low” – whether they are the powerless of Laclau or the neglected groups of Canovan (Moffitt 2016: 46, 63).

As a result of “conceptualising populism as a political style”, Moffitt argues, “the question is not only who the people are, but also how the activity of… “rendering-present” ‘the people’ actually occurs” (Moffitt 2016: 49). The first half of that question – who the people are – is dealt with below, while here the second half of the question is the focus: how does the representation of the people allow it to “act politically”? This is where the leader plays an important role, but whereas for Canovan the leader is an “organiser” of the “populist followers” and for Laclau the leader is an “articulator’ of “populist discourse”, for Moffitt the leader’s role lies in being the one “that ultimately ‘performs’ populism, and should thus be seen as the key actor of populism”. The leader “performs” populism through the aforementioned “bad manners”, as well as acting as an “incarnation” of the people – not just “representing” them, but acting as if the leader is the people (Moffitt 2016: 52–64). Doing so allows the leader to translate the sentiment that gives birth to populism into action, and while the performance that Moffitt stresses can be the cause, the consequence, or even both simultaneously of the emergence of populism, what matters here is that the leader “performs” populism in order to “allow” the people to act.

In summary, there is a broad agreement that populism isn’t simply a sentiment or an attitude, but it is a specific way of acting politically that gives rise to a specific form of leadership. There are, of course, disagreements over how and why this might happen: through the unmediated creative power of the people, directly channelled through a single individual as per Canovan’s theory; the formation of a coalition of dispossessed groups that is symbolically united in a leader figure, as per Laclau’s theory; or of a way of performing politics by individuals that draws from subversive “bad manners” to present oneself as the people itself, as per Moffitt’s theory. Nevertheless, there is at least broad agreement across the theoretical literature that populism acts in opposition to prevailing institutions or norms, and through a leader who represents the people of populism.

Section III: Populism and the concept of the people

So who are (or is) the people? The deeply contested nature of the term “populism” has not only brought to the fore questions around democracy (and associated norms), behaviour and action (as well as style and the role of charismatic leaders). More than ever, it has required theorists to think clearly about the concept of the people, especially its relationship to democracy, engendering a debate beyond populism studies, deep in the realm of democratic theory (Espejo 2011; Moffitt 2020). While the concept of “the people” is a myth (Morgan 1988), it is a necessary myth, in that it allows for the creation of a community, which Bernard Yack defined as “a group of individuals who imagine themselves connected to each other as objects of special concern and loyalty by something they share” (Yack 2012: 48). The specific shape and appearance of that community is, however, the crux of the matter, because there is a big difference between, say, the inhabitants of the UK and the voting populations. To complicate things further, there is disagreement over who should be included in each of those categories; the electorate of the UK does not include anyone under the age of 18, nor prisoners whose sentences exceed a certain length.

Nevertheless, we can focus here on the more specific question: what is the relationship between populism and “the people” as a concept? In other words, what is the shape of the populist people? As Tormey has noted, “appealing to “the people” is an everyday device used by most politicians”, so while it is clearly not unique to populism to do so, there has to be a way of understanding what distinguishes populism from other democratic practices (2018: 265). As with before, this section focusses on the answers of Canovan and Laclau to present alternative perspectives on this relationship, drawing on the previous sections.

As indicated in Section I, the foremost concept in Canovan’s understanding of populism as an ideology is “the people” – allowing it to be described as the ideology of democracy itself. The reason Canovan felt able to make this claim is because, as she argues, “within contemporary politics, the language of ‘the people’ is inescapable” while the specific concept of “the people” defies any clear or permanent definition (2005). However, as explained above in Section I, Canovan draws on Freeden’s morphological theory of ideology to explain how a concept like “the people” can move from such ambiguity to a specific meaning by its interaction with other concepts. As a result, the way in which Canovan considers populism to be a consequence of the tension between the two faces of democracy allows her to define the populist understanding of democracy as “government by the sovereign people, not as government by politicians, bureaucrats or judges”, and this specific idea of “the sovereign people” works to identify “an entity, a corporate body with a continuous existence over time” (Canovan 2002: 33–34). Moreover, Canovan includes the concept of “majority rule” because the institutions and mediations that reflect the “pragmatic face” of democracy lead populism to view elites as “small groups with illegitimate access to political power” ( Weisehomeier and Ruth-Lovell 2024).

This idea of the people as a “corporate body” composed of the majority is significant: as Canovan points out, the ambiguity of “the people” as a concept means it is simultaneously “a set of concrete individuals, taking action in a particular place at a particular time, and an abstract collective identity with a life beyond such limitations” (Canovan 2005: 91). For Canovan’s theory of populism, this means that populism emerges at a moment in which the bonds between a people and the institutions through which that people channels its creative energy are dissolved, creating a “moment of revolution” that brings the people “out of reserve” to become a “new “moral entity”, a “compound moral person” with its own will in which the wills of all individuals are subsumed”. Canovan argues then that “the people” in populism is one that exists in the abstract but is forced into a concrete form to restore the political community and restoring legitimacy to the institutions that have become corrupted, as above in Section II (2005: 121). Consequently, we can summarise Canovan’s theory of “the populist people” as follows: “a potential collective that emerges in a moment of crisis requiring collective action, which as a collective (not a ‘unity’) can exercise ‘popular sovereignty’ as a ‘compound moral person’ to defend the shared political world it has either inherited or built together” (Scott 2022).

While Canovan draws from the idea of the people as an abstract group that always exists in the background of democratic politics, Laclau instead argues that the purpose of radical democratic politics is itself the construction of a people ( Laclau 2006). In this sense, the process of coalition-forming, through which the symbolic unity is achieved through the emergence of a leader, is the act of engaging with the concept of “the people”. Laclau believes this happens through the frustration of different social demands by existing power structures, leading to an attempt to identify the emergent coalition as the whole people.

As detailed above in Section I, for Laclau, populism emerges when those in subject positions (individuals or groups) come to see their relationships to the structures of politics that governs them as inherently skewed in favour of the powerful. For this populist understanding of democracy, the relationship between the subject position and the structures of politics allows for the identification of a political identity and the groups that form around them, which then organise together to confront the system of power that oppresses or neglects them. Such a group then forms into a coalition which, of necessity, creates the conditions for a political leader to emerge. However, the key step that takes this coalition from a loosely defined group with political leadership into a people is the way in which the existing power structures respond to the demands of this group. Importantly, in the stage of the process between the realisation of subject positions, the subsequent formation of social groups, and the eventual formation of the coalition, each group will have its own demands of the political system that it attempts to address. To illustrate this, Laclau uses the example in the 1960s in the US of women’s liberation groups, homosexual rights campaigners and African-American activists who each had their own grievance with the US political system. At this stage, the political system can deal with each grievance directly and in isolation, in what Laclau calls an ‘administrative” fashion, which specifically means legal changes within the existing political framework, without directly altering how the political framework is structured. Doing so “accommodates” the social groups into the political structure to ameliorate the tension caused, and preserves the existing structure of politics in favour of the powerful (Laclau 2001).

As shown in Section I, Laclau contends that unification of the different social groups into a single coalition arrayed against the dominant political order can displace regime-stabilising accomodations. However, the unification that takes place must be a consequence of how the political system responds to the demands; specifically, the “frustration of a series” of these demands to transfer them “from isolated democratic demands to equivalential popular ones”. This specifically means the political system refusing to accommodate the demands of each social group, leading to a realisation that there is something lacking from that social group’s identity: in the example given by Laclau, for instance, homosexual rights campaigners would argue that their identity as “American” was compromised by their inability to marry, cohabit, give blood, etc. In other words, their identity was incomplete because they could not enjoy the full socio-political experience that others did. The reason for that incompleteness may be specific to that social group, but the shared recognition of such an incompleteness between social groups catalyses formation of different social groups into a single coalition aimed at addressing the fundamentals of the political system. This, as Laclau puts it, “is decisive: the construction of the “people” will be the attempt to give a name to this fullness”, meaning the political system (Laclau 2005a: 85).

Once this takes place, the “construction of the ‘people’” is completed by the claim of the coalition to be the entire people, what Laclau puts as “a plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus”, in a synecdoche, when the whole is known by the name of a part (2005a: 81). As Thomassen puts it, for Laclau “populism is a discourse that brings into being what it claims to represent: the people” (Thomassen 2019). Hereafter, the coalition claims that it is the whole people because it is working to fundamentally alter the entire political system in a way that would benefit everyone within the political group. By practical necessity, of course, for this discursive claim to be successful, this must be a sufficiently large number or a majority, otherwise the challenge to the political system and the claim to be the whole people will simply fail. In summary, for Laclau the democratic process in general is how a people can be identified, and for populism specifically the shape of that people is defined by a series of frustrated demands of social groups by the existing political structure that leads to the creation of a coalition claiming to confront the political system on behalf of everyone.

This, then, is the starkest distinction between Canovan’s and Laclau’s theories of populism: for Canovan, the people is an abstract concept that concretises in a moment of crisis into a corporate body that subsumes the will of the individuals that compose it. In contradistinction, for Laclau, no pre-existing, abstract identity lies waiting to be summoned. The actual process of politics leads to the identification of social identities capable of presenting demands to the political structure, the frustration of which creates a coalition of groups claiming to be the whole of the people itself.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown how populism has been theorised in relation to three key concepts: democracy, political action and the people. Three distinct theories of populism – as an ideology, a discourse, and as a political style – have been explored through this thematic lens, and the work of different influential theorists in these approaches (Canovan, Laclau and Moffitt respectively) has been explained.

Evidently, there are broad agreements between these theorists on the centrality of these concepts, and their implications for broader political trends. For example, in relation to democracy, Canovan and Laclau agree that a populist mood or sentiment is a consequence of the structure of democratic politics, and as a result the populist sentiment seeks to confront the institutional structures of that politics to change them. Likewise, Canovan, Laclau and Moffitt agree on the centrality of the leader for transferring populist sentiment into political action, as the leader acts as the symbolic unifier that has a direct relationship with the people. Lastly, Canovan and Laclau agree that “the people” is an essential concept in understanding how populism emerges and transitions from a frustration or mood into a consequential political movement.

However, these theorists have clear disagreements about how or why these things happen. In terms of democracy, for Canovan, the institutions that make politics work lead to populism because they can never achieve the promised goal of democracy, which is the ability to make the peoples’ demands real, while Laclau argues that the institutions of democracy are established to inherently prefer the demands of some groups over those of others, leading to a frustration of demands by those whom democracy does not privilege. In the same vein, when it comes to political action, Canovan theorises that the creative power of the people, as an inherent promise of democracy, becomes unmediated and channelled directly through a leader to bypass the mediating institutions of democracy. Laclau’s theory that a coalition of dispossessed groups requires the symbolic unity of a leader to effectively confront the structures of power means those institutions cannot be bypassed and must be renegotiated directly. And Moffitt’s theory of “bad manners” political style means that the leader acts to “become” the people and bring it into existence and into contact with the political structures that leader is challenging through his or her performative style. Finally, the relationship between populism and the concept of the people is the point at which there is the greatest divergence. Canovan theorises that the people is an abstract concept that sits in the background of politics ready to be summoned forth, capable of legitimating the institutions that govern it, while Laclau does not see this as possible, as the interaction between persons in a political setting is the very condition in which a people can emerge.

Overall, however, there is clearly agreement between theorists that populism offers a different way of thinking about these concepts than might otherwise be considered as common knowledge, even if there is little agreement on what the populist understanding of these concepts might be. Therefore, there are opportunities for further research into questions over what is uniquely populist in these understandings, especially in relation to the concept of the people. Is the process of constructing a popular identity in the conditions of democracy always a populist move, as Laclau argues? Such an argument sees populism as part of the permanently ongoing process of renegotiation of power inherent in politics, as both Laclau and Mouffe have argued, yet paradoxically accepts that populists in power revise political institutions and therefore the conditions of negotiation themselves. Is populism then simply a moment in which the people “become active” in contention with a moment of crisis, as Canovan argues? However, such a theory also risks missing whether there is a uniquely populist form of constructing the people. Moreover, does populism need democracy to emerge, or is it that populism can emerge in any political system, but can only be successful in conditions of democracy? Is “the people” a permanent feature of politics that exists only to christen institutions with the “halo of legitimacy”, or is it a nebulous identity 150.that is simultaneously the subject and creator of political institutions? And if the answer is neither of these, does this mean all politics involves “populism” at some point? These questions point to some difficult but promising avenues of enquiry regarding what political theorists consider democracy, political action and the people to be, and the relationship populism has and ought to have to each. A future analysis of how populism approaches these different concepts must attempt to understand what is uniquely populist – if anything at all – in the way these concepts are constructed by populists and populism.

References

Arditi, B. (2007) Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation, Edinburgh: University Press.

Canovan, M. (1999) “Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy”, Political Studies, vol. 48, 2–16.

Canovan, M. (2002) “Taking politics to the people: Populism as the ideology of democracy”, in Yves, M. and Yves, S. (eds.) Democracies and the Populist Challenge, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 25–44.

Canovan, M. (2005) The People, Cambridge: Polity Press.

de la Torre, C. (2013) “The people, populism, and the leader’s semi-embodied power”, Rubrica Contemporanea, vol. 2, no. 3, 5–20.

Espejo, P. O. (2011) The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State, Pennsylvania PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2013) Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gandesha, S. (2018) “Understanding right and left populism”, in Morelock, J. (ed.), Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism, London: University of Westminster Press: 49–70.

Holland, T. (2023) Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, London: Abacus.

Ionescu, G. and Gellner, E. (1969) Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s), London: Verso.

Laclau, E. (2001) “Democracy and the question of power”, Constellations, vol. 8, no. 1, 3–14.

Laclau, E. (2005a) On Populist Reason, London: Verso.

Laclau, E. (2005b) “Populism: What’s in a name?”, in Panizza, F. (ed.) Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, London: Verso: 32–49.

Laclau, E. (2006) “Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics”, Critical Enquiry, vol. 32, 646–690.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2014) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 3^rd edition, London: Verso.

Mansbridge, J. and Macedo, S. (2019) “Populism and democratic theory”, Annual Reviews, vol. 15, 59–77.

Moffitt, B. (2016) The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press.

Moffitt, B. (2020) Populism: Key Concepts, London: Polity Press.

Morgan, E.S. (1988) Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, New York NY: W.W. Norton.

Mouffe, C. (1993) The Return of the Political, London: Verso.

Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso.

Mouffe, C. (2005) “The ‘end of politics’ and the challenge of right-wing populism”, in Panizza, F. (ed.) Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, London: Verso: 50–71.

Mouffe, C. (2013) Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso.

Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism, London: Verso.

Mudde, C. (2004) The Populist Zeitgeist”, Government and Opposition, vol. 39, no. 4, 541–563.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2011) Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2013) “Exclusionary vs inclusionary populism: comparing contemporary Europe and Latin America”, Government and Opposition, vol. 48, no. 2, 147–174.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017) Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pauwels, T. (2016) Populism in Western Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ruth-Lovell, S. P. and Grahn, S. (2023) “Threat or corrective to democracy? The relationship between populism and different models of democracy”, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 62, no. 3, 677–698.

Scott, J. (2022) “‘There is no alternative’? The role of depoliticisation in the emergence of populism”, Politics, vol. 42, no. 3, 325–339.

Straumann, B. (2016) Constitutionalism and Crisis: Roman Political Thought from the fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thomassen, L. (2019) “Representing the people: Laclau as a theorist of representation”, New Political Science, vol. 41, no. 2, 329–344.

Tormey, S. (2018) “Populism: Democracy’s Pharmakon?”, Policy Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 260–273.

Urbinati, N. (1998) “Democracy and populism”, Constellations, vol. 5, no. 1, 110–124.

Urbinati, N. (2019) “Political theory of populism”, Annual Reviews, vol. 22, 111–127.

Weisehomeier, D. and Ruth-Lovell, S. P. (2024) “Trust the people? Populism, trust, and support for direct democracy”, Politics and Governance, vol. 12, 1–18.

Yack, B. (2012) Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, Chicago IL: University Press.

9. Anti-racist ideology

Teun A. van Dijk

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-13

Introduction: Racism and anti-racism

Racism may be defined as a system since it permeates all domains of society, especially dominant in “white” societies. Anti-racism, on the other hand, is not systematic because it is (as yet) not pervasive and dominant in these societies. Rather, anti-racism is a global macro movement (Van Dijk 2021), comparable to the macro movement of feminism (Twine and Blee 2001). As a macro movement, anti-racism is historical (it has developed during centuries), international and fundamental of a large repertoire of anti-racist resistance (Blunt 2020) and solidarity (Deveaux 2021). For instance, the discourse and activities of the Refugees Welcome movement in Europe in and after 2015 are manifestations of solidarity based on anti-racist ideology (for detail, see van Dijk 2024a).

As a macro movement, anti-racism combines historically and geographically specific anti-racist movements such as the international resistance against, and abolition of, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter in the US, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, global anti-colonialism and SOS Racisme in France and Spain, among many other local, national and internationalist movements (among many books, most about anti-racist education, see, e.g., Blake, Ioanide, and Reed 2019; Bonnett 2000; Zamalin 2019).

As movements of resistance and solidarity, anti-racisms consist of anti-racist cognition, such as anti-racist ideology and attitudes, and anti-racist social practices such as anti-racist discourse, protests, demonstrations, marches, occupations, strikes and a large repertoire of other forms of resistance and solidarity. Within a multi-disciplinary theory of this complex system of anti-racism, this chapter focuses on anti-racist ideology and its expressions in discourse.

Theory of ideology: A summary

As a background of the theory and methods of anti-racist ideological analysis in this paper, I briefly summarise and update my general theory of ideology, especially focusing where it is different from other theories of ideology (for detail see van Dijk, 1998; 2024).

A general theory of ideology is necessarily multi-disciplinary. It should feature notions from

Cognitive psychology, because ideologies are based on knowledge and located in the human mind and must primarily be defined in cognitive terms.
Social psychology, because they are forms of social cognition shared by groups of people and are related to social attitudes on socio-political issues.
Sociology, because they are acquired, shared and used by social group members in social practices and interaction and often in or through institutions and organisations such as schools and the media.
Political science, because many ideologies define political parties, political practices such as voting, governing, policies and political institutions such as parliaments.
Anthropology, because ideologies are culturally variable.
History, because ideologies develop and change in different historical periods.
Discourse studies, because the most explicit expression of ideology, and the major means of acquiring and changing ideology, is through language use, discourse, text and talk.

As a basis for a discourse analysis of anti-racist ideology, this chapter focuses primarily on the relations between social cognition and discourse, and only secondarily on notions from the other disciplines.

Ideology as social cognition

As is the case for knowledge and (other) beliefs, ideologies are by definition cognitive, located, acquired and changed in the long-term memory of the human mind. More specifically they are forms of social cognition shared by social collectives, such as (anti-)racists, (anti-)feminists, socialists, pacifists or militarists.

Ideologies are based on the most fundamental form of social cognition: sociocultural knowledge, as shared by an epistemic community. Indeed, in order to acquire and use an (anti-) racist ideology, one must know something about the “racial” (ethnic, etc.) identity and about real or attributed differences of human beings.

As is the case for several cognitive systems, such as knowledge, ideologies are probably organised to facilitate their acquisition and use. Systematic discourse analysis of many ideologies suggests that this organisation consists of several fundamental categories, such as:

Identity (who ARE we?).
History (what it is OUR history?).
Action (what do we DO?).
Goals (what do we WANT?).
Reference groups (INgroup vs OUTgroup).
Norms and values (what is GOOD/BAD for us; what MAY/SHOULD we do?).
Resources (what power/resources do we have or lack?).

Because of the crucial category of In-group vs Out-group, ideologies are usually polarised. Contrary to traditional concepts of ideology, e.g., inspired by its classical negative definition in terms of “false consciousness” as proposed by Marx-Engels, ideologies are not necessarily negative (van Dijk 2021b). Depending on the perspective and the interests of the In-group, they may of course also be positive, as is indeed the case for socialist, feminist or anti-racist ideologies. Mannheim (1936) called these “utopias”.

Attitudes

Whereas ideologies are very general and abstract, so that they can be applied in many different national and political contexts, social situations and by very different people, they are usually specified in other forms of social cognition, traditionally called attitudes in social psychology. Attitudes represent the evaluative beliefs of ideological groups about fundamental socio-political issues such as immigration, abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia or same-sex marriage. Ideological and political debate and struggle in society usually take place at this more specific level of attitudes and issues and not at the abstract fundamental level of ideologies. Under the influence of the polarised nature of the ideologies on which they are based, attitudes are also usually polarised: We are for or against an issue, as is the case for migration as controlled by racist or anti-racist ideologies.

The relation between attitudes and ideologies is “dialectical”, in the sense that under the influence of an existing ideology, more specific attitudes are developed about new social issues, on one hand, and more generic ideologies may be gradually developed from historically specific issues – as was the case for the ideology of anti-racism emerging from attitudes about abolition, racial discrimination, colonial oppression or police brutality.

As is the case for fundamental ideologies, attitudes are also based on socially shared (or disputed) knowledge, but at present there is no detailed cognitive theory of the mental structures of attitudes. Specific attitudes (e.g., on migration) also explain whether ideologies are used more or less radically, also depending on various types of context.

Mental models

Socially shared ideologies and attitudes are of course by definition acquired, shared, adapted and changed by individual members of ideological groups and applied in their everyday experiences, practices and discourse as represented in personal mental models (located in episodic memory; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983), for instance about a recent event of discrimination or immigration. This is how ideologies operate in the interpretations, actions and discourse of everyday life, for instance in voting, social interaction and debate.

At this individual level of ideology, social members may of course share in several ideologies. Someone may be socialist, feminist and anti-racist, and apply several ideologies in the interpretation of an event or in participating in an event, although in specific contexts one of these ideologies may be more prominent.

Ideological clusters

At the meso level of political parties or social movements, it is useful to introduce a specific notion of ideological clusters, e.g., to better define such overall notions as progressive, conservative, left, right, extreme right, or in such societal organisations as the Rainbow Coalition. For instance, as shown in its electoral programme, radical right party Vox in Spain is racist, nationalist, anti-feminist and catholicist (van Dijk 2024b). Thus, clusters may be formed on the basis of shared norms and values, as is the case for anti-racism, feminism and socialism related through the value of equality. In that sense, higher-level or meta-ideologies may be defined, as is the case for overall labels such as Left or Progressive positions of political parties, organisations or even individuals.

Under the influence of other ideologies, some ideologies of an ideological cluster may be more or less radical, as shown in their specific attitudes, discourse and other social practices. Thus, socialist and feminist ideologies usually tend to make racist attitudes less radical than neoliberal and nationalist ideologies (Nelson and Dunn 2017).

Discourse and other social practices

With the theory and analysis of the nature and structure of socially shared ideologies and attitudes and their application in personal mental models, we have construed the necessary cognitive basis for their “uses” in discourse and social practices of their members. Given the polarised nature of ideologies and attitudes, ideological discourse also tends to be polarised at all levels of text or talk, following a very general strategy we have called the ideological square:

Emphasise OUR good things.
Emphasise THEIR bad things.
De-emphasise OUR bad things.
De-emphasise THEIR good things.

As we’ll see in more detail below, this overall strategy may thus be locally implemented by choices and structures of the lexicon (e.g., terrorists vs freedom fighters), syntax (e.g., active or passive sentences or nominalisations), semantics (implications and presuppositions), rhetoric (hyperboles and euphemisms), formal or informal style, story structure, argumentation and multi-modality (e.g., the use of pictures or music) (for introduction to such discourse analysis for social scientists see also van Dijk 2024a). As can be noted in our analyses of ideological discourse fragments below and in our earlier research on anti-racist discourse (van Dijk 2020; 2021), it is generally also through such ideologically structured discourses that personal opinions, social attitudes and finally ideologies are acquired and shared in society. Of course, as we’ll see in our analyses below, anti-racist discourse focuses on and emphasises negative aspects of the racist out-group. On the other hand, in studies of racist discourse we found typical expression of positive in-group discourse, such as the denial of racism or emphasising “our” tolerance (van Dijk 1993).

Ideology, society and history

The theoretical framework summarised above is necessary to relate ideologies to actual social interaction and discourse, and hence also for any kind of ideological discourse analysis. Although the theory accounts for the socially shared nature of ideologies and attitudes and how these are formed, applied and communicated by individual social members, social, cultural and political aspects of ideologies need to be accounted for in meso and macro theories of society.

From a sociological perspective, it is relevant to study ideologies for different domains of society such as the economy, religion, politics, education, research or the arts. For instance, anti-racist ideologies may be more widespread in education, research and the arts than in the economy and politics.

Ideologies are typically adapted to socio-economic or socio-political structures. In our comparative analysis of the ideologies of radical right parties in Chile, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden, we found that whereas religious ideology about abortion may be primary in Chile and (still) influential in Catholic Spain, it is irrelevant in the Protestant countries such as Netherlands and Sweden where abortion has been a widely accepted right and hence hardly an ideological aspect of election programmes. The same is true for anti-feminism, still influential in machismo systems in Spain, but also irrelevant in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. On the other hand, racism is still prominent in the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic radical right-wing parties in the Netherlands and Sweden as well as in other “white” societies (for detail, see van Dijk 2024b).

Indeed, as we will show below, we need to describe and explain how anti-racism slowly developed as an ideology, first through religious criticism of the treatment of slaves since antiquity or ethnic minorities in the colonies, then for and through abolitionist campaigns in the 19^th century, the Civil Rights Movement in the US, Black Lives Matter campaigns against police abuse of black youth, or SOS Racisme in France and Spain, until the resistance against radical right-wing programmes and policies today. Therefore, in each historical period and each geographical context, ideologies such as racism and anti-racism depend on one hand on local events and structures and on the other in relation to other ideologies such as feminism, socialism, nationalism, militarism or ecologism.

Review of the literature on anti-racist ideology

From the outset we argued that whereas there is a vast literature on racist ideology, there is scant literature on anti-racist ideology. Of the millions of studies referred to in Google Scholar in July 2024, there is not a single article that has the expression “anti-racist ideology” or “anti-racist ideologies” in its title, and only some 200 mention it briefly in the body of the article. This is a first indication that as a topic of research, anti-racist ideology is not very prominent. Even in major monographs on anti-racism (such as Lentin 2004), racism may be examined in ideological terms, but there is no systematic and detailed analysis of anti-racism as an ideology.

One of the reasons why anti-racist ideology has not often been studied in detail and in these terms may be that the prevalent notion of ideology is still negative (van Dijk 2021b), and hence more commonly associated with racist ideologies. Moreover, most studies of anti-racism are carried out in education, sociology and political science, where socio-cognitive approaches are rare. On the other hand, the widespread social psychological approaches to racism tend to be in the negative terms of forms of ethnic prejudice and discrimination. Moreover, these may be in terms of more individual or experimental studies, and seldom in terms of socially shared ideologies.

Interestingly, in both cognitive and social psychology a typical cognitive notion such as “ideology” has seldom been extensively studied, for instance in monographs, with the exception of political psychology (Jost 2021) – but then also in negative terms, for instance as forms of authoritarianism (Huddy 2013; Osborne and Sibley 2022). For the same reason, a typical socio-cognitive notion of “anti-racist identity” of a white community network may be felt as a stigma or contradiction (Hughey 2010).

Similarly, wherever “anti-racist” is used as an adjective, it generally co-occurs with “activist”, “activism”, “practice”, “praxis”, “movement”, “campaign”, “discourse” or “politics”: that is as phenomena, but not as expressions or manifestations of anti-racism as underlying ideology. Indeed, in empirical studies of ideology such an ideology is often confounded with its empirical manifestations, such as discourse and other practices.

Within this general bibliographical situation, we briefly review the few studies that in various terms have studied anti-racist ideologies.

Alasdair Bonnett is no doubt the major theorist of anti-racism (see, especially, Bonnett 2000). For his dissertation (Bonnett 1993; see also Bonnet 1990) on educational ideologies from a geographical perspective he interviewed teachers in London, Tyneside and Devon in the UK to explore the ideological differences between these locations and concluded that educational ideologies about “race” depend on local socio-political structures and events, on one hand, and the discursive context of multiple educational programmes, on the other. Although he is hesitant about whether we should speak of “anti-racist ideology” in the first place, his detailed analysis of interviews with teachers and the local soci-political situation shows that in the ethnically diverse London of the 1980s, more radical manifestations of anti-racist ideologies were widely shared by various groups and organisations and typically expressed in terms of “struggle”. On the other hand, in the context of white working-class Tyneside, anti-racist ideology applied in the domain of education must be adapted to local class experience and sensibilities. In our terms of ideological clusters, we would say that anti-racism here combines and competes with socialism. In white rural Devon, (neo)liberal ideology dominates and excludes radical anti-racist educational practices; at most it appears in timid forms of “multiculturalism”, with such values as individualism and reformism (see also Nelson and Dunn 2017). Thus, Bonnett’s research shows how ideologies combine to shape more specific attitudes, e.g., in the social domain of education, and how they vary geographically, which means in different combinations of social political contexts, such as the experience of a “race crisis”. Thus, a general anti-racist ideology in terms of shared values of racial equality may be implemented in locally variable forms of multi-culturalist or more radical anti-racist policies and other educational practices.

More generally, anti-racist discourse and practices have been found to vary geographically depending on (other) ideologies, as is the case for a more or less “progressive” or “conservative” climate in specific cities or countries (see, e.g., Sarrasin et al 2012).

As is the case for most studies of ideology, Bonnett does not primarily define ideologies in explicit cognitive terms, although he does use the term “anti-racist consciousness”. On one hand, he explicitly rejects a definition of ideology as a “vague system of beliefs” (Bonnett 1993: 82), but on the other hand a few pages later he uses the term “belief system” to describe liberalism (Bonnet 1993: 85).

In addition, other studies of racist ideology do not offer or include a cognitive component in terms of specific belief systems and how they relate to discourse and other social practices, but generally discuss more specific anti-racist attitudes or policies (as in Yan 2003).

In a sociological study of anti-racist attitudes in Brazil, Bailey (2004) found that many people in the state of Rio de Janeiro support the idea of (i.e., share a positive attitude to) affirmative action and participating in anti-racist organisations. Rather than sharing the well-known Brazilian myth of “racial democracy”, it must be concluded they have instead an anti-racist ideology (see also Bailey, Fialho and Peria 2018).

Bunyasi and Rigueur (2015) offer insight into the sociological basis of ideologies by comparing the identities of black and white Americans who have a racial ideology different from that of their racial group. Hughey (2010) similarly examines differences between nationalist and anti-racist white groups as they are based on different racist ideologies.

In her study of anti-racist politics in Belgium, Detant (2005) wonders about the existence of a coherent anti-racist ideology, in opposition to much more coherent racist ideologies:

At the same time, there seems to be considerable confusion about what should be understood as the ideology and politics of anti-racism. There is no shared notion of what is meant by the concept of a multicultural society, no clear vision on how to develop a political practice that articulates new ways of recognizing cultural differences, or on the consequences of developing new conceptions of democracy, tolerance and solidarity in a globalizing world.

(Detant 2005: 207)

Indeed, most studies of anti-racism examine instead the racist ideologies of the radical right and the discourse and activities of anti-racist movements, but not the details of anti-racist movements beyond specific anti-racist attitudes, e.g. about immigration.

Discourse analysis of anti-racist ideology

Anti-racist ideologies can be empirically studied in several ways. One way is to ask people whether they have an anti-racist ideology and ask them to explain what it is. Obviously, such a method is hardly useful, first because many people may not be aware of such an ideology, may not have one in the first place, and even if they have one might not be able or willing to recognise it. Secondly, anti-racist social actions, such as participating in anti-racist movements such as Black Lives Matter or SOS Racisme, may be observed and described and anti-racist ideologies may be inferred from them. Although this no doubt provides reliable data if people act according to their ideologies, the problem is first that everyday action may be based on combinations of several ideologies, and second that the underlying ideology may not be very explicit. And even in such situations, people may act in a context in which they are supposed to act in an anti-racist way.

The most obvious method is to systematically study anti-racist discourse. This method may also be limited because discourse, like any social action, depends on context and people may say what is expected of them. Still, it is easier to examine the structures of both text and context to assess socially expected positive (anti-racist) replies, and to compare many discourses of the same person. Indeed, trivially, one may focus on the discourses of people who are known to be card-carrying anti-racists. This is, indeed, the method we’ll use to assess the structures of underlying anti-racist ideologies and attitudes, on one hand, and how these anti-racist beliefs are expressed in talk.

As data we will examine discourses studied in our earlier books on the history of anti-racist discourse (van Dijk 2020, 2021a), this time not primarily because of their discourse structures, such as their persuasive rhetoric, but because of their implicit or explicit underlying ideologies. Since these discourses were studied more or less chronologically, this also offers insight into possible developments and changes of anti-racist ideologies through the ages.

Since the notions of racism and anti-racism have only been explicitly discussed since the 19^th and especially the 20^th centuries, we may observe the very formation of anti-racist ideology in its elementary forms, e.g., in terms of anti-racist norms and values, even before self-conscious anti-racist ideological identity existed. To be able to observe such a development, we’ll choose our examples in chronological order, beginning with early anti-slavery texts.

Early anti-slavery discourse

Slavery has been resisted since it first existed, first of course by enslaved people themselves. Because these enslaved people, at least in early times, were not always literate and often were prohibited from learning to read and write, it is only from the 18^th century that we have access to verbal forms of discursive resistance. On the other hand, we do have access to some “white” anti-slavery solidarity discourse, especially by priests, since Roman antiquity, and especially since the 16^th century.

One of the first anti-slavery discourses was expressed by Bishop Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c.395) in his ironical homilies, e.g.: “I got me slave-girls and slaves. For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality?”

The principles of this text were that slaves are human beings, that they are created, like other human beings, to the image of God, and can therefore not be bought or sold, and that human beings may rule the earth but not other human beings. These personal opinions characterise the anti-slavery attitude shared by the bishop. But their underlying argumentation is ideological. On the one hand, this ideology is obviously religious. On the other hand, it is more generally humanitarian because of the prohibition that humans should not dominate other humans, presupposing a value of equality. The same value is implied by the fact that slaves, like other human beings, are shaped to the image of God, and are also rational beings. Finally, as human beings, slaves should also be free. In a few words, thus, the homily expresses some of the ideological premises of the rejection of slavery.

Many centuries later, another bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), condemns the abominable treatment (“butcheries”) of indigenous people by Spanish colonists in Mexico. This time, the attitude controlled by anti-racist ideology is the stark condemnation of inhuman treatment, based on the ideological norm that indigenous people should be treated well – as King Carlos I of Spain had ordered in his New Laws. The ideological polarisation in this case is not, as in racist discourse, Negative Them Others, and Positive Us, but between Positive Them and Negative Us (the Spanish colonists). Indeed, the indigenous people are described in very “positive” but paternalistic terms of colonialism, adapted to the values of the recipients in Spain:

Now this infinite multitude of Men are by the Creation of God innocently simple, altogether void of and averse to all manner of Craft, Subtlety and Malice, and most Obedient and Loyal Subjects to their Native Sovereigns; and behave themselves very patiently, submissively and quietly towards the Spaniards, to whom they are subservient and subject; so that finally they live without the least thirst after revenge, laying aside all litigiousness, Commotion and hatred (de las Casas).

Typical of an anti-racist ideology, thus, is the very negative description of a group of whites (our people) as Out-group. The inhuman treatment by the colonists is rhetorically enhanced in many ways, for instance by metaphors (they behaved like wolves and tigers). Not yet explicitly present in the discourses of Las Casas is another aspect of an anti-racist ideology: the identity of an anti-racist in-group. He could not yet speak of a group of priests condemning the actions of the colonists. This is more typical of anti-racist solidarity ideology, where protagonists do not usually enhance their own positive character but focus on the negative characteristics of the racist others. Obviously, since (anti-)racism was not yet defined as such in those times, we only have a proto-ideology of anti-racism in more general humanitarian terms. Yet, since indigenous people are described as very positive Others, the point is not just generally humanitarian, but an attitude based on an ideology that implies ethnic difference and hence an anti-racist one.

One of the first anti-slavery text of the 17^th century was the famous Germantown Petition of Dutch-German Quakers in Pennsylvania, US, in 1688: “These are the reasons why we are against the traffick of men-body, as foloweth …”. Again, the discourse itself, and especially its argumentation, deserve detailed analysis, but we are primarily interested in its ideological underpinnings. The relevant attitude, obviously, is about slavery. Its persuasive strategy is a direct appeal to slave-owners in terms of the rhetorical question: How would you feel if you were enslaved by the Turks? Relevant for our analysis is the general humanitarian and religious principle (the Golden Rule) that we should treat people “making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are”, as we would like to be treated. Crucial here, as in many anti-slavery texts, is the fundamental value of general equality (“making no difference”) between the “races”. Secondly, slavery is condemned because it is a form of stealing, and hence in terms of more general norms against theft, and buying what was stolen is equally bad. Thirdly, blacks are enslaved against their will and consent, and hence slavery is condemned by another human value, that of people’s autonomy. More relevant to context, the Quakers condemn slavery because they themselves had struggled for religious freedom in Europe and this also requires “freedom of the body”, thus establishing the fundamental value of freedom against the nature of enslavement. There is still no explicit formulation of Us as the anti-racist in-group, but the identity of the authors, their history and those they address, namely the Quakers, and the religious arguments implicitly identify the Quakers as anti-racist. And the reference to the enslaved as black, and being stolen, more specifically qualifies the negative attitude against slavery as anti-racist.

Black resistance against slavery

Though early anti-slavery texts were forms of empathy and solidarity written by religious people, a major resistance against slavery was formulated by black women and men from the 19^th century. Again, such texts deserve detailed discourse analysis, e.g., of storytelling, argumentation and rhetorical enhancement of the ways enslaved people were treated. Relevant here is the ideological basis of the critical condemnation of slavery. The earlier texts focused on the many ways slavery is inhuman, and in that sense they are proto-forms of human rights discourse. The notion of “rights”, however, only becomes relevant in the 18^th century. This means that besides the general topoi of the inhuman nature of slavery, and more generally the treatment of Others, in the first anti-slavery texts, black resistance takes on other ideological dimensions such as the political notion of (civil) rights.

A major anti-racist writer was Frederick Douglass, who wrote the following eyewitness account of a severe beating of a slave girl in his Bondage and My Freedom (1855):

I happened to see this exhibition of his rage and cruelty toward Esther. The time selected was singular. It was early in the morning, when all besides was still, and before any of the family, in the house or kitchen, had left their beds. I saw but few of the shocking preliminaries, for the cruel work had begun before I awoke. I was probably awakened by the shrieks and piteous cries of poor Esther. My sleeping place was on the floor of a little, rough closet, which opened into the kitchen; and through the cracks of its unplaned boards, I could distinctly see and hear what was going on, without being seen by old master. Esther’s wrists were firmly tied, and the twisted rope was fastened to a strong staple in a heavy wooden joist above, near the fireplace. Here she stood, on a bench, her arms tightly drawn over her breast. Her back and shoulders were bare to the waist. Behind her stood old master, with cowskin in hand, preparing his barbarous work with all manner of harsh, coarse, and tantalizing epithets. The screams of his victim were most piercing. He was cruelly deliberate, and protracted the torture, as one who was delighted with the scene. Again and again he drew the hateful whip through his hand, adjusting it with a view of dealing the most pain-giving blow (Douglass).

This is a characteristic anti-racist text of resistance, based on an anti-slavery attitude, with a detailed description of racist abuse by a slave master. Both the observer and the victim are slaves, and hence the anti-racist ideology of the fragment is in terms of US slaves as the Identity (Who are We), our Action (What do we do?) as a form of critical resistance by criticism, and the Opponent a white slave master, and the actions qualified as deliberate torture, presupposing a fundamental violation of social norms and values as defined by the observer.

This example also shows how a general anti-racist ideology and a specific shared anti-slavery attitude are related to specific discourse structures of empathic storytelling through the personal social mental model of a gruesome event as recalled by the author.

Besides the detailed, critical observation of racist abuse, Douglass more generally condemned slavery in the following terms:

The … depth, doom, greed, degradation, power, wickedness, dehumanizing, character, soul-killing power, rigors, galling chains, brutality, horror, evil, tyranny, injustice, fraud, inhumanity, malice, chain, dangers, chains and fetters, crimes, terrible jaws, enormity, inhumanity, abuses, pestiferous breath, wrongfulness, remorseless jaws, abominations … of slavery (Douglass).

Again, the discursive expression of an explicit anti-slavery attitude is based on a more fundamental anti-racist ideology associating the Out-group (white slave-owners) with a violation of many social norms and values. The description itself is an act of In-group (black) resistance in the form of critical analysis.

Anti-racist resistance against discrimination

W.E.B. Dubois, in the Souls of Black Folk (1903), is even more explicit in his anti-racist ideology:

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape … (Dubois).

This text, written after abolition in the US, is no longer about slavery, but more generally about oppression of “negroes” or “black people”. Now the analysis is more generally sociological, with explicit In-group and Out-group, polarised between positive Us (“innocent”) and negative Them (“humiliation”, etc.) and the (violation of) norms and values made explicit (“law, justice, courtesy, consideration,” etc). The more specific attitude in this case may be called “racial discrimination”, and the background fundamentals formulated in legal terms that were not yet formulated in earlier (anti-slavery) texts.

In 1954, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) argued the famous Brown vs Board of Education case in the following words:

IT FOLLOWS THAT with education, this Court has made segregation and inequality equivalent concepts. They have equal rating, equal footing, and if segregation thus necessarily imports inequality, it makes no great difference whether we say that the Negro is wronged because he is segregated, or that he is wronged because he received unequal treatment (Marshall).

At the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, we see that the relevant attitude is about the crucial issue of equal rights in schooling. The example, and Marshall’s famous plea in general, express on one hand an anti-racist ideology based on the fundamental value of social equality, and on the other a legal ideology with a value of justice. At the same time the example shows the influence of an attitude about discrimination, expressed in the euphemistic term “wronged”.

Racism is not just resisted by black people, but during the Civil Rights events also by some leading white people, as was the case in the words of President Kennedy in an official address of 1963:

I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened … One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free (Kennedy).

Again, the crucial anti-racist values of equality and freedom are expressed here. The respective attitudes are about current race relations in the US, the history of slavery and current economic oppression. The crucial term of the period is that of equal rights as a (national) value, and the condemnation of slavery as injustice. Obviously, the “principle” of equality is general, but the reference to “men of many nations” implies it is specifically relevant as ethnic–racial equality. The repeated reference to “nation”, especially in a presidential address, also expresses the ideology of nationalism (and the usual reference of the time only to “men”, an ideology of sexism). Different from emphasising the negative aspects of the racist out-group, this is an example of a positive discursive representation of an anti-racist in-group mediated by positive nationalism.

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998), (then) chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in a 1966 speech to students at the University of California in Berkeley, critically focuses on the issue of integration:

Now, several people have been upset because we’ve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a ‘thalidomide drug of integration’, and that some Negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people; and that that does not begin to solve the problem. That when we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to Ross Barnett; we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark; we went to get them out of our way; and that people ought to understand that; that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy (Carmichael).

Actually, as a matter of policy for black people he emphasises that the aim should not be integration but opposition to white supremacy, thus initiating the issue and the debate for militant anti-racist ideology until Black Lives Matter today. We see how a speech about the current debate on equal rights, with concrete examples of the Civil Rights movement (actions in Mississippi), the focus is on general policy (“we were never fighting for”) should be more fundamental. Ideologically this means that the value of equality, as defined by integration, is not enough, and that resistance is primarily in terms of the struggle against the most fundamental form of power abuse: white supremacy. Hence, as is the case for the slogans of “black is beautiful” and the manifestation of the organisation of Black Power, the anti-racist ideology of black resistance is not just about white people but against white supremacy,

Decades later, Black Lives Matter published the following manifesto on its website:

What we believe

Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organise. It started out as a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission was to build local power and to intervene when violence was inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive. Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state (Black Lives Matter).

The text has the usual categories of a movement manifesto (van Dijk 2023; 2024a), featuring its (i) identity, (ii) actions, (iii) goals (social etc. power), (iv) history, (v) the opposed and its actions (the state, police, violence) and (vi) values (freedom from anti-blackness, justice). The title implies that the manifesto is not just words but a belief, and hence an expression of the relevant anti-racist attitude of the moment (about police violence), and its underlying ideology.

The Movimento Negro in Brazil

After the abolitionist movement, and the (late) abolition in 1888, black people in Brazil were systematically discriminated against in all domains of society, as systematically expressed in their discourses of resistance (for detail, see van Dijk 2020). Despite earlier black and white opposition, also in academic texts, it was only in 1978 that a black movement was founded: the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU). In a call they wrote the following:

We can no longer be silent. Racial discrimination is a striking fact in Brazilian society, which hinders the development of the Afro-Brazilian Community, destroys the soul of the black man and his capacity for fulfilment as a human being. [...] The Unified Movement Against Racial Discrimination was created so that the rights of black men are respected (MNU).

The relevant anti-racist attitude in Brazil in 1978 was against systematic and rampant racism. Similar to the manifesto of Black Lives Matter in the US 40 years later, this text sketches the history and the reasons of the foundation of the movement, the main problem (discrimination) opposed and the ultimate goal (fulfilment as human beings and respect for rights). Again, as a signal of its times, the text speaks twice of “black men” instead of “black people”, showing that anti-racist ideologies then did not entail a feminist one. Yet the call is from the more general perspective of the “Afro-Brazilian community”.

The critical analysis of antisemitism

Anti-racist discourse and ideology is not limited to the struggle against slavery, discrimination and oppression of black and indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also against prevalent antisemitism in Europe. Since the early 19^th century, Jewish intellectuals in particular analysed and criticised the blatant antisemitic pamphlets of, for instance, nationalist professors such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, Jakob Friedrich Fries, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Friedrich Rühs and Saul Ascher (van Dijk 2021, Chapter 7).

Many of these critical analyses of antisemitism are written in a cool and distant academic style. On the other hand, Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), who is known to have invented the term “Zionism”in his Ausgewählte Schriften zur Jüdischen Frage (Birnbaum 1910), written between 1883 and 1887, writes in a more informal, militant style of the insult, which deserves to be cited at length:

That is why the anti-Semites are so repugnant to me, because they, those who are most deaf to the present and most blind to the future, do not want to see or hear anything of this entire development and want to stop it with their small or sick brains. Yes, but do they not have the merit of having recognised the principle of race and to have asserted it against those who one-sidedly overestimate the economic principle? Not at all! They have simply condensed into a mad, sordid farce everything that, according to the great scientific research and insights of our age, was tangible in the air and, in the course of development, was practically exploited or is about to be exploited by all forward-looking parties. What is the greater merit of these national anti-Semites supposed to be? That they are quite clear about their unbridled racial instincts, that they have bred a pure culture of them, that they falsify any historical thinking by their fascination with racial madness, that they are consistent in their backward-looking foibles to the point of ridicule, that they have, to be brief, made the mad sordid farce systematic? I almost prefer the more clumsy and cloddish, but in turn more jovial, less monomaniac and therefore – from the point of view of world history – less dangerous Christian Socialists (Birnbaum).

The anti-racist ideology in this case inspires a very negative qualification of antisemites, in this case also on the basis of the criteria of scientific research.

In France, Jewish anarchist Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), who became known because of his defence of Jewish officer Dreyfus (falsely accused and imprisoned for treason) in a typical academic analysis, deals with antisemitism in the more academic style of his History of Anti-semitism (1894):

WE have seen then that the causes of anti-semitism are, in their nature, ethnic, religious, political and economic. They are all causes of far reaching importance, and they exist not because of the Jew alone, nor because of his neighbours alone, but principally because of prevailing social conditions. Ignorant of the real cause of their sentiments, those who profess anti-semitism, justify their opinion by accusations against the Jew which, as we have seen, do not at all agree with facts. Charges racial, charges religious, charges political and economic, none of these grievances of anti-semitism are well founded. Some, like the ethnic grievance, arise from a false conception of race; others like the religious and political charges, are due to a narrow and incomplete interpretation of historical evolution; and last of all, the economic count, has its justification in the necessity of concealing the strife going on within the capitalist class. None of these accusations is justified. It is no more correct to say that the Jew is a pure Semite than it would be to say that the European peoples are pure Aryans (Lazare).

Anti-racist ideology thus influences academic analysis as a form of resistance by explaining various manifestations of anti-racism. This means that such texts are also controlled by ideologies of scientific research and its values. The negative representation of antisemitic beliefs and discourse is toned down by referring to ignorance and phrases like “do not agree with the facts” and “not justified”. Similar critical analyses of racism were written decades later, after World War II, under the auspices of the UNESCO (for detail, see van Dijk 2021).

Conclusion

Anti-racist ideology: A summary

The analysis of some anti-racist texts through history suggests the following conclusions:

i. Anti-racist discourse and debate focus on anti-racist attitudes about specific issues rather than on more fundamental anti-racist ideologies, such as slavery, discrimination, civil rights, police brutality, immigration restrictions, white supremacy and systemic racism.

ii. The underlying ideologies of these anti-racist texts are not just anti-racism, but may also be nationalism, humanism and sexism.

iii. The structure of the ideologies as forms of resistance and solidarity are primarily (a) the negative representation of white racist and antisemitic people as the out-group; (b) the positive representation of the (black, Jewish) in-group in resistance discourse, and white anti-racists (e.g. Quakers) in discourse of solidarity; (c) actions of resistance, including critical literary or academic analysis; (d) the fundamental norms and values (equality, freedom, justice etc.).

iv. The discursive expression of the underlying attitudes and ideologies in general details and amplifies the nature of racist power abuse, including ridicule and literary storytelling, on one hand, and cool distant academic analysis on the other.

v. The sociology of the ideological groups sustaining the anti-racist ideologies are historically: first (some) clerics or kings, followed by religious movements (like the Quakers), black writers and organisations (like the NAACP) and finally social movements such as BLM in the US, MNU in Brazil or SOS Racisme in France, and anti-racist or anti-antisemitic academics.

vi. The historical discourses show that there is a clear development of the contents and application of anti-racist ideologies, starting with incidental criticism of maltreatment (e.g. of slaves and indigenous people); increasing opposition to slavery in general, and especially its abuses (like violence of slave masters); analysis and criticism of all forms of discrimination after the abolition of slavery; opposition to eugenics; the academic challenge of the very notion of race; civil rights for black people; police violence; the critical analysis of white supremacy; and systemic racism. In other words, beginning with criticism of a “sinful” humanitarian abuse, there is increasing systemic analysis, opposition and organisation (in social movements) and increasingly radical political and academic analysis, e.g. in terms of white supremacy and systemic racism.

As they are not shown in the analyses above, we should mention finally the broader resistance and solidarity within Rainbow coalitions in which anti-racism is linked inter-sectionally to the rights of women by feminists, the rights of workers by socialists and rights of LGBT+ people by anti-homophobic activists.

Future developments

Despite the many studies of ideology, there still is no consensus of a general, overarching theory of ideology. Most studies are instead philosophical and political and ignore the important nature of ideology as a form of social cognition. What has been proposed above is still very tentative. More explicit cognitive science theory and methods are necessary to develop a theory of the mental representation of ideology, as well as of the socially shared attitudes controlled by it.

This is especially necessary for the study of anti-racist ideology and its attitudes, so far neglected in comparison to the study of racist ideology. Comparative analysis with feminist movements and ideologies would be especially fruitful.

Although contemporary studies of ideology have often used (anti-racist) discourse, there is no systematic and explicit ideological discourse analysis. The very general ideological square mentioned above may provide a very general strategy and also be useful for analysis. But the local details at all levels still need to be made explicit, including specific lexical selection, 167.grammar, style, rhetoric, metaphors and multi-modal analysis. So far, the most obvious is hyperbolic rhetoric amplifying the many ways racist abuse is described, but – for instance – what is a typical anti-racist argument structure in debates against racist discrimination, police brutality or pervasive policies of immigration restrictions?

Finally, besides cognitive and discursive analysis of ideology, we continue to need a comparative sociological analysis of anti-racist organisations in different periods and countries, also in relation to other social movements of resistance such as feminists.

References

Bailey, S. (2004) “Group dominance and the myth of racial democracy: Anti-racism attitudes in Brazil”, American Sociological Review, vol. 69, no. 5, 728–747.

Bailey, S., Fialho, F. and Peria, M. (2018) “Support for race-targeted affirmative action in Brazil”, Ethnicities, vol. 18, no. 6, 765–798.

Blake, F., Ioanide, P. and Reed, A. (eds.) (2019) Anti-racism, Inc., Goleta CA: Punctum Books.

Blunt, G. D. (2020) Global Poverty, Injustice, and Resistance, Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bonnett, A. (1990) “Anti-racism as a radical educational ideology in London and Tyneside”, Oxford Review of Education, vol. 16, no. 2, 255–267.

Bonnett, A. (1993) Radicalism, Anti-Racism, and Representation, London and New York: Routledge.

Bonnett, A. (2000) Anti-racism, London and New York: Routledge.

Bunyasi, T. and Rigueur, L. (2015) ‘“Breaking bad’ in black and white: What ideological deviance can tell us about the construction of ‘authentic’ racial identities”, Polity, vol. 47, no. 2, 175–198.

Detant, A. (2005) “The politics of anti-racism in Belgium: A qualitative analysis of the discourse of the anti-racist movement hand in hand in the 1990s”, Ethnicities, vol. 5, no. 2, 183–215.

Deveaux, M. (2021) Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Huddy, L. (ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hughey, M. (2010) “The (dis)similarities of white racial identities: The conceptual framework of ‘hegemonic whiteness’”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 33, no. 8, 1289–1309.

Jost, J. T. (2021) Left and Right. The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Lentin, A. (2004) Racism and Anti-racism in Europe, London: Pluto Press.

Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. and New York NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Nelson, J. and Dunn, K. (2017) “Neoliberal anti-racism: Responding to ‘Everywhere but Different’ racism”, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 41, no. 1, 26–43.

Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (eds.) (2022) The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Sarrasin, O., Green, E. G. T., Fasel, N., Christ, O., Staerklé, C. and Clémence, A. (2012) “Opposition to antiracism laws across Swiss municipalities: A multilevel analysis”, Political Psychology, vol. 33, no. 5, 659–681.

Twine, F. W. and Blee, K. M. (eds.) (2001) Feminism and Antiracism. International Struggles for Justice, New York NY: New York University Press.

van Dijk, T. A. (1993) Elite Discourse and Racism, Newbury Park CA: Sage.

van Dijk, T. A. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage.

van Dijk, T. A. (2020) Anti-racist Discourse in Brazil. From Abolition to Affirmative Action, Lanham KY: Lexington Books.

van Dijk, T. A. (2021a) Anti-racist Discourse. Theory and History of a Macromovement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Dijk, T. A. (2021b) Are Ideologies Negative? Language and Power: Essays in honour of Norman Fairclough. Amazon: 147–155.

van Dijk, T. A. (2023) “Social movement discourse: Manifestos”, In Caldas, C. R. and Coulthard, M. (eds.) Texts and Practices Revisited. Essential Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge.

van Dijk, T. A. (2024a) Social Movements Discourse. An Introduction, London: Routledge.

van Dijk, T. A. (2024b) The Discourse and Ideologies of the Radical Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Dijk, T. A. and Kintsch, W. (eds.) (1983) Strategies of Discourse Comprehension, New York NY: Academic Press.

Yan, M. C. (2003) “Anti-racism discourse: The ideological circle in a child world”, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 30, no. 1, 127–144.

Zamalin, A. (2019) Anti-racism. An Introduction, New York NY: New York University Press.

10. Ideology, genealogy and the function of performative violence in antisemitism

Maiken Umbach

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-14

Introduction

Antisemitism is not an ideology. Or is it? On the surface, it seems to lack most of the characteristics of an ideology. It offers no comprehensive analysis of the political world, no vision of an ideal political order, and no road map of how to get from one to the other. Antisemitism appears be a set of prejudices about one small population group, Jews, who in 2025 constitute about 0.2 per cent of the world population. This chapter argues that antisemitism is a more pervasive and a more comprehensive ideology than the overt articulation of anti-Jewish prejudices might suggest. It argues that, historically and today, antisemitism’s central premises are widely supported well beyond the small circle of individuals who identify as antisemites. Second, it explores how the historical ancestry of contemporary antisemitism strengthens its ideological power: history, in the antisemitic imagination, is a mechanism of what Freeden calls ideological “decontestation”, a process that renders contentious political content invisible or common-sensical.[24] Third, it argues that the fact that antisemitism seemingly defines itself only by what it opposes is less atypical of ideologies than it may appear, if we understand the term “ideology” to denote a set of political and social beliefs and practices, rather than just a political theory. And finally, it addresses the issue of the ultimate telos of antisemitism, arguing that it is animated by a utopian vision, which pogroms temporarily actualise, offering a glimpse of the political and spiritual redemption that forms antisemitism’s hidden core.

Studies of antisemitism fall broadly into two categories. The first is historical; most examples focus on one specific era and geography. We encounter several examples of this literature in the next section, which explores specific antisemitic libels. Most of these studies, implicitly and explicitly, posit a macro-historical transformation of antisemitism. Medieval and early modern antisemitism is typically characterised as a religiously motivated Judeophobia that expressed itself in a series of anti-Jewish tropes or libels, such as Deicide or the Blood Libel. During the 19^th century, these were gradually supplanted by a new, secular form of anti-Jewish racism. Antisemitism was now couched in the language of racial science and emerged as part of a wider colonial discourse. It also inspired attempts to establish antisemitic parties in several European countries. This racial antisemitism reached its peak in National Socialism, and declined sharply after 1945. However, elements of it continued to thrive beyond Europe, especially in the Islamic world, often merging older religious and newer racialised tropes (Gilbert 2010; Herf 2023; Küntzel 2024).

A second category of studies of antisemitism concern its forms in the 21^st century. Although historians are among their authors, most have been written by political scientists and sociologists; many of these authors are also activists seeking to combat antisemitism. David Hirsh, director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antsemitism, who publishes a seminal book series in this field, sees this contemporary form of antisemitism as integral to a new form of leftist ideology. It arose when sections of the Left replaced their founding principles – Hirsh cites “equality for women, sexual liberation ... the rule of law, democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, working-class self-liberation, science and reason, respect for minorities and national self-determination” (Johnson 2024) – with a new interpretative formula. This formula divides the world into two warring ideological camps: “the imperialists”, which include the Western world and all its values, and its opponents, “the resistance”. The Jewish state “became either central to, or symbolic of, this single, global machine of domination” (Johnson 2024: xxiii). In this ideological constellation, Israel, like the Jewish diaspora before it, represents humans who are alien to other people’s national territory, even to nature itself (Hirsh 2023).

This chapter draws attention to the broader patterns that cut across these chronological and ideological sub-divisions. Antisemitism, like all ideologies, has certainly evolved over time. And yet, I shall argue, it has a distinctive logic and structure that underpins all these variations; and it has a surprisingly stable, yet often disguised, telos or end goal. It will begin by exploring the question of continuity across time, and identify the telos of antisemitism.

Genealogies of the antisemitic imagination

A manipulated photo of Benjamin Netanyahu shows the Israeli Prime Minister with a Star of David emblazoned on his forehead, bloodshot eyes and the fangs of a vampire, which he is about to sink into the neck of a young Palestinian child. In 2015, this image started appearing in pro-Palestine rallies. It was shared widely on social media, and currently is the profile picture of the overtly antisemitic X (formally Twitter) account Jxllyfish.[25] The image taps into a long-standing anti-Jewish imagination. It is the Blood Libel: the false allegation that Jews abduct and murder Christian babies to use their blood for the preparation of matzo, unleavened bread baked for Passover ( Dundes 2007). During the reign of Henry III, England became the first European country officially to recognise the Blood Libel. This in turn led to a series of anti-Jewish pogroms and the eventual expulsion, in 1290, of the entire English Jewish population (Bennett 2005). The idea was taken up by modern antisemites, including propagandists for the Nazi regime, who frequently depicted Jews as vampires about to sink their fangs into innocent victims, as well, as, shortly after this, the rumour that started the murderous pogrom in Kielce, Poland, in 1945 (Gross 2006).

It is interesting that so-called modern, “racial” antisemites continued to propagate this medieval libel – but also that they themselves were at pains to advertise this historical genealogy. In May 1939, the Nazi illustrated weekly Der Stürmer published a cover story based on the Blood Libel. But the title image was a reproduction of a 1627 engraving by Flemish-born artist Raphael Sadeler, entitled Six Children Killed in Regensburg (Kager 1627). Here, as in many other instances, the Nazi regime mobilised historical precedents to normalise and legitimise its murderous onslaught on Europe’s Jewish population. After 1945, this imagery continued to be used – and not just by extremists. In 2020, the prize-winning Italian artist Giovanni Gasparro, who has held solo exhibitions in Paris in 2009 and at the Venice Biennale in 2011, revealed a new oil painting entitled The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trento for Jewish Ritual Murder. Painted in a neo-baroque style, the painting shows grinning Jews with grotesque features greedily harvesting blood from a Christian child.[26] This 21^st-century iteration of the Blood Libel, again, openly advertises its historical longevity.

The libel of Deicide – blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ – is another case in point. Matthew 27:24–25 states that the Jewish crowd who supposedly asked Pilate to crucify Jesus know that his blood is “on us and on our children”: Jews are irredeemably cursed (Kampling 2005). This inspired centuries of Christian anti-Jewish propaganda and persecution. It was only during the Second Vatican Council, 1962–65, that the Catholic Church officially repudiated this belief.[27] In 2021, the charge of Deicide, too, made a re-appearance in pro-Palestine marches, when a protest poster in London showed an image of Christ bearing the cross wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, with the slogan “Don’t let them do it again!”.[28]

A related libel is the “wandering Jew”. The earliest recorded instance appears in a 1228 chronicle by the English monk Roger of Wendover, who alleged that a Jew taunted Christ on the way to the crucifixion, and was cursed to wander the earth, homeless, for eternity (Lampert-Weisseg 2015). Cursed by God, Jews became rootless, global creatures, natural traitors to any country they inhabit. This trope reached infamy in the 1942 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew (Anderson 1965). Today, it features in the loyalty libel: the allegation that Jews form a global cabal and will invariably be disloyal to the nation–states in which they live. The famous Russian fabrication from 1902, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was cited in Hitler’s Mein Kampf as proof of the danger posed by these people from nowhere eager to colonise other nations’ lands; it also features in the 1988 Hamas Covenant. Finally, the money libel – the idea that all Jews are driven by profit, and by their nature are exploitative and parasitic on the honest work of others – has a similar genealogy (Fox 2010). It began with accounts in the New Testament about Judas’s betrayal for 30 pieces of silver and Jesus driving the moneylenders from the temple. And it informed centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, culminating in Nazi propaganda that pictured hunched Jewish men perched on sacks of gold (usually in front of a stock exchange, as in the 1942 satirical book The Poison Mushroom), or greedily rubbing their hands. Today, one of the most popular antisemitic memes online is the Happy Merchant, a line drawing of a hunched Jew with a kippah rubbing his hands and grinning. The meme has been employed to denounce Jewish conspiracies everywhere. Whatever ills befall mankind – from the financial crisis of 2008 to the Covid-19 pandemic – are the result of a Jewish plot to engineer and then profit from other people’s misery or disease.

Together, these libels constitute the political arsenal of antisemites (see also Falk 2008; Consonni 2022). And their sum total is often cited as a definition of the phenomenon itself. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism,[29] which, some criticisms notwithstanding,[30] has been adopted by 22 states and many major political parties and organisations. But antisemitism is, this chapter argues, more than the sum of the libels that form its component parts.

Defining antisemitism: Religious, racial or ideological?

To understand an ideology, we need to do more than understand its individual propositions: we also need to explore how it operates, who promotes it and what purposes it serves. A voluminous historical literature has explored antisemitic mobilisations in specific historical moments and locations. Nazi antisemitism has received most attention (Friedlaender 1997). But we also have detailed scholarship about attempts, successful and unsuccessful, of mobilisation around antisemitic libels in other periods and geographical settings (Riff 1976; Hagen 1996; Brustein and King 2004; Hauser and Janáčová 2021).

There are fewer general histories of antisemitism. Those that exist tend to propose a macro-historical distinction between two phases (Poliakov 2003; Levy 2005; Perry and Schweitzer 2005; Laquer 2006; Beller 2007). The pre-modern version is often classified as Judeophobia: religious prejudices energised by a church-led programme designed to discredit the religion from which Christianity broke away (Michael 2008). This is often held to be distinct from modern antisemitism. In the later 19^th century, this scholarship suggests, antisemitism evolved into a secular ideology that was not about religion, but about race. In 1880, the German journalist and politician Wilhelm Marr (1880) first popularised the term “antisemitism”. He argued that Jewish emancipation had allowed the Jews to control German finance and industry, and that no degree of assimilation could solve the Jewish problem: instead, it was a fight between two races that could only be resolved by the total elimination of one. This paradigm shift occurred concurrently with the rise of race sciences and eugenics more broadly (on race science and eugenics, see Schmuhl 2003). Scholars such as Eugen Fischer, professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, worked at the intersection of pseudo-scientific racism and antisemitism. Fischer developed his theories about racial types during fieldwork in Namibia, then German South West Africa, where he measured skull shapes and hair colour of people of mixed European and African heritage and conducted medical experiments on Herero and Namaqua people. Adolf Hitler read Fischer’s Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene while incarcerated in 1923, and cited it in Mein Kampf (Fischer, Baur and Lenz 1921). These ideas later informed the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws, which defined Jews as a distinct race targeted for persecution and eventual mass murder.

And yet, in practice, the distinction between pre-modern Judeophobia and modern, racial antisemitism was never clear-cut. As Walser Smith demonstrated in an influential 2002 micro history, the Blood Libel continued to fuel antisemitic violence even in the heyday of race science. Alon Confino (2014) argues that the 1938 November pogrom was intensely religious in motivation: Jewish synagogues were the key targets, and much of the performative Nazi violence focused not on markers of race but on markers of religion, notably Torah scrolls. The astounding collections of the Chamber of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem demonstrate that even in Nazi ghettos and concentrations camps, rituals of humiliation directed against texts and symbols of the Jewish faith invariably accompanied, and gave meaning and energy to, the attempted destruction of a whole people.[31] This preoccupation persisted beyond 1945, when the religious Blood Libel inspired new pogroms such as Kielce in 1946 (Gross 2006). Conversely, we know that race science, while providing symbolic ammunition for Nazi propaganda such as the exhibition Degenerate Art (Levi 1998), barely informed policy. Even the Nuremberg race laws defined Jews not in terms of skull shapes and hair colour but by religious practice, with the important modification that conversions to Christianity less than three generations before did not exempt individuals from persecution.

Religion, then, continued to inform and shape antisemitism in the modern era. Racism did not replace Judeophobia. Rather, the religious imagination, and the associated rituals of “purifying” violence in anti-Jewish pogroms, were now couched in a new diction, which assigned immutable attributes to a collective Jewish racial character. The attributes themselves, however, continued to be those grounded in old religious libels. Like other racists, antisemites regarded those they attacked as inferior, dirty, even sub-human. But unlike other racists, they also continued to imagine Jews as uniquely powerful: powerful threats to individuals, abducted for their blood, and threats to entire nations, who were secretly controlled by tiny Jewish minorities from within. These new secular–racial articulations of antisemitism made old tropes usable in a society where ideological allegiance was increasingly negotiated in secular terms. But they did not represent a total conceptual break with earlier forms.

This raises a question of classification. If antisemitism was not just a set of religious prejudices, and not just a variant of modern racism, could it be an ideology in its own right? Michael Freeden, one of the leading theorists of ideologies, suggested that ideologies are clusters of related and mutually reinforcing beliefs that are grouped in characteristic patterns and distinctive hierarchies (1996). Most ideologies derive their name from such a core concept. In liberalism, Freeden (1986) argues, liberty is a core value. Adjacent beliefs, such as civil rights or free market competition, relate to this conceptual core. Unrelated ideas may also feature, but are of secondary importance. Adherents of such ideologies identify with the core belief: “I am a liberal”, “I am a socialist” – even if many may add a string of qualifying adjectives, to designate which of the many branches of the ideology they identify with. Freeden concedes that ideologies are inherently unstable: they evolve over time, they absorb elements of other ideologies, they shed others and exist in competing iterations. But core values remain central to the character of ideologies. Antisemitism is, apparently, different. It has no obvious positive values. It defines itself by what it is against – the “anti”. Of course, the term antisemitism itself is problematic: Marr, who invented it, was himself an outspoken Jew-hater. But even those who have argued that the term should be replaced by “anti-Jewish hate”, or “anti-Jewish racism” (Cave 2023) emphasise the negative (hate, racism): a positive core value appears to be missing. This may explain why in surveys, only about two per cent of the UK population self-identify as antisemites. Few people are proud to hate. This gives antisemitism the appearance of a single-issue protest movement, not a comprehensive ideology. But appearances can be deceptive. And in this case, they may stem more from a methodological problem than from differences in substance.

The classical mode of ideology analysis, which centres on positive values, privileges the voices of political thinkers and leaders over the grassroots dimensions of ideological imaginaries and behaviours. To explore what happens if we take a more vernacular approach to ideologies, in 2015 my collaborators and I conducted an experiment. We used a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on Ideologies in Everyday Life, which we designed and ran jointly with the British Library, to crowdsource ideas and images about how people imagine their ideological alignments and commitments. We analysed 25 000 learner contributions and accompanying images (Humphrey, Umbach and Clulow 2019). The key finding was that freedom and liberty, the core of Freeden’s morphological analysis of liberalism, are somewhat atypical. Freedom was almost always positively appraised by our participants. For many, it was also an intensely personal aspiration. Justice, by contrast, did not have the same quality. Most saw justice as something to be delivered by institutions, not a personal concern or aspiration. This changed, however, when we talked about its antithesis: injustice. Many participants in the MOOC felt a personal calling to “be against”, or fight, injustice. In other words, when it comes to justice the act of demanding redress from a perceived injustice was a significantly more powerful tool of ideological mobilisation than the positive concept of justice itself (Humphrey, Umbach and Clulow 2019: 131). This finding chimes with recent work on the ideological dynamics of populism, where ideological mobilisation against enemies emerges as core to the political project itself (Ricci 2020; Berman 2021). Shifting the focus to the ideological vernacular across the political spectrum reveals similar mechanisms at work in other mainstream ideologies too. If, for most people, seeking redress from injustice is a more powerful incentive for ideological alignment than advocacy for a positive value, then we can more easily appraise antisemitism as a political ideology in its own right. Anti-Jewish libels serve the same function as other perceived instances of injustice in other ideologies: they are shorthand for an analysis of moral wrongs in the world; acting on them is to take positive action towards creating a better world. In the aggregate, the anti-Jewish libels amount to a near-comprehensive explanation of the world: social inequality, economic exploitation, a “parasitic” financial system, media and politics that are “out of touch” with the concerns of ordinary people – all these can be blamed on Jews. Conversely, eliminating Jewish power creates a world that is just, equitable and stable.

Understood in this way, antisemitism is not an extremist dogma, confined to the margins of the political spectrum in most democratic societies. It is, instead, an ideological cluster that helps people “make sense” of the world. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s surveys show that globally, 26 per cent of people believe in anti-Jewish libels.[32] Among Muslims, this rises to 49 per cent with Christians at 24 per cent While these surveys do not use validated measurements, the results nevertheless give a reasonable estimate of the scale of support for antisemitism, even if far fewer people self-define as antisemites. In reality, even the ADL surveys probably underestimate the scale of antisemitism: as in most surveys, respondents are more likely to give the answers that those posing the questions would like to hear. Moreover, surveys normally measure views expressed in conditions of calm. We know from historical research that anger – about any issue – causes antisemitism to increase dramatically: or perhaps more accurately, that it brings a pre-existing latent antisemitism to the surface (Latzer 2000; Fritzche 2011; Steuwer 2017). This correlates with recent findings on the appeal of conspiracy theories (Walter and Drochon 2022). Feeling disempowered or marginalised exacerbates the ideological appeal of the “anti”, which is central to the ideology of antisemitism. A mode of ideological analysis that neglects emotional economy and focuses only on rational aims and objectives is unlikely to come to grips with the phenomenon. For all its apparent negativity, antisemitism is more than simply a form of hate. Like conspiracy theories, antisemitism implicitly conveys a promise of an ideal word: because it imagines Jews as all-powerful, a “world without Jews” (Confino) is a utopia that transforms all aspects of public life: a version of capitalism without the power of (Jewish) banks; a version of the public sphere without the power of (Jewish) media; a version of the nation without the power of global (Jewish) networks, and so forth.

Antisemitism and anti-Zionism

This article argues that the historical longevity of the libels creates a collective memory which, while not usually at the forefront of people’s minds, can be easily activated. History itself plays a key part in a process that Freeden calls ideological “decontestation” (Freeden 1996; see also Geertz 1964). Precisely because ideologies are inherently unstable and open to debate, decontestation is key to their success: this is the process whereby highly contestable ideological assumptions are translated into immutable truths, or common sense. The libels of antisemitism are an example of this process. They are not articulated as new insights: in their self-conscious citing of historical precedents, they mobilise the suggestive power of 2000-year-old, transnational memories to imply that what has been around for so long must obviously be true. The history of antisemitism, in other words, is never silent in contemporary articulations: it informs and enhances the power of this ideology.

To test this hypothesis, it is useful to explore the obvious counter-example: anti-Zionism, i.e. hostility toward the state of Israel. Many scholars have explored the constitutive role of anti-Zionism in contemporary antisemitism (Wistrich 2004; Seymour 2019; Hirsh and Miller 2022). The IHRA definition of antisemitism includes several examples, including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”.[33] These issues appear to be separate from the classical anti-Jewish libels, levelled at Jews living in the diaspora. It seems reasonable to assume that rejecting the Jewish right to national self-determination is a fundamentally modern idea, and that its centrality to contemporary antisemitism means that we are now dealing with a version of the ideology that has changed almost beyond recognition. This would also chime with Chaouat’s (2016: 19–20) claim that the nature of antisemitism has profoundly shifted from a right-wing to a left-wing phenomenon in the 21^st century:

Anti-semitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, exclusion of the other, homogenization of society – quite the opposite.

... If Europe has a Jewish problem today, it is not because Jews are seen as a heterogeneous element in the nation, but because they allegedly adhere to a certain idea of identity and roots that contradicts the new strictly universalistic Weltanschauung. [... If formerly,] Jews were seen as all too modern “rootless cosmopolitans”, today’s European anti-semitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, and their origin. [This is] perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory.

(Chaouat 2016: 19–20)

Chaouat here accurately captures the self-perception of a movement that tries to draw sharp distinctions between the “anti-Zionism” of the Left and the older antisemitism of the Right. This is not just a matter of political orientation. The new popularity of so-called “anti-Zionism” among the European and North American Left is conceptually informed by the agenda of decolonisation. Palestine is seen a deserving of empathy and solidarity, as an authentic and indigenous nation, while Jews settling in Israel are regarded as a “white” colonising force, and hence the last bastion of European and American imperialism in the non-Western world (Hirsh 2017).

In all these respects, this kind of anti-Zionism seems unconnected to the ideology of antisemitism outlined so far. Even some scholars who argue that anti-Zionism is a variant of antisemitism have tried to draw a line between it and earlier forms directed against the Jewish diaspora. And yet, on closer inspection, the power of historical decontestation does not stop here. To be clear, not every criticism levelled against the government of Israel is antisemitic. Nor is it antisemitic to point to aspects of European Zionism that borrowed some elements from colonial discourse – as did nearly every other political movement of the early 20^th century. Yet, as Penslar has shown, the genesis of Zionism owes much less to colonialism than to European nationalism; and indeed, and most significantly, to anti-colonialism. In many respects, Zionism closely resembled other anti-colonial movements of the early 20^th century; this also explains some of the ideological characteristics of state-building in Israel after 1949, which were heavily informed by the example of other countries emerging from colonial rule ( Penslar 2017). Therefore, an equation of Zionism and colonialism is not a historical fact but an ideological construct whose history requires careful decoding.

One common denominator between anti-Zionism and antsemitism lies in the trope of Jewish power. In reality, the majority of Jewish people who joined the existing indigenous Jewish population of Mandate Palestine after 1945 were disempowered in the extreme: refugees driven out of countries they had inhabited for centuries, indeed, in many cases, millennia. They came overwhelmingly from two groups. The largest number were Arabic-speaking Mizrahi Jews, who, beginning with the Farhud Pogrom in Baghdad of 1941, were fleeing from Muslim-majority societies across the Middle East and North Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen (and later Ethiopia) (Küntzel 2024). The second, smaller group were refugees who had barely survived the horrors of the Holocaust and who were prevented from returning to their former homes in Europe, especially in Poland, where events like the 1946 pogrom in Kielce shattered any illusion that pre-Nazi harmonious coexistence might be restored. They were joined by a small minority of ideologically motivated “Zionists” – more on what that actually means below. For the moment, we should note that framing the flight of millions of displaced Jews as a “colonial project” is both historically inaccurate and morally offensive. But doing so allows any opposition to a Jewish state in the ancestral Jewish homeland to be framed as a justified, even righteous, resistance to Jewish power, in a world where “colonialism” itself has become a synonym for the illegitimate exercise of power.

Antisemitism had been framed as anti-colonial resistance long before the foundation of Israel. The Nazis themselves used this trope, in turn drawing on the centuries-old libel of a world Jewish conspiracy, which could only be overthrown through exterminationist violence. In doing so, Nazi ideology breathed new life into the old idea that Jews were by nature obsessed with power: that their aim was world control – through the financial system, the media, etc. Jews, in other words, acted as colonisers wherever they were: small in numbers, their aim was to control vast territories by acting as the real, if often invisible, power behind the throne. The Holocaust, framed in this way, was an act of anti-colonial liberation. Ideologues such as Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, made that exact point, suggesting that, historically and now, the German struggle for national survival was always one against colonisers, beginning with the 13^th-century threat from Genghis Khan and ending with Jews. Himmler oversaw a new edition of Michael Prawdin’s book about Mongol colonialism (Prawdin 1934), and in 1938 arranged for a copy to be sent to every SS officer. “For the Nazi elite, the Jews were the latest ruling class of the enduring, external, Asiatic threat to Europe” (Moses 2021: 298). Zionism, for Nazi ideologues, was just another Jewish colonial ploy. In 1922 Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi race theorist and later Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, published an essay entitled Zionism: Enemy of the State. To Rosenberg, the creation of a Jewish state was by definition unnatural. Jews, whom he claimed lack the ability to connect meaningfully to land, territory and nature itself, could never create an “authentic” state. Thus, even a Jewish state in the ancestral Jewish homeland would be unnatural: “Zionism is, at best, the paralysed attempt by an incapable people to create something productive, but more often just a means for greedy speculators to create a new military base for Jewish world domination” (Rosenberg 1922: 84).

Several leading Arab opponents of a Jewish presence in the land of Israel drew on this ideology. Hasan al-Banna, a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, was an avid reader of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. From 1935, the Brotherhood sent delegations to the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. At the 1938 Parliamentary Conference for Arab and Muslim Countries in Cairo, they distributed Arabic translations of selections from Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, repeatedly met Hitler and helped recruit Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen SS and in SS killing units. Convicted of war crimes, he found asylum in Egypt where he took in Yasser Arafat as his protégé.

The Muslim Brotherhood were, however, only one of many anti-colonial groups who came to see the Nazis as ideological allies. David Motadel (2019: 843) describes how, in the early 1940s, the German capital Berlin became

… a hub of global anti-imperial revolutionary activism. […] Scores of anticolonial leaders flocked to Germany, among them Indians; prominent Arabs, including the Iraqi nationalist Rashid ʿAli al-Kaylani, the Syrian rebel leader Fawzi al-Qawuqji, and Amin al-Husayni, the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem; Irish radicals, such as Seán Russell; and nationalist revolutionaries from Central Asia and the Caucasus – Turkestanis, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, and others. The Arab nationalist Yunus Bahri, exulted in his memoirs about wartime Germany’s anticolonial international: ‘Delegations from oppressed, colonized, and occupied lands such as the Maghrib, Russia, the Arab lands, and India were coming to Berlin, which was victorious on all battlefields.’ Many of them saw Germany as an ally in their struggle for a new world order. They set up political committees. They published their own papers. They convened congresses, calling for the liberation of the oppressed peoples. Some even made efforts to organize military and paramilitary units.

The Nazi appropriation of anti-colonialism built on earlier strands within German nationalism, which posited an ethnic-nativist alternative to the constitutional, civic nationalism of post-Revolutionary France. Projects like the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad railway became vehicles for German propaganda designed to forge counter-imperial alliances in the Middle East and Asia, with Emperor William II posing as an ally of indigenous peoples against British and French imperialism, claiming the German nation was always on the side of indigeneity (Marchand 2009; Gossman 2013). In the inter-war period this resonated with increasing numbers of anti-colonial activists who had become disillusioned with the Wilsonian brand of liberal national self-determination. It was not difficult to merge this new approach with antisemitism, drawing on two long-standing anti-Jewish libels. First, the power libel: where political virtue was defined not in terms of actual behaviours, but simply in terms of asymmetries of power, Jews seemed like obvious suspects, propping up, and benefitting from, the exploitation of indigenous populations. Second, the trope of the “wandering Jew” made it easy to cast Jews as “natural globalists”, colonising other nations like parasites invading a healthy body: the very embodiment of colonialism (Confino 1997).

Today, modern critics of Israel, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, claim that they are rejecting “settler colonialism”, accusing Israel of the theft of Arab lands. For many, this is no just a question of specific plots of land or boundaries: the mere existence of a Jewish state in the ancestral homeland of Jews is for BDS a moral wrong, because it is “colonial”.[34] On one level, this language diverges from the anti-colonialism propagated by the Nazis in which territorial questions played a secondary role. And yet, then as now, the colonial metaphor gives the accusation its ideological power, irrespective of what particular sub-category of colonialism is being debated. This metaphor connects questions about Israel’s right to exist to a pervasive discourse of “decolonisation”, understood as a moral imperative to “decolonise” Western knowledge cultures, which are seen as implicated in the creation of white supremacy. Decolonisation thus understood is about addressing “the epistemic injustice within disciplines […which] renders the collective interpretive resources required for epistemic justice structurally prejudiced” (Keet 2014). Drawing on the post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, who calls for resistance to colonial epistemologies, many have accorded a particular symbolic power to acts of violence in the overthrow of this order. From this starting premise, it is not difficult to arrive at an endorsement of violence as a “cleansing act of self-constitution, a redemptive act of regeneration” (Fanon 2001; see also Silverman 2009). Like the colonial libel itself, the idea that violence can serve as a catalyst for overthrowing colonial Jewish oppression has remained an ideological constant – even if the political context in which it is now applied has changed dramatically.

The colonial libel prime also exemplifies another quality of antisemitism as an ideology. Its aims cannot be achieved by gradual improvement or accommodation. It requires a totalising act of liberation to bring forth a new world: eliminating Jews will act as a trigger for profound and irreversible historical change. This is what Saul Friedlaender (1997, esp. Chapter 1) called “redemptive” antisemitism (see also Volkov 2003). Friedlaender used this term to distinguish Nazi antisemitism, and Hitler’s in particular, from more “traditional” forms of Christian Judeophobia. And yet the implied promise of spiritual redemption is of course in itself a religious promise. The industrialised mass murder of the Holocaust, the intent to wipe out the entire world’s Jewish population, was indeed unprecedented and remains so to this day. However, the association of antisemitism with acts of redemptive violence is not unique. We have seen several instances in this article. It was present in pogroms that became a staple of medieval, early modern and modern European history. It was present not just in the deranged fantasies of Hitler, but also in the actions of those perfectly ordinary men who enjoyed, and were mobilised by, the affective experience of the myriad individual acts of violence – against Jewish people as well as against sacred objects of Judaism – that occurred before, during and after the Holocaust (Browning 1998). As Wildt (2012) and others have shown, violence was not only a symptom of radicalisation: it was itself a tool for it. Arguably, this explains why the upsurge in current antisemitism was not sparked by the mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, nor by Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza from 27 October 2023, but 20 days earlier, by the violent attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians living in kibbutzim or attending a music festival. The UK watchdog Community Security Trust (CST) reported 1 330 antisemitic attacks in October 2023, more than the three previous highest monthly totals combined. 11 October saw 80 incidents – the highest number ever reported to CST on a single day.[35] While the wave of antisemitic incidents in the UK has barely subsided since, the October 2023 figure remains unsurpassed. As CST points out, this suggests that “it was celebration of Hamas’ attack, rather than anger towards Israel’s military response in Gaza, that prompted the unprecedented levels of antisemitism across the country.”[36] The taboo-breaking violence of the 7 October assault, which involved the rape and torture of women and children and was widely distributed as perpetrator-made trophy videos on social media, itself was the key mobilising moment (Ebbrecht-Hartmann 2024). This was not confined to the UK. In Australia, personalised car number plates appeared dedicated to the celebration of 7 October.[37] In the US, Columbia History professor Joseph Massad, writing in The Electronic Intifada on 8 October, celebrated the “innovative Palestinian resistance”, praised as “stunning videos” the horrific trophy footage of murder and torture, and included a sub-heading entitled “Jubilation and awe”.[38] Cornell History Professor Russell John Rickford screamed ecstatically into a megaphone: “Hamas have punctured the illusion of invincibility: it was exhilarating, it was energising.”[39] And Lake Micah, assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine, wrote of “Palestinians’ world historical audacity” and “actions in need of no apologia”.[40]

The barbarity of the assault, shocking as it was, seems also to have acted as a catalyst, actualising, if only for one futile moment, the redemptive promise inherent in antisemitism. This implicit utopianism constitutes the “positive” core of antisemitism, an ideology only seemingly defined only be negative, the “anti”. It resembles what Griffin called palingenetic ultranationalism, which he classified as the defining core of fascism: the longing for national rebirth that achieves social transformation not through specific steps or measures, but though a spiritual event, of which violence is a necessary feature (Griffin 1991). The same implicit utopianism defines antisemitism as an ideology.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I suggested that antisemitism is best understood as an ideology. Like other ideologies, antisemitism itself has no agency. It is a set of templates or epistemological shortcuts for making sense of the world. It needs to be mobilised by specific actors to have effects in the real world. The motivations of such actors vary: the ideology they are using to give their actions a political shape and direction, however, transcends specific circumstances. Antisemitism has certainly evolved over time, has acquired new supporters, and has developed links with new ideological clusters. It is not a singular, immutable force. At the same time, we are not dealing with entirely separate phenomena in different chronological and geographical contexts. Anti-Jewish libels have remained surprisingly constant across time and space. So has the redemptive promise at its core: explicitly or implicitly, taking or calling for violent action against Jews – especially in the public and performative form of a pogrom – is never just about expressing anger. It is also the staging of a desired new ideological formation: a world without Jews as a world without exploitation, without inequality, without power.

What does this analysis contribute to ideology studies more broadly? Antisemitism was not atypical in channelling ideological momentum against a perceived injustice, rather than for a clearly defined set of aims. This does not mean that such anti-ideologies have no goal or telos. This goal may not be expressed as clearly defined principles for the political organisation of the world. But anti-ideologies, too, offer a redemptive promise that far exceeds a single political issue. As Kingsnorth (2004) put it in his analysis of contemporary anti-capitalist ideologies, they consist of “one no, many yeses”. Addressing a specific “problem” – capitalism, colonialism, Jewish world domination – is imagined as the key to saving or redeeming the world as a whole. Such ideologies use sophisticated mechanisms for decontesting this core claim. History serves this function in antisemitism, providing a constant arsenal for embedding topical ideological messaging in deep-rooted collective memories of anti-Jewish libels, thus adding to their emotional power.

As argued in Ideologies in Action, too much of existing scholarship assumes a top-down model of ideology analysis (Humphrey, Laycock and Umbach 2019). When studying the grassroots levels of ideologies, scholars often assume a trickle-down effect from great texts via propaganda, media, political speeches and rituals; even Billig’s (1995) Banal Nationalism traces official symbols in everyday practice. It may be more plausible to assume that ideologies are co-produced from above and below. Key ideas and images are constantly repurposed and given new meanings in vernacular practice. They function not so much as formal ideas or theorems, but metaphors or “pathos formulas” (Warburg, see Becker 2013). These political emotions are building blocks of ideologies every bit as much as what we might traditionally recognise as “ideas” or “values”.

A focus on emotion in ideology studies can help reveal the function of the “anti” moment in so many of them. Ideologies often focus on grievances and channel the emotions released by them. As such, antisemitism mirrors what we might call the populist quality of many ideologies. Like antisemitism, populism’s appeal is based on hatred for the Other. And like antisemitism, populism imbues this Other with an oddly dual quality: something inferior, to be despised (e.g. foreigners, migrants), but also something powerful and dangerous (globalists, economic elites, the deep state). And like antisemitism, populism suggests that the world will, almost by magic, be improved if only this Other can be eliminated or neutralised. This is why the reach of ideologies is difficult to measure. An ideas-based conception of ideologies assumes that people identify with an ideology in a state of calm, because they are proud to espouse its core values. An emotions-based conception of ideologies explains why, in a state of agitation and frustration, ideological allegiances shift quickly. In such situations, an ideology which, in survey data, has support from only a few per cent of the population, can suddenly inspire and motivate a majority to political action.

References

Anderson, G. K. (1965) The Legend of the Wandering Jew. Hanover NH: Brown University Press.

Becker, C. (2013) “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln as a methodological paradigm”, Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 9, 1–25.

Beller, S. (2007) Anti-semitism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bennett, G. (2005) “Towards a revaluation of the legend of ‘Saint’ William of Norwich and its place in the blood libel legend”, Folklore, vol. 116, no. 2, 119–121.

Berman, S. (2021) “The causes of populism in the West”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 24, 71–88.

Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, London: Sage.

Browning, C. R. (1998) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York NY: Harper Perennial.

Brustein, W. I. and King, R. D. (2004) “Anti-semitism as a response to perceived Jewish power: The cases of Bulgaria and Romania before the Holocaust”, Social Forces, vol. 83, no. 2, 691–708.

Cave, M. (2023) “Anti-Racism Education”, Jewish News, 29/22/2023, [Online], Available: www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-anti-racism-education-needs-to-move-beyond-lectures-heres-why/

Chaouat, B. (2016) Is Theory Good for the Jews? French Thought and the Challenge Of The New Antisemitism, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Confino, A. (1997) The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Confino, A. (2014) A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Consonni, M. (2022) “‘Upping the antis’: Addressing the conceptual ambiguities surrounding ‘antisemitism’”, Society, vol. 59, no. 1, 25–33.

Dundes, A. (2007) “The ritual murder or blood libel legend: A study of anti-Semitic victimization through projective inversion”, in Bronner, S. J. (ed.) Meaning of Folklore, Denver CO: Utah State University Press: 282–409.

Ebbrecht-Hartmann, T. (2024) “Bilder des Siebten Oktobers”, Zeitgeschichte Online, October 2024, Available: https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/bilder-des-siebten-oktobers

Falk, A. (2008) Anti-Semitism: A History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred, Westport CT: Praeger.

Fanon, F. (2001) The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Books.

Fischer, E., Baur, E. and Lenz, F. (1921) Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene [Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene], Munich: J. F. Lehmanns.

Fox, A. (2010) Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype, New York NY: St Martin’s Press.

Freeden, M. (1986) Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Friedlaender, S. (1997) Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York NY: HarperCollins.

Fritzche, P. (2011) The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner writes the Twentieth Century, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Geertz, C. (1964) “Ideology as a cultural system”, in Apter, D. E. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, New York NY: Free Press of Glencoe: 47–76.

Gilbert, M. (2010) In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim lands, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Gossman, L. (2013) The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

Griffin, R. (1991) The Nature of Fascism, New York NY: St Martin’s Press.

Gross, J. T. (2006) Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hagen, W. W. (1996) “Before the ‘Final solution’: Toward a comparative analysis of political antisemitism in Interwar Germany and Poland”, Journal of Modern History, vol. 68, no. 2, 351–381.

Hauser, J. and Janáčová, E. (eds.) (2021) Visual Anti-semitism in Central Europe: Imagery of Hatred, Munich: Walter de Gruyter.

Herf, J. (2023) Three Faces of Anti-semitism: Right, Left and Islamist, London: Routledge.

Hirsh, D. (2017) Contemporary Left Antisemitism, London: Routledge.

Hirsh, D. (ed.) (2023) The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21^st century, London: Routledge.

Hirsh, D. and Miller, H. (2022) “Durban antizionism: Its sources, its impact, and its relation to older anti-Jewish ideologies”, Journal of Contemporary Anti-semitism, vol. 5, no. 1, 19–34.

Humphrey, M., Laycock, D. and Umbach, M. (2019) “Mediating between macro, meso, and micro morphologies: Adaptation and application in political ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 24, no. 2, 113–20.

Humphrey, M., Umbach, M. and Clulow, Z. (2019) “The political is personal: An analysis of crowd-sourced political ideas from a massive open online course”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 24, no. 2, 121–38.

Johnson, A. (ed.) (2024) Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays, London: Routledge.

Kager, J. M. (1627) Bavaria Sancta: The Life and Martyrdom of Holy Men and Women (Vol. III).

Kampling, R. (2005) “Deicide”, in Levy, R. S. (ed.) Anti-semitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO: 168–169.

Keet, A. (2014) “Epistemic ‘othering’ and the decolonisation of knowledge”, Africa Insight, vol. 44, no. 1, June, 23–37.

Kingsnorth, P. (2004) One No, Many Yeses, New York NY: The Free Press.

Küntzel, M. (2024) Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East. The Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II, London: Routledge.

Lampert-Weissig, L. (2015) “The wandering Jew as relic”, English Language Notes, vol. 53, no. 2, 89–101.

Laquer, W. (2006) The Changing Faces of Antisemitism, from Ancient Times to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latzel, K. (2000) Deutsche Soldaten, Nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung 1939–1945, Netherlands: Schöningh.

Levi, N. (1998) “‘Judge for yourselves!’: The degenerate art exhibition as political spectacle”, October, vol. 85, 41–64.

Levy, R. S. (ed.) (2005). Anti-semitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO.

Marchand, S. L. (2009) German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religions, Race, and Scholarship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marr, W. (1880) Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum, Berlin: Hentze.

Michael, R. (2008) A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church, New York NY and Basingstoke UK: Palgrave.

Moses, D. (2021) The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Motadel, D. (2019) “The global authoritarian moment and the revolt against empire”, American Historical Review, vol. 124, no. 3, 843–877.

Penslar, D. (2017) “Is Zionism a colonial movement?”, in Katz, E. B. et al. (eds.) Colonialism and the Jews, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press: 275–300.

Perry, M. and Schweitzer, F. M. (2005). Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present, New York NY: Palgrave.

Poliakov, L. (2003) The History of Anti-Semitism, 3 vols, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Prawdin, M. (1938) Tschingis Chan: Der Sturm aus Asien, Revised edition of Tschingis Chan und seine Erbe, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1934.

Ricci, D. (2020) A Political Science Manifesto for the Age of Populism: Challenging Growth, Markets, Inequality and Resentment, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Riff, M. A. (1976) “Czech antisemitism and the Jewish response before 1914”, Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. 29, 39–40.

Rosenberg, A. (1922) Der staatsfeindliche Zionismus auf Grund jüdischer Quellen erläutert, München: Deutschvölkische Verlagsanstalt.

Schmuhl, H-W. (2003) The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

Seymour, D. (2019) “Continuity and discontinuity: From antisemitism to antizionism and the reconfiguration of the Jewish question”, Journal of Contemporary Anti-semitism, vol. 2, no. 2, 11–24.

Silverman, M. (2009) “Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and violence,” in Forsdick, C. and Murphy, D. (ed.) Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press: 83–84.

Smith, H. W. (2002) The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German town, New York and London: W.W. Norton.

Steuwer, J. (2017) “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse”: Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933–1939, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

Volkov, S. (2003) “Revisiting Friedländer on Nazi antisemitism”, Journal of Holocaust Research, vol. 37, no. 1, 50–56.

Walter, A. S., and Drochon, H. (2022) “Conspiracy thinking in Europe and America: A comparative study”, Political Studies, vol. 70, no. 2, 483–501.

Wildt, M. (2012) Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939, New York NY: Berghahn Books.

Wistrich, R. (2004) “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism”, Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 3/4, 27–31.

11. The radical right and the ideologies of post-postmodern conservatism

Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-15

Introduction

For decades, even centuries, conservatism seemed to stand in unmovable opposition to ideology. From at least the time of Burke, conservatives extolled the virtues of tradition and settled customs, of tried and tested practices, of prudent and incremental evolution rather than radical change and of inherited hierarchies and social orders. Standing against rationalist schemes for human perfection and revolutionary ideologies calling for the radical remaking of individuals and societies that it saw at the heart of much that was wrong in the modern world, traditional conservatism declared itself anti-ideological by intellectual conviction and political disposition.

This image still captures the attitude of parts of the political right, but in recent years it has been joined – and in many cases arguably supplanted – by a quite different vision. In many areas, conservatism has become radical in both form and content. Its rhetoric is extreme, its concepts jarring and its prescriptions sometimes overtly revolutionary. In this radical conservatism, traditional conservative distrust of ideology is intellectually anachronistic and politically obsolete. Ideology – radical ideology – is essential, as are clear ideological programmes aligned with parties and movements explicitly committed to carrying them forward. Although these programmatic aspects are inevitably diluted or compromised in day-to-day political struggles, it is impossible to miss the transformation in contemporary conservatism from a distrust of ideology to deep ideological commitment. Ideology – and ideological analysis – is thus central to engaging the contemporary radical right.

In this chapter we seek to outline key elements of this complex transformation. Importantly, we argue, it is not simply the product of philosophical debates on the right. It emerges from the conviction, dating to at least WW I, that modernity (and now late or post-modernity) has swept away the social foundations of traditional conservatism, rendering it anachronistic. Radical conservatism is not a nostalgic call to return to tradition: it is a truly radical political ideology that recognises the erosion of previous national, social and political imaginaries by the forces of late/post-modernity but seeks to transform this situation from a source of conservative despair into one of radical possibilities and action.

To make this argument, we proceed in three stages. First, we outline an approach that sees ideology as a form of action taking place against specific political and historical contexts. Today’s radical conservatism represents just such an ideology. The second section examines one of the key struggles that gives it structure and direction: its opposition to what we call global liberal managerialism. Finally, in the third section we look at how this ideology appropriates many of the core claims usually associated with post-modernity, using them to construct a radical conservative vision of domestic politics and international order.

Ideology and radical conservatism

In his widely influential contributions to understanding the history of ideas, Quentin Skinner argues that to grasp the thinking of an era we need to understand both the historical context in which those ideas were produced and the ways that specific thinkers used conceptual innovations for political purposes (Skinner 1978: xi-xiii; Skinner 1995). Whereas analytic philosophy and much of political science treat concepts in purely logical or descriptive terms, a contextualist approach treats theory development and conceptual definition and contestation as forms of action. Theory construction is “intentional”: it seeks to define ways of thinking and thus to influence ways of acting. As Tully (1983: 496) puts it:

Since a political ideology represents political action (institutions, practices, etc.), to change some of the conventions of the ideology is to change the way in which some of that political action is represented. The manipulated conventions re-describe and so re-characterize the political action

and so legitimate or challenge certain positions. Concepts in this understanding can function as weapons, as “contributions to ideological controversies and as weapons of vindication or subversion in the strategies of local political forces whether or not the author recognizes it.

A contextual method thus moves beyond textual approaches that look solely at the “logic” of authors’ arguments and

enables us to characterize what these authors were doing in writing them. We can begin to see not merely what arguments they were presenting, but also what questions they were addressing and trying to answer and how far they were accepting and endorsing or questioning and repudiating or perhaps even polemically ignoring, the prevailing assumptions and conventions of political debate (Skinner 1978: xiii).

Focusing on the importance of context in understanding a set of ideas or political ideology stresses the need to understand the world in which the author intervenes and the debates that they might be engaged in. This is not just a question of situating texts in their respective socio-economic contexts, as if those texts were mere reflections of “deeper” material realities; it also involves situating the texts synchronically in relation to the other texts, linguistic conventions and cultural discourses that originally informed their production (Skinner 2007). As Skinner emphasises, because “the concepts we have inherited – and the interpretations we place upon those concepts – are just frozen conflicts, the outcomes of ideological debate,” intellectual history cannot focus solely on the views of those who temporarily won those debates. It must also engage “in an act of retrieval, trying to recover wider and missing structures of debate” (Skinner 2007: §4). Nowhere is this clearer than in understanding the radical right.

Conservatism is not a rigorously developed and cohesive school of thought but a constellation of ideas, attitudes and thinkers revolving around a series of historically situated rejections of liberal and socialist thought. As Karl Mannheim argues, conservatism “is a counter-movement and this fact alone already makes it reflective: it is, after all a response, so to speak, to the ‘self-organisation’ and agglomeration of ‘progressive’ elements in experience and thinking” (Mannheim 1997 [1936]: 84). Against the abstract, speculative tendencies of modern thought, conservatism emphasises the comforting immediacy of shared cultural conventions and self-evident truths. It affirms the importance of historical heritage, collective memory and the concrete, situated experience of one’s particular environment as the main determinants of political thought and action.

Contrary to what is often suggested by critics, conservatism is not necessarily committed to maintaining the status quo. Rather, conservatism seeks to prevent the sort of abrupt and disruptive change sought by forces perceived to be of the left and destructive of what conservatives at the time want to preserve. It does this typically by insisting on the presence of forces – e.g. nature, God, biology, history – deemed to be beyond human control and which impose severe limitations on the perfectibility of the human condition. Conservative intellectuals and scholars of political ideologies often supplement key characteristic of conservative thinking with a list of more substantive political concepts in their respective efforts to provide a more precise and comprehensive definition (Kirk 1953; Buckley 1959; Nisbet 1986; Welsh 2010; Scruton 2017; Robin 2017). According to Edmund Fawcett’s recent survey of the conservative tradition, for example, conservatism can be understood as a retort to liberal modernity revolving around four key tenets: a strong belief in social unity; incredulity towards meta narratives of moral progress; trust and respect for the authority of established institutions; and the rejection of the idea that all individuals are equal in any sense except in the eyes of God or before the law (2020: 41). Andrew Heywood’s influential Introduction to Political Ideologies (2017: 65–73) similarly suggests that conservatism is defined by the five core principles of organic society, tradition, human imperfection, property and authority.

However tempting, the difficulty with such attempts to identify a more substantive ideational essence in conservatism is that these concepts are notoriously vague and open to a wide variety of interpretations and configurations; they are also not exclusive to the ideological repertoire of the Right. As Michael Freeden argues: “to ransack conservatism for the substantive core concepts and ideas located in rival progressive ideologies, such as liberty, reason, sociability or welfare, is to look at the wrong place” (1996: 333). For apart from the morphological consistency provided by its core commitments to organic change and the randomness and uncontrollability of events and human behaviour,

conservative ideology can only display a substantive coherence that is contingent and time- and space-specific, because that coherence is created solely as a reflection of the substantive internal congruence of the rival ideological structures which the particular conservative discourse aims at rebutting (Freeden 1996: 339; see also Neil 2021; Eatwell and O’Sullivan 1989).

What we call radical conservatism or the radical right in this chapter has its origins in an anti-Enlightenment current that is consciously traditionalist and “reactionary”, insofar as it emerged as a reaction to the breakdown in the sacred historical order thought to have been created and guided by an inexplicable Providence. However, it only came into its own as a distinct style of right-wing politics during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries as a response to the rise of socialism and the perceived failures of conventional conservatism and bourgeois society to deal with the challenges of mass liberal democracy. As Jerry Muller argues:

The radical conservative shares many of the concerns of more conventional conservatism, such as the need for institutional authority and continuity with the past, but believes that the processes characteristic of modernity have destroyed the valuable legacy of the past for the present.

This leads to the conclusion that “a restoration of the virtues of the past” requires abandoning the gradualist attitude of conventional conservatism in favour of a more militant, voluntarist and programmatic approach that will command the loyalty of individuals and bind them together into an organic whole to a greater extent than existing institutions can be expected to do under present conditions of socio-cultural decay (1991: 697).

The threshold delimiting where conventional conservatism ends and radical conservatism begins is often ambiguous, not least because the problematic relationship to tradition and authority determining this continuum of reaction can manifest itself differently depending on the context. The context in which radical conservatives operate today is no longer defined by the disappearance of the aristocratic worldview and the all-pervasive threat of a world Communist revolution. Instead, it marked by the erosion of “national social imaginaries” and the end of grand meta narratives of progress that scholars generally associate with globalisation and the cultural phenomenon of “post-modernity”.

Global liberal managerialism and the erosion of national social imaginaries

The concept of “social imaginary” was developed by the Canadian political theorist Charles Taylor. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (2006 [1983]), Taylor defines social imaginaries as pre-reflexive background understandings through which we imagine our collective existence, make sense of our day-to-day social environment and develop normative and empirical understandings of how to act in the world (Taylor 2003). As in Husserl’s concept of the “lifeworld” (1970 [1936]) or Bourdieu’s concept of the “habitus” (1977), the social imaginary provides the ground of knowledge in lived experience and thus constitutes the implicit taken-for-granted rules of the game.

From this perspective, nationalism is qualitatively different from other modern political ideologies insofar as it has provided the broad contextual common sense out of which all grand political ideologies have emerged and developed into more focused assemblages of concepts and aspirations since the French Revolution (Anderson 1983; Taylor 2003). As Manfred B. Steger argues in an insightful interpretation:

Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism and Nazism/fascism were all ‘nationalist’ in the sense of performing the same fundamental task of translating the overarching national imaginary into concrete political doctrines, agendas and spatial arrangements”. [Despite significant differences in political orientation and normative commitments, modern political ideologies] normalized national territories; spoke in recognized national languages; appealed to national histories; told national legends and myths or glorified a national ‘race’. They articulated the national imaginary according to certain criteria that were said to constitute the defining essence of the community (Steger 2013: 7–8).

Since the 1970s and especially since the end of the Cold War, this idea that there is something “essential” about any given culture or national political community has lost a great deal of credibility. In Europe, North America and beyond, this scepticism has been matched by a growing public awareness of the world as an inter-connected planetary whole that transcends the state-centrism of historically dominant political ideologies. Although the socio-cultural foundation of national imaginaries has certainly not disappeared, the social affiliations they have sustained over the past two centuries are increasingly dissociated from a world of economic globalisation, population flows and global imaginaries facilitated by digital media.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1999) sought to capture this disassociation when he declared that Western liberal democracies had entered a new era of “liquid modernity” at the beginning of the 21^st century. At one level, liquid modernity is the conservative’s worst nightmare. For if one of the main characteristics of modernity is the fragility and transience of all forms of life, liquid modernity represents the intensification of this capacity for constant change in which previously “solid” categories such as employment, place of residence, commitments and relationships have become fluid. Liquid modernity marks a chronic weakening of the relationship between labour and capital and the unleashing of capital’s power to dissolve social and communal bonds. As individuals are cut loose from traditional networks of support, they are also freed from the restrictions or requirements those networks impose. In Bauman’s words, we have moved from a world in which we understood ourselves as “pilgrims” in search of deeper meaning to a world that we inhabit as “tourists”, changing places, jobs, spouses, values and often political and even sexual orientation in search of multiple fleeting social experiences. The consequence of this nomadic mindset is that constructing a durable identity that coheres over time and space which can effectively mobilise populations for collective action becomes increasingly difficult.

Social scientists identify the origins of these trends with various forms of globalisation. The radical right does not necessarily contest this interpretation. However, one of its key ideological planks is the claim that we should understand globalisation and this associated loss of attachment to the nation–state and particular localities as part of a new “managerial society”.[41] Globalisation is not the inevitable outcome of progressive modernisation or the consequence of neoliberal capitalism alone. It is instead a mechanism of wilful exploitation associated with the concrete agency of the so-called “managerial elites” or New Class – an increasingly global network of bureaucratic and technocratic elites that exercise power by managing and manipulating social change through their control of the economy and state, international and cultural institutions, such as mass media, schools and philanthropic organisations of all kinds.

This managerial theory of modernisation comes in many variants. Its origins can be traced back to the appropriation and adaptation of late 19^th-century anarchist critiques of Soviet-style communism in the work of Bruno Rizzi (1939). On the radical right, its most notable and influential theorist was the American ex-Trotskyite James Burnham. In The Managerial Revolution (1941: 39), Burnham argues that a trend of economic organisation had been developing in industrialised countries since 1914, in which a “New Class” of technically skilled managers and administrators were engaged in a “drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class”. According to Burnham, this new elite had displaced the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie that lacked the technical and functional skills to operate the 20^th-century mass society that they had created. At the same time, the classical liberal ideology that had supported the bourgeois order of the 19^th-century liberal gave way to the “new liberalism” that stressed the importance of the administrative state in managing mass democracy and large-scale capitalism. This ideological transformation marked a shift in the dominant forms of social power, which no longer lie in the ownership of the means of production but in the control of the means of production, the expert administration of mass societies and the mechanisms of economic redistribution.

Building on this diagnosis, today’s New Right ideologues argue that the contemporary New Class is composed of managers, lawyers, academics, information technologists, behavioural therapists and bureaucrats and consultants of all sorts who occupy positions of economic and political power in the post-industrial “information” society. The source and legitimation of their power lies in their claim to expertise and the indispensable need for it in managing modern life. The interests of this new ruling elite lie in maintaining and extending the increasingly global managerial institutions that it controls and in ensuring that the needs for and rewards of the technical skills they possess are valued and continuously increased. Yet like all successful ideologies, managerialism does not simply address the interests of the newly dominant elite. Instead, it claims both the objective need for its rule and a universal moral basis for it. The dominant ideology thus values more than expertise alone – it presents its authority and rule as being in the interests and committed to the wellbeing of others: to universal justice, equality and human rights. In the process, according to influential New Right thinkers like Paul Gottfried (1999) and Sam Francis (2016), this ideology facilitates the reproduction of a globalised economy in which the values of education, cultural capital, mobility, technical knowledge and connections to elite networks have become the primary determinants of salary, status and social advancement.

In this view, managerial elite networks have been central to the emergence and consolidation of the mass administrative state during the 20^th century. But the continuous expansion of those managerial networks now requires modes of thinking that facilitate the “liquidation” of the nation–state. This is partly because corporate economic interests require the mobility of both capital and labour and they seek relatively homogeneous markets in which there is little place for local ties and traditions. The globalising drive of liberal networks of power is also mandated by the progressive universalism underpinning the managerial revolution and by the infinite administrative, developmental and social engineering opportunities offered by a global political arena unregulated by a central enforcing authority. As Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier declare in the millennial Manifesto of the French Nouvelle Droite (2011 [1999]):

In the process of globalization, Western civilization is promoting the worldwide domination of a ruling class whose only claim to legitimacy resides in its abstract manipulations (logico-symbolic) of the signs and values of the system already in place. Aspiring to uninterrupted growth of capital and to the permanent reign of social engineering, this New Class provides the manpower for the media, large national and multinational firms and international organizations. This New Class produces and reproduces everywhere the same type of person: cold-blooded specialists, rationality detached from day to day realities. It also engenders abstract individualism, utilitarian beliefs, a superficial humanitarianism, indifference to history, an obvious lack of culture, isolation from the real world, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual, an inclination to corruption, nepotism and to buying votes.

Culturally, managerial liberalism claims to support and foster diversity, a claim that radical conservative ideology dismisses as illusory. In fact, they argue that far from promoting cultural pluralism, the managerial elites overseeing this cosmopolitan project reduce all values to subjective “lifestyles” and then subject those lifestyles to their manipulation by the market and the regulation by bureaucratic, therapeutic and cultural “experts” who prescribe acceptable forms of diversity within institutions of global governance and proscribe those they find offensive or politically incorrect (Francis 1991; 2000). Despite its claims to foster individuality and value cultural diversity, managerial liberalism is thus increasingly socially intrusive, enforcing what New Class elites and their allies see as acceptable forms of culture and individuality and using multiple forms of social power to do so. Managerial ideology, Gottfried (1999) suggests, exercises forms of power that pre-managerial despots could only dream of.

The consolidation of this liberal managerial order at a global level is closely linked to the rise of American power, the reconstruction and political–economic integration of the European Union and the concomitant expansion of capitalist networks in the Third World/Global South. However, unlike in classical Marxist theories of imperialism, the power of managerial liberalism is not a question of expanding the control of a given state or political–cultural unit over new territories, nor is it driven primarily by the need to find new markets and cheap labour and material resources to counter potential crises of over-production and over-accumulation. Rather, managerial globalism is motivated by the desire and capability of the managerial elite located in state, economic and mass cultural institutions to increase its power by developing managerial infrastructures in societies where these do not yet exist. Over time, the bureaucratic logic and imperatives of these organisational instruments, along with the interests of those who control them, tend to outgrow the political constraints of the national state (Gottfried 1999; Faye 2010 [1998]; De Benoist and Champetier 2011 [1999]; Francis 2016: 471–473).

In the radical conservative vision, the UN, NATO, the OSCE, the IMF, the World Bank and the thousands of NGOs and aid agencies established during and after the Cold War to help “modernise” and “develop” the non-Western world are all part of this political project designed to erode and replace national, racial and cultural particularisms with rootless cosmopolitan identities atomised within the framework of mass organisations. Global managerial ideologies thus target “traditional” social orders, states, ideas and identities that oppose its expansion, as New Rightists feel is the case with liberal international human rights campaigns and support for mass immigration. The primary methods for dealing with this resistance are the “soft” powers of liberal “global governance” – therapeutic social and education policies, cultural stigmatisation and legal activism – though recourse to violent coercion is also frequent, as the wars advocated and conducted by managerial liberal elites and states in the name of liberal democracy and human rights demonstrate. As norms of state sovereignty and great power responsibilities become more fluid, so do previously “solid” distinctions between domestic politics and foreign policy, citizens and aliens, war and peace, civilians and combatants and so on. The result is a totalising form of political power – ideological, technical, economic and institutional – that is in perpetual motion and increasingly disconnected from and destructive of place-bound histories, substantive communities and traditions. Having vanquished the limits on power that classical liberalism found in limited government, natural rights and national sovereignty, managerial liberalism is an ideology unbound.

Post-modern possibilities / post-modern populism

Liquid or post-modernity can at first glance seem to represent everything conservatives oppose – and as we have seen, in many ways it is. However, to view radical conservatism as simply opposed to post-modernity is to miss much that is unique in its ideology. Indeed, for important parts of this ideology, pure opposition to late or post-modern society is one of the errors of mainstream conservative movements, leaving them with little more than nostalgia and politically ineffective appeals to a world of yesterday. By contrast, some of the most challenging articulations of radical conservative ideologies are not unremittingly hostile to post-modern positions. Instead, they combine critique with appropriation, seeking a paradoxical revaluation and reorientation of post-modern insights toward reactionary ends.[42]

From these positions, post-modernism’s incredulity toward philosophical foundationalism and historical meta narratives of progress raises the paradoxical possibility of a reactionary “revival of myth and the tragic, agonistic worldview laying at the origins of Western civilisation and its best cultural achievements – what Spengler called the ‘Faustian spirit’” ( Steuckers 2012: 248–249). As De Benoist and Champetier emphasise, this is not a question of overcoming the crisis of modernity by returning to the past, but of recovering “certain premodern values in a decisively postmodern dimension” (1999: §2).

These thinkers see neo-Marxist, post-structuralist and post-colonial critiques of ideology as potentially valuable contributions to a radical conservative political project. Critiques of the ideological bases of Western modernity, deconstructions of the false pretences of Western universalism and exposés of modern and Western rights as disguising an underlying “will to power” all find support amongst ideologists in these parts of the right. However, the problem, as radical conservatives see it, is that critiques of modern ideology on the left fail to follow their analysis to its logical conclusions. As Alexander Dugin argues, rather than “subjecting to deconstruction the principles of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘equality’, etc.,” its protagonists demand “more ‘freedom’, ‘real democracy’ and ‘full equality’ and criticise modernity for failing to deliver these” (Dugin 2021:31). In many cases, this post-modern progressivism amounts

to the demand for complete repudiation of the ‘will to power’ altogether, from any hierarchy and appeal to a general, relaxed chaos, in which any hierarchical geometry of being, knowledge, society, politics, materiality, gender, production practices, etc., dies out and is erased (Dugin 2021: 88–89).

By contrast, radical conservatism fully embraces the “will to power” as a primordial feature of social life – and of ideology. But it “relativizes this will” at the same time as it exposes the moral hypocrisy of liberal universals and their New Class advocates (Steuckers 2012; Dugin 2021: 89). The aim is to transmute the conditions of moral relativism, media immediacy and cultural–aesthetic eclecticism heralded by post-modernism into an opportunity for a contribution to the reconstitution of an ethno–political populism best suited to the sociological and geopolitical demands of the 21^st century. Michael O’Meara (2013: 261–262) summarises this view in his sympathetic survey of the movement:

New Rightists approach postmodernism in ways that make it compatible with the traditional – and revolutionary – possibilities still latent in the European idea. Accepting the world’s intrinsic lack of coherence and the relativity of its different orders of value need not, then, trivialize or discredit the European heritage. From the identitarian’s perspective, postmodernism’s broadsides constitute an emphatic justification of tradition’s particularity and the fact that we are who we are only because we make certain decisions to identify with and defend our particular system of truth. The constructed (that is, the human or cultural) character of the historical narrative, the multiplicity of these narratives and their absence of closure are cause for commitment, not despair, for the culturally relative ‘truths’ born of one’s own identity are necessarily more meaningful than those that are not.[43]

According to New Right thinkers, the renewal of traditions and revitalisation of local communities has been made imperative by the disorientating temporalities and disastrous demographic and environmental consequences of globalisation. The alternative is a self-conscious return to tradition as a creative political act. As De Benoist and Champetier argue:

Fostering social interaction and a sense of celebration, traditions inculcate a sense of life’s cycles and provide temporal landmarks. Emphasizing rhythmic passing of the ages and of the seasons, great moments in life and the stages of the passing year, they nourish symbolic imagination and they create a social bond. These traditions must never be frozen in time, but must always be in a state of renewal (2011 [1999]: §10; see also De Benoist 1992).

Appropriating the language of “indigenous sovereignty” of the post-Cold War environmentalist left, radical conservatives insist on a close link between historical heritage, collective memory and spiritual rootedness in ancestral lands against the utopian vision of a cosmopolitan elite that has no concrete ties to the earth.[44] In their eyes, the protection of the ecosystem is inseparable from territorial sovereignty and the defence of “indigenous” white populations. For the theorists of the French Nouvelle Droite, as for Alexander Dugin in Russia (2012) and Greg Johnson (2018) and his acolytes of American Renaissance in the US (Taylor 1998; Santoro 2017), the challenges of the 21^st century call for a new synthesis of tradition and technology that will effect a decisive break with the egalitarianism of modernity to restructure the relationship between the local and the global. Guillaume Faye calls his own influential version of this synthesis Archeofuturism:

To envisage a future society that combines techno-scientific progress with a return to the traditional answers that stretch back into the mists of time. This is perhaps the true face of post-modernity … Could we not imagine and foresee a scenario where most of humanity reverts to living in traditional societies that consume little energy and are socially more stable and happy, while – in the context of globalisation – a minority continues to live according to the techno-industrial model? Might there be two parallel worlds in the future, the worlds of a new Middle Ages and of Hyperscience? Who would be living in each of these worlds and in what numbers? All daring and creative thought must think the unthinkable. I believe that Archeofuturism, an explosive meeting of opposites, is the key to the future, simply because the paradigm of modernity is no longer viable on a global scale (Faye 2010 [1998]: 45–46).

The radical conservative response to the fracturing of traditional social imaginaries by the forces of managerial liberalism and liquid modernity is not to despair at the loss of tradition. It is aggressively to reassert particular traditions and reinsert them into the currents of contemporary social life. In these positions, attacks on modern ideology are fused with self-consciously ideological alternatives that seek to reconfigure political life as an all-consuming conflict between those who wish to deepen the infrastructures that grew out of the geopolitical transformations of the 20^th century and those who wish to dismantle these infrastructures to the profit of nativist and neotraditionalist alternatives. Indeed, many of its leading intellectuals such as De Benoist (1995), Faye (1998), Sunic (2011 [1990]) and Dugin (2012) go so far as to argue that the dissolution of national social imaginaries within which the wide spectrum of modern political ideologies developed since the French Revolution has rendered the conventional distinction between Left and Right somewhat obsolete. The move is a direct challenge to the post-political “beyond left and right” narrative underpinning neoliberal globalisation from the 1990s onward, using it as an opportunity to advocate radical conservative alternatives. It appeals to a “traditional” working class disillusioned by economic dislocation, as well as the condescending cultural cosmopolitanism and intrusive identity politics of the progressive left.

It is also a direct challenge to the ideological fusion between cultural conservatism, neoliberal market fundamentalism and neoconservative militarised internationalism that has defined the centre right since the 1980s, especially since the end of the Cold War. Radical conservatives reject neoliberal forms of conservatism, portraying them as neither conservative nor radical, but as a reconfigured liberalism pretending to conservatism. As a young Belgian New Rightist explains in the journal Arktos, the proliferation of “neo” and “post” prefixes appended to the full range of modern political ideologies today attests to the changing character of the political landscape:

Holding on stubbornly to a rigid left-right-wing thinking pattern, which dates back to the 18^th century, is detrimental to our ability to correctly name the problems in society and formulate solutions. This is why I am sympathetic to the message ‘beyond left and right and against globalism’. The main contradiction on the political level is between imperialism, nowadays in the guise of globalism and the rest of the world (Junkers 2024; see also Gottfried 2017: 140; Piccone 1993–1994).

By stirring anxiety and mobilising stigmas over foreign competition, unemployment, welfare and immigration and casting their baleful outcomes as the responsibility of New Class elites, radical conservatives seek to force mainstream political parties to revise their traditional positions to provoke an exodus of voters from the centre right. That this ambitious re-articulation of the political takes on the mantle of “populism” should not surprise us, but the appeal of this description means that it requires careful handling, for “the people” is not so much the agent as what is at stake in this conflict. As former Trump advisor Steve Bannon contended during a European tour back in 2018:

There will always be ideas, parties and politicians of the Left and the Right, but these categories are beginning to lose their meaning. ‘Left against Right’ is simply a means to divide communities within themselves. The real struggle in the future will be one between the privileged and the dispossessed; between peoples and political classes; between nationalists and globalists; between those who hold traditional values and those who dismiss those values as garbage ... Our system of global government was instituted after the Second World War on the basis of certain rules and imposed through a mixture of central planning, political apathy and lack of trust in the working class. Their rights were progressively wiped away because technocrats believed that there were no other options – alternative possibilities were not seriously considered. Now, this is all changing (Bannon 2018).

In this vision, populism entails an attempt to defend a traditionalist and territorial conception of order against the globalist attempts to recast the entire world from the perspective of universalising ideals.

Different thinkers offer different visions of what a post-liberal order might look like in this respect. Some thinkers like De Benoist (1993; 2011) Faye (2010 [1998]), Dugin (2012; 2021) and Steuckers (2017) believe that the nation–state is irredeemably maladjusted to the changing techno-economic, political and cultural realities of the 21^st century and that the future belongs to much larger-scale forms of neo-imperial spatial orderings and continental integration.[45] Others like Gottfried (2017 [1999]), Francis (2016) and Ruuben Kaalep and August Meister (2020) are convinced that a revitalisation of the sovereign state system based on ethnic nationalism and the empowerment of majority cultures remains the best option for countering the advances of global liberal managerialism. Yet both nationalist and post-nationalist New Right factions tend to converge around the view (and hope) that the international politics of the 21^st century are slowly being re-organised into regional blocs under the leadership of powerful states claiming to represent not just a particular nation or a historical group of nations but a distinct civilization (Kaalep and Meister 2020; Dugin 2021; Steuckers 2022; De Benoist 2023).[46]

Again, different intellectuals delimit civilizations in different ways ( Bettiza, Bolton and Lewis 2023). But most see civilizations as large cultural communities based primarily on ethnicity and more complex and multi-dimensional constellations of values, worldviews, customs and spiritual beliefs that grow organically out of a particular geography. In this view, Samuel Huntington’s influential typology of eight civilizations is overly determined by an American vision of the world, which under-appreciates the pre-Christian sources of European civilization along with the land-based Weltanschauung that sets it apart from the maritime, one-world liberal civilizationism envisioned by Anglo-American powers (De Benoist 2011; Faye 2010 [1998]; Dugin 2021). As De Benoist explains (2011: 28): “power under these emerging conditions of multipolarity is being re-defined as the ability to resist the influence of others rather than to impose one’s own. The main enemy of this pluriverse will be any civilization pretending to be universal and regarding itself as entrusted with a redeeming mission (‘Manifest Destiny’) to impose its model on all others.”

Radical conservatives do not present this civilizationism as a disinterested social scientific observation about the changing character of contemporary politics and ideology, but as a geopolitical project to be realised. Faye uses the term “vitalistic constructivism” to emphasise the organic voluntarism of this neo-Spenglerian project of civilizational building (2010 [1998]: 35). As Dugin emphasises, the key issue here is not whether the existence of civilizations today “is a demonstrated and weighty factor or a weak and turbulent hindrance on the path to the certain onset of unipolarity or West-centric globalisation”. The idea of civilizations as agents of international relations is not some sort of return to the pre-modern age, but a post-modern attempt to create a sense of continuity and evolution from past origins in response to the perceived exhaustion of the nation–state: “Civilizations are that which needs to be created. There is a cultural, sociological, historical, mental, psychological base for civilizations and it is empirical. But the transition from civilization as a cultural and sociological given to civilization as a source of agency in a multipolar world requires effort” (2021: 58–59). In this vision, post-modernity and the relative decline of the West have freed ideological commitments from their ties to a common globality, allowing each civilizational bloc to evolve according to its own epistemic, cultural and spiritual system of belief unencumbered by liberal universality (2021: 149).

Conclusion

Radical conservative contributions to intellectual and political debates on liberal democracy, geopolitics and the future of world order have until quite recently been largely absent from public attention. However, the increasing prominence of radical right parties and movements and the contraction of the political space between the radical right and the centre right in many liberal democratic countries in recent decades has given these ideological visions renewed and often worrying relevance. The diverse actors in these movements mobilise “traditional” values and modern technologies in powerfully novel ways. They display aesthetic, rhetorical and intellectual strategies drawn from a wide range of social theories, often turning putatively critical or “progressive” ideas to reactionary purposes.

Scholars of political ideologies have begun to acknowledge the growing significance of these radical right positions in the present conjectures (Griffin 2000; Sedgwick 2011; Bar-On 2013; Camus and Lebourg 2017; McAdams and Castrillon 2022). What this literature demonstrates is that radical right critiques of liberal orders and institutions are not simply descriptive or explanatory: they are forms of political action. They are part of a socio-cultural project that, while diverse, has significant transnational linkages and affinities and has questions of international politics at the heart of many of its most important elements (Klinke 2018; Drolet and Williams, 2018, 2022; Abrahamsen et al 2020; 2024; De Orellana and Michelsen 2019; Varga and Buzogany 2022; Estrada-Campos 2023).

In a situation in which counter-hegemonic practices can be linked to the agendas of large political parties and ambitious illiberal powers such as Russia and China, the challenge can no longer be ignored or be disregarded on the grounds that it is morally or politically reprehensible. If the resurgence of this politics is to be countered effectively, it is vital that the ideas, theories and polemics of its leading protagonists are fully understood and their strategies accurately recognised. It will be vital to develop analyses tracing the ideological innovations on the radical right, as well as institutional innovations designed to facilitate their spread and influence, including transnational conferences, party groupings, shared diplomatic initiatives and radical right think tanks, to name but a few. The challenges are myriad, but this is an engagement likely to become ever more significant for scholars and practitioners of politics and international relations in years to come.

References

Abrahamsen, R., Drolet, J. F., Gheciu, A., Narita, K., Vucetic, S. and Williams, M. (2020) “Confronting the international political sociology of the new right”, International Political Sociology, vol. 14, no. 1, 94–107.

Abrahamsen, R., Drolet, J. F., Gheciu, A., Narita, K., Vucetic, S. and Williams, M. (2024) The World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anderson, B. (1983/2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.

Bannon, S. (2018) “Soros est l’ennemi de tous les nationalismes: Entretien avec Steve Bannon”, Les Non-Alignés, 8 July, [Online], Available: https://leblogalupus.com/2018/07/12/entretien-avec-steve-bannon-soros-est-lennemi-de-tous-les-nationalismes/

Bar-On, T. (2008) “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The dream of Pan-European empire”, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 327–345.

Bar-On, T. (2013) Rethinking the French New Right, London: Routledge.

Bauman, Z. (1999) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bettiza, G. Bolton, D. and Lewis, D. (2023) “Civilizationism and the ideological contestation of the liberal international order”, International Studies Review, vol. 25, no. 2, viad006, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viad006

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brubaker, R. (2017) “Between nationalism and civilizationism: The European populist moment in comparative perspective”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 40, no. 8, 1191–1226.

Buckley Jr., W. F. (1959/1968) Up from Liberalism, New York NY: Arlington House.

Burnham, J. (1941) The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, New York NY: John Day.

Camus, J.-Y. and Lebourg, N. (2017) Far Right Politics in Europe, trans. Todd, J. M., Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

De Benoist, A. (1992) “Tradition?”, Telos, vol. 94, 82–88.

De Benoist, A. (1993) “The idea of empire”, Telos, vol. 98–99, 81–98.

De Benoist, A. (1995) “End of the left-right Dichotomy: The French case”, Telos, vol. 102, 73–89.

De Benoist, A. (2011) “The NR: Forty years; after”, in Sunic, T. (ed.) Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, London: Arktos: 15–29.

De Benoist, A. (2023) “The dawn of civilizational states”, Agon 9 April, [Online], Available: www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states

De Benoist, A. and Champetier, C. (1999) “Manifesto for a European renaissance”, in Sunic, T. (ed.) Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, London: Arktos, 207–244.

De Orellana, P. and Michelsen, N. (2019) “Reactionary internationalism: The philosophy of the new right”, Review of International Studies, vol. 40, no. 5, 748–767.

Drolet, J. F. and Williams, M. C. (2018) “Radical conservatism and global order: International theory and the new right”, International Theory, vol. 10, no. 3, 285–313.

Drolet, J. F. and Williams, M. C. (2020) “America first: Paleoconservatism and the ideological struggle for the American right”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 25, no. 1, 28–50.

Drolet, J. F. and Williams M. C. (2022) “From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations”, Journal of International Political Theory, vol. 18, no. 1, 23–45.

Dugin, A. (2012) The Fourth Political Theory, London: Arktos.

Dugin, A. (2021) The Theory of a Multipolar World, London: Arktos Media.

Dyal, M. (2017) “We are the real subalterns: Deleuze, Guattari, & the new right”, North American New Right, vol. 2, 73–118.

Eatwell, R. and O’Sullivan, R. (ed.) (1989) The Nature of the Right, London: Pinter.

Estrada Campos, R. D. (2023) “The international turn in far-right studies: A critical assessment”, Millennium, vol. 51, no. 3, 892–919.

Faye, G. (1998/2010) Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, London: Arktos.

Forchtner, B. (2020) “Far-right articulations of the natural environment: An introduction”, in Forchtner, B. (ed.) The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication, London: Routledge: 1–17.

Francis, S. T. (1991) “Principalities and power”, Chronicles, December, 9–11.

Francis, S. T. (2000) “Paleoconservatism and race”, Chronicles, December, 8–12.

Francis, S. T. (2016) Leviathan and its Enemies, Washington DC: Washington Summit.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gottfried, P. (1999) After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial States, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gottfried, P. (2017) Revisions and Dissents: Essays, Dekalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press.

Griffin, R. (2000) “Interregnum or endgame? The radical right in the ‘post-fascist’ era”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 5, no. 2, 163–178.

Hamilton, P. (2002) “The greening of nationalism: Nationalizing nature in Europe”, Environmental Politics, vol. 11, no. 2, 27–48.

Heywood, A. (2017) Introduction to Political Ideologies, London: Red Globe Press.

Husserl, E. (1936/1970) The Crisis in the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.

Johnson, G. (2018) Towards a New Nationalism, San Francisco CA: Counter-Current.

Junkers, B. (2024) “Beyond left and right: The future of anti-globalism”, Arktos, 16 January, [Online], Available: https://arktos.com/2024/01/16/beyond-left-and-right-the-future-of-anti-globalism/

Kaalep, R. and Meister, A. (2020) Rebirth of Europe: The Ethnofuturist Manifesto, London: Arktos Media.

Kirk, R. (1953/2001) The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot, Washington DC: Regnery Gateway.

Klinke, I. (2018) “Geopolitics and the political right: Lessons from Germany”, International Affairs, vol. 94, no. 3, 495–514.

Mannheim, K. (1936/1997) Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

McAdams, A. J. and Castrillon, A. (eds.) (2022) Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, New York NY: Routledge.

Muller, J. Z. (1991) “Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the radical conservative critique of liberal democracy in the Weimar Republic”, History of Political Thought, vol. 12, no. 4, 695–715.

Neil, E. (2021) Conservatism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nisbet, R. (1986/2001) Conservatism: Dream and Reality, New York NY: Transaction.

Olsen, J. (1999) Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany, London: Palgrave.

O’Meara, M. (2013) New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, London: Arktos.

Piccone, P. (1993–1994) “Confronting the French new right: Old prejudices or a new political paradigm?”, Telos, vol. 98–99, 3–23.

Rizzi, B. (1939/1985) The Bureaucratisation of the World, trans. Westoby, A., New York NY: Free Press.

Robin, C. (2017) The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Santoro, P. (2017) “White environmentalism”, American Renaissance, April 29, [Online], Available: www.amren.com/commentary/2017/04/white-environmentalism-roosevelt-conservation-environment/

Scruton, R. (2017) Conservatism: Ideas in profile, London: Profile Books.

Sedgwick, M. (ed.) (2011) Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Skinner, Q. (1978) Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Q. (1995) “Language and social change”, in Ball, T., Farr, J. and Hanson R. L. (eds.) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 119–132.

Skinner, Q. (2007) “Concepts only have histories: Quentin Skinner interviewed by Emmanuelle Tricoire and Jacques Lévy”, Espacetemps, [Online], Available: www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/quentin-skinner/

Steger, M. B. (2013) “Political ideologies in the age of globalization”, in Freeden, M. and Stears, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Steuckers, R. (2012) “Post-modern challenges: Between Faust and Narcissus”, North American New Right, vol. 1, 248–249.

Steuckers, R. (2017) Europa: De l’Eurasie aux périphéries: une géopolitique continentale, 3 vols., Lille: Bios.

Steuckers, R. (2022) “Géopolitique et avenir de l’Europe”, Geopolitika, 8 September, [Online], Available: www.geopolitika.ru/fr/article/geopolitique-et-avenir-de-leurope-entretien-avec-robert-steuckers

Sunic, T. (2011) Against Democracy and Equality, London: Arktos.

Taylor, C. (2003) Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Taylor, J. (ed.) (1998) The real American Dilemma: Race, Immigration and the future of America, Oakton VA: New Century Books.

Tully, J. (1983) “The pen is a mighty sword: Quentin Skinner’s analysis of politics”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 13, no. 4, 489–509.

Varga, M. and Buzogany, A. (2022) “The two faces of the global right: Revolutionary conservatives and national-conservatives”, Critical Sociology, vol. 48, no. 6, 1089–1107.

Welsh, J. (2010) “‘I’ is for ideology: Conservatism in international affairs”, Global Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 165–185.

Section IV: Institutions and networks as ideological vectors

Introduction

This section takes us to the pre-social media heart of what we characterise, in the general Introduction to this volume, as meso-level ideological activity. Chapters on think tanks, political parties, traditional news media, intellectual networks and the modern policy-making process all speak directly to key vectors and interactive feedback loops of ideological production, transmission and consumption. Suggesting how the worlds of macro-level ideological production connect to micro-level citizen consumption, they reveal important dynamics and morphological features of comingled and competing ideological ecologies. Without such accounts, we really would be in the dark about how ideologies animate and penetrate “the real world”.

In Chapter 12, Julien Landry and Guillaume Lamy provide a valuable taxonomy and penetrating analysis of think tanks, which have played an increasing role in ideologically motivated and strategically framed policy advocacy since the 1960s, especially in Western polities. They trace the key features of institutionally generated, influential policy expertise in think tanks that often have powerful and perhaps opaque sources of support and typically develop ties with sympathetic civil society organisations, political parties, newspapers or magazines and loose intellectual networks. Whether on the left, in the centre or partial to the radical right, think tanks are in the business of shaping public opinion through ideologically motivated knowledge production, providing weapons in partisan, cultural and other wars of ideas. Lamy and Landry provide a succinct yet powerful account of think tanks’ character, institutional connections to other combatants in the war of ideas and power within contemporary policy processes, thus providing a valuable complement to Behr and Constantin’s Chapter 15 on intellectual networks and Robertson’s Chapter 16 on ideological influences on policy change.

Most of us see political parties as central players in both political life and ideological contestation. In Chapter 13, Eunice Goes reviews three influential approaches to making sense of the complicated party/ideology interface and insightfully assesses their strengths and weaknesses. She proposes that we look for additional guidance on these matters from “discursive institutionalism” (Schmidt 2010), which attempts to thread the needle between giving both ideas and institutions their due in accounting for how power structures political decisions. Goes’ analysis underscores the importance of political parties as not only channels of ideological transmission across meso-level institutions and processes and to citizens, but also as creators and adapters of ideologies. Her discussion of key methodological tools available for studying party/ideology relationships provides a fine example of the kind of theoretical and methodological pluralism supported by this volume.

In Chapter 14, Darren Fleet, Shane Gunster and Robert Neubauer deploy tools from a wide range of critical communication studies (Gramsci 1971; Fuchs 2016); to argue that ideological framing of media coverage of climate change is the central factor shaping public opinion about climate change. With a focus on the media treatment of the oil industry’s role in driving contemporary climate change and using the Canadian media scene as their primary empirical case, they portray a war of ideas conducted through alternative framing of this causal relationship. The authors draw other meso-level institutional actors into their analysis, noting the role of think tanks, industry-supported experts within the “climate change-countermovement”, conservative populist political parties, a culture of carbon-intense consumption and environmental groups in these competing media narratives. Their analysis tracks the use of conventional print and television media for competing ideological purposes on the issue of climate change while pointing out the impact of social and online media on a rapidly changing media ecology.

Chapter 15 shifts attention from understanding ideological contestation on one major issue to appreciating the significance of institutionally anchored networks of like-minded individuals sharing broad ideological goals. Valentin Behr and Anemona Constantin adapt a sociology of ideas approach (Bourdieu 1984; Geroulanos and Sapiro 2023) to their purpose of tracing an evolving network of conservative intellectuals and party operatives, primarily focusing their attention on the European scene but with telling observations about key figures and well-connected institutions in the US. The authors stress the multi-positionality of these illiberal (Fawcett 2024) intellectual actors, identifying their homes in and across think tanks, political parties, authoritarian state institutions, universities, various media and other incubators of adaptive conservative strategy and thought. This chapter thus forms part of a complementary analytical package with Chapters 12, 13 and 14 and suggests meso-level sources of the policy-making discussed in Chapter 16.

Evan Robertson takes us from the world of ideological incubation and meso-level practical orientation to the translation of such influences to “real world” policy outcomes, courtesy of recent work on the “ideational turn” in policy studies (see e.g. Carstensen 2011; Van Esch and Snellens 2022). In Chapter 16, Robertson addresses a set of crucial questions about these translation processes, such as: why should we see policy elites both inside and outside state structures as the key agents converting policy-relevant ideas into policy and programmatic practices? How do such elites perform this conversion and how can we know how they do this? Can we trace macro-level thinking about broad social and political goals to specific policies and if so, how? His answers to these and related questions take us on a tour through recent theoretical and empirical literature within the ideational approach to policy studies, distinguishes between different levels and types of policy-relevant ideas and demonstrates through the ideational approach that the often-distant academic worlds of policy studies and ideology analysis have much to offer each other.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Homo Academicus, Paris: Minuit.

Carstensen, M. B. (2011) “Ideas are not as stable as political scientists want them to be: A theory of incremental ideational change”, Political Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 596–615. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467–9248.2010.00868.x

Fawcett, E. (2024) “Illiberalism and conservatism”, in Laruelle, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, C. (2016) Critical Theory of Communication: New readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet, London: University of Westminster Press.

Geroulanos, S. and Sapiro, G. (eds) (2023) The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas, London: Routledge.

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Hoare, Q. and Newell-Smith, G., (eds), London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Schmidt, V. A. (2010) “Reconciling ideas and institutions through discursive institutionalism”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. (ed.) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, online, Oxford Academic, [Online], Available: https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0003

van Esch, F. and Snellens, J. (2022) “How to ‘measure’ ideas. Introducing the method of cognitive mapping to the domain of ideational policy studies”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol 31, no. 2, 428–451. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2022.2155215

12. The role of advocacy think tanks

The war of ideas through research

Julien Landry and Guillaume Lamy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-17

Introduction

The think tank – or public policy research and analysis organisation – has been an object of interest in both casual and scholarly conversations about policy expertise and political ideology. It is also an increasingly global phenomenon. Early examples date back to the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the US and the UK, while many think tank landscapes began to take shape in the post-war era and in a more pronounced fashion in the last three decades of the 20^th century. The late James McGann’s Global Go To Think Tank Index inventoried over 11 000 such organisations worldwide (McGann 2021). In North America and Europe, the saturation of the think tank landscape has slowed the creation of new think tanks, but they remain a growing force worldwide as the demand for policy advice and expert discourse persists. Think tanks produce and disseminate policy research and analysis, operating through discourse forged by the meeting of social scientific methods, public policy, politics and ideology.

A combination of historical factors explains the emergence and development of think tanks in various polities, including increased policy complexity, the breakdown of political consensuses, the over-production of highly qualified personnel and rising capitalist philanthropy irrigating the non-profit sector (see for example Ricci 1993; Abelson 2018; Lamy 2021; Landry 2021b; Medvetz 2012). Think tanks became increasingly common in the last third of the 20^th century for two fundamental reasons: expert discourse became essential for groups seeking political influence or to comfort or challenge the status quo; and governments increasingly lost or relinquished centralised control over policy advice and analysis.

The think tank label covers a diverse range of outfits with varying degrees of separation from governments, academia, transnational institutions and other policy actors. The classic view of think tanks as independent, non-profit, non-partisan organisations devoted to policy analysis and research was drawn from a few American examples like the Brookings Institution. Yet this fails to account for the use of the term to describe state, party, university or consultancy-affiliated think tanks worldwide and even contract-based think tanks in the US (see Medvetz 2012; Mendizabal 2021).

Think tanks are specific in the hybrid nature of their engagement. They cannot become purely academic or lose relevance, nor can they transform into news outlets, meme farms or bodies solely for political action, without losing their core identity. Thomas Medvetz (2012) describes this as a balancing act, as think tanks navigate the demands of academia, politics, bureaucracies, media and industry. They overlap with these spheres, allowing some to be recognised as advocacy tanks, for example, while others are considered “universities without students” (Weaver 1989).

This hybridity and diversity offer a window into the intersection of policy expertise and ideology in the world of think tanks. Advocacy tanks act as politicised research teams embedded with interest groups and political communities, while academic and technocratic think tanks show how robust knowledge mobilisation for decision-making involves underlying values and a specific horizon of admissible policy objectives. This chapter explains how ideology is embedded in think tanks, focusing more specifically on advocacy tanks. Their proliferation is often associated with the emergence of a more fraught policy environment, where the language of expertise – as long as it still holds sway – can become a vehicle for the triumph of ideology in the war of ideas.

In this chapter we define ideology as sets of ideas with internal coherence – that is to say “consistency” and “constraint” (Gerring 1997: 980) – linking descriptive and prescriptive dimensions of political discourse (Parenteau and Parenteau 2023: 31–41). Ideologies shape how social and political actors think and feel (or embody) political ideas and how they construct political identities to recognise allies and adversaries. They feature among what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1981) conceptualises as politically actionable and legitimate forms of perception and expression embedded in the relations of power that shape the field of political competition. These parameters are especially helpful when analysing think tanks. They connect the instruments of perception and expression embodied by the policy analysts at think tanks to the communities of ideas these think tanks form and reproduce and link these to the power relations that allocate resources to certain think tanks, expressions and ideas.

This chapter reviews the treatment of think tanks in academic research, explores their role as producers of ideological discourse and analyses two discursive products: Tax Freedom Day and Earth Overshoot Day. It also discusses the influence and credibility of think tanks and their evolution, concluding with promising directions for future research.

Think tanks in academic research

Early studies of think tanks focused on their rise and role in American politics, later expanding to other countries. Early writings on think tanks sought to understand the development of a policy advice industry at the margins of the American government (Dickson 1971; McGann 1995). Accordingly, their involvement with ideology was conceptualised in the debates between pluralist and elitist theories of politics in the US (for overviews see Abelson 2018; Medvetz 2012; Landry 2021b). Pluralists saw think tanks as largely independent purveyors of policy expertise, with diverse ideological underpinnings and just one of many types of actors involved in the policy process and the marketplace of ideas (e.g., Newsom 1996; Polsby 1983). In contrast, theories of American policy elites saw think tanks as “policy planning organisations” entrenched in networks of power, mostly cohesive in their ideological preferences and invested in the coordination of an equally cohesive power elite on matters of public policy (e.g., Domhoff and Dye 1987).

As summarised by Diane Stone (2004a), the literature on think tanks developed into two broad approaches. The first studied think tanks as organisations, focusing on their strategies, challenges and operations in relation to their environment, type and the stakes of securing a niche, achieving public influence and garnering the attention of policy-makers (e.g., Weaver 1989; Weiss 1992; Rich 2004; McGann and Johnson 2005; Abelson 2018). The second approach viewed think tanks as parts of policy networks, communities and coalitions to understand their involvement in policy processes through the groups and structures that constitute policy debates and advice (e.g., Lindquist 1989; Stone 1996; Pautz 2012).

These strands of think tank research contextualised these organisations in diverse national settings (e.g., Stone and Denham 2004; McGann and Johnson 2005) and transnational networks (Stone 2004b). They also developed typologies of think tanks based on affiliations and styles of intervention; provided valuable insight into their inner workings; established foundations for the comparison of think tank landscapes across time and space; identified mechanisms by which think tanks influence policy-makers or public opinion; and showed how they integrate networks of actors and institutions who share their ideas or have common interests.

From there, research on think tanks examined their development over time, influence in different policy areas or regarding particular political transformations and their presentation as ecosystems of policy research in different institutional settings (for an overview see Kelstrup 2021). Critical approaches also developed alongside these studies to explore how think tanks engage with ideology, expertise, politics and power (for an overview see Landry 2021a). Further studies focused on how the ideologies of think tanks form, endure and change (Gonzalez Hernando 2019; Landry 2020, 2022).

Over the last three decades, think tanks have increasingly been conceptualised as diverse organisations with varying degrees of involvement with policy research and ideological advocacy. They have also been contextualised within specific national or transnational settings and increasingly understood not as isolated organisations but as networks of people, resources and ideas invested in collectivities and structures that can be described empirically. These advances have enabled scholarship to examine the relationships between think tanks and ideology at multiple levels, from the institutional structures and resources that shape the involvement of these organisations, down to the discourses circulated and the staffers and contributors who produce them.

The methodologies for studying think tanks align with the questions asked about them and have drawn on the usual tools of social research. The data for the study of these organisations is often freely available online or comes from fieldwork, interviews, publications and documents, annual reports, conference recordings, media sources, surveys etc.

Studies of think tank influence often conflate visibility and impact or struggle to isolate the effect of individual think tanks among many public actors, particularly when impact is narrowly defined as a direct causal link between their discourse and policy decisions. However, studies of their advocacy in specific policy areas or political developments illustrate instances of meaningful influence under certain conditions (for an overview see Kelstrup 2021; see also Hauck and Risende 2021; Zimmerman 2021).

International comparisons can show how think tanks integrate into different institutional and national contexts (Campbell and Pedersen 2011; Kelstrup 2016; Rastrick 2017; Abelson 2018; Ruser 2018), while longitudinal analyses explore how crises, political change and history shape think tanks (Medvetz 2012; Gonzalez Hernando 2019; Landry 2021b; 206.Lamy 2021). Case studies, interviews, fieldwork, content analysis and organisational profiles can situate or compare individual think tanks through their discourse (Gonzalez Hernando 2019; Alam 2021; Lamy 2022), embedded communities (Landry 2020, 2021c, 2022) and organisational strategies (Abelson 2018). Social network analysis has been used to study the embeddedness of think tanks in coalitions, administrations, policy establishments, chains of national and transnational relations and intellectual circles (de Graaff and Apeldoorn 2021; Hauck and Risende 2021; Salas-Porras and Medina-Hernández 2021; Tchilingirian 2021; Russer 2022). It has also scrutinised the mechanisms by which think tank staff circulate to and from parties, unions, public and private organisations, universities and media (Zhu 2020; Yates and Turgeon 2022). Likewise, recent studies have analysed their visibility across media outlets (Claveau et al 2022) and political parties (Lamy 2019), notably in terms of political and ideological structuring.

Think tanks and ideology

Not all think tanks intervene in public policy in the same way. They generally produce or disseminate policy research and analysis; fulfil research contracts; organise conferences, training programmes, workshops and policy discussions; and promote policies, ideas or systems of values. However, different think tanks will emphasise a mix of these activities, varying their focus on independent research, contracts, services or the proselytisation of ideas or ideology. This mix typically results from the niche they occupy, the community they craft around them and the role they aim to play for their constituency.

For example, the American Enterprise Institute in the US gathers resources from private companies and produces research advocating tax and regulatory relief, serving their interests during policy implementations, reforms or rollbacks. Likewise, left-leaning advocacy tanks, often funded by unions, progressive associations or environmental movements, argue for higher taxes on extreme wealth to address inequality and climate change. Centrist think tanks, by contrast, seek practical solutions aligned with mainstream policy goals and interests. However, the difference between advocacy and scholarly or centrist think tanks is not that one is ideological and the others are not, but rather that they mobilise ideology and research in different ways and therefore hold specific discourses, integrate distinct networks and intervene in politics and policy differently (Landry 2021c, 2022b).

Advocacy tanks meld scholarship and ideology by focusing on the “war of ideas”, participating more directly in the struggle for ideological dominance. As a result, they tend to be more overtly ideological and, since the 1980s, more aggressive in their marketing and dissemination strategies to capture media attention and compete with entrenched policy experts (Stone 1996; Medvetz 2012).

Their ability to engage in this struggle depends on the availability of resources and allies and on the institutional arrangements that shape the importance of policy advocacy in a given polity, whether in transnational or supranational contexts like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or the European Union or more typically in national or sub-national jurisdictions.

A polity, for example, can form what Campbell and Pedersen (2011: 167) call a “knowledge regime” or a particular arrangement of the “sets of actors, organisations and institutions that produce and disseminate policy ideas” as a function of various levels of state centralisation/decentralisation in the policy advisory system and market coordination/liberation in the national economy. This framework shows how institutions (and the way they incorporate organised interests) determine the resources and opportunities for different ways of mobilising policy advice and research. It explains the prominence of scholarly, state, advocacy and party research units and the dynamics of the policy knowledge production process. The US, with its liberal market economy and decentralised open state, for example, enables a politically integrated cadre of well-funded external research units to take advantage of the many access points this “highly adversarial, partisan and competitive” system provides (Campbell and Pedersen 2011: 186). In this context, technocratic and advocacy think tanks abound and provide advice to the various levels and chambers of government and to members of relatively undisciplined political parties. They also bridge political and bureaucratic institutions by sending staffers to form transition teams and incoming administrations (Weiss 1992; Ricci 1993; Abelson 2018).

Despite global trends towards the externalisation and politicisation of policy advice, the American context contrasts strongly with those of Westminster-style advisory systems – found in Canada and the UK for example – which privilege stronger norms of bureaucratic neutrality and public-sector career trajectories for senior public servants (compare Abelson 2018; Craft and Halligan 2017). These “politically tempered” knowledge regimes, with their small, publicly and privately funded research unit sectors in civil society, are born of a combination of closed centralised states and liberal market economies. These also contrast with the “consensus-oriented knowledge regime” found in Germany or the “statist-technocratic knowledge regime” found in France (Campbell and Pedersen 2011: 186).

These arrangements determine whether a polity provides niches for distinct types of think tanks to integrate the polity and intervene in politics and policy. In the People’s Republic of China, for example, official and semi-official think tanks have privileged access to decision-makers, while private think tanks rely on other actors like “universities, overseas foundations, private enterprises and other sectorial partners” (Nachiappan 2013). This results in two streams of policy advice. The first is for think tanks affiliated with the state, military or party, where “top-down” instructions lead to policy advice as “assignment” with limited autonomy. The second, continuing with Chinese liberalisation reforms of previous decades, allows more independent think tanks to engage in “bottom-up” initiatives that frame policy advice as “suggestion” (Li 2021). Since 2018, under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has tightened control over think tanks, using them to advance propaganda and cultural policies (Tsai, Li & Song 2022). Institutional conditions determine not only the niches for think tanks but also the ways of mobilising ideology that these niches support, tolerate or repress.

In Canada, as in China, forms of intervention and types of relations can be mutually exclusive. Dominant paradigms recognised by the Canadian state align with scholarly and technocratic think tanks or those representing what is perceived as legitimate pluralist interests, while specific business, labour and political interests support a small but active advocacy think tank sector. Canadian technocratic think tanks tied to dominant institutions and middle powers are often centrist, focused on consolidating or reforming policy and ideology, while activist tanks’ transformative agendas are less likely to be included in official policy circles and often have networks and funders coherent with their roles in politics and policy ( McLevey 2014; Landry 2020, 2021c, 2022). For example, the centrist Conference Board of Canada caters to mainstream interests including state and private actors; and the centre-right C. D. Howe Institute mediates interactions between financial interests (including banks) and the state. In contrast, the Fraser Institute takes a more militant stance and relies on allies from 208.holdings and asset management firms rather than institutional actors like banks. These think tanks also attract policy experts with backgrounds consistent with their roles (Landry 2022).

This ecology of think tank niches helps explain how expertise and ideology intersect in each polity and the prominence of political and ideological alternatives. A niche also shapes dynamics at the level of individual think tanks. The way each think tank engages with the policy process and the ideas it promotes are generally coherent with a) its community composition; b) an identity crafted in relation to this community; c) its role for the network and institutions it represents; and d) the accesses and boundaries this role entails (Landry 2021b: 29–32). A niche means particular constituencies, ways of engaging them and the public and a pattern of acceptable policy problems and solutions that certain types of scholars, funders, clients and publics are ready to advance, support, contract or hear.

As the Introduction makes clear, ideology can include a macro level of core texts and canonical ideas that are retransmitted, recirculated and revisited within and between political communities. Many think tanks provide support for this by promoting the canonical ideas of intellectual traditions. Some think tanks are named after members of these traditions or make popularising their work a part of their mandate. Likewise, some think tanks like the conservative Heritage Foundation in the US work to engage with ideological work at the micro level by engaging with citizens and stoking populist sentiments. However, by forming a particular community of members, employees, fellows, contributors, administrators, financiers and publics, think tanks are particularly active at the meso level of ideological work, the one occupied by discourse producers and professionals. Each think tank forms a forum, that is to say a space and an instrument for the expression, receptivity and control of a certain horizon of statements formulated by a particular mix of employees, fellows and independent contributors with a relatively distinctive set of past experiences, training and trajectories that remains coherent with its mission and the role it plays for its constituency.

Because the opportunities for think tanks to meld expertise and ideology are shaped by the institutions and interests that control policy accesses and the flow of resources in a given knowledge regime, it can be said that these organisations instantiate the materiality of ideological production in society (compare Landry 2021a; Salas-Porras and Murray 2017). However, as argued by Jordan Tchilingirian (2021), this does not entail that they can be reduced to being servants of their networks. The way they react to historical or intellectual change is often predicated on the composition of these networks (Ruse 2018; Gonzalez Hernando 2019; Plehwe 2021) and they have been found to defend the interests of key funders, notably in the realm of climate denial (Dunlap and Jacques 2013; Ruser 2018; Lamy 2022), among others. That said, the relationship between the ideologies they represent and the interests that support them can be described as co-evolutionary (Assche et al 2017), where “certain types of intellectual, political, bureaucratic and economic elites” converge around a think tank and “combine their resources and dispositions” (Landry 2022: 1310). It remains possible in some jurisdictions to describe a core niche making up a particularly integrated policy elite. However, co-evolutionary dynamics can also take the form of an interplay between multiple spheres of power (Medvetz 2012) or institutional structures, creating unique policy networks or niches around different policy sectors or areas of interest. In such settings, think tanks engage in interplay with particular arms of the state or particular political actors, a distinct mix of staff and contributor career trajectories and other relevant constituencies (Landry 2021c).

Each of these niches allows for a particular mix of acceptable problems and solutions, informed by mandates, policy knowledge, organised interests and the ideologies that traverse them. The identities that circulate in these networks can be governed by “status homophily”, where insider status depends on privileged accesses, particular skillsets or political legitimacy; or by “value homophily” where the community is organised around advocacy or intellectual militancy (Ruser 2018). These niches also allow for distinct – often mutually exclusive – opportunities to engage in the policy process, in the political process or in the war of ideas (Lamy 2019; Landry 2021c). Advocacy tanks are a purpose-oriented service, working like an organisational technology, able to propose solutions and policies and intervene in the war of ideas, while integrating a community organised around a distinct ideological coherence. They do so using language that, over the course of the 20^th century, had become a kind of dress code for political institutions, namely the empirical political grammar of expert discourse.

The research-based conceptual innovations of advocacy tanks

Advocacy tanks, like other advocacy groups, use various strategies to promote shifts in public policy. Common strategies include publishing reports and briefs; engaging in public commentary; creating forums for like-minded communities; funding projects to help emerging intellectuals develop their network and gain visibility; and, importantly, in the jurisdictions where it is possible, activating revolving-door mechanisms between think tank staff and governments.

In their efforts to influence public opinion, advocacy tanks aim to create, enhance or change sensibilities and ideas to influence the policy process by intervening in the broader political or ideological context. From this perspective, advocacy tanks are politicised information-producers whose research-based interventions promote ways of thinking, behaving, voting or consuming that favour a particular ideological standpoint.

These organisations have innovated ways of joining expert discourse and ideological struggle and these innovations have been emulated by advocacy tanks globally. For example, libertarian and conservative think tanks have created and refined consumer-focused information products like rankings of schools, universities, hospitals and highways or social/civic rankings like freedom indexes or justice report cards. These have ostensibly been established to promote individual choice and market-based decisions but also, more generally, to influence perceptions of institutions, countries or policies based on the advocacy tank’s preferred criteria for making intangible things like freedom and justice more tangible and even measurable. This selection of salient elements amounts to what media analysis scholars call framing (Scheufele 1999), a way of representing reality that simplifies complex issues by creating new categories or oppositions to focus public attention on key elements. Two research-based conceptual innovations, from both ends of the ideological spectrum, are discussed below to exemplify how advocacy tanks, like social movements and public intellectuals, use expert discourse to produce concepts that are useful for framing.

a) Tax Freedom Day

Created as a trademark in the 1940s by the businessman Dallas L. Hostetler (WSJ 1949), the Tax Freedom Day® emblem is now held by the American Tax Foundation.[47] Based on the total tax rate established in a jurisdiction, this concept converts the ratio taxed/total revenue into a day in the calendar year, defined as “the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year” (York, Mauro and Wei 2019). In simpler terms, it marks the point when individuals stop working for the state and can finally work for themselves.

Every year, nearly 30 libertarian think tanks in various countries announce and celebrate Tax Freedom Day. Outside the US, prominent ones include the Adam Smith Institute (UK), the Fraser Institute (Canada), the Free Market Foundation (South Africa) and the Centre for Independent Studies (Australia). These announcements are relayed by media and political allies in the hopes of influencing taxpayers, providing a quick rubric to evaluate governments. The message is that a government is moving in the right direction if the Tax Freedom Day comes earlier every year. Tax Freedom Day acts as an intellectual shortcut to punish or reward governments based on their taxation policy, while keeping the subject of income taxes on the agenda from year to year and raising awareness of other taxes.

Despite its simplicity, Tax Freedom Day remains a research-based information product. Advocacy tanks use computing skills and tax-related knowledge to calculate it, but the success of this strategy relies on established relays in the media and the political arena. Social scientists mostly ignore Tax Freedom Day or contest its methodology, conceptual limits and assumptions ( Gajerski 1996; Starky 2006). Researchers argue that quality of life is not inversely correlated to the amount of taxes collected by a state, but to the quality and accessibility of services provided (Jacques and Noël 2018). Likewise, child mortality rates in the US are higher where the taxes are lower (MacKenzie and Tucker 2010). Advocacy tanks on the left also seek to disqualify Tax Freedom Day with their own technical reports (Brooks 2005; MacKenzie and Tucker 2010; Thompson 2022).

The technical nature of both Tax Freedom Day and the counter-claims from rival advocacy tanks illustrate how the language of expertise has become a necessary point of passage to stay competitive in the war of ideas. Yet for the producers of the Tax Freedom Day reports, critics from the left and from academia do not really matter. To paraphrase the founder of the Fraser Institute in Canada, what matters is the effect of these contents on taxpayers (Walker 2011). The goals of these informational strategies are political and ideological, not academic.

As an instrument of politics and ideological struggle, the popularity and salience of Tax Freedom Day are also influenced by political tides. Using Google Books and n-gram method, we can see both the genesis of this concept and its rise and fall over time. Its growth coincided with sustained efforts to weaken the Keynesian/providential paradigm, as well as economic and political crises that rocked the foundations of the post-war consensus, as shown in Figure 12.1.

A black-and -white area graph charting data over a timeline, with the horizontal axis spanning years from 1945 to 2017 in non-uniform intervals, and the vertical axis representing a scaled value from 0x to 10x. The graph shows very low values, mostly near 0x, from 1945 until the mid-1970s, followed by a rapid spike starting around 1990, reaching a peak value of approximately 9.5x around 1999 and 2000, after which the value generally decreases but remains significantly higher than the pre-1990 levels, ending near 1x in 2017.

Figure 12.1 Tax Freedom Day (1945–2019).

Source: Google Books (English), n-gram method, 3 years mean smoothed.

Despite its decline, the international trajectory of Tax Freedom Day reveals a global network of elite actors and vectors that share political and ideological affinities like parties, public intellectuals, economics and business magazines and newspapers. For instance, in November 2011, a Conservative MP in Westminster proposed a law to make the announcement of Tax Freedom Day by parliament each year official ( Hollobone 2011). Similarly, elected Republicans in the US frequently announce Tax Freedom Day in federal or state senates (Grassley 2001; Marklein 2019), while nearly every year, Canadian federal Conservative MPs refer to the Fraser Institute’s Tax Freedom Day in debates in the House of Commons (Menzies 2013).

b) The Earth Overshoot Day

Created by the New Economics Foundation in the UK and computed annually since 2004 by another European think tank, the Global Footprint Network (GFN), Earth Overshoot Day aims to instil the same kind of effect on the public consciousness and political discourse as Tax Freedom Day, but from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. It conceptualises the point when humanity “starts consuming more resources than our planet can sustainably produce” (GFN 2024). The concept frames and condenses environmental issues into an indicator that highlights how, for example, mankind would need “1.75 Earths based on the 2022 humanity footprint” to continue its course when taking into account the limits of the ecosystem (GFN 2023).

Though still relatively young, the use of this framing strategy has steadily grown around the world, as illustrated in Figure 12.2. The Google Books database indicates a six-fold increase since 2011, reflecting growing awareness of environmental issues since the start of the 21^st century.

A black-and-white area graph charting a single value over time, with the horizontal axis representing years from 2000 to 2019 and the vertical axis representing a scaled value from 0x to 6x. The graph shows a period of very low values near 0x from 2000 to 2005, followed by a sustained and increasingly steep growth, passing the 1x mark around 2011 and accelerating to reach a high point of approximately 5.7x in the final year, 2019.

Figure 12.2 Earth Overshoot Day (2000–2019).

Source: Google Books (English), N-gram method.

Earth Overshoot Day has faced scepticism similar to that of Tax Freedom Day. Critics of Earth Overshoot Day come not only from the capitalist-GDP-growth side of the political fence, but also from scientists (Fiala 2008; Blomqvist et al2013) and ecologists (Hickman 2010; Pearce 2013), who argue that the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s measurements are Overshoot Day’s only evidence-based content. They claim that most of the stated “exceedances” in this framing cannot be linked to objective limits of the Earth’s renewal capacities, such as energy consumption, raw material extraction and crop and trash production, because of unknown parameters like future, yet undiscovered, ways of processing, recycling and collecting and technologies that could drastically change the availability of resources.

Framing techniques such as these research-based conceptual innovations remain strategies or lexical gadgets invented to simplify phenomena and therefore maximise their chances to stimulate thought and political action. They help sensitise the public and elites and provide verbal ammunition for ideological warfare. Like Tax Freedom Day, the Earth Overshoot Day concept found numerous relays in the media and political arenas, particularly among left-wing allies. In France the far-left party, La France insoumise (“France unbowed”), referred to Earth Overshoot Day while proposing to declare a state of climate and ecological emergency in 2019 ( Mélanchon et al 2019). Similarly, a Green Party member in the Australian Senate recently evoked the overshoot concept in a plea for stronger policies targeting climate change (Pocock 2023).

The influence of advocacy tanks and the challenge of populism

The relays through which think tank products circulate into politics and decision-making cannot be reduced to a linear or even uni-directional transfer of ideas. From the genesis of ideas, such as elderly pensions or public health care in the 19^th century to their institutionalisation in the second half of the 20^th, decades have passed and those who promoted ideas at the very beginning are almost never the ones who pass the laws to enshrine them.

Those studying the impact of think tanks must contend with the complex and variegated channels through which ideas circulate. Claims about the impact of think tanks are also difficult to generalise since policy networks, sub-sectors and national contexts vary in their propensity to rely on expert discourse or invite the participation of think tanks. The influence of think tanks can be as direct as engaging with policy-makers or as structural as shifting the definition of a problem or the background conditions of political bargaining. It can also be as recursive as altering the rules of policy discourse production itself or as performative as exemplifying positions in the landscape of recognisable policy positions.

The influence individual think tanks have is usually derived from the roles they are positioned to play in relation to their particular niche. In this regard, advocacy tanks are well placed to play a leadership role in the war of ideas, due to their status as permanent research organisations with significant resources to disseminate research skills and promote and produce politicised information requiring expertise in public policy. But beyond research, the conceptual innovations they create or promote serve as a marker of ideological identity, helping to aggregate communities with specific political sensitivities. While concepts like Tax Freedom Day and Earth Overshoot Day are argumentative strategies, they also function as networking tools between formal and informal allies. The ultimate goal is for these strategies to integrate everyday language of both the masses and elites, to frame thought and policies during design and implementation. However, the path to this kind of influence is often indirect and circumstantial, arising from broader networks and broader circumstances or trends.

As idea brokers (Smith 1993) or interstitial organisations (Medvetz 2012), think tanks and advocacy tanks specialise in using research and expertise to connect people, organisations and supporters linked by elective affinities. As political work becomes more specialised, they assume an essential role in collating the elements that make up the discourse of interest groups and advocacy coalitions. However, their identity as think tanks still depends on the status and currency of expert discourse as a source of cognitive authority, something that cannot always be taken for granted.

The rise in prominence and generalisation of expert discourse – including the lexicon of modern statecraft (inflation, interest rates, trade balance), an “empirical grammar” (Lamy 2024) for presenting ideas (opinion polls, international comparison, accounting simulation, feasibility studies, statistics) and the implicit rules for using these properly – help explain the proliferation of think tanks and the need for each ideology to have its own experts (Landry 2021b).

The interplay between political and ideological competition and the resources and legitimacy needed to advance credible ideas in an age of experts is central to the advocacy tank’s role in modern polities. Advocacy tanks have long relied on the efficacy of expert discourse for authority, but also undermine it (for example in the case of climate change or the health effects of tobacco). At the very least, their rise was tied to organising efforts to counter the policy voices of established experts. The success of advocacy tanks has shaped how think tanks engage with various publics, forcing competitors like academic and technocratic think tanks to become more media savvy and politically attuned (Medvetz 2012). Furthermore, the rise of advocacy thanks coincided with a more contested policy environment where the legitimacy of expert discourse itself is put to the test. In some ways, advocacy tanks may have contributed to the decline of the trust in expertise by fostering “the hyper-organisation of contending sources of expertise”, the “depreciation of expert discourse” and the “functional equivalence” between counter-expertise and less costly forms of political action (Landry 2021d: 188).

The likelihood that the political functions of expert discourse will collapse anytime soon is not high. As Stephen Brooks (2021) observes, the response of think tanks to the rise of populist forms of political expression has typically ranged from criticising their pitfalls to attempting to identify their root causes, reflecting concerns about their continued reliance on expert authority and liberal democracy. The groups, publics and institutions sustaining traditional think tanks have not disappeared and their resilience in the face of populism is, predictably, different from polity to polity. Some advocacy tanks aligned with populist movements have found opportunities in this context. For example, the Heritage Foundation in the US has leveraged its history of engaging with grassroots conservatism to gain traction within the Trump administration, even as this administration sidelined the networks of established think tanks that once served Republican and Democratic administrations alike (De Graaff and Apeldoorn 2021). Similarly, the recently formed America First Policy Institute has developed close ties with and placed numerous people in the senior level of the second Trump administration (Bensinger and Fahrenthold 2024; Yourish, Gamio and Wu 2024). Nonetheless, the ability of advocacy tanks to engage with forms of political action that discredit expertise relies on a delicate balancing act. As Brooks (2021: 334) remarks, “few genuinely populist think tanks exist”, partly because “populism does not require what think tanks provide”.

Conclusion

The production of ideological discourses by advocacy tanks has a mostly indirect influence on ideological struggle and ideological change. These efforts are grounded in specific niches and networks with distinct conditions for access, rules of engagement, ideological proclivities and opportunities to engage with publics who can serve as relays or intermediaries for the ideas that advocacy tanks produce or may themselves be relaying or mediating. Other types of think tank (for example, academic or technocratic ones) also integrate networks of their own which can also share preferences, goals and values structured by ideologies that necessarily inform policy-making. Advocacy tanks differ from academic and technocratic think tanks, not because they are ideological and others are not, but in that they are more directly involved in mobilising discourse for ideological struggle. They also share a type of discourse with other think tanks, namely expert discourse and the armature of techniques and terms that generally accompanies its production and dissemination. By engaging in ideological struggles through research, advocacy tanks and other politicised research groups have generalised the use of expert discourse to the war of ideas. While expertise once positioned itself as distinct from opinion or popular will, the growing polarisation of experts, facilitated by advocacy think tanks, serves as a reminder that expertise is not apolitical but rather highly soluble in ideology.

Decades of research on think tanks have provided insights into how they form, evolve and became embedded in national, transnational and supranational polities. We now better understand their roles and the conditions enabling them in different contexts. Research also shows how think tanks’ advocacy work is supported by various forms of power within the networks and institutions where they operate. While there is always room to explore how think tanks are evolving amid rapidly changing technologies for public engagement, it may be time for researchers to refocus on the elite-driven meso level of ideological work, where think tanks’ advantages are more entrenched. Future research could benefit from ethnography and network analysis to better understand how networks of think tanks, politicians, interest groups and stakeholders engage with the interface of policy analysis and ideology, to examine the dynamics of ideological work in these settings and to explore how particular amalgamations of policy, knowledge, alliances and ideology are actually achieved.

References

Abelson, D. E. (2018) Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes, 3^rd edition, Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Alam, T. (2021) “In the backstage of influence and ‘policy marketing.’ Collusive transactions and action-oriented knowledge at Epode European Network”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks. Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 78–95.

Assche, K. V., Beunen, R. and Duineveld, M. (2017) “Co-evolutionary planning theory”, in Gunder, M., Madanipour, A. and Watson, V. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory, 1^st edition, New York NY: Routledge: 221–233.

Bensinger, K. and Fahrenthold, D. (2024) “The group at the center of Trump’s planning for a second term is one you haven’t heard of”, The New York Times, 24 October, [Online], Available: www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign-america-first-policy-institute.html

Blomqvist, L., Brook, B. W., Ellis, E. C., Kareiva, P. M., Nordhaus, T. and Shellenberger, M. (2013) “Does the shoe fit? Real versus imagined ecological footprints”, PLoS Biology, vol. 11, no. 11, e1001700.

Bourdieu, P. (1981) “La représentation politique: Éléments pour une théorie du champ politique », Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 36. no. 1, 3–24.

Brooks, N. (2005) Tax Freedom Day: A Flawed, Incoherent and Pernicious Concept, Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Brooks, S. (2021) “Think tanks confront the challenge of populism”, in Abelson, D. and Rastrick, C. (eds) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 322–337.

Campbell, J. L. and Pedersen, O. K. (2011) “Knowledge regimes and comparative political economy”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. H. (eds) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, New York NY: Oxford University Press: 167–190.

Claveau, F., Santerre, O., Veillette, A. and Rocheleau, S. (2022) “Les think tanks dans le champ médiatique canadien”, Politique et Sociétés, vol. 41, no. 3, 75–104.

Craft, J. and Halligan, J. (2017) “Assessing 30 years of Westminster policy advisory system experience”, Policy Sciences, vol. 50, no. 1, 47–62.

De Graaff, N. and Van Apeldoorn, B. (2021) “Trump and the foreign policy elite think tank networks”, in Abelson, D. and Rastrick, C. (eds) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 338–353.

Dickson, P. (1971) Think Tanks, New York NY: Atheneum.

Domhoff, G. W. and Dye, T. R. (eds) (1987) Power Elites and Organizations, Newbury Park, London: Sage.

Dunlap, R. E. and Jacques, P. J. (2013) “Climate change denial books and conservative think tanks: Exploring the connection”, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 57, no. 6, 699–731.

Fiala, N. (2008) “Measuring sustainability: Why the ecological footprint is bad economics and bad environmental science”, Ecological Economics, vol. 67, no. 4, 519–525.

Gajerski, B. (1996) “Myth of Tax Freedom Day: The Fraser Institute continues to misuse statistics to push its right-wing political agenda”, Briarpatch, vol. 25, no. 9, 32.

Gerring, J. (1997) “Ideology: A definitional analysis”, Political Research Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, 957–994.

GFN (2023) Estimating the Date of Earth Overshoot Day 2023, Oakland CA: Global Footprint Network.

GFN (2024) About Earth Overshoot Day, [Online], Available: https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/about-earth-overshoot-day/ 12 Sept 2024.

Gonzalez Hernando, M. (2019) British Think Tanks after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Grassley, C. (2001) “Commemoration of Tax Freedom Day”, United States Senate, 5 May.

Hauck, D. and Resende, C. (2021) “Think tanks and the turnaround of the right in Brazil”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks: Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 136–155.

Hickman, L. (2010) “Earth overshoot day: A day to forget or a day to remember?”, The Guardian, 20 August, [Online], Available: www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/20/earth-overshoot-day [accessed 12 Sept 2024].

Hollobone, P. (2011) “Taxation Freedom Day Bill”, Hansard: The Official Report of All Parliamentary Debates (U.K.), vol. 536, 25 February.

Jacques, O. and Noël, A. (2018) “The case for welfare state universalism or the lasting relevance of the paradox of redistribution”, Journal of European Social Policy, vol. 28, no. 1, 70–85.

Kelstrup, J. D. (2016) The Politics of Think Tanks in Europe, New York NY: Routledge.

Kelstrup, J. D. (2021) “Methodological challenges and advances in studying think tanks”, in Abelson, D. E. and Rastrick, C. J. (eds) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 33–42.

Lamy, G. (2019) « Think tanks et politiques publiques: La relation des élus avec l’IRIS et l’IEDM à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec », in Couture, J. and Jacob, S. (eds) Démocratie et Politiques Publiques, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval: 283–300.

Lamy, G. (2021) “How advocacy tanks wrote the latest chapter in the history of political intellectuals”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks: Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 20–35.

Lamy, G. (2022) “Recherche ou lobbyisme? L’Institut économique de Montréal et le réchauffement climatique depuis 1999”, Politique et Sociétés, vol. 41, no. 3, 129–162.

Lamy, G. (2024) Le renouvellement de la guerre des idées par la recherche: les stratégies d’influence des think tanks libertariens au Québec. Ph.D. dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal.

Landry, J. (2020) “Grounding the political spectrum: How three Canadian think tanks integrate social space”, Critical Policy Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 365–387.

Landry, J. (2021a) “An introduction to critical studies of think tanks”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks: Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 1–18.

Landry, J. (2021b) Les think tanks et le discours expert sur les politiques publiques au Canada (1890–2015), Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa.

Landry, J. (2021c) “What’s in a think tank’s mix of interventions? Plugging into politics and policymaking in Canada’s knowledge regime”, in Abelson, D. E. and Rastrick, C. J. (eds.) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 239–257.

Landry, J. (2021d) “Politics by the same means? Think tanks, polarization and the road to post-truth in the United States and Canada”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks: Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 176–194.

Landry, J. (2022) “Do business-backed think tanks represent class interests? The co-evolution of policy learning and economic elites in the Canadian knowledge regime”, Administration & Society, vol. 54, no. 7, 1305–1327.

Li, L. (2021) “The development of think tanks in China”, in Abelson, D.E. and Rastrick, C.J. (eds) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 179–204.

Lindquist, E. A. (1989) Behind the myth of think tanks: The organization and relevance of Canadian policy institutes. Ph.D. dissertation, Berkeley CA: University of California.

MacKenzie, M. J. and Tucker, D. J. (2010) “Death and taxes: Child health and the state tax freedom race”, Children and Youth Services Review, vol. 32, no. 12, 1803–1806.

Marklein, H. (2019) “Tomorrow is Tax Freedom Day in Wisconsin”, Wisconsin Senate, April 18.

McGann, J. G. (1995) The Competition for Dollars, Scholars and Influence in the Public Policy Research Industry, Lanham MD: University Press of America.

McGann, J. G. (2021) “2020 Global Go to Think Tank Index Report”, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania.

McGann, J. G. and Johnson, E. C. (2005) Comparative Think Tanks, Politics and Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar.

McLevey, J. (2014) “Think tanks, funding and the politics of policy knowledge in Canada”, Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, vol. 51, no. 1, 54–75.

Medvetz, T. (2012) Think Tanks in America, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mélanchon, J.-L., Panot, M., Autain, C. and Bernalicis, U. (2019) Proposition de résolution N° 1943 déclarant l’état d’urgence climatique et écologique, France: Assemblée nationale.

Mendizabal, E. (2021) “Describing and comparing think tanks”, in Abelson, D. E. and Rastrick, C. J. (ed.) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 16–32.

Menzies, T. (2013) “41^st Parliament, 1^st Session, Edited Hansard, Number 266”, 10 June, [Online], Available: www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/41-1/house/sitting-266/hansard

Nachiappan, K. (2013) “Think tanks and the knowledge–policy nexus in China”, Policy and Society, vol. 32, no. 3, 255–265.

Newsom, D. D. (1996) The Public Dimension of Foreign Policy, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

Pautz, H. (2012) Think Tanks, Social Democracy and Social Policy, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parenteau, D. and Parenteau, I. (2023) Les idéologies politiques: le clivage gauche-droite, 2^nd edition, Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec.

Pearce, F. (2013) “Admit it: We can’t measure our ecological footprint”, New Scientist, 20 November, [Online], Available: www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029445-000-admit-it-we-cant-measure-our-ecological-footprint/[12 Sept 2024].

Plehwe, D. (2021) “Interplays of economic and knowledge power. Neoliberal think tank networks and the return and universalization of entrepreneurship”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks: Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 117–136.

Pocock, B. (2023) “Environment protection (sea dumping) amendment (using new technologies to fight climate change) Bill 2023 – Second reading”, Hansard (Senate), 6 November, Parliamentary of Australia.

Polsby, N. (1983) “Tanks but no Tanks”, Public Opinion, vol. 6, no. 1, 2–14.

Rastrick, C. (2017) Think Tanks in the US and EU: The role of Policy Institutes in Washington and Brussels, London: Routledge.

Ricci, D. M. (1993) The Transformation of American politics: The new Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Rich, A. (2004) Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Ruser, A. (2018) Climate Politics and the Impact of Think Tanks: Scientific Expertise in Germany and the US, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ruser, A. (2022) “En finir avec le consensus climatique: le rôle des think tanks dans l’émergence tardive du réseau climatosceptique en Allemagne”, Politique et Sociétés, vol. 41, no. 3, 105–127.

Salas-Porras, A. and Medina-Hernández, M. (2021) “Transnationalization of the Mexican corporate elite: Looking beyond cross-border corporate networks”, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 30, no. 1, 43–69.

Salas-Porras, A. and Murray, G. (2017) Think Tanks and Global Politics: Key spaces in the Structure of Power, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Scheufele, D. (1999) “Framing as a theory of media effects”, Journal of Communication, vol. 49, no. 1, 103–122.

Smith, J. A. (1993) Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the rise of the New Policy Elite, New York NY: The Free Press.

Starky, S. (2006) Tax Freedom Day: A Cause for Celebration or Consternation? Ottawa ,Canada: Parliamentary Information and Research Service, Library of Parliament. [Online] Available: https://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection-R/LoPBdP/PRB-e/PRB0632-e.pdf

Stone, D. (1996) Capturing the Political Imagination: Think Tanks and the Policy Process, London: Frank Cass.

Stone, D. (2004a) “Introduction: Think tanks, policy advice and governance”, in Stone, D. and Denham, A. (eds) Think Tank Traditions: Policy Research and the Politics of Ideas, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Palgrave: 1–16.

Stone, D. (2004b) “Transfer agents and global networks in the transnationalization of policy”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 11, no. 3, 545–566.

Stone, D. and Denham, A. (eds) (2004) Think Tank Traditions: Policy Research and the Politics of ideas, Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; Palgrave.

Tchilingirian, J. (2021) “Network intellectuals and networked intellectuals: Relational approaches to the study of British think tanks”, in Abelson, D. E. and Rastrick, C. J. (eds) Handbook on Think Tanks in Public Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 2–15.

Thompson, M. (2022) “Fraser Institute’s ‘Tax Freedom Day’ wildly exaggerates the tax bill of the ‘average Canadian family’”, Press Progress, 20 June.

Tsai, W. H., Li, G. and Song, W. (2022) “Agent politics of Chinese think tanks and cultural industry governance in China’s ‘new era’”, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 20–39.

Walker, M. (2011) “If it matters, measure it”, in Dyble, C. (ed.) Freedom Champions. Stories From the Front Lines in the War of Ideas, Washington DC: Atlas Economic Research Foundation: 121–128.

Weaver, R. K. (1989) “The changing world of think tanks”, PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 22, no. 3, 563–578.

Weiss, C. H. (ed.) (1992) Organizations for Policy Analysis: Helping Government Think, Newbury Park, London: Sage.

WSJ (1949) ‘“Tax Freedom Day”’, Wall Street Journal, 22 April, 4.

Yates, S. and Turgeon, A. (2022) “Les portes tournantes entre les think tanks, l’administration publique et les partis politiques: la légitimité par la proximité?”, Politique et Sociétés, vol. 41, no. 3, 13–46.

York, E., Mauro, M. and Wei, E. (2019) “Tax Freedom Day 2019 is April 16^th”, Tax Foundation, 10 April.

Yourish, K., Gamio, L. and Wu, A. (2024) “Project 2025, Mar-a-Lago and Fox news: What connects Trump’s new staff picks”, The New York Times, 3 December, [Online], Available: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/03/us/politics/trump-cabinet-administration-picks.html

Zhu, X. (2020) “Think tanks in politically embedded knowledge regimes: Does the ‘revolving door’ matter in China?”, International Review of Administrative Sciences, vol. 86, no. 2, 295–315.

Zimmerman, E. (2021) “Think tanks as governance entrepreneurs: Institutionalizing human rights in ASEAN”, in Landry, J. (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Think Tanks. Power, Politics and Knowledge, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 156–174.

13. Political parties as vehicles of ideologies

Eunice Goes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-18

Introduction

Political parties are relatively recent political organisations which established themselves as the main vehicles of political ideologies. However, the relationship between ideologies and political parties is far from straightforward. The difficulty in understanding it lies in two key factors: the first is understanding the role of ideologies in the activities of political parties; and the second is understanding the role of political parties in producing, contesting and consuming ideologies.

These difficulties are compounded by the way ideologies have been treated by scholars of political parties and historians of political thought. While scholars of parties tended to underplay the role of ideologies in the behaviour of parties, scholars of political thought devalued ideologies as significant forms of political thought. This chapter explains how these misunderstandings as well as the distinct objects of study of these different fields impacted the study of how political parties engage with ideologies.

The chapter starts by briefly examining how political scientists and political sociologists accounted for the role of ideologies in the life of political parties. Next, the chapter charts how ideologies became an independent object of study. Having disentangled ideology from its associations with “false consciousness” and having outlined how ideology studies became a key guide to the understanding of society and political life, the chapter explains the relationship between political parties and ideologies. In the final section, the chapter discusses and assesses the most fruitful methodologies used by ideology scholars to analyse how political parties participate in the production, contestation of ideologies and in processes of ideological change

Political parties as “users” of ideologies

The study of ideologies and of political parties took off at roughly the same time. The establishment of universal suffrage from the mid-19^th century onwards in Europe and North America put a spotlight on ideologies and spearheaded the emergence of new ideological constellations. Socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, anarchism were new forms of political thought that were action-oriented, and that in most cases led to the emergence of a new type of political party. This new type of political party was different in nature from the pre-democratic parties that represented the common interests of different aristocratic and/or bourgeois cliques in legislatures ( LaPalombara and Weiner 1990: 25–6). Indeed, these parties, which had been created outside parliament to represent the values and interests of different social groups, tended to be more centralised and more ideologically coherent (LaPalombara and Weiner 1990: 28).

Because ideology was treated as a given and electoral politics dominated political life, scholars of political parties focused their attention on the study of the representation of electoral strategies, voting behaviour and on party organisation. This focus, strongly influenced by positivist assumptions, produced the first typologies of political parties. If the political parties of the pre-democratic age were no more than “pure followings of the aristocracy” as Max Weber claimed (2014 [1946]: 33), the new parties were fundamentally different in terms of membership, programmes and strategy.

While Weber classified parties in the broad categories of “patronage” and “ideology” parties (2014 [1946]), Maurice Duverger proposed a typology which distinguished parties by size and structure. Thus, caucus and branch parties were categorised by size and cadre and mass parties were classified in terms of organisation (Duverger 1990 [1954]). In these earlier theoretical studies, ideology was seen as just one of the many factors that shaped the activities of political parties. As political parties represented different social classes, electoral competition was seen “as a conflict among classes” (Lipset, quoted by Dahl 1990: 151) and class was understood as a proxy for ideology (Sartori 1990 [1968]: 170).

The underplaying of the role of ideology in the activities of parties was not a mere by-product of the positivist bias of scholars of political parties. In truth, the post-war consensus around Keynesian economics changed the dynamics of electoral competition in the democracies of North America and Western Europe. This change led Otto Kirchheimer to identify the emergence of a new type of party – the catch-all party (1990 [1966]: 54). This new type of party was no longer focused on winning only the support of one or two groups of voters, but of many groups by manipulating “ideology for maximum general appeal” and by undergoing processes of “de-ideologization’” (Kirschheimer 1990: 55).

As a result of this change in party politics, political scientists, in particular rational choice theorists, elevated power-seeking considerations to the main goal of political parties. Thus, ideology became a secondary consideration because, as the rational choice theorist Anthony Downs (1957: 34–35) puts it, “since none of the appurtenances of office can be obtained without being elected, the main goal of every party is the winning of elections”.

This focus led to the understanding of political parties as a) institutions that seek influence in a state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government, and b) usually consist of more than a single interest in society which attempt to “aggregate interests” (Ware 1997: 5). Ware claimed that ideology plays a central role in party politics (Ware 1997: 17); however, ideology is notoriously absent from this definition.

Another response to the de-ideologisation of political parties resulted in the development of valence theory. The key assumption of valence theory is that not all voters are invested in party ideologies. Instead, the way parties frame the electoral competition around specific salient issues plays an important role in the choice of voters. Thus, party positioning on issues and the rise of consensus politics meant that the factors driving voting behaviour were either the evaluations of competence of party leaders or valence issues (Stokes 1963: 373). These assumptions led Jane Green and Sara Hobolt (2008: 461–2) to conclude that in an age of ideological convergence “competence should matter in elections that are fought on valence issues”.

Interestingly, the tendency to de-ideologise the programmes and discourse of political parties has intensified in recent decades. Several contemporary parties treat the ideologies with which they are associated as a nuisance because they do not appeal to the median voter. As a result, parties engage in what the political scientist Katherine Dommett (2016: 109–110) defined as “ideological quietism”, that is, a process whereby parties’ rhetorical practices suggest that “ideology no longer matters”.

Over the past several decades, both the de-ideologisation and the vote-maximisation theses started to be questioned by institutionalists and party ideology scholars. Indeed, institutionalist scholars who monitored European party politics noted that not all parties pursue vote-maximising as their primary goal. For example, Kaare Strom argues that political parties follow a variety of goals, namely vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking goals (1990: 566). To these goals Harmel and Janda (1994: 265–9) added “intraparty democracy maximisation”, “participation and representation of members”, while others consider ideology an important party goal (Buckler and Dolowitz 2012; Werner 2020).

Klaus von Beyme (1985: 29) makes a stronger claim about the role of ideologies in the lives of political parties when he notes that “over the longer term only parties based on an ideology have succeeded in establishing themselves in Europe”. More seriously, he argues, “even if they instrumentalised their programme for vote-seeking or office-seeking goals, their aims and strategies will remain unclear if scholars do not consider their ‘familles spirituelles’” (von Beyme 1985: 30–1).

But despite von Beyme’s claim that political parties are ideological organisations, the theory of party families is not necessarily related to ideologies, but to their histories and original names (Mair and Mudde 1998: 224). More recently, scholars have advocated moving away from the theory of party families and adopting the concept of ideological clusters instead. The purpose of this shift is to recognise the fact that political parties move within their party families (de la Cerda and Gunderson 2023: 2–3).

The rediscovery of ideology through the “familles spirituelles” theory informed two main methodological approaches to the study of political parties’ ideologies. One – the Chapel Hill Expert Survey – uses the quantitative classifications of the ideology and policy positions of political parties made by experts on either a left–right scale or based on policy positions on a range of issues. Another approach, proposed by the Manifesto Project, which was initiated in 1979 by a research group of the European Consortium for Political Research and renewed in 2009 as the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR), uses the policy stances presented in electoral manifestos to classify the ideology of political parties. The data from the manifestos is collated and coded and is then used to measure the ideological positions of parties on a range of 54 sentence-categories grouped into seven policy domains (Budge, Robertson and Hearl 1987). Different methodologies (Budge, Robertson and Hearl 1987; Laver and Budge 1992; Klingemann, Hofferbert and Budge 1994; Laver, Benoit and Garry 2003) have been used to calculate the positioning of parties on the left–right axis which produced reasonably accurate classifications.

The datasets collated by both the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and MARPOR offer useful tools to conduct quantitative research on the ideological positions of parties and are particularly useful to conduct longitudinal studies of several political parties. For example, a study by Andreas Fagerholm (2013), which used the MARPOR dataset, showed the extent to which social democratic parties shifted to the right in the period 1970–1999.

The datasets generated by the Manifesto Project and Chapel Hill have also inspired fascinating research about voters’ understanding of the ideologies of political parties. From Anthony Downs’ (1957: 100–1) observation that the left–right divide offers key cognitive cues to voters when assessing different parties (see also Fortunato, Stevenson and Vonnahme 2016: 1212), other fascinating insights emerged.

For instance, behavioural research has shown that party manifestos have a limited influence over voters’ understanding of the ideological positioning of political parties (Adams et al 2014: 948). Instead, voters take their cues from elite discourse in the media, from other parties’ reactions (Busch 2016: 162) and from parties’ “policy images” (Adams et al 2011: 371) to make assessments about the ideological positioning of the different parties. Similarly, party polarisation can enable voters to make more accurate evaluations of party’s ideologies (Levendusky 2010: 114; Carroll and Kubo 2018: 250). All these cognitive shortcuts enable voters to make roughly correct assessments about parties’ ideological positioning (Busch 2016: 160).

However, relying exclusively on the MARPOR or the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys datasets to analyse the ideologies of political parties has several limitations. First, relying on the classifications of different experts may not result in a uniform categorisation. Second, party manifestos serve electoral purposes (Mair and Mudde 1998: 219). As such, this approach fails to consider party activities between elections. Third, as these approaches do not analyse speeches, media interventions or other party documents, the manifesto datasets do not offer a complete explanation of the ideological projects parties pursue. Fourth, policy stances may reflect ideological positions, but they are not ideologies. Policy stances are often contextual to the electoral cycle and are rarely placed in the ideological context of the party.

Above all, studies of party ideologies that draw on Downsian spatial analysis tend to emphasise the primacy of power-seeking goals at the expense of any other goal (Downs 1957: 100–101). For instance, Buckler and Dolowitz argue that ideas “play a more significant and complex role in democratic competition than Downs might have thought”; they maintain that “his model provides a reference point by which to qualify what might otherwise (and equally implausibly) be asserted as the driver of political competitions” (2012: 578). At best, ideology is presented as a constraining factor because parties are electorally penalised if they “leapfrog” ideologically (Budge 1994: 448).

Doubtless, these different theories offer valuable insights about electoral competition, party change and voting behaviour. However, they tend to offer a reductive understanding of political parties as they are often presented as highly cohesive and monolithic organisations. In reality, political parties are diverse institutions where different factions compete to lead the party ideologically and organisationally. They are also organisations composed of different actors – from parliamentary candidates to party officials, electoral strategists, intellectuals, activists – who are often supported by a network of think tanks, media organisations, public intellectuals, community organisers, funders, supporters and so on, who are not part of the party but who contribute to its activities, including ideological production and contestation. Moreover, these quantitative accounts offer a partial explanation of the role of ideologies in the activities of political parties. In these accounts, ideologies play a merely instrumental role. They are never seen as an independent variable that can guide the thinking and the actions of political parties, even when they undergo processes of ideological change. In fairness, these quantitative approaches do not seek to explain how political parties engage with ideologies. Their central objects of study are the political party as a power-seeking institution and voters’ electoral behaviour.

A step forward in the understanding of how political parties engage with ideologies must start from the premise that political parties are not just power-seeking institutions. As ideological organisations they are also interested in achieving ideological goals, in solving policy puzzles and in transforming voters’ preferences. Thus, if parties are institutions that pursue power, they do so for ideological reasons.

Ideologies, truth and political power

While mainstream political science has minimised the role of ideas and ideology in the activities of political parties, scholars of political thought tended to view ideologies as a pedestrian form of political thinking that aimed to manipulate public opinion and distort reality. This common (mis)understanding of ideologies meant that before the role of political parties in the production and contestation of ideologies was considered, the study of ideology had to be taken seriously. But it took a while for that to happen.

As explained with great clarity and detail in several studies and anthologies on the subject (Seliger 1976; Freeden 1998; Žižek 2012; Freeden and Stears 2013; Festenstein and Kenny 2005; Freeden 2022; Ostrowski 2022), the development of the study of ideologies moved relatively quickly to establish the important idea that ideologies are forms of thought practice (Gramsci 1999: 196) that can be used by dominant social groups to subtly maintain social order (Althusser 2008: 7). When ideologies are seen in this light, determining whether they distort or reflect reality became irrelevant questions. As Žižek (2012: 7) argues, “a political standpoint can be quite accurate (‘true’) as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological; and vice versa, the idea that a political standpoint gives of its social content can prove to be totally wrong, yet there is absolutely nothing ‘ideological’ about it”.

What matters then is that ideologies as forms of thought action that permeate all aspects of social and political life have concrete effects in the world. First, ideologies help us make sense of reality, offering cognitive maps to understand the world (Geertz 1973). As Ostrowski argues, without the “lens” of ideologies “reality would seem blurred and out of focus, uniform in emphasis, and devoid of features noticeable enough to ‘draw the eye’, with our attention caught only contingently by random collisions and ‘close encounters’ with our surroundings” (Ostrowski 2022: 50). From this effect another one follows: because ideologies shape the way we understand the world, they shape our actions too.

It thus becomes clear that understanding ideologies is a way of learning about society and politics. As Seliger explains, ideologies are “sets of ideas by which men posit, explain and justify ends and means of organised social action, and specifically political action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given order” (1976: 14). As action-oriented forms of political thought, ideologies are in constant tension. The two opposite “ends–means” relationships of ideology are, as Seliger (1976: 254) puts it, both “a means of achieving power and of power as a means of realizing ideology [and are] not always sharply and consistently distinguishable”.

From this understanding of ideologies, others followed. Crucially, the “discursive turn” spearheaded by the Essex School of Language and Ideology lead by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Michael Freeden’s morphological approach, established the study of ideologies “as a major genre of political thought” (Freeden 1998: 13).

The establishment of ideology studies has also resulted in a detoxified concept of ideology. Ideology scholars now approach ideologies as a particular form of political thought that is action-oriented and expressed in a variety of formats. Thus, instead of only analysing the texts of the great theorists of each ideological tradition, ideology studies also study other producers of ideology, namely political parties, think tanks, social movements, intellectuals, artists and anyone involved in the production and contestation of ideologies. This opening led in turn to the inclusion of different forms of ideological texts. Alongside the rationally argued philosophical essay, ideology studies also analyse sound-bites, speeches, party manifestos, posters, slogans, songs, art, popular culture, film, memes and social media postings.

Political parties and ideologies: An awkward symbiosis

The establishment of ideology studies as a distinct field of social and political enquiry paved the way for the emergence of insightful new explanations about how power is exercised and about how political actors think, as well as about the role of ideologies in political decision-making. It also contributed to a richer understanding of the activities of political parties. Despite this, establishing the role of ideology in the life of political parties or the contribution of political parties to the production, contestation and dissemination of ideologies is not a straightforward affair.

The difficulty stems from the fact that political parties have complex relationships with ideologies. If political parties are the most visible embodiments of ideologies, they are not necessarily their most faithful followers. On the other hand, ideologies are forms of action-oriented political thought that are associated with specific meanings. As Michael Freeden (1998: 3) helpfully suggests, ideologies are a form of “lived” political thinking which is action-oriented and defined by specific characteristics that form distinctive conceptions of the good society. Thus, each ideology is “characterized by a morphology that displays core, adjacent and peripheral concepts” (Freeden 1998: 77). What then distinguishes one ideology from another is the way those concepts are “bunched together” ( Freeden 2000: 304) and interpreted. Moreover, as Laycock explains, in Freeden’s approach concepts are not autonomous but relational, because their meaning “arises from the (historically and culturally) specific relationship to other concepts in a given time and place” (2019: 6).

The different purposes of political parties and ideologies result in a relationship that is symbiotic but awkward. Though it is through political parties that ideologies reach prominence (Berman 2010: 10), some political parties try to fit the ideology to which they are associated into their immediate goals. To use Freeden’s fitting explanation, in the hands of political parties, ideologies “will be simplified, made user-friendly, harmonized internally, energized assertively, and overblown” (Freeden 1998: 18–19). In other words, political parties will try to weaponise ideologies for a variety of purposes. To complicate matters further, the ability of political parties to reinvent themselves is constrained by ideologies (Budge 1994; Buckler and Dolowitz 2012: 582) as any attempt to revise their programmes may be penalised by voters. As Blackburn (2017: 124) argues, these features turn political parties into “unreliable vehicles for ideologies”.

This unreliability is problematic because, though political parties are the most prominent manifestations of ideologies, they do not have property rights over them. In fact, the participation of political parties in the production of ideologies is contested. For instance, Freeden_ (2006: 18) maintains that political parties are “carriers and distributors of ideology not makers of” . But this claim undervalues the fact that political parties are heavily involved in the production and contestation of ideologies, not only because they want to win elections or are historically constrained by them, but also because ideology is what political parties “do”. Indeed, the participation of political parties in ideological production often aims to adapt the ideology to new circumstances with a view to securing its longevity. In these circumstances, ideology is not simply a constraint, but part of a party’s raison d’être. Moreover, citizens’ understanding of the dominant ideologies is shaped by how they are “practised” by political parties.

The transformation of social democracy throughout the 20^th century in Europe illustrates this point. Initially, this was an ideology that emerged outside political parties, but was then developed by social democratic parties and their intellectuals. Social democracy did not change simply because the “ideologues” adapted to new circumstances; it also changed because the parties that tried to implement social democracy had to find solutions to problems that had been unforeseen by the “theorists”, and these solutions, which were often improvised, went some distance to more precisely define social democracy (Goes 2024). This being said, the account of social democracy offered by social democratic parties has always been contested by intellectuals, activists and party factions.

To fully understand the relationship between ideologies and political parties it is crucial to see the latter as producers of the former. Obviously, they are not the exclusive producers of ideologies, but they are one of the actors that participates in their production and contestation. Intellectuals, social movements, interest groups, think tanks, journalists, activists, will interpret the classic texts of the ideology and will create new ones, including what Blackburn (2017: 118) defines as “vernacular forms of thinking”, or what Alan Finlayson (2012: 751) calls “everyday” political ideas that can be found in speeches, newspaper articles, posters, social media posts and performances.

On the other hand, political parties must contend with the fact that ideologies are dynamic systems of political thought. Ideologies adapt to new circumstances and respond to the different pressures of activists, intellectuals, institutions and any actor involved in the production and contestation of ideologies. Because ideologies exist on an historical continuum, they are mouldable systems of political thought that are in constant mutation over time and space ( Freeden 2018: 2). But change and transformation have limits. As Freeden explains, the “breakdown of identifiable patterns” can lead to the “snapping” of the ideology and to the emergence of new ideological permutations (Freeden 1998: 87–88).

Studying ideologies: Discourse, morphologies and power

Thus far, we have established that there is an awkward symbiosis between political parties and ideologies. We have also established that political parties participate in ideological production. But to account for their awkward symbiosis, special methodological tools need to be deployed. It is clear that the quantitative analysis of party manifestos is insufficient to analyse the role of political parties in ideological production and contestation as well as the role of ideology in the lives of political parties. They may offer interesting and valuable insights about political parties’ ideological change in response to voter behaviour, but are less useful at explaining the nature of that change. Moreover, manifestos are only one of the many ways whereby parties express ideological views. Thus, the analysis of party ideologies proposed in these studies is reductive, ahistorical and lacks context. Finally, these studies do not view political parties as ‘thinking’ organisations that take seriously their historical trajectories and ideological missions.

Fortunately, a variety of methodological approaches has been developed by scholars from different disciplines to assist us in that task (Maynard 2013). These approaches account for several factors, namely that: 1) language plays a central role in politics; 2) ideologies are adaptable but there are limits to their adaptability; and 3) political parties often use ideologies in instrumental ways.

Amongst the myriad approaches used by scholars of ideologies to study how political parties engage with ideologies, four stand out: discourse analysis; morphological analysis; rhetorical analysis; and a mixed method that combines the tools of historical institutionalism with the mapping structure of discursive institutionalism. Each of the four approaches briefly outlined below can map the various ways whereby political parties use ideologies.

One much-used approach to analyse how political parties relate to and use ideology is based on the methodologies of discourse analysis. Underpinning this approach is the belief that ideology is ubiquitous (Norvall 2000: 316) and is expressed in speech acts. The most established approach in the discourse analysis of ideologies is the one developed by the Essex School of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. This approach, which reflects Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, argues that ideologies seek to decontest political contexts and relations of domination ( Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 105). This approach assumes that because social phenomena are mediated through the articulation of discourse, their meanings cannot be permanently fixed. Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 106–7) argue that meanings change with contexts and with the “relativity of values”. Because of this, the purpose of discourse analysis is not to uncover the “truth” about reality, but to explain how discursive practices construct reality (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 113).

The discursive approach to the study of ideology through language combines the study of linguistics with insights from structuralism and social theory and assumes (correctly) that language is an instrument of power. Thus, critical discourse analysis claims that language affects social structures and therefore can lead to social change or continuity (Fairclough 1989: 37). This approach seeks to link the formal features of texts with social and political contexts. Thus, critical discourse analysis is developed in three stages: first, the researcher must describe the text in its form; second, s/he/they must interpret the relationship between the speaker and the audience; third, the researcher must explain the relationship between interactions and social context (Fairclough 1989: 109). But if this approach offers a detailed analysis of speech acts, it only contextualises them in the immediate time and space. As a result, what political actors say is dissociated from ideologies and their historical trajectories.

An alternative approach is public political discourse analysis, which emphasises the role of context and focuses on both the production and reception of ideas. This approach entails several steps, namely the analysis of the discourse in the context of other ideas and discourses that were in circulation at the time, and the establishment of connections between different communication practices (Chadwick 2000: 289–290). But like critical discourse analysis, it engages little with ideological morphologies.

The morphological or conceptual approach theorised by Michael Freeden stands out as the most frequently used approach in empirical studies of ideologies in the last two decades. It offers a nuanced methodology which assumes that the production and contestation of ideologies is shaped by discourse, context and power. This approach analyses ideologies as forms of political thinking that are woven in discourse and seek to influence political action in a particular time and space. The morphological approach also entails a conceptual analysis of the texts created by the producers of ideologies, as well as a contextual analysis that deploys the tools of the historian and an investigation of the morphological patterns that can lead to the attribution of ideological meaning (Freeden 1998: 14). This approach allows for the contextualisation of discourses within the time and space in which they were uttered and the determination of how they relate to distinct ideologies.

Because the main feature of ideologies is the “morphological act of decontestation”, Freeden says that they must be analysed as “systems of broadly held political beliefs, speaking in languages familiar, or accessible to, most members of a society” (1998: 551–552). This process of simplification of ideologies has accelerated in the last decade because of the widespread use of social media, the polarisation of public opinion and the coarsening of public life ( Freeden 2019: 4). As a result, the ideological coherence of the dominant ideologies of the last century is vanishing, “making way for the bitty, the catchy, the ephemeral and the colloquial” (Freeden 2019: 7). This process has also led to the emergence of what Freeden called “ideolonoids”, that is “empty shapeshifters that assume the guise of ideologies but lack substance” (Freeden 2019: 2).

Drawing on Freeden’s morphological approach and Laclau and Mouffe’s insights on the power of discourse, political scientists have also developed ways of analysing ideologies through “rhetoric”. As Finlayson (2012: 753) explained, “the political theory of ideologies is concerned to establish how political doxa works – how it forms, is manifested, reproduced, develops and decays”. This approach goes further than critical discourse analysis because it locates “political thinking in its historical context but” does “not reduce such thought to it” (Finlayson 2012: 753). One of its innovative features is that it takes seriously the acting, speaking and thinking of political actors, and does not assume that they use rhetoric and ideology as an obfuscation mechanism. Its distinctive feature is that it focuses on the argument and how it is deployed through rhetoric. This focus is justified on the grounds that ideological thought and expressions

… are never simply a ‘working out’ of a series of concepts and propositions but a dynamic interaction of predispositions with both opponents and events, mediated by political actors who must make choices about how to understand and persuasively present a case they must perform.

(Finlayson 2012: 758)

Elsewhere I have proposed an alternative approach to the analysis of how political parties use ideas and ideologies that is especially appropriate for analysing parties’ processes of ideological change (Goes 2021). This approach, which combines Vivien A. Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism with Peter A. Hall’s criteria to test the power of ideas, shows how political parties participate in the production of ideologies by mapping how they use, adopt and adapt ideas to enact ideological change and contribute therefore to the production and contestation of ideologies. The next section explains how discursive institutionalism and historical institutionalism can be combined to analyse ideological change.

Discursive institutionalism is an analytical framework that places ideas at the centre of political action. As such, it does not disregard the role of interests in political decision-making, but it assumes that interests reflect ideas and that in turn ideas can affect the behaviour of political actors. Indeed, ideas enable political actors to make sense of the world by offering 228.causal explanations for social and political phenomena and propose roadmaps to guide political decisions.

As an approach that focuses on “who talks to whom, where and when” (Schmidt 2010: 16) discursive institutionalism emphasises the dialogical nature of ideological production and contestation and allows us to identify the different stages of those processes. In particular, it sheds light on how those dialogical processes can potentially transform the preferences of political actors by mapping how ideas influence them from “thought to word to deed” (Schmidt 2008: 309). This is so because discursive institutionalism focuses on the dynamic nature of the ideational process; that is, it maps how “ideas are generated among policy actors and diffused to the public by political actors through discourse”, and it shows how ideologies are produced, renewed and changed (Schmidt 2011: 55). Thus, the key contribution of discursive institutionalism is to propose a method to map the different stages of how ideas are thought, debated, adopted, adapted and enacted by political actors.

Discursive institutionalists argue that the diffusion of ideas occurs through discourse but is influenced by the institutional context (Schmidt 2010: 4). Crucially, the institutional context is shaped by what Schmidt defines as “background ideas”, which are “the unquestioned assumptions of a polity, the deep philosophical approaches that serve to guide action, the unconscious frames or lenses through which people see the world” (Schmidt 2016: 320). In political parties, those background ideas are the ideological traditions with which they are associated.

Thus, to properly understand how ideas can influence or drive processes of ideological change, discourse needs to be contextualised and categorised by degree of generality (policies, programmes and philosophies), and type of content (cognitive or normative). Cognitive ideas provide blueprints for political action, and normative ideas attach values to political action. Schmidt identifies two types of discourse used by political actors that need to be analysed: coordinative, among political actors; and communicative, between political actors and the public (Schmidt 2008: 305–7). This distinction is important because coordinative discourse signals the intentions of political actors as well as their thought processes, but communicative discourse reveals the constraints they face.

The typology of discourses proposed by discursive institutionalism seems to be especially apt for analysing how political parties engage in ideological production. Because discursive institutionalism focuses on explaining how ideas can lead to policy or ideological change, it pays special attention to the ideational activities of the epistemic community which is responsible for the production of different types of ideas within a political party. This epistemic community, composed of professional intellectuals, think tank experts, party intellectuals and activists from different factions, political advisers and strategists, performs different but related roles: it prioritises issues; it offers causal explanations for policy problems; it links ideas and solutions to the morphologies of ideologies; and it devises strategies to make those ideas attractive to wider audiences.

Thus, discursive institutionalism is well suited to establishing whether a political programme is ideologically coherent or whether a political party is seeking to depart from an ideological tradition to join another or to form an ideological hybrid. It also enables researchers to develop a granular map of the ideas and intentions of political actors and a detailed understanding of the epistemic community engaged in the process of ideological production and contestation. However, discursive institutionalism cannot explain why certain ideas gain currency while others are abandoned or diluted. The key element missing from discursive institutionalism is an understanding of the power of political actors to choose and impose their ideas on others.

To address this weakness, the tools of historical institutionalism can be used. The key assumption of historical institutionalists is that to be powerful, ideas need to possess certain qualities. Peter A. Hall proposes three criteria to test the power of ideas in processes of paradigmatic change (or third-order change, as he defines it), that is change that is not simply about tweaking policy instruments, but which involves change in the values and goals of a society or institution. Hall developed this concept to theorise how economic ideas can lead to paradigmatic policy change, namely how Keynesianism was replaced by monetarist ideas. This concept of paradigmatic change can be stretched to explain how parties use ideologies and ideas and contribute to ideological change.

The first criterion is the persuasive capacity of ideas, a condition which is also required by discursive institutionalism. But persuasiveness is not merely dependent on the intellectual coherence or technical viability of an idea. Hence, in Hall’s model, to be successful ideas also need to be comprehensible. That is to say, they need to resonate with how the recipients of the idea understand the world. Third, to influence policy, ideas must be endorsed by powerful actors (Hall 1989: 368–370). The endorsement of new ideas that can potentially result in their adoption depends, as Hall explains,

not only on the arguments of competing factions, but on their positional advantages within a broader institutional framework, on the ancillary resources they can command in the relevant conflicts, and on exogenous factors affecting the power of one set of actors to impose its paradigm over others.

(Hall 1993: 280)

Because it brings into the equation considerations about power, this third criterion might be the most important one.

This approach has limitations. It over-emphasises the role of institutionalised political actors in the production and contestation of political ideologies by underplaying the role of other ideologists who contribute to the creation of meaning around ideologies, namely marginalised party factions, intellectuals, activists and party outsiders. However, the combination of discursive and historical institutionalisms enables scholars to map how parties develop their political thinking and how they link it to ideologies and broader systems of political thought. In particular, it is a method that sees parties as complex institutions that are interested in power and ideas, but which are themselves arenas for power competition. As such, this combined method considers the contribution to ideological production by a wide range of actors (internal and external to the party) and can identify the coalition of actors who have power to shape the party’s ideological production.

Conclusion

The four methodological approaches briefly outlined here offer rich understandings of the awkward but symbiotic relationship between political parties and ideologies: some emphasise the immediate context in which ideas and discourse are produced, others focus on the form; some try to locate discourse in particular ideological morphologies, while others offer detailed maps of how ideological production and contestation takes place in political parties.

None of the methodological approaches outlined here can offer a full picture of how ideologies are produced and contested. In truth, none of the approaches promises to do that. Moreover, because these approaches tend to offer a fine-grained analysis of ideological production and contestation at a given time and space, they are too resource-intensive to enable a longitudinal study of a party ideological family. As mentioned earlier, quantitative approaches are better suited to this type of analysis. But in their different ways the qualitative methods outlined above use tools that enable ideology scholars to: 1) show that parties are complex institutions populated by a variety of actors who often pursue conflicting goals; 2) show that ideologies play a central role in the lives of parties; 3) explain how political parties understand the world; and 4) show how they locate themselves vis-à-vis the ideologies they seek to articulate, and how they, with the help of diverse network of actors, contribute to ideological production, contestation and change.

References

Adams, J., Clark, M., Ezrow, L. and Somer-Topcu, Z. (2014) “Do voters respond to party manifestos or to a wider information environment? An analysis of mass-elite linkages on European integration”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 58, no. 4, 967–978.

Adams, J., Clark, M., Ezrow, L., Glasgow, G. and Somer-Topcu, Z. (2011) “Is anybody listening? Evidence that voters do not respond to European parties’ policy statements during elections”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 55, no. 2, 370–382.

Althusser, L. (2008) On Ideology, London: Verso.

Berman, S. (2010) The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blackburn, D. (2017) “Still the stranger at the feast? Ideology and the study of the twentieth century British politics”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 22, no. 2, 116–130, 124.

Buckler, S. and Dolowitz, D. (2012) “Ideology matters: Party competition, ideological positioning and the case of the Conservative Party under David Cameron”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 14, 576–594.

Budge, I. (1994) “A new spatial theory of party competition: Uncertainty, ideology and policy equilibria viewed comparatively and temporally”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 24, no. 4, 443–467.

Budge, I., Robertson, D. and Hearl, D. (1987) Ideology, Strategy and Party Change: Spatial Analyses of Post-war Election Programmes in 19 democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Busch, K. B. (2016) “Estimating parties’ left-right positions: Determinants of voters’ perceptions’ proximity to party ideology”, Electoral Studies vol. 41, 159–178.

Carroll, R. and Kubo, H. (2018) “Polarization and ideological congruence between parties and supporters in Europe”, Public Choice, vol. 176, no. 1/2, Special Issue: Honoring Keith T. Poole, 247–265.

Cerda, N. D. L. and Gunderson, J. R. (2023) “Are party families in Europe ideologically coherent today?”, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 63, no. 3, 1208–1226. [Online], Available: https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-6765.12638

Chadwick, A. (2000) “Studying political ideas: A public political discourse approach”, Political Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 283–301.

Dahl, R. (1990) “Party systems and systems of opposition”, in Mair, P. (ed.) The West European Party System, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dommett, K. (2016) “Ideological quietism? Ideology and party politics in Britain”, Political Studies, vol. 64, no. 1, 102–122.

Downs, A. (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York NY: Harper & Row Publishers.

Duverger, M. (1990) “Caucus and branch, Cadre and mass parties” in Mair, P. (ed.) The West European Party System, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fagerholm, A. (2013) “Towards a lighter shade of red? Social democratic parties and the rise of neoliberalism 1970–1999”, Perspectives in European Politics and Society, vol. 14, no. 4, 538–561.

Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power, London: Longman.

Festenstein, M. and Kenny, M. (2005) Political Ideologies: A Reader and a Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Finlayson, A. (2012) “Rhetoric and the political theory of ideologies”, Political Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, 751–767, 765.

Fortunato, D., Stevenson, R. T. and Vonnahme, G. (2016) “Context and political knowledge”, The Journal of Politics, vol. 78, no. 4, 1211–1228.

Freeden, M. (1998) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Freeden, M. (2000) “Practicing ideology and ideological practices”, Political Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 302–322.

Freeden, M. (2006) “Ideology and political theory”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 11, no. 1, 3–22, 18–19.

Freeden, M. (2018) “Loose talk costs … nothing”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 23, no. 1, 1–9.

Freeden, M. (2019) “Editorial: The coming realignment of ideology studies”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 24, no. 1, 1–10.

Freeden, M. (2022) Ideologies Studies: New Advances and Interpretations, London: Routledge.

Freeden, M., Stears, M. and Sargeant, L. T. (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geertz, C. (1973) “Ideology as a cultural system”, [Online], Available: http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Ideology_Cultural.htm

Goes, E. (2021) “Ideas and party change: The role of predistribution in labour’s ideological renewal”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 26, no. 2, 180–200.

Goes, E. (2024) Social Democracy, Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK: Agenda Publishing.

Gramsci, A. (1999) “Selections from the Prison notebooks”, in Forgacs, D. (ed.) The Antonio Gramsci Reader, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Green, J. and Hobolt, S. B. (2008) “Owning the issue agenda: Party strategies and vote choices in British elections”, Electoral Studies, vol. 27, 460–476.

Hall, P. A. (1993) “Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: The case of economic policymaking in Britain”, Comparative Politics, vol. 25, no. 3, 275–296.

Hall, P. A. (1989) ‘Conclusion: The politics of Keynesian ideas’, in Hall, P. A. (ed.) The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Harmel, R. and Janda, K. (1994) “An integrated theory of party goals and party change”, in Journal of Theoretical Politics vol. 6, no. 3, 259–287.

Kirchheimer, O. (1990). “The catch-all party” in Mair, P. (ed.) The West European Party System, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klingemann, H., Hofferbert, R. I. and Budge, I. (1994) Parties, Policies and Democracy, Boulder CO: Westview Press.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso.

LaPalombara, J. and Weiner, M. (1990) “The origins of political parties” in Mair, P. (ed.) The West European Party System, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Laver, M. and Budge, I. (ed.) (1992) Party, Policy and Government Coalitions, London: St. Martin’s Press.

Laver, M., Benoit, K. and Garry, J. (2003) “Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data”, The American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 3, 311–331.

Laycock, D. (2019) “Introduction” in Laycock, D. (ed.) Political Ideology in Parties, Policy, and Civil Society: Interdisciplinary Insights, Vancouver: UBC Press.

Levendusky, M. S. (2010) “Clearer cues, more consistent voters: A benefit of elite polarization” Political Behavior, vol. 32, no. 1, 111–131.

Mair, P. and Mudde, C. (1998) “The party family and its study”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 1, 211–229.

Maynard, J. L. (2013) “A map of the field of ideological analysis”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 18, no. 3, 299–327.

Norvall, A. J. (2000) “The things we do with words: Contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 20, no. 2, 313–346.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2022) Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sartori, G. (1990) “Structuring the party system” in Mair, P. (ed.) The West European Party System, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmidt, V. A. (2008) “Discursive institutionalism: The explanatory power of ideas and discourse”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 11, 303–26.

Schmidt, V. A. (2011) “Reconciling ideas and institutions through discursive institutionalism”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. H. (eds) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmidt, V. A. (2016) “The roots of neo-liberal resilience: Explaining continuity and change in background ideas in Europe’s political economy”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 18, no. 2, 318–334.

Seliger, M. (1976) Ideology and Politics, London: George Allen & Unwin.

Stokes, D. E. (1963) “Spatial models of party competition”, The American Political Science Review, vol. 57. no. 2, 368–377.

Strøm, K. (1990) “A behavioural theory of competitive political parties”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 34, no. 2, 565–598.

Von Beyme, K. (1985) Political Parties in Western Democracies, Aldershot UK: Gower.

Ware, A. (1997) Political Parties and Party Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weber, M. (2014 [1946]) “Politics as a vocation”, in Geerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C. (eds) Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Werner, A. (2020) “Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals”, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 22, no. 1, 122–142.

Žižek, S. (2012) “The spectre of ideology”, in Žižek, S. (ed.) Mapping Ideology, London: Verso.

14. News, ideology and climate change

“You cannot begrudge people for wanting to feel better”[48]

Darren Fleet, Shane Gunster and Robert Neubauer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-19

Introduction

Apple TV’s hit streaming series, The Morning Show, (2019–present) offers an interesting entry point into the discussion of news, ideology and the climate crisis. The show follows the lives of two journalists, Bradley Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) and Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), as they navigate the tensions of post #meToo America. In season 1, episode 6, Levy and Cooper are sent on assignment to California to cover the out-of-control wildfires sweeping across the state. During this fieldwork, Cooper, a young former small-town reporter who recently burst onto the national media scene via a viral YouTube video, challenges the show’s executive producer (Charlie Black) and lead host (Alex Levy) over their wildfire coverage. While Levy and Black want to close the newscast with a story featuring a good Samaritan who rescued pets from the blaze, Cooper challenges this “feel-good”, individualised news framing. The editorial room discussion unfolds as follows:

Co-host Bradley Cooper: Don’t you think that is a little bit soft? I mean, I like dogs, but just to end to the show?

Producer Charlie Black: Um what did you have in mind Bradley?

Co-host Cooper: I don’t know, maybe something about the allocation of firefighting resources, how they prioritize which homes they want to save …

Producer Black: …Um. It might look like we are denigrating first responders, so I am not sure it is the right tone for us …

Co-host Cooper: I mean we’re a news program. I think our tone is the truth. Even when it’s ugly.

Lead host Alex Levy: Oh my God! Are you going to do this every day? … This ‘I’m so down with the people’, superior, journalist, bullshit? It’s really obnoxious … You have no respect for our show …

Co-host Cooper: Well, I don’t need to lie to myself about the quality of the show …

Producer Black: … Respectfully. We are the number one morning news program in the country”.

Co-host Cooper: Which is why you are an incredible platform to open people’s eyes to what’s really happening … instead of force-feeding them a bunch of glossy garbage that sedates them into thinking their lives are great because they saved some dog.

Lead host Levy: Why!? So we can all just fucking kill ourselves?! ... Jesus! You cannot begrudge people for wanting to feel better. It’s part of the job.

What makes this scene a relevant entry point to a discussion of ideology, climate and news is how it gestures towards the intersection between varying historical conceptions of ideology and journalism’s societal role. Its fictionalised account of the news gathering processes offers a useful device for thinking about media and the ideological constructions of reality. In this chapter, we focus on several key dimensions of this dialogue:

First, we review how Cooper’s claim that popular news media “force feeds” audiences “glossy garbage that sedates them” aligns with longstanding perspectives within the critical theory tradition of ideology and its entanglement with journalism, as well as scholarship charting the role news media played in popularising the narratives of industry-funded climate-sceptic campaigns. We also look at Levy’s invocation of conservative populist frames that critique climate crisis-engaged reporting as “superior, journalist, bullshit” in ways that reinforce common sense articulations of petroculture and the “American way of life”.

Next, we explore Levy’s claim that “You cannot begrudge people for wanting to feel better”, drawing on emerging scholarship on the role of identity and ideology in the social organisation of climate change and the ways in which news media often help manage cognitive dissonance by reproducing dominant logics of individual agency, unbridled economic growth and consumerism which undermine meaningful climate action. Finally, we take up Cooper’s claim that journalism ought “to open people’s eyes” in regard to underlying climate change causes and potential solutions.

Ideology and news media

Carvalho defines ideology “as a system of values, norms and political preferences linked to a program of action vis-à-vis a given social and political order”, in which “people relate to each other and to the world on the basis of value judgments, ideas about how things should be and preferred forms of governance” (2007: 225). Carvalho posits this value-neutral definition as distinct from critical or Marxist definitions that highlight ideological mystification, or the “distortion of reality” in ways that reproduce relations of social power.

The value-neutral conception is perhaps the most common definition of ideology in environmental communication scholarship (e.g. Zia 2010; Berglez and Olausson 2014), with Jost et al (2009: 309–310) arguing that such conceptions have largely displaced critical definitions in contemporary scholarship. Yet, as they note, these are not mutually exclusive approaches. After all, the same belief systems can both orient subjects to the world in particular ways even while fundamentally mischaracterising key aspects of it.

News media necessarily prioritise certain values and narratives over others and these can include those which make particular distortions of reality (such as those that reproduce both the social power of the fossil fuel industry and dominant modes of energy-intensive development) more compelling as a means of (mis)understanding objective reality. In short, news is a key area through which the ideological strategies and influence of particular actors, as well as broader social systems and worldviews, are reinforced or challenged. This is particularly relevant to climate change as “mediated reality” (Scheufele, in Feldman 2016: 2). Given the abstract and diffuse character of global climate change, humans cannot comprehend it through direct experience alone. We are dependent upon news and other media to connect the dots between our lived experience, the impacts of climate change (like extreme weather) and its causes; in this sense, climate change is socially constructed (Brand and Brunnengräber 2012).

Just as important as climate change’s presence in news media is how it is framed within coverage. To frame, notes Entman (1993: 52), is “to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluations and/or treatment recommendation”. News framing thereby helps shape the “social construction” of climate change (Pettenger 2007), including audiences’ understanding of its causes, consequences and entanglement with our lives.

“Force-feeding them glossy garbage that sedates them”: Ideology, journalistic sources and the climate counter-movement

What does it mean to say that “the media” feeds audiences “garbage” that “sedates them?” In the context of ideology critique, Cooper’s appeal functions as a layperson’s articulation of various critical analyses of journalism which explore how media are bound up in relations of social power and ideology. Such analyses have often examined how both institutionalised news routines and media political economy shape journalistic reporting. Political economy accounts such as Herman and Chomsky’s (2021) “propaganda model” examine how advertising-based business models, profit maximising and ownership structures reproduced the worldviews of powerful institutions in corporate media. Habermas’ (1991) famous analysis of the “refeudalisation” of the public sphere argued that the commercialisation of journalism encouraged the rise of public relations while undermining democratic deliberation. Similarly, Stuart Hall et al’s (2017) classic study of news-sourcing practices examines how news routines tend to establish “official sources” from socially authoritative institutions as “primary definers” of news stories in ways that privileged the interests of powerful social groups.

These different strands come together in what we describe as a Gramscian analysis of news and ideology. In Gramsci’s (2020) classic formulation of hegemony, he foregrounds the importance of culturally authoritative civil society institutions in reproducing the ideological worldviews of powerful social groups, even while oppositional actors may respond by producing their own institutions or attempting to influence existing ones (Neubauer 2011). This captures a key intersection between media and ideology: the ideological struggle between competing actors to frame reality by gaining media entry as journalistic sources. As Leiserowitz notes, news as an arena of claims-making is fundamentally an “exercise … in power”, as those “with the power to define the terms of the debate strongly determine the outcomes” (quoted in Boykoff 2011: 168). With this in mind, Cooper’s declaration reads as more nuanced and less cynical. The refusal to “force-feed” her audience “garbage” is an acknowledgement that there are different choices at play in producing news coverage and in the scene she is explicitly addressing an outlet’s sourcing choices.

This brings us to an infamous intersection between journalism, ideology and climate change: the role news media played as unwitting accessories in fossil capital’s decades-long campaign to promote climate scepticism. Industry achieved this by leveraging journalists’ news-sourcing routines to reproduce climate disinformation in the public sphere, particularly in the Anglosphere countries where industry has significant political power. Much of this involved funding a sprawling climate change-counter-movement (CCCM), working indirectly through third-party groups and experts (or, often, dubiously credentialed “experts”) who could influence public opinion as news sources (Neubauer 2011; Oreskes and Conway 2011).

This campaign influenced news coverage in three ways: first, by cultivating scientific scepticism about climate science and misrepresenting scientists as deeply divided over the issue; second, by exaggerating the economic costs of taking action and amplifying fears about lifestyle implications of reducing fossil fuel use ( Stecula 2019); and third, by attacking climate scientists and advocates as “environmental elites” misrepresenting science for their personal gain at the expense of energy-hungry consumers (Neubauer 2011). Ideology’s core feature in critical theory is its ability to distort and repress information threatening dominant structures, institutions and practices. Given that the CCCM convinced many that climate science was uncertain, delaying robust action, it seems a fairly unambiguous example of ideological “mystification” in the critical sense.

While news sources compete to influence public opinion, they do not compete on even terrain (Anderson 2017). Several factors helped industry and its sceptic allies to serve as journalistic sources. The first was long-term industry funding of the CCCM – a network of think tanks, advocacy groups and other institutions which produced knowledge and experts that supported industry interests in the press (Jacques, Dunlap and Freeman 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2011). Many of these institutions and actors were embedded in a broader pre-existing neoliberal counter-movement funded by capital since the 1970s to undermine growing threats to corporate power in the US, UK and Canada. Dedicated to the promotion of free-market policy in the public sphere, this neoliberal counter-movement had targeted environmentalism from the outset, recognising the threat to corporate interests posed by stringent environmental regulation (Beder 2002; Gutstein 2009). This helps explain the resources and institutional coherence of the CCCM, as well as how many members – some of whom had built source credibility with journalists for decades on various issues – were well positioned to serve as climate news sources as the issue’s public profile grew.

A second factor in the counter-movement’s success was its exploitation of journalistic norms and routines, as journalists used sceptic sources to “balance” climate reporting (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004). Standard sourcing routines featuring “both sides” of a controversy led to false balancing when applied to largely settled climate science, misleading audiences into thinking there was an evenly divided scientific debate. This tendency towards false balancing increased as climate change transformed from scientific issue to perceived political issue (Chinn, Hart and Soroka 2020), a shift the counter-movement – with its focus on economic costs and the alleged nefarious agendas of climate advocates (for example, activists wanting to take away your “freedom”) – strongly encouraged (Neubauer 2011).

The counter-movement also exploited journalists’ tendency to establish “hierarchies of credibility” in which “official” sources from authoritative institutions – government, industry, etc. – are quoted more frequently and as the “primary definers” of news stories (Anderson 2017: 3–5). Less authoritative institutions and oppositional actors, like activists, indigenous peoples, organised labour and others, tend to be placed further down the hierarchy, a pattern that continues in recent Canadian coverage of fossil fuel controversies (Gunster and Saurette 2014; Hackett and Adams 2018). These tendencies further enabled industry, allied politicians and industry-funded civil society groups to become climate news sources, the latter often possessing the cultural capital of expert credibility via their association with established neoliberal policy advocates grown influential following decades of corporate funding and public advocacy (Neubauer 2011).

The counter-movement’s advantage here was amplified by long-term shifts in media political economy, especially the economic decline of legacy news outlets. Decades of budget and staff cuts following multiple rounds of ownership consolidation, declining subscriptions and the capture of online advertising revenue by Meta and Google has made overworked journalists more vulnerable to public relations content (Gibson 2016). Scholars have documented an intensifying influence of public relations on news coverage, recycling the perspectives of those with the greatest capacity to produce public relations material (Anderson 2017; Schäfer and Painter 2021). The CCCM excelled at producing “information subsidies” – PR content such as interviews, press releases, guest written op-eds and so on – which sources provide to journalists to subsidise content production and influence news framing (Anderson 2017: 5). Substantial industry funding gave climate scepticism the edge since counter-movement actors could produce more information subsidies than environmentalist rivals or publicity-averse scientists.

A final factor in the counter-movement’s ideological influence was the rise of right-wing news media, which have proven especially hospitable to pro-industry views and experts (Carvahlo 2007). Differing ideological commitments strongly shape climate coverage (O’Neill et al 2015), with right-leaning outlets particularly willing to feature counter-movement sources and pro-industry claims (Carvahlo 2007; Gunster and Saurette 2014). Unsurprisingly, studies show that greater consumption of right-wing news media decreases scientific literacy on climate change compared with reading more objective news content (Diehl et al 2021). The influence of partisan media has arguably been strengthened by an increasingly ideologically polarised media system resulting from economic strategies for navigating a world of fragmenting media audiences (Taibbi 2019). Conservative columnists are especially central to the climate obstructionism machine by reproducing ideologically driven narratives about climate change (Gunster et al 2018). While solidified scientific consensus has undermined sceptics’ credibility as hard news sources, hostility to climate change has remained strong among conservative columnists who translate the raw material of information provided by industry and counter-movement into climate obstructionist narratives in their op-ed writing, TV and radio appearances (Gunster et al 2018; Gunster and Saurette 2014), activating in-group reasoning and confirmation bias in conservative audiences (Elsasser and Dunlap 2013).

“Superior, journalist bullshit”: Conservative populism, news media and climate change

If the CCCM cultivated scepticism in climate science (Oreskes and Conway 2011), equally important was their articulation of climate politics with right-wing populist ideology (Neubauer 2011). The result was an “extractive populist” discourse in which oil and gas fuelled the wellbeing of energy consumers and workers, with climate action described as threatening carbon-intensive lifestyles, consumption habits and culture (Gunster et al 2021). Key here was stoking populist anger at climate advocates framed as liberal elites: the scientists, environmentalists, politicians and journalists described as pushing a self-serving, fraudulent climate agenda at the expense of the people (Neubauer 2011). Ironically, then, even while news media helped spread extractive populist discourse, it emerged as a key signifier within it. When Witherspoon’s climate justice advocate in The Morning Show is accused by her senior colleague of posturing with “superior, journalist bullshit”, she expresses precisely this populist articulation of the elitist journalist pushing an unwanted climate agenda.

The counter-movement’s success can be grasped in research identifying party affiliation and political ideology as the strongest predictors of belief in climate change and support for action, with conservatives far less likely to believe in climate change or support climate action than those with other ideological dispositions (Zia and Todd 2010; Davidson and Haan 2012; McCright and Dunlap 2013; Hornsey et al 2016; Bolin and Hamilton 2018; Furnham and Robinson 2022). This aligns with longstanding work identifying cultural and ideological worldviews as core drivers in the interpretation of and response to scientific risks (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983). Accordingly, Dan Kahan and his colleagues have argued for a cultural cognition framework in which responses to climate change are driven by motivated reasoning, accepting or rejecting particular “facts” according to their alignment with one’s ideological worldview (Kahan et al 2011). Unsurprisingly, climate scepticism is particularly strong in the Anglosphere where the climate counter-movement was and is strongest, while ideology-based predictors are far weaker in other regions (Boykoff 2011; McCright 2016; Stecula and Merkley 2019; Diehl et al 2021). Cultural cognition of climate risk is therefore not driven exclusively by psychological factors, but rather activated, sustained and reinforced by media and cultural ecosystems and corresponding ideologies (Jost et al 2009, Gibson 2016; Maeseele and Pepermans 2017).

McCright therefore argues that elite cues from counter-movement news sources became a clear force in driving climate polarisation in the US (McCright and Dunlap 2011; 2013), as the shift from scientific sources in the late 1980s to political sources (politicians, think tank scholars, etc.) in the 1990s increased activation of counter-movement frames (Carvalho 2007; Chinn, Hart and Soroka 2020; Schafer and Painter 2021). This is because a key driver of cultural cognition is cues from political and ideological elites that provide conceptual frameworks positioning climate action as threatening identities, beliefs and value systems (Guber 2017; McCright 2011). Right-wing media have been especially noteworthy here, prioritising conservative political elites and excluding those challenging their perspective. There is now significant research confirming the “Fox news effect”, in which watching right-wing news is strongly associated with climate scepticism, a process that intensifies as ideology and media selection become self-reinforcing spirals (Feldman 2016; Bolin and Hamilton 2018; Bolsen and Shapiro 2018; Diehl et al 2021).

Klein argues that the most important ideological intervention of the counter-movement was its prescient diagnosis of the threat climate change posed to conservative worldviews celebrating capitalism, small government, economic inequality and consumer freedom, along with related neoliberal policy pillars of privatisation, deregulation and austerity (Klein 2014: 4). Similarly, Paterson (2021) explores the contradictions between capitalism and climate action, with key capitalist dynamics: – infinite growth; dominance of the profit motive; externalisation of ecological costs; historical links between fossil energy and capitalist development; and the political power of business – undermining the changes required to lower emissions to safe levels.

Therefore, another important intersection between media, ideology and climate concerns how the counter-movement exploited the dominant social logics of our collective “petroculture” (Szeman, Wilson and Carlson 2017), or the deeply embedded imaginaries – and values – of fossil-fuelled society ( Petrocultures Research Group 2016). There is an elective affinity between affective attachments to high-carbon consumption – driving, flying, meat-intensive diets, etc. – and a desire to avoid information that highlights the catastrophic impacts of these practices (Daggett 2018). Huber and Urry similarly explore how American access to cheap oil enabled automobility and suburbanisation, reifying specific, fossil-fuel-dependent articulations of freedom, autonomy and prosperity for middle and working classes (Huber 2013; Urry 2013). In turn, Cara Daggett’s work on petromasculinity explores how the spread of cars, suburbs and the nuclear family (oriented around white male workers) yoked the American dream (and attendant gender norms) to the continued supply of cheap energy (Daggett 2018). Daggett thereby argues that climate denial is best understood through desire, rather than as a failure of scientific communication or reason. Specifically, it is “an attachment to the righteousness of fossil fuel lifestyles” which “produces a desire to not just deny, but to refuse climate change” (Daggett 2018: 41). Needless to say, affective attachments to carbon-intensive practices also remain powerful barriers to change even among the climate friendly: academic communities and institutions, for example, have not been particularly innovative or bold in adopting easily available and pragmatic alternatives to emissions-intensive travel, with meetings and conferences frequently located in exotic and appealing locations (Higham and Font 2020).

Here Althusser’s understanding of ideology as living one’s relationship to the material world in mythical ways becomes vital. When Althusser observes ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 2012: 82), the critical implication for news media is to observe the ways that these relationships are positioned as both concretely material and ideologically common sense and how it is they touch down upon and offer pliable (if potentially misleading) explanations for what one sees happening in broader society and one’s own life. Ideology then has both a psychological character, structuring our cognitive and affective experience of the world, and an explanatory role, in that it helps the world make sense to us.

As Stuart Hall (1988) put it in his classic analysis of Thatcherism:

the first thing to ask about [any popular] ideology … is not what is false about it but what about it is true. By ‘true’ I do not mean universally correct as a law of the universe but simply ‘makes good sense,’ which … is usually quite enough for ideology.

(45)

Seemingly channelling Hall, the CCCM presented climate action as not just an attack on the comforts and convenience of an energy-intensive economy by eco-elites, but as a threat to fossil-fuelled identities, worldviews and concepts of freedom and security understood as simultaneously market-based and energy dependent. As Stecula and Merkley (2019: 3) argue, “citizens had to learn to connect their individualistic or conservative ideological beliefs to opposition to climate change”, giving comprehensible symbolic form to the affective and material dimensions of petroculture. This explains how right populism has become such a significant factor in climate obstructionist discourse (Lockwood 2018; Kulin, Johansson and Dunlap 2021), as ideological polarisation becomes amplified through patterns of media exposure that help audiences suppress uncomfortable information (Boykoff 2011; Feldman et al 2014; Bolin and Hamilton 2018; Bolsen and Shapiro 2018). Yet the desire to avoid uncomfortable information implicating climate change in contemporary ways of life applies not just to right populism, but to various, more “pragmatic” forms of climate denial. Here, once again, news media helps mediate our engagement with climate change at an ideological level.

“You cannot begrudge people for wanting to feel better”: News media and the social organisation of climate change

Climate change is socially discomforting. As literature scholar Timothy Morton has noted, the weather, once the most innocuous of conversations, is now wrought with existential dread and ideological implication (Morton 2013). In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard (2011) describes the various ways that even climate-conscious populations work to keep climate change emotionally and psychologically “away”. Drawing upon sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, Norgaard argues that how “we learn what to ignore” is as impactful and meaningful as what we learn to think about and act upon (Zerubavel in Norgaard 2011: 5). In this approach, no idea is ever absent from public life; rather, ideas are organised into, or out of, political relevance (see also Hajer 1995).

As we have seen with the CCCM, it is not a lack of information about the ecological crisis per se that conditions our engagement, but rather how this information is socially organised and tied to other systems of meaning. Journalism scholar Candis Callison argues that “alongside the dominant discourses through media in the midst of transformation, social networks and affiliations provide a vital translation of science in varied vernaculars such that climate change becomes invested with meaning, ethics and/or morality” (Callison 2014: 15). Localisation of understanding means that climate change necessarily means different things to different audiences. Ideology, then, helps mediate this multiplicity. Scholars in this terrain also observe the ways that understandings of gender, labour and economy are tied to historical articulations (and celebrations) of resource extraction, consumptive excess and national identity (Barney 2017; Daggett 2018; Massie and Jackson 2020).

Others observe how challenging the structural features of contemporary society threaten to invoke system-justification imperatives that nudge people in conservative directions. When the system from which I take meaning and identity is threatened, that can increase the pressures for system justification which tend to enhance the appeal of conservative ideas (Jost et al 2009; McCright and Dunlap 2013; Jacquet, Dietrich and Jost 2014; McCright, Dunlap and Marquart-Pyatt 2016). What these authors identify is that fossil fuels have significant social, psychological and political meanings beyond their ecological malignancy. As various “energy humanities” scholars have observed (Boyer and Szeman 2014: para. 3), addressing fossil fuels necessarily means addressing the fossil-fuelled values, beliefs, expectations and identities that have come to define life and expectation in carbon-intensive societies (LeMenager 2013; Szeman, Wilson and Carlson 2017).

A key takeaway of this literature is the identification of strategies that audiences use to navigate the uncomfortable and dissonant feelings that climate change invites (Norgaard 2011; Morton 2013). Here, Levy’s claim in The Morning Show that “you cannot begrudge people for wanting to feel better” offers salient commentary on the role of media in this process. News offers stories, narratives and frames that work to alleviate the bad feelings of global warming – for example a story about a good Samaritan saving abandoned pets from wildfire. The production of these narratives also has a meta quality: the same media systems that report on climate change and its deadly impacts are primarily funded by economic and cultural systems wedded to logics of growthism, consumerism and ever-increasing resource through-put, logics fundamentally at odds with a sustainable existence on planet earth. In this regard, news media makes an important contribution to the ideological organisation of climate change.

“Carbon realism”, growthism, consumerism and advertising

It is true that the CCCM’s extractivist populist discourses have leveraged people’s discomfort with the threat to consumption patterns, values, identities and cultural narratives underpinned by energy-intensive lifestyles and economic development models historically dependent on ever-expanding fossil fuel use. Yet the desire to avoid uncomfortable information implicating climate change in contemporary society applies not just to right populism, but also to what could be called carbon realism, the various ascendant, “pragmatic” ideological formations such as climate capitalism, green growth and weak eco-modernisation that present a “soft landing” for the fossil fuel industry (aka the elusive renewables transition, bridge fuels, carbon capture, far-off net zero promises etc.). Here, industry-funded communications once again lead the way, as fossil capital and the corporate sector more broadly shift from hard-core science denial to novel responsibility-displacing strategies (Schneider et al 2016; McCurdy 2018; Lamb et al 2020).

For example, McCurdy (2018) observes the “shifting” advertisement strategies of the Canadian oil sands industry, who have discursively transitioned away from sustainability claims toward “lifestyle” messages that symbolically link concepts of family, enjoyment and care with the “ubiquity of oil in our everyday lives and celebrate oil as the lifeblood of consumer capitalism” (McCurdy 2018: 48). Narratives like these highlight comfort, desire and consumer demand as the key drivers of fossil fuel industry expansion and thus implicate consumers in the political architectures of extractivism through their personal consumption choices – displacing politics from the voting booth and redirecting citizenship to the marketplace (Maniates 2001). Such stories draw upon long-established promotional practices and neoliberal ideological contexts that situate individual consumers, as opposed to broader social systems, as the cause of – and solution to – the ecological crisis (Maniates 2001).

A key objective is the rehabilitation of corporate actors – transforming them from problems to partners – and with them the broader economic system, as business seeks to convince the public that existing energy-intensive practices and institutions can be made compatible with climate action through prudent environmental policy management based on market-based instruments and corporate-led technical innovation (Hajer 1995; Graham and Carrol 2023). Green growth, ecological modernisation and the like therefore function according to critical notions of ideology as the mythic or symbolic resolution of material contradictions and conditions. Like extractive populism, this discursive gambit can be understood as a way to navigate the cognitive dissonance caused by the stark, objective contradictions between what science and the economy tell us is “real” and the emotional discomfort people feel in caring for a planet that they are also actively destroying. Media plays a key role in managing this dissonance by reproducing carbon-realist discourses within news and political commentary, precisely because they fall within what Danial Hallin (1984: 21) describes as the “sphere of consensus”, in which journalists typically assume that broad public consensus removes any need to present opposing views.

The term “carbon realism” invokes the work of cultural scholar Mark Fisher, who uses the term “capitalist realism” to describe a world in which no alternative to capitalism is imaginable within the context of globalised neoliberalism (Fisher 2009). While Fisher unpacks the foreclosure of the social imagination due to the ubiquity of neoliberal capitalist relations and the commodification of leftist social critique, realist perspectives are commonly referenced on the right, not with dismay but with moral affirmation. As such, opponents of industry regulations are often framed by corporate boosters as unreasonable, uninformed and unrealistic (Schneider et al 2016; Gunster et al 2021; Kinder 2024). For example, describing the American coal lobby response to increasing calls for energy transition, Schneider et al (2016: 119) write: “the broader strategies of anti-divestment rhetoric use a realist rhetorical style to establish a ‘common sense’ discourse that valorises the industry perspective as rational and realistic, while dismissing the perspective of divestment advocates as naïve”.

Yet the ideological potency of these discourses comes in part because they are not exclusively within the domain of bad faith, industry-fuelled counter-movement actors. Rather, they are also evident from various good faith, “pragmatic” scholars and thinkers in environmental and energy policy, for instance Vaclav Smil (Smil 2022). While Smil acknowledges the ecological necessity of a transition away from fossil fuels, he is fundamentally sceptical of the economic and material capacity of modern society to implement such change on the scale necessary to avoid catastrophic planetary warming. Returning to the “sphere of consensus”, key assumptions within carbon realism include some of the industrialised world’s most deeply revered beliefs concerning economic growth. In 1972, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth pointed out the incontrovertible logic that infinite growth is ultimately incompatible with life on a planet with finite resources and limited capacities to absorb waste (Meadows et al 1972). More recently, the planetary boundaries framework has identified nine critical thresholds essential to the preservation of life on earth, with human activity currently pushing beyond six of them (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2023). Beyond these devastating ecological impacts of excessive industrial growth, research has contested the idea that a rise in GDP necessarily translates into equivalent improvements in human wellbeing and prosperity, with equity and safety sometimes even more significant indicators of happiness (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). As Jackson puts it, “every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth” (cited in Stuart, Gunderson and Petersen 2020: 211).

Yet “growthism”, Hickel argues, remains the master narrative shaping public discourse about our societal priorities, with a growing economy normalised as the best (and only) way to ensure human wellbeing (Hickel 2020). News media are complicit here, continuing to elevate a singular obsession with economic growth as the most important responsibility of governments and politicians, trumping other priorities. This occurs throughout various aspects of news coverage and commentary: presenting narrow economic metrics such as GDP as a proxy for collective wellbeing; emphasising the role of corporate leaders and market dynamics as essential for human progress; tying the fate of governments to their ability to sustain and increase rates of growth; failing to explore alternative models and practices for governing the economy; and so on.

The partner of “growthism” is consumerism, the ideology positioning the consumption of commodified goods and services as the best (and only) way to satisfy human needs, produce meaning, identity and community and experience pleasure, autonomy and freedom (Hickel 2020). Consequently, consumption itself is increasingly considered a site of politics in the form of “commodity activism”, whereby our shopping choices act as the primary venue of political expression (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012: 1). Crucially, the advertising-supported model for most commercial news media over the last century ensures that news content is broadly harmonised with both consumerism and the promotional objectives of carbon-intensive industries (e.g. automobility, travel/tourism, suburban development, etc.). These observations align with critiques of consumerism that describe advertising and promotion as a total system of symbolic meaning which helps normalise, moralise, stimulate and celebrate consumption (Jhally, Earp and Young 2017). For instance, Carvalho (2007: 239) notes Edwards and Cromwell’s argument that pro-climate action news values in the UK’s Guardian and Independent clash with “their promotion of indiscriminate consumerism through advertising of cheap flights, gas-guzzling cars and bargain holidays abroad”..

The normalisation of energy-intensive consumerism extends beyond advertising copy and into the thematic organisation of news itself. In Canada, a fossil-fuel-producing juggernaut, the nation’s flagship “prestige” paper the Globe and Mail features dedicated sections on Travel and Driving (the latter of which essentially functions as sustained promotional copy for the auto industry). Tellingly, there are no dedicated sections for public transportation, science reporting or environmental sustainability. Even when news audiences are “well-informed”, they are presented with two starkly dissonant, ideological propositions – care about the planet, but not so much that it disrupts the broader economy (*and don’t forget to recycle this newspaper). This makes the task that Cooper asserts journalisms’ role ought to be – “to open people’s eyes” – that much more challenging.

Conclusion: Media, ideology and the social organisation of political possibility

Facts are important for behavioural change and policy-making, but they are not everything. Voluminous research identifies values, worldviews and ideology as the primary predictors of beliefs about and action upon climate change. Media, both legacy and social, play a powerful role as creators, carriers and legitimators of acceptable ideas. Communications as a field – and critical theory in general – has historically understood ideology along classical Marxist terms as mystification in the production and transmission of socially powerful ideas. Important additions to these approaches along Gramscian lines present ideology through the landscape of social contestation and consent, nuancing an exclusive focus on the distortion of objective reality within a more open ended analysis of how social reality is both generated and mediated (Boykoff 2011; Neubauer 2011; Oreskes and Conway 2011; Hall 2017).

Gramsci identified media(s) as key institutions where dominant ideas are propagated, reinforced and challenged, noting that the dominance of any ideological discourse is never complete. As shown above, numerous contemporary communications scholars (as well as inter-disciplinary thinkers encompassed within the field of environmental communication) have interpreted the workings of legacy and digital media in ways that reveal the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s assessments, offering vital insights to the workings of ideology in public discourse about climate change today. The field’s nuanced analysis of media institutions and technologies, and mediated communications practices more generally, expands on early approaches to ideology (both value-neutral and critical) as fundamentally about the impact and accuracy of socially widespread ideas and beliefs (Eagleton 2014). In doing so it helps us interrogate the ever-shifting assemblage of media institutions, communication technologies, social groups, political movements, political economic forces and cognitive–affective processes which together both generate and mediate ideological phenomena. In the context of a worsening climate crisis, such approaches are vital not just to scholarly inquiry but humanity’s ability to survive (and hopefully thrive!) on our ailing planet.

As explained in this chapter, the CCCM has exploited various journalist norms such as false balancing, ownership networks, op-eds and the regime of “objectivity” to limit, delay and obfuscate the necessary actions needed to meaningfully address climate change. Moreover, ideologies of growthism, consumerism and green modernisation continue to underwrite “common-sense” understandings of economy, prosperity and wellbeing, all ideologies that feature prominently even in much of today’s ostensibly pro-environmental media. Further, recent work in sociology and the energy humanities suggests that how humans engage with information is deeply patterned by personal experiences, emotional management, community identity and affective attachments to high-carbon living.

These ideas offer important challenges to longstanding information-deficit approaches to public engagement that promote the ideology of individual consumer choice and individual behaviour change as the appropriate sites for environmental action and adaption. As such, future work in the field of environmental communication and ideology should continue to explore how media can enable pro-ecological values, norms and beliefs as well as public deliberation on systemic social change, practices that celebrate collective meanings and examples of non-consumer-based expressions of energy transition. Thinkers like Kari Marie Norgaard, Candis Callison, Jason Hickel, the Petrocultures Research Group, and energy humanities scholarship more broadly, are promising in this regard.

Also promising is the growing research around “solutions media” and “solutions journalism” (McIntyre and Lough 2021). Moving beyond a focus on the ways media systems can impede needed social action and self-reflection, this approach explores best practices for ways in which both legacy and so-called alternative media can provide context and opportunity for public education and democratic deliberation about prospective solutions to complex social problems. Such approaches can be productively applied to wicked socio-ecological problems like climate change and the ecological crisis more generally, ideally in ways which counter partisan polarisation while stimulating citizen engagement (Gunster 2017).

Finally, the scholarship outlined in this chapter would benefit from engagement with parallel research tracking our rapidly evolving digital media environment. This includes an ongoing shift towards digital climate advocacy (and obstructionist movements) on social media platforms ( Segerberg 2017; Bloomfield and Tillery 2019; Massie and Jackson 2020) and rapidly emerging, web-based “alternative media” models (Brand and Brunnengräber 2012), both of which have become key sites of pro-climate action and obstructionist discourse and politics (Gunster 2022).

Such studies dovetail with a broader trajectory in communication scholarship exploring the rise of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017), where our emergent digital media ecosystems are increasingly dominated by oligopolistic firms whose data-driven, marketing-based business models, algorithmic content distribution and site architecture oriented around maximising user engagement contribute to a broader epistemic crisis of misinformation, polarising echo chambers and networked propaganda (Manokha 2018; Persily 2017; Ling 2023). These conditions have sadly created fertile new grounds for climate science denial, extractive populism and related climate obstructionist discourses (Bloomfield and Tillery 2019; Gunster 2022; Neubauer et al 2023), even while the same digital media has provided potent tools for climate action movements. These shifts suggest the need for continued research into the rapidly evolving media ecologies that support both meaningful climate action and the CCCM.

References

Althusser, L. (2012) “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)”, in Durham, M. and Kellner, D. (eds). Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Hoboken NJ: Wiley.

Anderson, A. (2017) Source Influence on Journalistic Decisions and News Coverage of Climate Change, Oxford University Press, [Online], Available: https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/9777

Barney, D. (2017) “Who we are and what we do: Canada as a pipeline nation”, in Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press: 78–119.

Beder, S. (2002) Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green.

Berglez, P. and Olausson, U. (2014) “The post-political condition of climate change: An ideology approach”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 25, no. 1, 54–71. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2013.845588

Bloomfield, E. F. and Tillery, D. (2019) “The circulation of climate change denial online: Rhetorical and networking strategies on Facebook”, Environmental Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, 23–34. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1527378

Bolin, J. L. and Hamilton, L. C. (2018) “The news you choose: News media preferences amplify views on climate change”, Environmental Politics, vol. 27, no. 3, 455–476. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2018.1423909

Bolsen, T. and Shapiro, M. A. (2018) “The US news media, polarization on climate change and pathways to effective communication”, Environmental Communication, vol. 12, no. 2, 149–163. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2017.1397039

Boyer, D. and Szeman, I. (2014) “The rise of energy humanities”, University Affairs, 12. [Online], Available: https://archives.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/the-rise-of-energy-humanities/

Boykoff, M. T. (2011) Who Speaks for the Climate?: Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boykoff, M. T. and Boykoff, J. M. (2004) “Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige press”, Global Environmental Change, vol. 14, no. 2, 125–136. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001

Brand, A. and Brunnengräber, A. (2012) “Conflictive knowledge constructions on climate change through mainstream and alternative media?” Transience, vol. 3, no. 1, 7–24.

Callison, C. (2014) How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts, Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Carvalho, A. (2007) “Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: Re-reading news on climate change”, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 16, no. 2, 223–243. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662506066775

Chinn, S., Hart, P. S. and Soroka, S. (2020). “Politicization and polarization in climate change news content, 1985–2017”, Science Communication, vol. 42, no. 1, 112–129. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547019900290

Daggett, C. (2018) “Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire”, Millennium, vol. 47, no. 1, 25–44.

Davidson, D. J. and Haan, M. (2012) “Gender, political ideology and climate change beliefs in an extractive industry community”, Population and Environment, vol. 34, no. 23, 217–234. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-011-0156-y

Diehl, T., Huber, B., Gil De Zúñiga, H. and Liu, J. (2021) “Social media and beliefs about climate change: A cross-national analysis of news use, political ideology and trust in science”, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, vol. 33, no. 2, 197–213. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz040

Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1983) Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Eagleton, T. (2014) Ideology, London: Routledge.

Elsasser, S. W. and Dunlap, R. E. (2013) “Leading voices in the Denier Choir: Conservative columnists’ dismissal of global warming and denigration of climate science”, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 57, no. 6, 754–776. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212469800

Entman, R. (1993) “Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm”, The Journal of Communication, vol. 43, 51–58. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460–2466.1993.tb01304.x

Feldman, L. (2016) “Effects of TV and cable news viewing on climate change opinion, knowledge and behavior”, in Feldman, L. (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.367

Feldman, L., Myers, T. A., Hmielowski, J. D. and Leiserowitz, A. (2014) “The mutual reinforcement of media selectivity and effects: Testing the reinforcing spirals framework in the context of global warming”, Journal of Communication, vol. 64, no. 4, 590–611. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12108

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? Ropley UK: John Hunt.

Furnham, A. and Robinson, C. (2022) “Correlates of belief in climate change: Demographics, ideology and belief systems”, Acta Psychologica, vol. 230, 103775. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103775

Gibson, T. A. (2016) “Economic, technological and organizational factors influencing news coverage of climate change”, In Feldman, L. (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.355

Graham, N. and Carroll, W. (2023) “Climate breakdown: From fossil capitalism to climate capitalism (and beyond?)”, Socialist Register, vol. 59. [Online], Available: https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/39593

Gramsci, A. (2021) “Selections from the Prison Notebooks”, in Prentki, T. and Abraham, N. (eds), The Applied Theatre Reader, 2^nd edition, London: Routledge.

Guber, D. L. (2017) “Partisan cueing and polarization in public opinion about climate change”, in Feldman, L. (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.306

Gunster, S. (2017) “Contesting conflict? Efficacy, advocacy and alternative media in British Columbia”, in Hackett, R., Forde, S. Gunster, S. and Foxwell, K. (eds) Journalism and Climate Crisis, New York NY: Routledge: 120–143.

Gunster, S. (2022) “Connective action, digital engagement and network-building: A year in the life of Canadian climate Facebook”, Environmental Communication vol. 16, no. 5, 645–663.

Gunster, S. and Saurette, P. (2014) “Storylines in the sands: News, narrative and ideology in the Calgary Herald”, Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 39, no. 3, 333–359. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2014v39n3a2830

Gunster, S., Fleet, D., Paterson, M. and Saurette, P. (2018) “Climate hypocrisies: A comparative study of news discourse”, Environmental Communication, vol. 12, no. 6, 773–793. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1474784

Gunster, S., Neubauer, R., Birmingham, J. and Massie, A. (2021) “’Our oil’: Extractive populism in Canadian social media”, in Carroll, W. (ed.) Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy, Edmonton: Athabasca University Press.

Gutstein, D. (2009) Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy, Toronto: Key Porter Books.

Habermas, J. (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [Online], Available: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262581080/the-structural-transformation-of-the-public-sphere/

Hackett, R. and Adams, P. (2018) Jobs vs the Environment? Mainstream and Alternative Media Coverage of Pipeline Controversies (Corporate Mapping Project). Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. [Online], Available: www.corporatemapping.ca/jobs-vs-environment/

Hajer, M. A. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process, New York NY: Clarendon Press.

Hall, S. (1988) “The toad in the garden: Thatcherism among the theorists”, in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London: Macmillan Education: 35–57.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (2017) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Bloomsbury.

Hallin, D. C. (1984) “The media, the war in Vietnam and political support: A critique of the thesis of an oppositional media” The Journal of Politics, vol. 46, no. 1, 2–24. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.2307/2130432

Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (2021) “Manufacturing consent”, in Chorbajian, L. (ed.) Power and Inequality, 2^nd edition, New York NY: Routledge.

Hickel, J. (2020) Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World, New York NY: Random House.

Higham, J. and Font, X. (2020) “Decarbonising academia: Confronting our climate hypocrisy”, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, vol. 28, no. 1, 1–9. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2019.1695132

Hornsey, M. J., Harris, E. A., Bain, P. G. and Fielding, K. S. (2016) “Meta-analyses of the determinants and outcomes of belief in climate change”, Nature Climate Change, vol. 6, no. 6, 622–626. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2943

Huber, M. (2013) Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Jacques, P. J., Dunlap, R. E. and Freeman, M. (2008) “The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism”, Environmental Politics, vol. 17, no. 3, 349–385. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010802055576

Jacquet, J., Dietrich, M. and Jost, J. T. (2014) “The ideological divide and climate change opinion: ‘Top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches”, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01458

Jhally, S., Earp, J. and Young, J. T. (eds) (2017) Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse (film), Northhampton MA: Media Education Foundation.

Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M. and Napier, J. L. (2009) “Political ideology: Its structure, functions and elective affinities”, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, 307–337. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163600

Kahan, D., Jenkins-Smith, H. and Braman, D. (2011) “Cultural cognition of scientific consensus”, Journal of Risk Research, vol. 14, no. 2, 147–174. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2010.511246

Kinder, J. B. (2024) Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Klein, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, New York NY: Simon and Schuster.

Kulin, J., Johansson Sevä, I. and Dunlap, R. E. (2021) “Nationalist ideology, right-wing populism and public views about climate change in Europe”, Environmental Politics, vol. 30, no. 7, 1111–1134. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1898879

Lamb, W. F, Mattioli, G., Levi, S., Roberts, J. T., Capstick, S., Creutzig, F., Minx, J. C., Müller-Hansen, F., Culhane, T. and Steinberger, J. (2020) “Discourses of climate delay”, Global Sustainability, vol. 3, 1–5. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13

LeMenager, S. (2013) Living oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Ling, J. (2023) “Far and widening: The rise of polarization in Canada”, The Public Policy Forum, Ottawa. [Online], Available: https://ppforum.ca/publications/polarization-democracy-canada/

Lockwood, M. (2018) “Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: Exploring the linkages”, Environmental Politics, vol. 27, no. 4, 712–732. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2018.1458411

Maeseele, P. and Pepermans, Y. (2017) “Ideology in climate change communication”, in Feldman, L. (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.578

Maniates, M. F. (2001) “Individualization: Plant a tree, buy a bike, save the world?”, Global Environmental Politics, vol. 1, no. 3, 31–52.

Manokha, I. (2018) “Surveillance: The DNA of platform capital – The case of Cambridge Analytica put into perspective”, Theory and Event, vol. 21, no. 4, 891–913. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2018.0054

Massie, A. and Jackson, E. (2020) “‘Standing up for Canadian oil and gas families’: Tracing gender, family and work in the Alberta petro-economy”, Media Tropes, vol. 7, no. 2, 40–66.

McCright, A. M. and Dunlap, R. E. (2011) “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010”, The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 2, 155–194. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533–8525.2011.01198.x

McCright, A. M. and Dunlap, R. E. (2013) “Bringing ideology in: The conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA”, Journal of Risk Research, vol. 16, no. 2, 211–226. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2012.726242

McCright, A. M., Dunlap, R. E. and Marquart-Pyatt, S. T. (2016) “Political ideology and views about climate change in the European Union”, Environmental Politics, vol. 25, no. 2, 338–358. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2015.1090371

McCurdy, P. (2018) “From the natural to the manmade environment: The shifting advertising practices of Canada’s oil sands industry”, Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 43, no. 1, 33–52.

McIntyre, K. E. and Lough, K. (2021) “Toward a clearer conceptualization and operationalization of solutions journalism”, Journalism, vol. 22, no. 6, 1558–1573.

Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W. W. (1972) The limits to growth, Club of Rome. [Online], Available: www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collections/limits-growth

Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the end of the World, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Mukherjee, R. and Banet-Weiser, S. (eds) (2012) Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, New York NY: NYU Press.

Neubauer, R. (2011) “Manufacturing junk: Think tanks, climate denial and neoliberal hegemony”, Australian Journal of Communication, vol. 38, no. 3, 65.

Neubauer, R., Graham, N., and Krobath, H. (2023) “Defending ‘Canadian energy’: Connective leadership and extractive populism on Canadian Facebook”, Environmental Communication, vol. 17, no. 6, 634–652.

Norgaard, K. M. (2011) Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

O’Neill, S., Williams, H., Kurz, T., Wiersma, B. and Boykoff, M. (2015) “Dominant frames in legacy and social media coverage of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report”, Nature Climate Change, vol. 5, 380–385.

Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. (2011) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York NY: Bloomsbury USA.

Paterson, M. (2021) In Search of Climate Politics, New York NY: Cambridge University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108974912

Persily, N. (2017) “The 2016 U.S. Election: Can democracy survive the internet?”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 28, no. 2, 63–76. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0025

Petrocultures Research Group (2016). After Oil. Petrocultures Research Group, [Online], Available: https://afteroil.ca/

Pettenger, M. E. (ed.) (2007) The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses, London: Ashgate.

Schäfer, M. S. and Painter, J. (2021) “Climate journalism in a changing media ecosystem: Assessing the production of climate change-related news around the world”, WIREs Climate Change, vol. 12, no. 1, e675. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.675

Schneider, J., Schwarze, S., Bsumek, P. K., and Peeples, J. (2016). Under Pressure: Coal Industry Rhetoric and Neoliberalism, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Segerberg, A. (2017) “Online and social media campaigns for climate change engagement”, in Feldman, L. (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.398

Smil, V. (2022) How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to our Past, Present and Future, London: Penguin UK.

Srnicek, N. (2017) Platform Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stecula, D. A. and Merkley, E. (2019) “Framing climate change: Economics, ideology and uncertainty in American news media content from 1988 to 2014”, Frontiers in Communication, vol. 4. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00006

Stockholm Resilience Centre (2023) Planetary Boundaries. Stockholm University, [Online], Available: www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

Stuart, D., Gunderson, R. and Petersen, B. (2020) “Overconsumption as ideology”, Nature and Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 199–223. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2020.150205

Szeman, I., Wilson, S. and Carlson, A. (eds) (2017) “On petrocultures: Or why we need to understand oil to understand everything else”, in Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press: 3–25.

Taibbi, M. (2019) Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes us Despise one Another, New York NY: OR Books.

Urry, J. (2013) Societies Beyond Oil: Oil dregs and Social Futures, London: Zed Books.

Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, London: Penguin Books UK.

Zia, A. and Todd, A. M. (2010) “Evaluating the effects of ideology on public understanding of climate change science: How to improve communication across ideological divides?”, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 19, no. 6, 743–761. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662509357871

15. The International of Conservative Intellectuals

Transnational networks, illiberal inputs and ideological flexibility

Valentin Behr and Anemona Constantin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-20

Introduction

Conservatism and conservative intellectuals have long been under-studied topics but have recently been brought into the limelight by the growing interest in the “illiberal turn”. The rise of regimes challenging the “liberal consensus” in Central Eastern Europe a decade ago led to a shift in scholarship from themes such as populism, public discontent and democratic backsliding (Scheppele 2013; Bermeo 2016; Bogaards 2018; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018; Berman 2021) to an inquiry into illiberalism and conservative mobilisations (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; Laruelle 2022; Sajó, Uitz and Holmes 2022). Although “ideas do not make revolutions” (Chartier 2000), a wide range of research began addressing the ideological background of these regimes (Bluhm and Varga 2019; Buzogány and Varga 2023; Coman, Behr and Beyer 2023).

If we were to omit its post-war renewal, conservatism, an “old philosophy” that has met uneven political echoes through different times and spaces and is rather anchored in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of thought (Mannheim 1986; Epstein 1966), could hardly be regarded as the source of these transformations in post-communist Europe. More of a way of “looking at life and things” than actively engaging in politics, conservatism could be contemplated as the wisdom of quiet disagreement and resistance to change by the privileged classes and other dominant social actors, rather than the spark of revolutions (Tate 2019; Fawcett 2020). However, conservatism is a patchwork of ideas, with a belief in the key role of “natural” norms derived from God, tradition, the community or biology at its core ( Freeden 1996; Robin 2017). Although its political translations have been diverse, its strong inequalitarian undertone could lead to radical or even revolutionary manifestations, as in the case of Germany’s inter-war “conservative revolution” or, more recently, the overtly anti-liberal and nationalist ideas espoused by certain political and corporate leaders.

Recent developments have made the contribution of intellectuals to the rise of illiberalism a relevant research question. These include the pervasive debates around “woke-ism” and “political correctness”; the unfinished “culture wars” (Hunter 1991; Trencsényi 2014; Barša, Hesová and Slačálek 2022) pitting Liberals and progressivists against traditionalists, Christian Democrats and anti-communists; and the support given by self-defined conservative figures to illiberal political entrepreneurs. Several scholars have already pointed at the ongoing ideological reconfiguration of the right along anti-liberal lines (Plattner 2019; Behr 2021).

A “fuzzy and inconsistent classification” (Laruelle 2022), illiberalism can designate a political regime organisation or practice, a policy or a “set of social … phenomena” (Sajó, Uitz and Holmes 2022). Most of the time however, illiberalism is understood as “a modern ideological or ideational family that perceives itself in opposition to and reaction to liberalism” (Waller 2024), in “all its varied scripts – political, economic, cultural, geopolitical, civilizational – often in the name of democratic principles and by winning popular support” (Laruelle 2022).

Based on this definition, most studies on conservatism and its cross-fertilisations with illiberalism emphasise their shared ideas and political worldviews and the ways they shape public policies and political decisions. We argue, however, that the interactions between conservatism and illiberalism should be studied not only from an ideational perspective, but also from a sociological one. This implies investigating the conditions under which contemporary conservatism is produced to match or to compete with illiberalism by intellectuals caught in specific professional, social and political configurations or fields (Bourdieu 1991; Geroulanos and Sapiro 2023). It also means taking an interest in how these actors engage in politics and interact with illiberal leaders and parties or mobilise through public interventions, journals organisations, to impact society and politics. Among these strategies, the intellectual societies and think tanks (Medvetz 2012; Lok, Pestel and Reboul 2021; Behr 2021), based on transnational networks play a significant role in the legitimisation and even in the realisation of illiberalism.

To tackle this question, we begin by exploring the scholarship on conservatism and conservative intellectuals and the methods to empirically study their political ties and influence. We then consider the “International of Conservative Intellectuals” (ICI) as a relevant case study. Finally, we suggest several guidelines for a future research agenda.

Conservative Intellectuals: An elusive research object?

The very phrase “conservative intellectual” may sound like an oxymoron, given numerous publications highlighting the historical attachment of intellectuals to the contestation of authorities, whether political, social or religious (Charle 1996; Trebitsch and Granjon 1998). Under the influence of French sociology, the scholarship on intellectuals generally emphasises their left-wing inclinations and traditions of activism originating in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Suny and Kennedy 1999; Charle and Jeanpierre 2019) and opposition to the political establishment (Ory and Sirinelli 1986; Charle 1990). Linked to deep socio-political transformations (the struggle for national determination, mass education, urbanisation), the emergence of intellectuals as a social group is generally associated with change, modernisation and democratisation, which explains why most historical accounts celebrate their contributions to progressive movements. However, in other national settings, intellectuals remained closely aligned with ruling powers (Konrád and Szelényi 1979). They maintained ties to the Church and aristocracy in England, to public universities in Germany and to national state bureaucracies in Central Eastern Europe, Russia and in the colonies (Gellner 1983; Hroch and Fowkes 1985; Thiesse 2001; Anderson 2016; Falola and_ Agbo 2018). More influential in the UK and later in the US, conservatism remained, if not peripheral, at least dominant on the continent, as well as in Latin America (Charle 1990; Castañeda 1993).

It is, in part, due to these historical and geographical variations that scholarship tends to neglect conservative intellectuals as a collective subject and focuses on the “great conservative figures” (Kirk 1953; Allitt 1993, 2009; Robin 2017), often detached from social structures. Only a few historical and sociological accounts (Allitt 1993; Serry 2004; Faure 2022; Matonti 2022; Swartz 2023) have pointed out the weight of professional, institutional or economic factors bearing on the political behaviour of conservative intellectuals as complex actors belonging to disparate social arenas. Conservative intellectuals remain at present an under-rated research topic, several authors recalling even their persistent anti-intellectualism (Chomsky 1969; Sowell 2009; Scruton 2014).

Grasping conservatism beyond disciplinary boundaries

Disciplinary boundaries divide the study of conservatism into the history of ideas on one side and the sociology of its actors on the other (Gross, Medvetz and Russell 2011). This division has major implications for the study of conservatism, starting with its definition.

While some authors have opted for a substantialist and sometimes ahistorical perspective on conservatism, understanding it as a political philosophy or ideology attached to “things as they are” (traditional values and institutions) and associating it with “reactionism” (a return to a past state), “revanchism” and “counterrevolution” (Pierson and Skocpol 2007; Robin 2017), others have approached it through constructivist lenses, as a social and political identity in the making, continuously built by “creative” actors through struggles and adapted to changing contexts and local traditions (Conover and Feldman 1981; Peele 1984; Swartz 2023).

Deviating from its most established versions and regarded more as an ideological nebula than as a coherent and stabilised system, conservatism is therefore understood by recent scholarship as a “field of debate” encompassing various strains, not always coherent, ranging from “classical” conservatism, libertarianism and Christian democracy, to national conservatism, Catholicism, right-wing feminism and anti-communism (Varga and Buzogány 2022; Della Sudda 2022; Lok 2023). Highly heterogeneous, yet vivid and connected to current affairs, contemporary conservative circles maintain a strategic flexibility, even an ambiguity that allows intellectuals to build bridges with political parties and counter-movements from both the mainstream right and the fringes of the parliamentary space. Among these connections, those with illiberalism, an ideological trend appropriated most of the time by political leaders and almost never by intellectuals, is currently one of the increasing points of inquiry (Fawcett 2024; Tait 2024; Varga and Buzogány 2024).

Breaking with a history of political thought focused on identifying continuities and establishing a firm canon based on long genealogies (Kirk 1953), new research orientations have emerged. These studies show how alliances within the conservative realm are made and unmade over time and how ideological filiations once taken for granted are “invented”. The complicated history of new conservatism and fusionism in the US (Nash 1996; Ansell 1998), as well as the radicalisation of early 1990s liberals in Central Eastern Europe following their countries’ accession to the EU, demonstrate these dynamics ( Kopeček 2022).

These orientations have proven highly fruitful for studying both “great” and “petty” conservative intellectuals (Sternhell 2010; Matonti 2022), showing that their recent popularity is due to the provision of valuable resources rather than to the intrinsic strength of their “common-sense” proposals (Lepistö 2021).

By breaking with the idea of “frustrated” (Chartier 1982) or “dominated” intellectuals who engage with conservatism to overcome marginalisation or a lack of public audience, this scholarship has established, on the contrary, that conservative authors often occupy dominant positions as respected academics, community leaders or public writers (Swartz 2023). Faithful to a relational perspective, this literature explores the social ties on which conservatism relies as a collective and negotiated identity and highlights the importance of sociability networks in holding together the ideological divisions that cut across this nebula.

Going beyond the split between the sociology of elites and the study of social movements, another body of literature advocates for the methodological “normalisation” of the study of conservative mobilisations ( Agrikoliansky and Collovald 2014). In this perspective, although dominant actors are usually more difficult to grasp because they have a looser command of traditional protest tools, are more socially integrated and are less inclined to overtly protest, conservative mobilisations should be examined in the same manner as left-wing activism. This approach opens a new field of investigation and invites scholars to explore the “quiet” yet exclusivist arenas where the fabrication of conservatism takes place, despite the obvious obstacles linked to the scarcity of sources, the difficulty of conducting fieldwork and the ethical problems the study of anti-liberal movements poses to researchers ( Sibgatullina 2024).

Approach and methods

Less committed to institutional roles than “organic intellectuals”, conservative intellectuals intervene in politics often from above and collectively. The role of think tanks, foundations and epistemic communities that bypass official institutions, as well as the use of social networks that shortcut traditional channels of communication and maintain an ambivalent relationship with political organisations, is thus crucial to evaluate contemporary conservatism’s ideological and political ties with illiberalism.[49]

To grasp these organisations, we rely on a theoretical and methodological framework deriving from the sociology of ideas. Considering intellectuals as participants in a relational sphere (or field), we seek to study both their ideological production and the social context in which it takes place (Geroulanos and Sapiro 2023). We thus assume that their stances are informed by their positions in the social and professional space and the positions of their competitors, in a struggle for the definition of the legitimate worldview (Bourdieu 1984). This implies that we focus on intellectuals’ interventions in the public sphere (Eyal and Buchholz 2010) and study collective groups of intellectuals rather than isolated individuals.

To do so, we rely on both qualitative and quantitative methods. Prosopography allows us to determine which are the most common professional and social categories among conservative circles and to identify correlations between their resources and trajectories, on one hand, and their ideology, on the other. Interviews allow us to complement biographical data, but also to get a better understanding of their values and worldviews and to reconstruct the history of the organisations in which they participate(d). Participant observation during their meetings and conferences have permitted us to capture the ideas in the making, not as finished products but as imperfect outcomes of a negotiation process between actors struggling to define common or dominant views. It is also a useful method for observing the relationships within and outside these communities, which are not only based on ideological proximity but rely on social affinities. Documentary analysis is needed to study the content of various interventions, such as public statements, writings, speeches and social networks’ discussions. We seek here to consider a variety of ideological productions and to study them in their broader context of production/reception, which is both intellectual and political since intellectuals’ interventions are often aimed, directly or indirectly, at political parties (Skinner 2002).

The International of Conservative Intellectuals

What we call the ICI has been formed in the last 20 years. This thought collective reunites scholars, think tankers and pundits, who rally around transnational organisations such as conferences, publications, research institutes, think tanks and clubs. Far-right and (liberal) conservative politicians are also taking part in this transnational nebula, which has become more institutionalised in recent years. The so-called “NatCon” (National Conservatism) conferences organised since 2019 provide a good illustration of this phenomenon: the 2024 edition took place in Brussels with the participation of political leaders such as Nigel Farage, Mateusz Morawiecki and Viktor Orbán. J. D. Vance, the American Vice-President, has also been a regular attendee.

The ICI has contributed to the elaboration and dissemination of a common though simplified ideology. Neither homogenous nor coherent, the ICI is functioning as a pressure group, able to advocate for more conservative stances on a set of political and cultural issues, hence contributing to the reconfiguration of the global right (or, rather, in the case of this chapter, the Western right) along anti-liberal lines.

Hungary and Poland (in 2023) seem to be inspiring laboratories for many actors of this International, as the central European “illiberal democracies” have become new hubs for the ICI. This is illustrated by the hosting of the American Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest in 2022 and the visits paid to Budapest and Warsaw by conservative scholars and intellectuals, through fellowships and participation in conferences. Hence, there is much to learn from extending the study of intellectual conservatism beyond Western Europe by including Eastern Europe. We thus retrace the history of the ICI from the point of view of both Western and Central European intellectuals who have been involved in all the steps of its creation since the Cold War. This is not to say that Central Eastern intellectuals have played the major role in that story. Rather, it is a methodological means to make the study of the formation and circulation of conservative political ideas more complex by going beyond the East/West divide.

Methodologically, we reconstruct the socio-historical configurations in which these processes took place by articulating the development of the ICI and the social properties of its key actors. This sociological approach allows us to show how a transnational group of like-minded intellectuals has been shaped, as the result of the combination of both the work of ideological entrepreneurs on one hand and of a political context marked by the electoral victories of illiberal political entrepreneurs on the other. We also examine the ICI’s ideological consistency.

Origins of the International of Conservative Intellectuals

The Vanenburg Society and the Centre for European Renewal (CER) can be considered the first and major step in the establishment of the ICI. Since 2006, intellectuals from across Europe have gathered at yearly meetings, the Vanenburg conferences. In 2007 they established the CER, a pan-European club initiated by Dutch conservative intellectuals gathered within the Edmund Burke Stichting, headed by Andreas Kinneging. A professor of philosophy of law at Leiden University, Kinneging has been associated with the conservative think tank of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). In the late 1990s, he separated from the organisation to embrace an academic career.[50]

Quickly, the CER meetings brought together members of conservative civil society, mainly scholars, think tankers and columnists, who reflected on ways to spread their ideas in European countries, sharing their concerns about morality issues (such as abortion and LGBTIQ rights) but also the domains of education and culture, sometimes the economy, which they saw as heavily dominated by left-wing ideology.

Among the first participants in the CER was the late British philosopher Roger Scruton. As the founder and editor (from 1982 to 2001) of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, and the author of books such as The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and How to Be a Conservative (2014), Scruton was a major figure of the ICI until his death in January 2020. Living mainly as a writer and a columnist, he held several academic positions in the UK and the US. In the early years of Thatcherism that he considered to be too focused on economic concerns, Scruton sought to provide a more intellectual basis for conservatism, critical of egalitarianism, multi-cultural education and feminism (Scruton and Dooley 2016).

Regular participants in CER meetings included Chantal Delsol, a French philosopher, and Central European scholars such as Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko and Hungarian philosopher András Lánczi, both close to conservative political parties such as Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary.

Interpersonal relations between members of the CER from both Western and Central-Eastern European countries existed before the mid-2000s, cemented around anti-communism and Euroscepticism, which have longer historical roots (Behr 2023a). These Cold War bonds were reactivated to establish the CER.

After the fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Eurosceptic political networks, already established in the 1990s, constituted another space for the circulation of conservative ideas between East and West (Slobodian and Plehwe 2020). A closer cooperation between British conservatives and their Central European counterparts emerged, as the 2004 EU enlargement to the East was taken as an opportunity to consolidate a Eurosceptic right wing in favour of a less federalist EU. This ultimately led to the creation of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

Next to the British Tories, the Polish PiS party has become the largest delegation in this parliamentary group following the 2014 European election. Legutko (as president of the PiS delegation in the European Parliament and vice-president of the ECR Group Between 2017 And 2024) And Polish Sociologist Zdzisław Krasnodębski (As Vice-president of the EP between 2018 and 2019) became prominent actors of the European Right. The ECR’s foundation New Direction, founded in 2010, organises conferences and summer schools that have served as another platform attracting conservative intellectuals in Europe. Participants to New Direction’s initiatives include Yoram Hazony and Ofir Haivry, who have contributed to the ideological reconfiguration of the US right following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 (Hazony and Haivry 2017).

The CER thus marks a genuine step towards the shaping of the ICI. It publishes the quarterly The European Conservative, a transnational publication for right-wing intellectuals with 5 000 print copies, professionally organised with an editor-in-chief trained in the US, Alvino-Mario Fantini. While the CER is formally hosted by the Edmund Burke Stichting in the Netherlands, the editorial team of The European Conservative has recently moved to Budapest, where it found more favourable grounds to develop its activities, including public funding.[51]

The illiberal impulse

The relocation of The European Conservative from Amsterdam to Budapest illustrates the illiberal impulse that has benefited the ICI following the electoral victories of Fidesz in Hungary and of PiS in Poland.

From 2011 onwards, Polish conservative intellectuals launched the annual “Poland’s Great Project” congresses (Polska Wielki Projekt (PWP)). Among the main organisers of this event is the Centre for Political Thought (Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej), a bedrock of Polish conservatism headed by Legutko until 2005. PWP congresses sought to design a strategy to regain “cultural hegemony” while PiS was in opposition (Behr 2023b). Under the PiS government (2015–2023), PWP congresses extended their scope to host many European intellectuals, entrepreneurs and politicians, invited to reflect on conservative reforms to be carried out in areas from European and foreign policy to education, culture and economy. Regular attendees include Scruton and David Engels.

As a historian and a specialist on ancient Rome, Engels held a professorship at the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 2013, the publication of his first essay, Le Déclin, in which he compares the crisis of the EU to the fall of the Roman Republic, gained him the status of a public intellectual not only in Belgium but also in France and Germany. In 2018 he joined the Instytut Zachodni (Western Institute) linked to the Polish government and published the manifesto for a “hesperialist” (i.e. conservative) renewal of Europe, together with the volume Renovatio Europae (2019), which includes contributions by prominent members of the CER. Since 2024 Engels has been a lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Vendée (France) and senior research fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels.

But it is Viktor Orbán’s government which has been the greatest supporter of the ICI. The MCC, Hungary’s main private university, has been closely associated with Fidesz since its foundation in the late 1990s and financially supported by the Hungarian government (Pető 2022). Together with the Danube Institute, it offers attractive fellowships to scholars and pundits from all over Europe and the US. The Danube Institute aims to promote Hungary’s “illiberal democracy” as a model for a remaking of the European right. It is indirectly funded by the Hungarian state and led by a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, John O’Sullivan.

O’Sullivan was editor of the conservative magazine the National Review from 1988 to 1997. He also co-chaired the New Atlantic Initiative, an international organisation dedicated to accompanying the post-communist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, especially by supporting the adhesion processes to NATO and the EU of the countries from this region.

MCC and the Danube Institute have hosted dozens of fellows praising Hungary’s illiberal democracy, including Rod Dreher and Francesco Giubilei. Dreher even settled in Budapest. He has been an editor for the National Review, a senior editor at The American Conservative and a regular contributor to The European Conservative. A Christian writer, Dreher has been associated with the national–conservative movement in the US and praised for his book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017).

Giubilei embodies a new generation of Italian conservatives who support Fratelli d’Italia. He founded several magazines and online newspapers, as well as Nazione Futura, a think tank and a publishing house. He also briefly served as a special advisor for the Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, from December 2022 to June 2023.

The MCC has recently opened its own think tank in Brussels, where it seeks to challenge the “progressive” and “politically correct” establishment. MCC Brussels is chaired by Frank Füredi, a British sociologist born in communist Hungary and a conservative public intellectual, yet once a leftist. Author of Populism and the European Culture Wars: The Conflict of Values between Hungary and the EU (Füredi 2018), his political views are nuanced as he calls himself today a “conservative” in family matters, a “liberal” in economics and a “social democrat” when it comes to education, health and social problems.[52]

The ideological reconfiguration behind Trumpism

US protagonists appear as late comers in the ICI. Since 2019, the NatCon conferences have been organised by the Washington-based Edmund Burke Foundation. Chaired by Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony, the foundation seeks to redefine the global right along illiberal lines and presents conservatism as opposed to liberalism. A Bible scholar, Hazony identifies as a Modern Orthodox Jew and a Judeo-nationalist. He has become a vocal advocate of a distinctly anti-liberal national conservatism, in writings such as The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022).

US “post-liberal” scholars such as Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule have also made their way to Hungary. Pappin, a political theorist, now serves as president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state institution. Political theorist Deneen joined the chorus of critics of liberalism and advocates of Catholic communitarianism with his Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023), in which he promotes a form of post-liberal conservatism that strives for the “common good”. Vermeule is professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He too has voiced support for Catholic integralism and sought to articulate it into a theory of common-good constitutionalism. Both Hazony and Vermeule have praised Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (2016). The book, prefaced by O’Sullivan, describes liberal democracy as a totalitarian ideology with ominous similarities to Soviet-style communism (Behr 2023a).

Our account of the ICI is only a partial view, since it is just one part of a broader global right which has been studied from other angles, including transnational advocacy networks (Clifford 2012; Williams and Drolet, this volume) and anti-gender campaigns (Kuhar et Paternotte 2017; Datta 2021). While we have been focusing on arenas involving intellectuals, often closely linked to politicians, other transnational conservative actors include the Vatican, the World Congress of Families and numerous business and religious lobby organisations (Stoeckl and Uzlaner, 2022). Many of the intellectuals mentioned above participate in meetings held by such organisations: however, they did not play a key role in establishing them. Russia has also been a key actor supporting transnational conservative movements and far-right political parties ( Shekhovtsov 2018; Datta 2021), though not the ICI. While Russian and Central European conservatives share common topics, there seem to be few connections and little circulation of ideas between them (Bluhm and Varga 2019).

What is a conservative intellectual today?

In previous sections we introduced a few protagonists evolving in the ICI, chosen for their multiple participations in a nebula of organisations (see Table 15.1). Hence, they form a transnational elite comprising scholars, think tankers and pundits.

Table 15.1 Conservative intellectuals’ involvement in transnational organisations

Name	CER	NatCon	New Direction	MCC/Danube Institute	Polska Wielki Projekt	Collegium Intermarium	The European Conservative
Blond		x		x	x
Delsol	x			x		x	X
Deneen		x		x	x	x	x
Dreher		x		x	x	x	X
Engels		x	x	x	x	x	X
Fantini		x	x	x			X
Furedi		x	x	x			X
Giubilei		x	x	x		x	x
Haivry		x	x	x
Hazony		x	x	x
Joch	x		x	x
Kinneging	x			x		x
Krasnodebski			x	x	x
Lánczi	x	x		x		x
Legutko	x	x	x	x	x		X
Murray	x	x	x	x
O’Sullivan		x	x	x		x	X
Pappin		x		x		x	x
Pesey	x	x					X
Puppinck		x		x		x
Scruton	x	x	x		x		X
Vermeule		x		x	x	x

Many of them are involved in several organisation(s) within this nebula. Table 15.1 shows protagonists’ participation in the activities (conferences and publications) of the CER and New Direction; participation in transnational conferences (NatCon and Polska Wielki Projekt); fellowships and/or conferences at MCC and the Danube Institute (merged in the table since protagonists typically participated in both); participation in teaching and conference activities of Collegium Intermarium, a Polish private university established by Ordo Iuris (a legal think tank of conservative lawyers closely associated with the PiS) ( Curanović 2021); and contributions to The European Conservative.

We can thus draw a general picture of the ICI’s main protagonists. We have consciously chosen a sample of multi-positioned individuals rather intensely involved in the ICI. Our sample is thus by no means comprehensive, nor representative of the hundreds of participants in those organisations and events. It comprises the most visible players in the group.

While they are characterised by a genuine degree of inter-personal relations and inter-textual citations, the organisations we have chosen to consider as key to the ICI are distinct in their aims and scopes. For instance, the CER has a more scholarly and semi-closed character, while NatCon is more political, bringing together top politicians and intellectuals and open to larger audiences. The ICI is thus far from being a unified network. Instead it consists of several overlapping groups and networks, with this chapter’s protagonists as a rather tiny group of recurrent figures, which testify to the consolidation of the intellectual exchange institutionalised in recent years.

Next to politicians who are regular participants in events such as NatCon, Polska Wielki Projekt and New Direction’s conferences, four different categories of protagonists of the ICI can be distinguished to better characterise their profiles.

Scholars, who are also often public intellectuals and think tankers (Engels, Hazony).
Think tankers, often with a foot in academia as PhD holders and/or university lecturers (Blond, Puppinck).
Columnists/pundits, who may also be active as think tankers (Murray).
Scholars–politicians, who form a category that may be specific to Central European countries, where a significant number of political personnel are recruited from university staff (Legutko, Krasnodębski, Joch) (Zarycki, Smoczyński and Warczok 2017).

These are profiles of petty intellectuals, characterised by a high degree of multi-positionality between various social spaces ( Boltanski 1973). At the crossroads between academia, politics, the media and think tanks, they possess various resources (social, symbolic but also political and economic) that favour their influence on both the public and the political debate. Their academic legitimacy is rather weak, but they enjoy great access to media and close ties with political leaders. These “fast thinkers” spread illiberal discourse in a diffuse way, not elaborating master theories of conservatism but legitimising the political agenda and sometimes seeking to achieve an academic credibility for politically charged ideas. Addressing the mainstream media, party or NGO activists, these intellectuals do not seek to play a direct role in politics but to shape, endorse and legitimate conservative ideas and illiberal policies.

A research agenda

In this final section we discuss two presently under-studied avenues for future enquiry: the ideological coherence of contemporary conservatism and its connections with illiberalism; and the social factors of (transnational) intellectual engagement on the right.

The ICI actors examined above come from different intellectual and political tendencies of the right (Varga and Buzogány 2022). In both their writings and the interviews we have conducted with them, contentious lines of argument are noticeable when it comes to religion, national sovereignty, economics, gender and international relations.

Despite this ideological inconsistency, the need for transnational exchange and coordination seems to be widely shared among protagonists of the ICI, who contribute to forms of rapprochement between political leaders and parties (at the EP for instance) and to the shaping of a common political platform. This platform is opposed to liberalism in its political, economic and cultural declinations, with an emphasis on the latter. Liberalism appears as conservatives’ new common enemy, which contributes to their rapprochement with illiberals. Manifestos such as The Paris Statement: A Europe We Can Believe In[53] and National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles (June 2022),[54] written and signed by members of both the CER and the NatCon movement, are good illustrations of their shared values and differences (see the reply An Open Letter Responding to the NatCon Statement of Principles).[55]

First, the critique of economic liberalism and neoliberalism: this dimension goes rather unnoticed in the scholarship, though an emerging literature discusses the extent to which “New Right” and “national conservative” actors question neoliberalism, for instance by looking for inspiration in Chinese and South-East Asian developmentalism (Naczyk 2022; Varga and Buzogány 2022).

Second, the need for education system reform and alternative institutions (private colleges, home schooling), which primarily target universities considered to be tools of leftist propaganda and ideologised.

Third, both statements emphasise the importance of identity in its national, family and religious declinations. “National independence” is the first of the ten principles listed in the NatCon Statement, while the Paris Statement, though it praises Western civilization and international cooperation, defines Europe as “a community of nations”. Family constitutes the basic unit of community, in an explicitly nativist perspective: both statements support natalist policies.

Religion and especially the Judeo-Christian tradition is a third and crucial marker of identity. Unsurprisingly, the Paris Statement emphasises the Christian roots of Europe, while the NatCon Statement identifies the Bible as “the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization”.

Fourth and finally, the rejection of non-European (or non-white) immigration comes as a logical consequence of such a definition of Western identity. In both manifestos, immigration is equated with a threat to the community or even with “colonisation”.

Altogether, these statements endorse an inegalitarian and elitist worldview, accompanied by a euphemised form of racism. A sense of hierarchy and authority, characteristic of conservative ideology, is to be found explicitly in the Paris Statement.

The social factors of intellectual engagement on the right offer another promising avenue for future research on the topic. Is it possible to identify common patterns of socialisation which may drive our protagonists’ political engagement?

The critique of the establishment and especially of academia, whose political autonomy is questioned, definitely constitutes a common trope (Paternotte and Verloo 2021). Such a critique should be linked to these intellectuals’ own position vis-à-vis academia, where they sometimes hold peripheral positions, feeling or being marginalised due to their political views (Swartz 2023). In this respect, political engagement may offer a certain public recognition but also some professional upward mobility, i.e., symbolic and material profits. This invites us to expand our research in two complementary dimensions.

The first is a cross-country comparison of intellectual and academic fields. This permits us to understand their differentiated permeability to the circulation of ideas and, ultimately, to understand how an ideological Zeitgeist is shaped.

Second, a deeper investigation of the ICI should look at the intensity of protagonists’ involvement in transnational organisations. This would allow us to identify more precisely the social resources that may favour this involvement, but also the symbolic and material retributions such as access to transnational and foreign intellectual markets.

Conclusion

Based on a sociology of ideas that draws on Bourdieu’s theory of fields and the Cambridge School of intellectual history, this chapter has emphasised the relevance of the transnational level for the analysis of conservative intellectuals and ideologies in a context characterised by the electoral successes of “illiberal” political entrepreneurs. Such an approach permits us to characterise the protagonists of the ICI as a petty, transnational and multi-positioned elite whose interventions take various forms, ranging from intellectual exchange and ideological education to political engagement. While we should take these intellectuals’ ideas seriously, they seldom form a consistently constructed, coherent ideology. Rather, we are dealing with a kind of ideological bricolage that combines references to grand theories with a veneer of academic legitimacy, together with a loose commentary on the current political situation. Ideology thus appears as a ready tool to legitimate political entrepreneurs and their illiberal policies, particularly in the broadly understood cultural realm.

While we firmly believe that the approach we have presented in this chapter can provide new insights into the use and circulation of intellectuals and ideas, both transnationally and between social spheres, other methods will certainly be useful in exploring the research agenda presented in the last section of this chapter. For instance, the analysis of online media and social media, both in terms of content – through discourse or narrative analysis (Squire et al 2014) and in terms of social networks through a directed multi-layer network approach (Logan, LaCasse and Lunday 2023) – is certainly key to understanding the diffusion of conservative and illiberal ideas.

Another complementary approach is to study the reception of these ideas, the diversity of their audiences (social media users, youth, political activists) and their appropriation and interpretation. Scholarship on the reception of ideologies (Hall 1973; Darnton 2003) and more recently on fake news, post-truth and conspiracy theories (Fassin 2021) provides us with valuable insights into their uneven success. It could be fruitfully combined with scholarship on “ordinary” far-right voters and activists, who rarely read the intellectuals considered in this chapter and whose worldviews are nevertheless similar in some respects (Challier 2021; Faury 2024).

References

Agrikoliansky, É. and Collovald, A. (2014) “Mobilisations conservatrices: comment les dominants contestent?”, Politix, vol. 106, no. 2, 7–29.

Allitt, P. (1993) Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950–1985, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Allitt, P. (2009) The conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Anderson, B. (2016) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, New York: Verso.

Ansell, A. E. (1998) Unravelling The Right: The New Conservatism In American Thought And Politics, Boulder CO: Westview Press.

Barša, P., Hesová, Z. and Slačálek, O. (eds) (2022) Central European Culture Wars. Beyond Post-Communism And Populism, Prague: Filozofická fakulta UK.

Behr, V. (2021) “From anticommunism to antiliberalism. Polish conservative intellectuals’ involvement in the transnational circulation of ideas”, in Hałas, E. and Maslowski, N. (eds) Politics of Symbolization Across Central and Eastern Europe. Strategies, Conflicts, Solutions, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien: Peter Lang: 241–259.

Behr, V. (2023a) “Towards a transnational and social history of anti-liberalism. Insights from the trajectory of Ryszard Legutko”, European Politics and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, 22–39.

Behr, V. (2023b) “The illiberalism(s) of Polish conservative intellectuals”, in Laruelle, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berman, S. (2021) “The causes of populism in the West”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 24, no. 1, 71–88.

Bermeo, N. (2016) “On democratic backsliding”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 27, no. 1, 5–19.

Bluhm, K. and Varga, M. (eds) (2019) New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe, New York NY: Routledge.

Bogaards, M. (2018) “De-democratization in Hungary: Diffusely defective democracy”, Democratization, vol. 25, no. 8, 1481–1499.

Boltanski, L. (1973) “L’espace positionnel: multiplicité des positions institutionnelles et habitus de classe”, Revue Française de Sociologie, vol. 14, no. 1, 3–26.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Homo Academicus, Paris: Minuit.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Buzogány, A. and Varga, M. (2023) “Illiberal thought collectives and policy networks in Hungary and Poland”, European Politics and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, 40–58.

Castañeda, J. G. (1993) “The intellectual and the state in Latin America”, World Policy Journal, vol. 10, no. 3, 89–95.

Challier, R. (2021), Simples militants: Comment les partis démobilisent les classes populaires, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Charle, C. (1990) Naissance des « intellectuels »: 1880–1900, Paris: les Éditions de Minuit.

Charle, C. (1996) Les Intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle: Essai d’histoire Comparée, Paris: Seuil.

Charle, C. and Jeanpierre, L. (eds) (2019) La Vie Intellectuelle en France, Paris: Éditions Points.

Chartier, R. (1982) “Espace social et imaginaire social: les intellectuels frustrés au XVIIe siècle”, Annales, vol. 37, no. 2, 389–400.

Chartier, R. (2000) Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution Française, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Chomsky, N. (1969) American Power and the New Mandarins, New York NY: Vintage Books.

Clifford, B. (2012) The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coman, R., Behr, V. and Beyer, J. (2023) “The shaping power of anti-liberal ideas”, European Politics and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, 1–4.

Conover, P. J. and Feldman, S. (1981) “The origins and meaning of liberal/conservative self-identifications”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 25, no. 4, 617–645.

Curanović, A. (2021) “The international activity of Ordo Iuris. The Central European actor and the global Christian right”, Religions, vol. 12, no. 12, 1038, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121038.

Darnton, R. (2003) Pour les Lumières: Défense, illustration, méthode, Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.

Datta, N. (2021) Tip of the Iceberg: Religious Extremist Funders against Human Rights for Sexuality & Reproductive Health in Europe, Brussels: European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual & Reproductive Rights.

Della Sudda, M. (2022) Les Nouvelles femmes de droite, Marseille: Hors d’atteinte.

Eatwell, R. and Goodwin, M. J. (2018) National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy, London: Pelican.

Epstein, K. (1966) The Genesis of German Conservatism, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Eyal, G. and Buchholz, L. (2010) “From the sociology of intellectuals to the sociology of interventions”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 36, August, 117–137.

Falola, T. and Agbo, C. (2018) “Nationalism and African intellectuals”, in Shanguhyia, M. S. and Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan US: 621–641.

Fassin, D. (2021) “Of plots and men. The heuristics of conspiracy theories”, Current Anthropology, vol. 62, no. 2, 128–137. [Online], Available: https://doi-org./10.1086/713829

Faure, J. (2022) Russian Modernist Conservatism (1960–2022): The Intellectual and Social Reconstitution of Russia’s alternative to Western Liberal Modernity, Thèse de doctorat, Paris: Sciences Po Paris.

Faury, F. (2024) Des Électeurs ordinaires: Enquête sur la normalisation de l’extrême droite, Paris: Seuil.

Fawcett, E. (2020) Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fawcett, E. (2024) “Illiberalism and conservatism”, in Laruelle, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, London: Clarendon Press.

Füredi, F. (2018) Populism and the European Culture Wars: The Conflict of Values between Hungary and the EU, London and New York: Routledge.

Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Geroulanos, S. and Sapiro, G. (eds) (2023) The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas, London: Routledge.

Gross, N., Medvetz, T. and Russell, R. (2011) “The contemporary American conservative movement”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 37, no. 1, 325–354.

Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Birmingham UKS: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Hazony, Y. and Haivry, O. (2017) “What is conservatism?”, American Affairs, vol. 1, no. 2. [Online], Available: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/what-is-conservatism/

Hroch, M. and Fowkes, B. (1985) Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hunter, J. D. (1991) Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, New York NY: Basic Books.

Kirk, R. (1953) The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Washington DC: H. Regnery & Company.

Konrád, G. and Szelényi, I. (1979) The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, Brighton UK: Harvester Press.

Kopeček, M. (2022) “From narrating dissidence to post-dissident narratives of democracy: Antitotalitarianism, politics of memory and culture wars in East-Central Europe 1970s–2000s”, in Barša, P., Hesová, Z. and Slačálek, O. (eds) Central European Culture Wars. Beyond Post-Communism and Populism, Prague: Filozofická fakulta UK, 28–83.

Kuhar, R. and Paternotte, D. (eds) (2017) Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing against Equality, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Laruelle, M. (2022) “Illiberalism: A conceptual introduction”, East European Politics, vol. 38, no. 2, 303–327.

Lepistö, A. (2021) The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism: The American Right and the Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Logan, A. P., LaCasse, P. M., & Lunday, B. J. (2023) “Social network analysis of Twitter interactions: A directed multilayer network approach”, Social Network Analysis and Mining, vol. 13, art. 65. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-023-01063-2

Lok, M. (2023) Europe against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lok, M., Pestel, F. and Reboul, J. (eds.) (2021) Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700–1930), Leiden: Brill.

Mannheim, K. (1986) Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Matonti, F. (2022) Comment sommes-nous devenus réacs?, Paris: Fayard.

Medvetz, T. (2012) Think tanks in America, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Naczyk M. (2022) “Taking back control: Comprador bankers and managerial developmentalism in Poland”, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 29, no. 5, 1650–1674.

Nash, G. H. (1996) The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, Wilmington DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Ory, P. and Sirinelli, J.-F. (1986) Les Intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Paris: Armand Colin.

Paternotte, D. and Verloo, M. (2021) “De-democratization and the politics of knowledge: Unpacking the cultural Marxism narrative”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 556–578.

Peele, G. (1984) Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Pető, A. (2022) “The illiberal polypore state and its science policy”, in Mörner, N. (ed.) The Many Faces of the Far Right in the Post-Communist Space, Stockholm: Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University: 33–41.

Pierson, P. and Skocpol, T. (eds) (2007) The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Plattner, M. F. (2019) “Illiberal democracy and the struggle on the right”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 30, no. 1, 5–19.

Robin, C. (2017) The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Sajó, A., Uitz, R. and Holmes, S. (eds) (2022) Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, New York NY: Routledge.

Scheppele, K. (2013) “The rule of law and the Frankenstate: Why governance checklists do not work”, Governance, vol. 26, no. 4, 559–562.

Scruton, R. (2014) How to be a Conservative, London: Bloomsbury Continuum.

Scruton, R. and Dooley, M. (2016) Conversations with Roger Scruton, London: Bloomsbury.

Serry, H. (2004) Naissance de L’intellectuel Catholique, Paris: La Découverte.

Shekhovtsov, A. (2018) Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Sibgatullina, G. (2024) “Ethics of studying illiberalism in a hyperconnected, polycrisis-defined era: An introduction to the special issue”, Journal of Illiberalism Studies, vol. 4, 1–7.

Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics: Volume 1: Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Slobodian, Q. and Plehwe, D. (2020) “Neoliberals against Europe”, in Callison, W. and Manfredi, Z. (eds) Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, New York NY: Fordham University Press: 89–111.

Sowell, T. (2009) Intellectuals and Society, New York NY: Basic Books.

Squire, C., Molly A., Mark, D. (2014) What is Narrative Research?, New York: Bloomsbury.

Sternhell, Z. (1910) The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Stoeckl, K. and Uzlaner, D. (2022) The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars, New York NY: Fordham University Press.

Suny, R. G. And Kennedy, M. D. (1999) Intellectuals And The Articulation Of The Nation, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press.

Swartz, D. L. (2023) “Trump divide among American conservative professors”, Theory and Society, vol. 52, no. 5, 739–769.

Tait, J. (2024) “American illiberal thinkers”, in Laruelle, M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tate, J. W. (2019) “Liberalism, conservatism and contested boundaries”, Newcastle Business School Discussion Paper Series: Research on the Frontiers of Knowledge.

Thiesse, A.-M. (2001) La création des identités nationales: Europe, XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris: Seuil.

Trebitsch, M. and Granjon, M.-C. (1998) Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels, Bruxelles: Complexe.

Trencsényi, B. (2014) “Beyond liminality? The Kulturkampf of the early 2000s in East Central Europe”, Boundary2, vol. 41, no. 1, 135–152.

Varga, M. and Buzogány, A. (2022) “The two faces of the ‘global right’: Revolutionary conservatives and national-conservatives”, Critical Sociology, vol. 48, no. 6, 1089–1107.

Varga, M. and Buzogány, A. (2024) “Genealogies of illiberalism”, in Laruelle M. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Waller, J. (2024) “Distinctions with a difference: Illiberalism and authoritarianism in scholarly study”, Political Studies Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 365–386.

Zarycki, T., Smoczyński, R. and Warczok, T. (2017) “The roots of Polish culture-centered politics: Toward a non-purely cultural model of cultural domination in Central and Eastern Europe”, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 31, no. 2, 360–381.

16. Political elites, ideas and public policy

How ideologies and ideational transmission shape policy stability and change

Ewan Robertson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-21

Introduction

Over the past several decades a burgeoning literature has explored the role of ideas in public policy. Scholars have established that “ideas matter” in policy analysis and have identified different types and levels of idea that influence policy processes. At the same time, there is ongoing research and debate about the conditions and mechanisms through which ideas may shape policy stability and change. Lines of enquiry include how different levels of ideas interact, how the causal role of ideas can be identified and tested and the relationships between ideas, institutions and different forms of power (Schmidt 2008; Béland and Cox 2010; Mehta 2010; Béland 2016; Carstensen and Schmidt 2016).

Amid these themes, this chapter focuses on a key category of actor: policy elites. The label denotes an array of professionals and experts who work in a given field of public policy and by whom policy is ultimately made ( Genieys and Smyrl 2008: 21). The term includes ministerial and bureaucratic figures directly involved in decision-making, as well as specialists within think tanks, academia, journalism and interest groups who routinely engage with expert-level policy debates and deliberations. Policy elites can be distinguished from ordinary citizens without specialist knowledge and collective actors such as political parties or media consortia (as distinct from individual specialists within these organisations). These other actors may engage in public debate and influence policy; they are not, however, directly involved in day-to-day policymaking nor do they tend to possess technical expertise of a given field. The core premise of this chapter is that policy elites are crucial actors through whom ideas shape policy processes. Consequently, the study of elites is necessary to identify key mechanisms through which ideas have a causal impact on policy stability, change and comparative variation.

Building on these observations, this chapter provides an up-to-date review of the ideational approach to policy studies as well as: how ideas influence policy elites; the various ways in which elites use ideas in pursuit of their policy goals; and how we can identify the causal impact of (ideationally motivated) elites on public policy outcomes. In doing so, the discussion addresses core issues in the ideational literature. For example, how can we identify the causal influence of ideas on policy processes, including the role of macro-level (background) ideologies and philosophies? How can we discover the conditions under which some ideas become policy, or shape dominant ideological frameworks, while others do not? What concepts, tools and research strategies do we have at our disposal to investigate such questions?

The remainder of the chapter is organised as follows. The first section reviews the ideational approach to policy studies including core claims, types and levels of ideas and key analytical frameworks. The second section then explores what is known of the links between elites, ideas and policy. Drawing on examples mainly from economic, social and labour market policy in high-income countries (although these research approaches are applicable to a broader range of contexts), it discusses the various mechanisms through which elites and ideas shape policy. These include ideas as elite preference-shapers, elites as vectors of transmission between ideational levels and spatial policy domains, and ideas as instruments of power. The conclusion identifies avenues for future research in this field, including consideration of how the concept of ideology can be further integrated into mainstream ideational approaches.

The ideational approach to public policy analysis

Context and key claims

As a dimension of public policy analysis, “ideas” can be defined simply as “the normative and cognitive beliefs of actors” (Daigneault 2014a: 1) or more precisely as “the beliefs, theories, and discourses that (re)construct or (re)structure how actors perceive, define, communicate, and make their interests actionable in distributional struggles” (Carstensen et al 2022: 4; cf Schmidt 2008). As is evident from the latter definition, a core interest of ideational analysis is in ideas as causes (or independent variables), i.e. ways that ideas shape how actors interpret their interests and translate these into policy (Béland and Cox 2010: 13). Another focus is to study policy ideas as outcomes (or dependent variables), identifying the conditions under which some ideas become policy (or shape the assumptions underlying policy) while others do not (Schmidt 2008: 307; Cairney 2012: 269).

Until the late 20^th century, however, the notion of ideas as a variable of government action was marginal compared to structuralist, materialist, institutionalist and rational choice schools of thought (Campbell 2002; Blyth 2003; for discussion see Béland and Cox 2010; Mehta 2010). Through these lenses, ideas and discourse were often viewed as by-products of political actors’ material self-interest or institutional strategic position rather than as causal forces in their own right. From the 1980s, a growing literature re-established ideas as a central dimension of political science (Beland and Cox 2010: 6). This trend was driven in part by critiques of the capacities of other analytical traditions to fully explain actors’ observed policy preferences or processes of policy change as well as stability. In the process, a new ideational literature developed which brought several epistemological and ontological claims to prominence in the study of public policy (for reviews see Béland 2010: 147–148; Béland and Cox 2010; Daigneault 2014a: 1; Béland and Mandelkern 2023).

First, ideational scholars claim an independent causal role for ideas in shaping actors’ interests. Conversely, they posit that the preferences of social and political figures for policy are not (only) determined by actors’ “objective” material or institutional position (Blyth, 2003; Mehta, 2010). An early observation of this point was made by Heclo (1974: 305), who argues that policy activity is driven as much by decision-makers “puzzling” (“collectively wondering what to do”) as by “powering”, e.g. responding to material political pressures. In this vein, ideational scholars tend to assume that actors’ interests are at least partially socially constructed and shaped by their (shared) interpretations of social reality (Hall 1993; Hay 2002, 2010; Parsons 2007: 98; Béland 2010; Béland and Cox 2010). As a corollary, it is often suggested that actors’ rationality is “bounded” or “thin”, meaning political agents will act in pursuit of their objectives; however, these objectives are in turn are informed by beliefs and interpretations (Parsons 2007: 98; Bengtsson and Ruonavaara 2017: 51). Unpacking this further, scholars distinguish several ways in which ideas themselves influence policy preferences. On a deeper level, as noted above, ideas shape how actors interpret the world and settle upon what they consider as desirable and feasible courses of action (Hall 1993; Berman 2010; Hay 2010; Daigneault 2014a). On a more applied level, ideas act as sources of learning and “instruction sheets” which help policy actors convert their preferences into “actionable policies” (Blyth 2003; Béland and Mandelkern 2023: 89; cf Béland 2010: 148).

Second, ideational scholars have engaged with institutionalist theories which emphasise how past events and current institutional structures can both shape actors’ preferences and constrain avenues of change. Genieys and Smyrl (2008: 5–8) observe that, despite the effects of institutional path dependence, significant policy change often takes place, and that while institutions can shape the extent and direction of change, they cannot account for the underlying motives of policy actors. Other scholars have emphasised that ideas and norms are embedded within institutions and rules, and thus constitute and re-construct institutional structures (Béland and Cox 2010: 8–9). For example, a seminal contribution by Schmidt (2008) develops the study of ideas into a new form of institutional analysis: discursive institutionalism. Following this approach, Schmidt critiques tenets of other institutionalist traditions that view institutions as only “stable equilibria” and “external structures for rule-following” (Schmidt 2008: 304, 322). Rather, institutions are posited to be “simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents” and as such institutional change “is dynamic and explainable across time through agents’ ideas and discourse” (Schmidt 2008: 305, 322).

Levels and types of idea

In order to rigorously study the various possible roles of ideas as either causes or outcomes in policy processes, scholars have also categorised ideas by their nature and level of abstraction. Regarding the former, a distinction is often made between cognitive/ontological ideas (assumptions about how the social world is structured, and probable cause-and-effect relationships between policies and their effects) and normative ideas regarding what is “right” and “just” and how society should operate or be structured (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993: 103; Campbell 2002; Tannenwald 2005: 14; Schmidt 2008: 306). Regarding levels of ideas, a tripartite division is often identified, whose selected terms here are “public philosophies”, “paradigms” and “policies”.[56] At the most abstract level are public philosophies, defined as “organizing ideas, values, and principles of knowledge and society … [which] generally sit in the background as underlying assumptions that are rarely contested except in times of crisis” (Schmidt 2008: 306).

Similar concepts are those of a “zeitgeist”(Mehta 2010) and actors’ “deep core” beliefs (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Sabatier 1998). These types of ideas can include convictions about the relative importance of principles such as freedom, equality and security; assumptions about human nature and what the “good society” should look like; and views about the appropriate role of the state and market in governing society.

A second level is that of policy paradigms. These are frameworks of ideas applied to a particular policy field that shape what is considered to be the nature and causes of problems, desirable policy goals and feasible solutions to achieve these goals (Hall 1993: 279). Partially cognate terms in the literature include “policy programmes” (Schmidt 2008) and “policy core beliefs” (Sabatier 1998). While a single paradigm may become dominant in a given field (such as neoliberalism in economic policymaking since the 1980s), these are dynamic ideational constructs which co-exist with, and are contested by, alternative frameworks. Finally, a third tier of ideas concerns specific notions about policies themselves, including the instruments, design elements and resource allocations required to achieve particular goals (Hall 1993; Sabatier 1998: 104; Schmidt 2008: 306; Mehta 2010).

As the preceding discussion intimates, different types and levels of idea also interact with each other. It is generally assumed that more abstract values and assumptions influence more concrete policy ideas and preferences (Sabatier 1998). Yet it is also possible for developments at the policy level to “upflow” and reshape paradigms and philosophies (Mehta 2010). In developing the concept of the policy paradigm, Hall (1993) distinguishes between different levels of change, divided into “first order” (changes to policy settings), “second order” (changes to policy instruments) and “third order” (changes to policy goals) – with shifts on all three levels engendering a “paradigm shift” (Hall 1993). In this sense, paradigms can be viewed as crucial to interactions between ideational levels, as these are the mid-level frameworks which link deeper public philosophies to concrete policy ideas as actors deliberate over problem-framing, goal-setting and solution-searching.

Where might ideologies fit within such frameworks? An ideology is understood here as a “coherent and relatively stable set of beliefs or values” (Knight 2006: 625) which shapes “interpretations of the world and guidelines for dealing with it” (Berman 2010: 105). Yet despite the long history of the term, many ideational scholars of public policy do not employ it explicitly in their own conceptual repertoires (see Campbell 1998, 2002; Sabatier 1998; Schmidt 2008; Mehta 2010; Carstensen and Schmidt 2016). Furthermore, where ideology is discussed in relation to public policy, use of the term is not always consistent. For example Béland and Cox refer to ideologies as synonymous with public philosophies, while Hall equates the concept with paradigms (Hall 1993: 284; Béland & Cox 2010: 13). Daignault, meanwhile, considers ideologies as part of the more abstract dimension of paradigms concerning “values, assumptions, and principles about the nature of reality, social justice, and the appropriate role of the state” (Daigneault 2014a: 3). In alignment with the latter observation, the term “ideology” is viewed in this chapter as largely synonymous with other higher-level concepts (public philosophies, deep core beliefs), i.e. constructs composed of the deeper values and assumptions which shape actors’ instinctive interpretations of policy problems and solutions.

Analytical frameworks and challenges

In addition to identifying ideational concepts and levels, scholars have created analytical frameworks aimed at detecting when and how ideas may play causal roles in policy processes. These help researchers to empirically study how ideas, interests and institutions interact, and the conditions under which some ideas succeed in being adopted as real-world policies while others do not.[57] An early example is Hall’s (1989) proposal that variation in the cross-national adoption of ideas is conditioned by their perceived “economic”, “administrative” and “political” viability. A seminal contribution is Kingdon’s Multi-Streams Analysis (MSA) framework, which posits that for ideas to become policy it is necessary for processes within “problem”, “solution” and “politics” streams to align, thus opening a “policy window” or opportunity for reform (Kingdon 1984, 2013). Somewhat similarly, Clasen (2000) proposes a framework which distinguishes between actors’ “means”, “motives” and “opportunities” for seeking policy change. This considers how changing structural contexts, fiscal pressures and political considerations can combine to produce the conditions whereby “the old way of thinking give[s]‌ way to new ideas” (Clasen 2000: 92).

In another canonical approach, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) conceives of government action as disaggregated into policy sub-subsystems where belief-driven actor coalitions compete for influence and authority (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Sabatier 1998). According to this theory, sources of policy change include dynamics internal to policy sub-systems (e.g. actors adjusting their preferences in response to new learning) and external impacts from shifting political and socio-economic conditions (Sabatier 1998: 104–105). A further popular analytical framework in which ideas play an important role is punctuated equilibrium theory, which specifies conditions under which long periods of policy stability are “punctuated” by sudden change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2009).

While the preceding section covers some of the key trends and approaches from earlier generations of ideational scholarship, these and other scholars also identify challenges for ideational studies (for discussion, see Béland and Cox 2010). Among these, a central concern is whether and how it can be possible to demonstrate the causal role of ideas on actors’ policy preferences and actual processes of policy (non-)reform (Hay 2010; Mehta 2010: 24). This is particularly the case when dealing with more abstract and unobservable ideologies and philosophies (Berman 2010; Béland and Cox 2010: 14). For example, Daigneault (2014b: 460) criticises the practice of assuming a causal relationship between paradigms and policies when both are present because “similar policies may be adopted for entirely different reasons”. To address such issues, researchers have recommended undertaking detailed (usually qualitative) empirical analysis and temporal process tracing to identify the observable influence of ideas on actors and how these lead to preferences for certain policies over alternatives (Berman 2010; Mehta 2010; Daigneault 2014b). Further recommendations include specifying the historical alternatives not chosen, identifying dissent between actors in similar strategic positions, and making use of within- or cross-case comparisons (Parsons 2010: 135–140). Moreover, Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) posit that there has been a lack of theorisation about the precise relationship between ideas and power, and how ideas themselves can operate as a form of power. This is crucial to understanding “agents’ promotion of certain ideas at the expense of the ideas of others” and actors’ relative capacity to do so (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016: 319–320). Finally, methodological approaches to the study of ideas remain a point of debate. On one hand, several of the aforementioned scholars use qualitative methods such as elite interviews, documentary analysis and process tracing as a way of opening the “black box” of actors’ perceptions and motivations – something which quantitative methods are less equipped to do ( Rueschemeyer and Stephens 1997: 62). On the other hand, regarding research into the spread of policy ideas across countries, it has been suggested that qualitative approaches have often been applied in a “cursory fashion” and face methodological limitations in capturing interdependencies and multiple interactions between cases ( Obinger et al 2013: 117). At the same time, these debates provide grounds for further theoretical, analytical and empirical advances in the ideational study of public policy. These issues are further illuminated when zooming in on the study of the relationship between ideas and policy elites in particular.

Elites, ideas and public policy

Policy elites and ideational analysis

Policy elites are central to understanding the links between ideas and public policy. While other social and political actors also participate in policy debates and conflict, elites hold a privileged position as the actual makers of policy or those with specialist knowledge which affords them a place in expert-level deliberations. Drawing upon Schmidt (2008: 310), policy elites operate in the realm of “coordinative discourse” involving “the individuals and groups at the centre of policy construction who are involved in the creation, elaboration, and justification of policy and programmatic ideas”. From this premise, understanding the ideas – amid other factors – motivating elites can help explain processes of policy change and stability (Genieys and Smyrl 2008: 21).

In studying policy elites, there are various categories to consider. While actors may hold more than one role, a distinction can be made between those directly involved in decision-making and policy design (e.g. government ministers and civil servants) and those acting as knowledge brokers who provide policy-relevant information and seek to influence decision-makers. In the latter category, the study of experts and “technocrats” – especially economists – has been a prominent theme of ideational research (Bickerton and Accetti 2021: 31; Béland and Mandelkern 2023: 91). A related type of actor is the “policy entrepreneur”, understood as a specialist who transcends their own organisational affiliation and actively promotes the adoption of a particular reform idea (Heclo 1974: 308; Kingdon 1984: 21; Mares 2003: 50–51). A pertinent observation here is that while the actions of a policy entrepreneur can increase the chances of a proposal being adopted as policy, their precise effects are difficult to forecast (Mares 2003: 51; Kingdon 2013: 205–6).

As well as their individual roles, elites form networks and communities within their specialist fields, the size and membership of which may be more or less open (Rhodes and Marsh 1992; Cairney 2012: 156). In addition to being bound by common policy interests, some networks are conceived as “epistemic communities” which are tied together by similar paradigmatic outlooks, sharing “a set of normative beliefs, causal models, notions of empirical validity, and a common policy enterprise” (Haas 1992; Campbell 2002: 30). According to several theories, including the ACF mentioned earlier, such networks are a key unit of policy analysis because patterns of competition between them are a driver of policy change or stability. Much of this conflict takes place via a “battle of ideas” as the actors composing each network seek to establish their views as the widely-accepted “common-sense” understandings of problem framings and policy solutions in a given sector (c.f. Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Jordan and Maloney 1997; Sabatier 1998; Genieys and Smyrl 2008).

Building on these concepts, the sections below discuss specific ways in which the study of elites produces theoretical and empirical insights into the relationship between ideas and public policy. These consider: i) ideas as elite preference-shapers; ii) elites as vectors in the movement of ideas; and iii) how elites use ideas instrumentally in policy conflicts.

Ideas as preference shapers and motivators

As noted earlier, ideational scholars posit that actors’ subjective interpretations of social reality influence how they conceive of their policy preferences. But precisely how might normative and cognitive beliefs shape preferences or help translate these preferences into concrete policies? While the relationship between beliefs and preference formation is complex, two processes emphasised here are “cognitive biases” and “policy learning”. Regarding the former, studies of behavioural and cognitive psychology show that humans have limited information-processing capacity, seek to avoid cognitive overload and are subject to biases such as the “seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand” (Nickerson 1998: 175; Paulus et al 2022; Vedejová and Čavojová 2022). A similar observation has been made by Sabatier, who suggests policy actors “resist information suggesting their deep core or policy core beliefs may be invalid and/or unattainable” (Sabatier 1998: 104–105). Following this logic, actors’ own interpretive frameworks will shape their receptivity to external information and deliberations over the nature of policy problems, goals and feasible solutions. Terms employed to describe these processes include “cognitive shortcuts” (Parsons 2007: 13); “cognitive lock” (Berman 2010; Béland and Cox 2010: 13; and “cognitive filtering” (Hay 2010; Robertson 2023).

A second mechanism through which ideas shape preferences is policy learning, constituting “relatively enduring alterations of thought or behavioural intentions which result from experience and/or new information and which are concerned with the attainment or revision of policy objectives” (Sabatier 1998: 104; for discussion see Cairney 2020: 207–226). However ideational theorists tend not to view policy learning as an entirely “evidence-based” or “rational” process, but one determined by myriad political, institutional and contextual factors, as well as actors’ own interpretive frameworks and dominant paradigms (Hall 1993; Sabatier 1998; Cairney 2020: 226). Mediated by these factors, sources of learning can include past experiences of policy success or failure, new evidence about current policies or drawing lessons from elsewhere (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Rose 2002). Regarding the latter, two types of lesson drawing frequent scholarly interest are “transfer” and “diffusion”. Policy transfer refers to when “knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system (past or present)” is passed to another (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000: 5). Policy transfer is shaped by numerous mechanisms and can take place on a continuum from “voluntary” to more “coercive” forms (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000: 7; Obinger, Schmitt and Starke 2013: 114). Diffusion is a similar concept, understood as when policy decisions in one country or setting condition or influence policy choices in another – a process in which international organisations have played an increasingly important role (Simmons et al 2006: 787; c.f. Meseguer and Gilardi 2009: 528; Obinger et al 2013: 113; Béland et al 2018: 463–464).

An implication of these observations is that ideas and beliefs can provide an independent motivation behind policy actors’ actions. For example, Schmitt (2016) observes that since the 1980s neoliberal ideas have formed the dominant background assumptions of policymaking in high-income countries. Core tenets of this ideology include the primacy of market efficiency, the limitation of the state’s role in guaranteeing “unfettered markets” and property rights, and a view of individuals as “rationally self-interested actors” (Schmidt 2016: 319–322). One form of the influence of these ideas can be seen in their direct promotion by convinced “true believers” in politics, academia, journalism and civil society (Schmidt 2016: 322). As an applied example, Hopkin and Shaw (2016) argue that the financialisation of the British economy from the 1980s was driven by an ideologically motivated political elite rather than external business lobbying. In common with the US, a key prior driver of financial deregulation and internationalisation was that “neoliberals won the battle of economic ideas” (Hopkin and Shaw 2016: 365).

Similar examples can be observed in social and labour market policy. Since the latter decades of the 20^th century neoclassical economic thinkers have reframed post-war welfare states – especially features that limit market mechanisms – as sources of problems (creating “rigidities” which stymie growth and exacerbate unemployment) rather than solutions (protecting individuals against economic risks and stabilising demand during recessions). Towards social security, this critique has included the charge that generous social benefits and poor tax-benefit design create “incentive traps” which risk individuals taking the “rational” decision to become or remain unemployed. The growing influence of this logic is arguably one of the reasons that many elites who administer social and employment policies became convinced of the need to reform taxes and benefits to “make work pay” (MWP). Such discourse and recommendations emerged as a strong feature of the policy strategies of the OECD and European Union in the 1990s and 2000s (OECD 1994, 1997, 2005; European Commission 2003; Allègre and Jaehrling 2011: 278). A concrete manifestation of this thinking was the growing popularity of in-work benefits (IWBs): tax or benefit policies which top up workers’ wages and increase financial incentives to work compared with unemployment ( Immervoll and Pearson 2009; Abbas and Robertson 2023). A number of researchers have found empirical evidence to suggest that IWB policies in high-income countries have been at least partly driven by policy-makers’ ideational convictions regarding “incentive traps” as problems to be tackled (Colomb 2012; Cousins 2014; Grover 2016; McCabe 2018; Sloman 2019; Touzet 2019; Robertson 2023). More broadly, as highlighted further in the sections below, research into the ideational motivations of elites abounds in social policy literature.

It is worth noting that while many of the above examples use qualitative methods, quantitative researchers have also investigated links between policy ideas and policy reforms. In a study of the ideological orientations of governments in 18 OECD countries from 1971 to 2009, Horn (2017) found that, controlling for other factors, the impact of economic pressures on social security retrenchment was “buffered by [pro-] welfare ideology and nullified in the absence of pronounced market ideology” (Horn 2017: 28). More recently, Herre’s (2021) global dataset of government ideologies associates ideologically leftist leaders with more redistributive welfare policies. Further research using this dataset is ongoing (Herre and Rommel 2023). Moreover, a random control trial by García-Hombrados et al (2024) found that the probability that local politicians will adopt a policy in response to new information is increased if there is an ideological alignment between decision-makers and the institutional source of that information.

Ideational transmission between levels and domains

Elites are also active participants in – and thus vectors of – the movement of policy ideas. As noted earlier, one type of movement involves “downward-flowing” and “upward-flowing” interactions between different ideational levels (Mehta 2010). Downward processes include where “public philosophies … shape how more specific problems are defined, which, in turn, affects which specific policy ideas seem to be viable solutions to the newly defined problem” (Mehta 2010: 43). Here, it is often policy elites who undertake the cognitive labour to translate more abstract ideas into concrete policies. To revisit an earlier example, in the 1990s an international epistemic community of economists and other specialists drew upon the assumptions of neoclassical economic theories to propose specific reforms which would remove the “rigidities” in labour markets claimed to cause high unemployment (e.g. OECD 1994).

Conversely, “upward-flowing” interactions occur when specific policy ideas and reforms influence more abstract problem framing, paradigms or public philosophies (Mehta 2010: 43–44). Policy elites are closely involved in such processes, as their interpretations of whether a policy has been successful or not, or over the nature of a policy problem, influence which background assumptions become or remain dominant in a given field. For instance, perceptions of the inability of existing policies to tackle a problem may erode the underlying paradigm and ideological assumptions upon which these policies’ rationale is based. Mehta (2010: 44) suggests that this process occurred when Keynesian economic measures failed to combat “stagflation” in the 1970s, paving the way for neoliberalism’s ascendency as an alternative public philosophy. Carstensen, Ibsen and Schmidt (2022: 8–9) discuss various additional examples of “upward-flowing” ideational interactions in the area of employment relations. Of course, upward- and downward-flowing interactions are contested processes and changes in ideas at one level may not necessarily lead to shifts on another level. A notable example is the 2008 financial crisis, where despite overly loose regulations being commonly understood as a catalyst, neoliberalism remained the pre-eminent paradigm of economic policy-making (Hopkin and Shaw 2016; Schmidt 2016).

A second type of movement is the spatial transfer of ideas both between tiers of authority (supranational, national and local) and different policy domains. As others have noted, policy elites play important roles in policy transfer and diffusion (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000:10; Béland et al 2018: 464). In addition to epistemic communities linked by a common paradigmatic outlook, also relevant here are “instrument constituencies”: policy networks drawn together by their shared support for a specific policy instrument, but potentially due to different reasons and rationales (Voss and Simons 2014; Béland et al 2018: 464).

The international diffusion of IWB is an illustrative example of the spatial movement of ideas. As previously discussed, from the 1990s onwards the need for reforms to MWP was promoted by the OECD and EU as well as economically liberal governments such as in the US and UK. There is extensive evidence that the logic of “incentive traps” then progressively influenced economists, policy advisers and decision-makers in a number of other high-income countries and contributed to the widespread diffusion of IWBs by the 2000s (Duncan et al 2003; Banks et al 2005; Colomb 2012; Abbas and Robertson 2023). Moreover, while studies of policy transfer and diffusion are often qualitative, quantitative researchers have also sought to chart the international spread of policy ideas and interaction effects between policy systems. For example, Obinger et al (2013) highlight the studies of Brooks (2007) and Gilardi et al (2009), which examine the diffusion of pension and hospital financing reforms, respectively.

It is also important to note that ideas are not only transmitted hierarchically from international to nation–state level or from perceived “leaders” to “laggards”. For example, the ideas of policy elites in EU member states also feed upwards into European-level policies (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000:7). This process can be observed in the negotiation of the European Platform Work Directive passed in 2024 (Aloisi et al 2024). Likewise, changing ideas and learning on a local level may lead to national policy shifts. The implementation of the Active Solidarity Income minimum income benefit in France in 2009 was presaged by its earlier adoption and experimentation by local authorities, the départements ( Vlandas 2013).

Last, policy elites often seek to transfer ideas between sectors within the same political system. Carstensen and Röper (2019) term this process “invasion from within”, and provide a theorisation of mechanisms through which policy actors may successfully transmit paradigmatic frameworks from one sector into another. As an example, they analyse the transmission of ideas from the financial sector to the pensions policy domain in Germany during the 1990s (Carstensen and Röper 2019). A similar process can be observed regarding MWP reforms. An important driver behind the introduction of British and French tax credit policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the ways in which “economistic” policy figures embedded within finance ministries assumed increasing influence over social security policy, in the process seeding ideas regarding “incentive traps” and “tax-benefit integration” within social security ministries (Colomb 2012; Clegg 2015; Touzet 2019).

Instrumental uses of ideas

As previously indicated, processes of policy debate or ideational transmission do not take place in isolation, but within wider struggles for intellectual, institutional and material authority over governance and policy. As such, policy elites may also purposefully use ideas and discourse as tools to achieve their objectives. For example, in their discussion of ideas as “coalition magnets”, Béland and Cox (2016) describe how policy entrepreneurs strategically frame their proposals to secure decision-makers’ support and appeal to diverse and perhaps otherwise resistant interests. One example cited is “social inclusion” as a polysemic concept whose function has been to build legitimacy for activation measures (e.g. employability support and work-search requirements) in welfare reform processes (Béland and Cox 2016: 438–440). Another recent advance is the conceptualisation of “ideational power” by Carstensen and Schmidt (2016), which they define as “the capacity of actors (whether individual or collective) to influence actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational elements” (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016: 320). The authors distinguish three forms of ideational power: power through ideas (the capacity to influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs); power over ideas (the capacity to impose certain ideas and exclude others); and power in ideas (deeper background ideas and philosophies that structure thought and policy preferences).

While the previous sections have touched upon instances of power “through” and “in” ideas, “power over ideas” perhaps most vividly demonstrates the instrumental use of ideas. Rather than only seeking to convince others of the superior merits of their proposals, here policy elites wield ideas and discourse as weapons to maintain their authority, impose their preferences and exclude alternatives. Instances of “power over ideas” include where powerful actors control which policy ideas are promoted or discussed in the public sphere; when less powerful actors exert pressure on policy-makers by “naming and shaming” them against commonly-accepted norms; and where elite actors use their power “not to listen” or resist ideas and framings considered undesirable (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016: 326–327). Illustrating this latter notion, Slater (2012) argues that British Conservative policy-makers and think tanks engaged in the “production of ignorance” by “[directing] political and public attention away from viable alternatives” to their plans for “punitive” welfare reforms during the early 2010s (Slater 2012: 961).

The above discussions lead back to a core issue for the ideational approach. Empirically, how can we distinguish between the independent causal influence of ideas or ideational power on policy, rather than their being by-products of other factors such as material power, institutional features or structural pressures? Many of the theoretical concepts and research strategies used by the studies cited in this chapter provide tools for this task. To provide further examples, Horn (2017) used quantitative techniques to control for alternative explanations and isolate the effect of government ideology on welfare policy across a large number of cases, and then further delved into the causal mechanisms identified via comparative case studies. In a qualitative comparative approach, Robertson (2023) explored the adoption of, and convergent reforms to, IWB policies in France and the UK from the 1990s to the 2020s. To identify the independent effects of ideas, process tracing of each reform within and across cases was undertaken using a modified MSA framework. This strategy allowed for the parsing of ideational influences on policy-makers from other factors such as electoral motives, interest group lobbying and institutional constraints. Comparative and temporal process tracing also allowed the researcher to discover sequences whereby policy elites first became convinced of certain policy proposals and then other organised interests adopted positions towards reforms that governments were already decided upon. This provided grounds to suggest that policy-makers had been “protagonists” rather than “consenters” to chosen directions of change (c.f. Korpi 2006). Overall, these different analytical techniques were used to test and substantiate the argument that shared elite ideas played an independent, causal role in the reforms studied (Robertson 2023: 275).

Conclusion: Key issues and future research

The concepts, methods and examples cited in this chapter underline that the ideational approach has become a central dimension of policy studies. Moreover, from earlier generations of literature which established that “ideas matter”, more recent work has explored the many ways in which ideas – including via ideationally influenced and motivated elites – act as causal forces shaping policy. These include studies that explore the influence of different types and categories of ideas, different levels of ideational change, upward and downward-flowing interactions and ideational power, to reprise a few. Further important concepts not explored in depth in this chapter are the use of ideas in political agenda-setting and as feedback mechanisms which promote institutional stability as well as change ( Béland et al 2022).

Moreover, the chapter has demonstrated various ways in which policy elites are central actors in the link between ideas and policy. As well as being ideationally guided themselves to differing extents, their actions involve translating more abstract ideas and ideological assumptions into actionable proposals and, simultaneously, using more applied ideas and experiences to refashion dominant paradigms and ideologies. Elites furthermore act as vectors in the transfer of ideas between discrete hierarchical levels and policy sectors. In these senses, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and specialists are agents whose actions link macro and meso processes in both ideology studies and public policy analysis. Finally, as part of contested power struggles, elites harness ideas as instruments to achieve their intellectual (and material) hegemony over policy domains and to attempt to bend public policy processes to their will.

Building on the contributions of the ideational approach to public policy, several further avenues of research appear promising. On a conceptual level, the category of “ideology” appears to be insufficiently integrated into the mainstream literature. In part this is because other concepts such as “public philosophies”, “zeitgeist” and “paradigm” have come to be partly synonymous with, or incorporate, the ideological dimension of policy studies. Likewise, the broader term “ideational” allows researchers to encapsulate a wider range of terms and processes than “ideological”, while the latter may still be perceived as limited by its connotations with 19^th- and 20^th-century materialist and Marxist traditions (c.f. Béland and Cox 2010: 8). Yet as an ideational construct, “ideology” remains a central concept in political science and can be effectively integrated into and harnessed by policy theories – as Daigneault demonstrates by incorporating distinct “ideological roots” as a dimension of social assistance paradigms (Daigneault 2014a). Here, incorporating the ideological dimension provides clearer insight into the threads running from policy-makers’ deepest convictions through to the more explicit frames and ideas that form much of quotidian debate.

Methodologically, it would also be interesting to see further advances in how both qualitative and quantitative methods capture the role of ideas and ideology in policy studies. For quantitative approaches, this includes the challenge of accounting for the diffusion and spread of specific policy instruments as well as more quantifiable policy outcomes, while for qualitative methods it includes using and developing aforementioned techniques to isolate the causal effects of ideas and raise confidence in the generalisability of findings beyond particular cases of study. In this sense, a potentially fruitful way forward is the increased application of mixed methods strategies together with comparative analysis, as several examples illustrated.

Meanwhile, further empirical studies could continue to explore and develop the theoretical and conceptual advances of ideational scholars in recent years, in particular regarding the conditions which enable ideational factors to play a causal role compared to other types of factors and the mechanisms through which ideas impact policy. The typology of ideational power (itself built upon the framework of discursive institutionalism) and specific concepts such as coalition magnets and instrument constituencies provide novel tools in this task, as do classic analytical frameworks like MSA that help researchers to explore the interactions between ideational and other factors. Overall, it seems likely that ideational scholarship will continue to grow and break new terrain, in the process developing knowledge of how the ways humans think and communicate shape the policy systems which govern our societies.

References

Abbas, J. and Robertson, E. (2023) “The rise of in-work benefits: Policy, politics and evaluation”, in Clegg, D. and Durazzi, N. (eds) Handbook of Labour Market Policy in Advanced Democracies, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar: 280–294.

Allègre, G. and Jaehrling, K. (2011) “Making work pay for whom? Tax and benefits impacts on in-work poverty”, in Fraser, N., Gutiérrez, R. and Casas-Peña, R. (eds) Working Poverty in Europe, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan: 278–303. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307599_13

Aloisi, A., Rainone, S. and Countouris, N. (2024) “Platform-work directive: The clock is ticking”, Social Europe, [Online], Available: www.socialeurope.eu/platform-work-directive-the-clock-is-ticking[27 Mar 2024].

Banks, J., Disney, R., Duncan, A. and Van Reenen, J. (2005) “The internationalisation of public welfare policy”, The Economic Journal, vol. 115, no. 502, C62–C81. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0013–0133.2005.00980.x

Baumgartner, F. and Jones, B. (1993) Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Baumgartner, F. and Jones, B. (2009) Agendas And Instability In American Politics, 2^nd edition, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Béland, D. (2010) “The idea of power and the role of ideas”, Political Studies Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 145–154. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478–9302.2009.00199.x

Béland, D. (2016) “Ideas and institutions in social policy research”, Social Policy & Administration, vol. 50, no. 6, 734–750. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12258

Béland, D., Campbell, A. L. and Weaver, R. K. (2022) Policy Feedback: How Policies Shape Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Béland, D. and Cox, R. H. (2010) “Introduction: Ideas and politics”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. (eds) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 3–20. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0001

Béland, D. and Cox, R. H. (2016) “Ideas as coalition magnets: Coalition building, policy entrepreneurs, and power relations”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 23, no. 3, 428–445. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1115533.

Béland, D., Foli, R., Howlett, M., Ramesh, M. and Woo, J. J. (2018) “Instrument constituencies and transnational policy diffusion: the case of conditional cash transfers”, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 25, no. 4, 463–482. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2018.1470548.

Béland, D. and Mandelkern, R. (2023) “Teaching about the role of ideas in social policy”, in Irving, Z. (ed.) Teaching Social Policy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 85–97.

Bengtsson, B. and Ruonavaara, H. (2017) “Comparative process tracing: Making historical comparison structured and focused”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 47, no. 1, 44–66. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393116658549

Berman, S. (2010) “Ideology, history, and politics”, in Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press: 105–126. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0006

Bickerton, C. J. and Accetti, C. I. (2021) Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blyth, M. (2003) “Structures do not come with an instruction sheet: Interests, ideas, and progress in political science”, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 1, no. 4, 695–706. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592703000471

Brooks, S. M. (2007) “When does diffusion matter? Explaining the spread of structural pension reforms across nations”, Journal of Politics, vol. 69, no. 3, 701–715. Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468–2508.2007.00569.x

Cairney, P. (2012) Understanding Public Policy, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cairney, P. (2020) Understanding Public Policy: Theories and Issues, London: MacMillan Education.

Campbell, J. L. (1998) “Institutional analysis and the role of ideas in political economy”, Theory and Society, vol. 27, no. 3, 377–409. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006871114987

Campbell, J. L. (2002) “Ideas, politics, and public policy”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 28, no. 1, 21–38. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141111

Carstensen, M. B., Ibsen, C. L. and Schmidt, V. A. (2022) “Ideas and power in employment relations studies”, Industrial Relations, vol. 61, no. 1, 3–21. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12302

Carstensen, M. B. and Röper, N. (2019) “Invasion from within: Ideas, power, and the transmission of institutional logics between policy domains”, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 52, no. 9, 1328–1363.. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019830713

Carstensen, M. B. and Schmidt, V. A. (2016) “Power through, over and in ideas: Conceptualizing ideational power in discursive institutionalism”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 23, no. 3, 318–337. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1115534

Clasen, J. (2000) “Motives, means and opportunities: Reforming unemployment compensation in the 1990s”, West European Politics, vol. 23, no. 2, 89–112. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402380008425368

Clegg, D. (2015) “The demise of tax credits”, The Political Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 4, 493–499. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12203

Colomb, F. (2012) “Le Succès des Incitations”, Gouvernement et Action Publique, vol. 3, no. 3, 31–52. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3917/gap.123.0031.

Cousins, M. (2014) “In-work benefits: Effective social protection or ‘Emperor’s new clothes’?’”, European Journal of Social Security, vol. 16, no. 2, 100–121. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/138826271401600201

Daigneault, P.-M. (2014a) “Three paradigms of social assistance”, SAGE Open, vol. 4, no. 4, 1–8. [Online], Available: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244014559020

Daigneault, P.-M. (2014b) “Reassessing the concept of policy paradigm: Aligning ontology and methodology in policy studies”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 21, no. 3, 453–469. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2013.834071

Dolowitz, D. P. and Marsh, D. (2000) “Learning from abroad: The role of policy transfer in contemporary policy-making”, Governance, vol. 13, no. 1, 5–23. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/0952-1895.00121

Duncan, A., Pearson, M. and Scholz, J. K. (2003) “Is there an emerging consensus in making work pay policies?”, Prepared for the Conference: “Political Economy of Policy Transfer, Learning and Convergence”. Tulane University, 11–12 April 2003.

European Commission (2003) Communication from the Commission: Modernising Social Protection for More and Better Jobs: A Comprehensive Approach Contributing to Making Work Pay. [COM (2003) 842 Final], Brussels.

García-Hombrados, J., Jansen, M., Martínez, Á., Özcan, B., Rey-Biel, P. and Roldán-Monés, A. (2024) Ideological Alignment and Evidence-Based Policy Adoption, IZA DP No. 17007, [Online], Available: https://docs.iza.org/dp17007.pdf[10 Feb 2025].

Genieys, W. and Smyrl, M. E. (2008) Elites, Ideas, and the Evolution of Public Policy, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gilardi, F., Füglister, K. and Luyet, S. (2009) “Learning from others: The diffusion of hospital financing reforms in OECD countries”, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 549–573. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414008327428

Grover, C. (2016) Social Security and Wage Poverty: Historical and Policy Aspects of Supplementing Wages in Britain and beyond, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Haas, P. M. (1992) “Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination”, International Organization, vol. 46, no. 1, 1 – 35. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300001442

Hall, P. A. (1989) “Conclusion: The politics of Keynesian ideas”, in Hall, P. A. (ed.) The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press: 361–392. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv173f1vq.18

Hall, P. A. (1993) “Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: The case of economic policymaking in Britain”, Comparative Politics, vol. 25, no. 3, 275–296. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.2307/422246

Hay, C. (2002) Political Analysis, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave.

Hay, C. (2010) “Ideas and the construction of interests”, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. H. (eds.) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 65–81. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0004.

Heclo, H. (1974) Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Herre, B. B. (2021) Where Ideology Matters for Market Intervention and Redistribution: Evidence from Global Data, Doctoral Thesis. University of Chicago. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.6082/UCHICAGO.3329

Herre, B. B. and Rommel, T. (2023) Government ideology and social policy: Evidence from new global data, Social Policy Worldwide, [Online], Available: https://socialpolicyworldwide.org/post/government_ideology_and_social_policy-_evidence_from_new_global_data_16 [1 Apr 2024].

Hopkin, J. and Shaw, K. A. (2016) “Organized combat or structural advantage? The politics of inequality and the winner-take-all economy in the United Kingdom”, Politics and Society, vol. 44, no. 3, 345–371. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329216655316

Horn, A. (2017) Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization: How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/9789048529384

Immervoll, H. and Pearson, M. (2009) “A good time for making work pay? Taking stock of in-work benefits and related measures across the OECD”, IZA Policy Paper No. 3. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1787/225442803245.

Jordan, G. and Maloney, W. A. (1997) “Accounting for subgovernments: Explaining the persistence of policy communities”, Administration and Society, vol. 29, no. 5, 557–582. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/009539979702900503

Kingdon, J. W. (1984) Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Boston MA: Little, Brown.

Kingdon, J. W. (2013) Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Updated Edition, 2^nd edition, Harlow UK: Pearson Education Limited.

Knight, K. (2006) “Transformations of the concept of ideology in the twentieth century”, vol. 100, no. 4, 619–626. American Political Science Review. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055406062502

Korpi, W. (2006) “Power resources and employer-centered approaches in explanations of welfare states and varieties of capitalism: Protagonists, consenters, and antagonists”, World Politics, vol. 58, no. 2, 167–206. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1353/wp.2006.0026

Mares, I. (2003) The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McCabe, J. T. (2018) The Fiscalization of Social Policy: How Taxpayers Trumped Children in the Fight Against Child Poverty, New York NY: Oxford University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190841300.001.0001

Mehta, J. (2010) “The varied roles of ideas in politics: From “whether” to “how”’, in Béland, D. and Cox, R. H. (eds.) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 23–46. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0002

Meseguer, C. and Gilardi, F. (2009) “What is new in the study of policy diffusion?”, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 16, no. 3, 527–543. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290802409236

Nickerson, R. S. (1998) “Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises”, Review of General Psychology, vol. 2, no. 2, 175–220.

Obinger, H., Schmitt, C. and Starke, P. (2013) “Policy diffusion and policy transfer in comparative welfare state research”, Social Policy and Administration, vol. 47, no. 1, 111–129 [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12003

OECD (1994) The OECD Jobs Study: Facts, Analysis, Strategies, Paris, [Online], Available: www.oecd.org/els/emp/1941679.pdf

OECD (1997) OECD Jobs Strategy: Making Work Pay: Taxation, Benefits, Employment and Unemployment, Paris, OECD.

OECD (2005) OECD Employment Outlook 2005, OECD Employment Outlook, OECD, Paris. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1787/empl_outlook-2005-en

Parsons, C. (2007) How to Map Arguments in Political Science, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Parsons, C. (2010) “Ideas, position, and supranationality”, in Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 127–142. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0007

Paulus, D., de Vries, G., Janssen, M. and Van de Walle, B. (2022) “The influence of cognitive bias on crisis decision-making: Experimental evidence on the comparison of bias effects between crisis decision-maker groups”, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, vol. 82. Art. 103379 [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103379.

Rhodes, R. A. W. and Marsh, D. (1992) “Policy communities and issue networks: Beyond typology”, in Marsh, D. and Rhodes, R. A. W. (eds) Policy Networks in British Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 249–268.

Robertson, E. (2023) Wage Supplements in Mature Welfare States: Accounting for In-Work Benefit Reforms in France and the United Kingdom, 1995–2020. Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

Rose, R. (2002) Ten steps in learning lessons from abroad. EUI – Robert Schuman Centre Working Paper 2002/5.

Rueschemeyer, D. and Stephens, J. (1997) “Comparing historical sequences: A powerful tool for causal analysis: A reply to John Goldthorpe’s ‘Current Issues In Comparative Macrosociology’”, Comparative Social Research, vol. 16, 55–72.

Sabatier, P. A. (1998) “The advocacy coalition framework: Revisions and relevance for Europe”, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 5, no. 1, 98–130. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501768880000051.

Sabatier, P. A. and Jenkins-Smith, H. C. (1993) Policy Change and learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach, Boulder CO: Westview.

Schmidt, V. A. (2008) “Discursive institutionalism: The explanatory power of ideas and discourse”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 11, 303–326, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.060606.135342

Simmons, B. A., Dobbin, F. and Garrett, G. (2006) “Introduction: The international diffusion of liberalism”, International Organization, vol. 60, no. 04, 781–810. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818306060267

Slater, T. (2012) “The myth of “broken Britain”: Welfare reform and the production of ignorance”, Antipode, vol. 46, no. 4, 948–969. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12002

Sloman, P. (2019) “Redistribution in an age of neoliberalism: Market economics, ‘poverty knowledge’, and the growth of working-age benefits in Britain, c. 1979–2010”, Political Studies, vol. 67, no. 3, 732–751. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718800495

Tannenwald, N. (2005) “Ideas and explanation: Advancing the theoretical agenda”, Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 13–42. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1162/1520397053630619

Touzet, C. (2019) The Politics of Negative Expansion: The Left’s Turn to Fiscal Welfare for Low-Income Groups in Britain and France in the 2000s, Doctoral Thesis, University of Oxford.

Vedejová, D. and Čavojová, V. (2022) “Confirmation bias in information search, interpretation, and memory recall: Evidence from reasoning about four controversial topics”, Thinking and Reasoning, vol. 28, no. 1, 1–28. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2021.1891967

Vlandas, T. (2013) “The politics of in-work benefits: The case of the ‘active income of solidarity’ in France”, French Politics, vol. 11, no. 2, 117–142.

Voß, J. P. and Simons, A. (2014) “Instrument constituencies and the supply side of policy innovation: The social life of emissions trading”, Environmental Politics, vol. 23, no. 5, 735–754. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2014.923625

Section V: Exploring places of latent ideology

Introduction

The theme of the chapters in this section of the handbook concerns the operations of ideology in areas that have, in the view of the authors, been either under-explored or which could be rendered more amenable to analysis if framed differently from conventional approaches. Thus “latent” in the sense that these forms of ideology exist and have been decoded to some extent, but significant work remains to be done in bringing them fully into the light. The opportunities for further research revolve around understanding the domains in which ideology operates, the bringing of “common sense” understandings under critical scrutiny, moving beyond logo-centric analyses of ideologies and appreciating how ideological beliefs can operate to great effect among mass publics even where levels of explicitly “ideological thinking” appear low.

One area where the potential role of ideology in shaping people’s life experiences has been under-explored is in the workplace (although see Glynos 2008 and 2011). As Bal, Alhnaity and Tommasi argue in their chapter, the role of ideology “at and in work” has been rather neglected and they call for a more engaged scholarship in this domain. The authors enumerate a range of approaches to analysing ideology in the workplace and choose to work with a Žižekian framework, as this is seen to open paths to fruitful forms of enquiry lacking in other approaches. In particular, using Žižek’s theory of ideology can take us past the idea that ideology is somehow a reflection, distorted or otherwise, of reality, to see that ideology is constitutive of what, for human subjects, reality is (Žižek 2008). We make our world with ideology. The main analytical work in the chapter looks at how a Žižekian fantasy of fairness and meritocracy helps to both create and sustain the prevalence of neoliberal ideology in the capitalist workplace. The authors seek to offer an unmasking of this “fantasy of normality” and, as a counter to the destructive trends of neoliberalism, call for a new “counter-ideology” centred on the notion of dignity in the workplace.

Traditionally, the analysis of ideology has been highly logo-centric. This is not to say that the political power of (for example) images, rituals or architecture has been ignored (see, for example, Oestricher 1985; Lewis 1992), but rather that, when it comes to the analysis of what ideologies are and how they operate, the analysis of the written and spoken word has predominated. In her chapter, Mary Bock makes a strong case for the analysis of the visual dimensions of ideology to be given greater attention in ideology analysis, as it seeks to understand an independently powerful ideological force. She reminds us that words and images are not “separate but equal”. Images exist in a symbiotic relationship with words and they are capable of a more powerful incitement of emotions and remain long in the memory, being processed in a different part of the brain. Bock offers a set of tools and analytical approaches for decoding visual ideologies, centred on the concepts of affordances (how we attach meaning to objects) and framing (how images are employed to promote certain problem definitions, supposed causal pathways and moral evaluations). In order to understand the process of framing, Bock provides us with three “metaphorical modes” of framing, the “puzzle”, the “design” and the “viewfinder”. These concepts provide the viewer with a critical lens for decoding the ideology of the visual, in an age when digital manipulation and the creation of completely artificial images, are easier than ever before.

In their contribution to this volume, Danny Osborne and Joaquín Bahamondes raise a conundrum. How can the proposition that most citizens fail to pass the threshold of thinking ideologically and the proposition that ideology is “alive and well” among the public and plays a significant role in determining political outcomes both be true? They respond to this question in Chapter 19 by returning to conceptual distinctions about citizens’ relations with ideology first made in classic behavioural work by Converse (1964). Building on political psychological research since Converse, they show that, although few members of the public think about politics in explicitly ideological terms, i.e. in terms of systematic, consistent and constrained reflection about politics, many do call upon more latent, symbolic, identity-based approaches to thinking about politics. In a discussion that echoes Section 1 of this volume, they argue that in the literature from political science and political psychology, two starkly different conceptions of ideology are at play. The notion of ideology as constrained and relatively consistent thought-patterns is not only distinct from ideology as a form of symbolic self-identification, the latter phenomenon is also much more common in the public domain than the former. They demonstrate the effects of symbolic thinking for those holding conservative belief systems (improving a sense of wellbeing through the belief that society is fair). They argue that future research should look to develop a unified conception of ideology, in order to reduce unnecessary confusion in this field.

The relationship between the human and the non-human has often been taken as a matter of common sense, fleshed out in terms of a “natural hierarchy” in which human beings operate (through the faculty of reason or language or tool use, etc.) at a “higher” level of functioning than non-human nature. Thus, human dominion has been latently validated in ideological terms. One area where such implicit assumptions about natural domination have been challenged is in the field of animal studies (Singer 1975; Regan 2001; Kalof 2017) and this is where James Carson looks for explicit, reflexive questioning of this supposedly natural order of things. The central figure in Carson’s analysis is the 18^th-century English essayist Samuel Johnson, whose musings on the human–animal relationship help to offer a “prehistory of the postmodern interrogation of the distinction between humans and animals.” This distinction requires critical analysis because it facilitates injustice not only in the relationship between humans and non-humans, but also (as eco-feminists like to remind us) within human society. Carson examines scholarly research on Johnson, relevant recent theory from literary criticism and challenging philosophical work in animal studies to raise basic questions about ideologies of human domination over other creatures.

References

Converse, P. E. (1964) “The nature of belief systems in mass publics”, in Apter, D. E. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, Glencoe IL: The Free Press of Glencoe: 206–261.

Glynos, J. (2008) “Ideological fantasy at work”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 13, no. 3, 275–296.

Glynos, J. (2011) “On the ideological and political significance of fantasy in the organization of work”, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, vol. 16, 373–393.

Kalof, L. (ed.) (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, C. (1992) “Images and ideology: A theoretical framework for critical research in visual literacy”, Journal of Visual Literacy, vol. 11, no. 2, 9–34. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/23796529.1992.11674464

Oestreicher, R. (1985) “Images of ideology and the ideology of imagery”, Labour/Le Travailleur, vol. 15, 179–184.

Regan, T. (2001) Defending Animal Rights, Urbana and Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press.

Singer, P. (1975) Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, New York NY: HarperCollins.

Žižek, S. (2008) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

17. Ideology in the workplace: A psychological perspective on the hyper-normalisation of neoliberal beliefs

Matthijs Bal, Roxana Alhnaity and Francesco Tommasi

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-23

Introduction

People in adulthood spend significant portions of their lives at work. They identify with their work and with their organisations and their work may provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life. However, work can also be a space of depletion, discrimination and meaninglessness (Bal et al 2023; Simon et al 2024). Considering that work plays different roles in people’s lives and that these differences can be socially determined, it is relevant to shift our attention to the societal contexts that affect people’s work experiences. This aspect has received relatively little attention in disciplines devoted to the study of people at work (e.g., management and work psychology research) and in particular the role of ideology at and in work has been neglected. In parallel, work experiences capture only a relatively minor part in academic debates on ideology, which traditionally focus more on the political and social dimensions of ideology.

In this chapter we elucidate the various ways through which ideology can be studied at work. To do so, we explain how ideology affects attitudes and behaviours in workplaces and how workplace ideology is studied within academia (Bal and Dóci 2018). The study of ideology in workplaces and the ways in which such study is conducted are intertwined and need to be taken into account in conjunction. In pursuing our purpose, we acknowledge that for us, as academics, there is simply no “objective” outsider position to study ideology in work; academics will also project their own views and ideological references about how workplaces function onto the study of ideology itself. It is worth mentioning that studying ideology also implies bringing our own positionalities as academics to the task. We give ourselves license to do so, as it is not possible to manifest research interest in ideology without projecting personal views and ideological references. For the analytical purpose of this work, we undertook an ideological analysis while also instantiating our views characterised by radical ideas of dignity and sustainability (Bal et al 2023; Tommasi 2023). However, while recognising the desirable and undesirable effects of ideology, our description presents an intellectual endeavour to subjugate the ways ideology functions in management science. By being transparent as scholars about our own positionality, we can take into account the multiple ways through which ideology can be conceptualised and studied and thus retain the analytical value of ideology analysis. Instead of assuming that there is one single, objective way to discuss ideology, we can present the different ways ideology is understood and studied and from that position capture its academic value.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the ways ideology can be understood in workplaces. We discuss how ideology has been theorised at work and in management (Seeck et al 2020). Subsequently, we focus on the most recent and promising way ideology has been theorised in relation to workplaces and behaviours using contemporary psychoanalytic theory, including the work of Žižek (1989). Such theory helps to explain how ideology becomes internalised in the core fantasies (i.e., unconscious desires and affects) of workers about how workplaces and careers are structured and organised (Bal et al 2021; Glynos 2021). Furthermore, we analyse in particular the impact of neoliberal ideology on work and workers, as neoliberal capitalism constitutes the very framework through which contemporary workplaces are shaped throughout the world (Harvey 2005; Bettache and Chiu 2019). Finally, the chapter discusses the specific fantasy of normality which elucidates the ideological status quo in contemporary working life. Following our psychoanalytic analysis of ideology, the fantasy of normality represents the given reality of ideology that normalises a situation as-is and does not question its absurdity of the dissolution of logic (Bal et al 2023). The chapter concludes with a plea for pluralism in the study of ideology in management and lays out the possibilities for more engaged scholarship towards greater planetary and human dignity at work.

Ideology at work

Traditionally, management and organisation studies have seen ideology through two lenses. The lens most often used is that of ideology as a set of opinions, values and moral truths that people have (Johnson and Roberto 2018) and which may be shared among groups or collectives (Mees-Buss and Welch 2019). Such opinions have been contrasted as either the left wing (liberal) or the right wing (conservative) (Briscoe and Joshi 2017), which may have consequences for how people identify, feel and behave at work. For instance, in the study by Briscoe and Joshi (2017) it was found that, compared to conservative managers, liberal left-wing managers were likely to have a lower gender pay gap in performance-related pay. This distinction points to the overt political beliefs of employees and managers at work. Another lens focuses on the more “hidden” aspects of ideology and portrays it as a “pair of glasses”, obfuscating a clear view of reality or something that is meant to distort the undisturbed understanding of the world and its functioning (Swigart et al 2020). By becoming aware of ideological aspects of work and organising, it is possible to overcome such distortion and obtain a neutral and “objective” perspective on reality. In other words, this lens assumes that being politically left-wing makes one see workplace behaviours in their exploitative dynamics while underestimating the free exchange that drives workplace behaviours; while being politically right-wing would make one “blind” to the exploitation central to work and over-estimate the notion of freedom in working relationships. These two approaches to ideology in management have been dominant in US scholarship and US management journals and provide a way to assess ideology in a neutral, objective and scientific way.

Ideology has also been approached at a more fundamental level in European management scholarship, as the work of Seeck et al (2020) shows. Seeck et al (2020) present an overview of the uses and functions of ideology in management scholarship and distinguish seven ways in which ideology has been conceptualised and used in scholarship. These seven ways represent a chronological order of ideology scholarship after World War II, from the 1950s onwards until the present. The following ways to study and understand ideology are not mutually exclusive, but represent a continuum of progressively understanding the ways ideology functions in workplaces.

Ideology as domination. The most well-known and “traditional” view of ideology pertains to the notion of domination and control and is based on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It relates to how powerful groups in society and management in organisations dominate workers and exploit them, without workers necessarily being aware of this exploitation (and therefore working under a “false consciousness” or the illusion that they are not exploited). In this way, management has control over workers to gain surplus value from their labour and to exploit them for the generation of organisational profit. This represents the ways ideology was prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s in management studies.
Ideology as legitimisation. Following these early conceptualisations, a second way in which ideology was conceptualised was by legitimising inequality and authority, following the work of Max Weber and prominent from the 1960s onwards. Ideology in this approach functions to consolidate the status quo and make people believe that authority is there because of the inherent necessity of it simply existing (Azevedo et al 2019). For instance, (rising) inequality can be legitimised through an appeal to the “natural order” in which there are both winners and losers in organisational life, and hence a justification for inequalities in terms of wealth, income, access and resources.
Ideology as interpretation. Third, a less (or even a-)political way of describing ideology is as interpretation or the study of ideology as a frame of reference, which arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This aligns most closely with mainstream research in management, which tends to portray ideology as a particular perspective on reality that may distort one’s view, but usually remains at the level of conscious, explicit attitudes (such as a political, left-wing ideology (Swigart et al 2020)).
Ideology as integration. Around the same time as the previous way of describing ideology, the view of organisations needing particular explicit ideologies with which workers can identify and feel a sense of belonging developed. In this way, workers can experience a sense of cohesion when they are ideologically connected to a shared sense of identity. Most work on the psychology of political ideology (Jost 2006; Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008) can be found within this stream: political ideology (e.g., being left- or right-wing) gives individuals a way of belonging to a social group.
Ideology as normative logic. Another way of describing ideology that was developed in the 1970s is that of accentuating the rules and norms underpinning ideology, and thus providing rationalisations and prescriptions for managers and workers on how to act, as ideology provides clear impetus for people to mobilise around specific actions aligned with the dominant ideology. For instance, Total Quality Management can be seen as an ideology that imposes norms upon organisations and actors, providing practical guidance about how to act under given circumstances. According to Seek et al (2020), this view lacks a political dimension and could be seen as an apolitical way of conceptualising ideology in its provision of practical guidelines without any overt ideological connotation.
Ideology as critique. In response and addition to the five previous ideology conceptualisations, a stream of research on ideology as critique has developed. This refers to the use of the concept “ideology” as a critique, such as that conducted within the Frankfurt School. However, while the Frankfurt School originated in the 1930s, it was in the 2000s that ideology as critique became more widespread in management studies. Ideology as a concept is employed here as a critique to expose the ideological nature of discourse, practices and work in organisations. Ideology, however, is also used in a derogatory way by those who claim to be “non-ideological” (among whom academics especially are found). Any (ideological) critique on hegemonic, positivistic scholarship believing in “non-ideological objective truths” is usually countered by positivistic scholars calling critical scholars “ideological” and thus non-scientific or pseudo-scientists. In this way, ideology becomes a rather hollow concept, devoid of a real meaning while being used merely to make an accusatory statement.
Ideology as fantasy construction. The most recent and also most “psychological” perspective on ideology is drawn from Žižek (1989), who built his theory of ideology based on the work of Marx, Hegel and Lacan. He defines ideology as a fantasy construction structuring reality itself. Given its relevance to understanding the ideological connotations of work, and the primacy of his work in the most recent ideology conceptualisations (Bal and Dóci 2018; Glynos 2021), we discuss Žižekian theory in greater detail. As stated above, the seven ways of describing ideology in management studies also represent a chronological continuum: while the earliest work from the 1950s closely followed the Marxist approach to ideology as a rather straightforward domination and control of forces within society, subsequent approaches either found nuances in this conceptualisation (e.g., ideology as legitimisation or object of critique) or an apolitical way of defining ideology (e.g., as interpretation or normative logic). The most recent stream of ideology as fantasy construction not only builds on these previous approaches (or critiques the apolitical way of viewing ideology), but also necessarily introduces a psychoanalytic perspective, emphasising the role of internalising ideology into people’s core beliefs.

The work of Seeck et al (2020) distinguishes itself from the more US-oriented scholarship emphasising the “neutrality” of ideology while maintaining that overall, ideology serves first as a project of domination, control and exploitation and second, can be understood in more complex ways than mere exploitation. The seventh conception of ideology has particular relevance for the subsequent discussion in this chapter, as it elucidates the psychological conceptualisation of ideology, emphasising the role of (collective) fantasy in understanding ideology (Glynos 2021). In this way, ideology is not merely an indication of whether an individual identifies with liberal or conservative political preferences, but a tool for organisations to control their workers and an internalisation of ideology towards an acceptance of the unequal status quo being regarded as “normal” and the way things should be. In this sense, ideology serves as a mask to hide direct exploitation of people. Ideology therefore provides an appealing narrative or a noble lie (Žižek 2011) to justify such exploitation, exerting control over individuals and making them internalise fantasies to counter resistance against their exploitation.

Psychoanalytic Žižekian theory of ideology

The Žižekian theory of ideology has roots in Marxism, Hegelian philosophy of dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Slavoj Žižek’s (1989) book The Sublime Object of Ideology brings together insights from these three philosophers into a coherent theory of ideology. In particular, he describes ideology as a fantasy structuring reality. In contrast to the popular view of ideology as a pair of glasses obfuscating reality, ideology offers reality itself. It is through perception that one becomes aware of the world. However, one’s perception is always embedded within the imaginary and symbolic, as they give rise to how experiences are interpreted. On one hand, the imaginary consists of the fantasies within the individual about how he or she wants to see themselves in the world (the ideal ego), which impacts upon how the individual experiences the world. On the other hand, the symbolic denotes the notions imposed from outside the individual about how individuals ought to experience themselves, the world and themselves within the world (the ego ideal). Both the imaginary and symbolic function at the fantasmatic level (the deeper, unconscious level of fantasies and dreams) and not merely at the level of conscious reasoning (e.g., identifying oneself as being right-wing). However, such fantasies are not innocent, highly personal wishes, needs and drives, but are infused in the symbolic structures within society.

Žižek argues that not only does ideology function as a fantasy, but that fantasy also structures reality. In other words ideology is performative, as it not only shapes the ways through which people experience the world but also how people act and give form to the world. Ideology as a fantasy, therefore, structures people’s reality, as they experience reality in line with their fantasies and act upon it accordingly. The structural nature of ideology reflects that understanding of subjectivity as embedded in historical–societal discourses/narratives and not an entity external to ideological fantasies (Lacan 1977/2006). This reverses the traditional notion that ideology is a reflection of reality, a perspective to understand the world; it holds that in fact it is constitutive of the world itself. Žižek (1989) extends the Marxist notion of false consciousness (i.e., “workers do not know that they are being exploited, but are nonetheless still doing it”) into an “enlightened false consciousness” or disavowal: people are very well aware of what they are doing, but nonetheless still do it. Hence, there is a level of cynicism in contemporary ideological investment, whereby people are aware that the fantasies that structure their perceptions of the world are illusionary, but continue to act as if they are meaningful representations of reality. Hence, people may disengage to some extent from their beliefs in ideology (e.g., the promise of freedom, progress and growth), but still perpetuate ideology by performing in it (Alvesson and Spicer 2016). Hence, ideology is always performative in shaping the world, as people continue to invest in it even when they no longer believe in an ideological promise.

However, there is always a void between the symbolic (i.e., that which is externally imposed upon the individual in terms of symbolic structures within society, including public discourse) and experienced reality or that which cannot be symbolised. The gap or void can be located there, which is also denoted as the Real (capital R), which falls outside of the scope of ideological messaging (Žižek 1989, 2006). This Real denotes a much more traumatic kernel outside ideological expression, one which is defined by lack or the fundamental inconsistency in meaning. Fantasy is needed, therefore, in order to see the world as consistent and meaningful (Žižek 1989). Consequently, ideology does not offer an escape from reality, but reality itself is an escape from this more traumatic, real kernel (Žižek 1989: 45).

Moreover, fantasy is not just a way to deal with the inherent inconsistencies in our world and the lack of sense and meaning; it is also about desire. As such, fantasy delivers enjoyment to the individual and to collectives. For instance, a deeply held fantasy of the entrepreneurial self holds that people have the desire to get rid of the chains of employment and become their own boss as self-employed workers. This not only aligns with the symbolic, as contemporary (neoliberal) ideology dictates that people are in charge of their own destiny and fate, but also with the imaginary, in which people fantasise about themselves as masters of their own life (and not just products of social circumstances). Moreover, it provides emotional and libidinal enjoyment as they fantasise about being rewarded for their efforts in due course. In this way there is even enjoyment in self-exploitation, where people accept sub-par working conditions and precarious work contracts because of an expectation of delayed gratification. Work is no longer a space of depletion, discrimination and meaninglessness, but becomes the space in which realising self-enjoyment is central, where working or performing is working and performing for the self.

Notwithstanding the actual possibility of these future rewards materialising, as people may be eternally stuck in precarious, insecure work, it is structured through fantasy that people may continue to enjoy. Furthermore, ideology often takes into account its own failure to describe experienced reality (Kilroy 2019) and therefore fantasy operates to mask this inconsistency by finding a scapegoat to be sacrificed for its own failure. For instance, while wage stagnation and insecure employment can be analysed as a function of decades of neoliberal governmental policy, foreigners and immigrants are blamed for such problems, giving rise to populism and xenophobia (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008). Hence, ideology unfolds through investment in fantasy and exclusion of people (Bal et al 2023).

From fair-market ideology to neoliberal ideology

So far we have discussed the various ways to analyse ideology at work with particular interest in ideology as fantasy. We now turn to applying ideology analysis to the most prominent ideological framework guiding contemporary workplaces. We discuss how neoliberal ideology has impacted upon workplaces. Discussions of neoliberal ideology have arisen somewhat recently in the management field (Bal and Dóci 2018; Azevedo et al 2019), yet research on a specific aspect of neoliberal ideology has been around for a longer period. Jost et al (2003) introduced “fair market ideology”, or the tendency to view market-based processes as fair, legitimate and just, to the field of management. This is an ideology (in the sense of a “belief system”; Jost et al 2003) that portrays the primacy of the free market as the natural order underpinning economic life and the structure of organisations and workplaces, notwithstanding the growing inequality that can be observed as a result of free-market capitalism (Jost et al 2003). Jost et al (2003) describe fair market ideology as a paradox, as beliefs in such ideology persist while at the same time inequality is growing, showing the unfairness of the free market in the growing group of “losers” versus the small group of “winners”. Research has shown that belief in free market ideology correlates positively with system justification, belief in a just world and political conservatism. However, while research on fair market ideology has been informative, it does not capture the full essence and range of a more pervasive economic–political ideology that affects and structures workplaces, which is neoliberalism (Bal and Dóci 2018). Moreover, free-market ideology does not explain why people maintain their belief that the system is fair and just while inequality keeps growing. It is interesting that this was discussed over 20 years ago, while in the last two decades (global) inequality has grown exponentially, raising the question of why the system is perpetuated. To answer this question, insights into neoliberal ideology are necessary to explain persistent work attitudes.

Neoliberalism captures the essence of fair-market ideology, but extends it in important ways and has been analysed in line with the Žižekian conceptualisation of ideology as fantasy construction (Žižek 1989; Bal and Dóci 2018). Neoliberalism, while originally discussed by Foucault, was described by Harvey (2005) as a project and political–economic ideology to maximise individual economic freedom to enhance human wellbeing. Neoliberalism was initiated by thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman and was promoted across society by organisations such as the Mont Pelerin Society (Bettache and Chiu 2019), of which Hayek, Popper and Friedman were the founding members. This society follows a Draft Statement of Aims in which the members described how the establishment of markets requires individualism, competition and decentralisation of power and control. These ideas have marked initial discourses of today’s political–economic logic, that is the logics of neoliberalism. The central idea is to promote individual and corporate economic freedom, to allow the free market and competition to act as mechanisms through which economic activity is regulated, without the government interfering in such processes. Hence, the role of economics and corporations has become central in structuring society. At the same time, neoliberalism has become the target of deep criticism in relation to the main problems of contemporary society. As discussed before, free markets cause inequality to grow over time (Jost et al 2003; Bettache and Chiu 2019). Moreover, neoliberal capitalism causes the commodification of everything (Harvey 2005), so everything on this planet is a commodity or something that can be traded on the market. Any tangible product and intangible service should be deregulated, according to neoliberal theory, and should be left to the market to be offered by corporations using competition mechanisms. Without the necessity of presenting neoliberalism as a comprehensive meta narrative explaining everything in contemporary society and workplaces, it is noticeable how, in line with psychoanalytic theory, neoliberal ideology becomes internalised through the emotional investment of individuals in society and workplaces. Hence, neoliberal commodification has a performative meaning, as it is internalised by both organisations and individuals and functions accordingly in terms of shaping existing circumstances within organisational life.

The most problematic feature of neoliberal commodification is that it has no respect for the planet and the dignity of the planet itself. As a result, neoliberalism has contributed to the destruction of the planet for corporate profit (Bal et al 2023). However, it is striking to observe that neoliberal ideology has been long neglected in management studies, which continue to assume a rather neutral position of organisations within the broader landscape while taking the political-economic-social-ideological order for granted. Neoliberalism can be analysed as an ideology, as it is widely understood as the natural state of affairs in society, where governmental deregulation, privatisation and withdrawal from social provision and benefits are projected to be normalised within a contemporary global context.

In the Western world organisations function within a neoliberal environment and work itself has to be theorised and understood within the context in which it is designed and structured. Bal and Dóci (2018) analyse how neoliberal ideology has affected workplaces and workplace behaviours. Based on Glynos and Howarth’s (2007) logics framework, they analysed the political, social and fantasmatic logics behind neoliberal ideology. Political logic deals with how neoliberal ideology affects workplaces and Bal and Dóci (2018) revealed how instrumentality, individualism and competition are the key features through which workplaces have been reformed neoliberally. All behaviour and actions are presumed to be instrumental (to profit or organisational outcomes or effectiveness). Work or organising have no inherent value, but only because they have a utility. Moreover, all people at work are individually responsible for their wellbeing, life, careers and success and failure. Hence, they have to become self-reliant and can no longer trust protective frameworks (law, regulation, labour agreements) to guide them in their working lives. Finally, competition is the way the market functions, but also increasingly how organisations and employees function. Individuals are expected to compete for the best jobs, build the best CVs and be more employable than others to secure the best chances for a job and a career.

Social logics explain the what of neoliberal ideology in workplaces. Accordingly, the rise of the business case, individualisation, the decline of labour agreements, the increasing use of contracts, quantitative assessment and control and monitoring have all aided the neoliberal project, reducing the meaning of “organisation” and “work” to mere transactional exchanges between utility maximisers (Bal and Dóci 2018; Hornung and Höge 2019; Hornung, Höge and Unterrainer 2021; Tommasi 2023). Finally, the question is how neoliberal ideology is maintained in the workplace: a wealth of research shows how inequalities increase due to neoliberalism and how the social fabric of organisations is destroyed as a function of the neoliberalisation of working life (Dardot and Laval 2014; Glynos 2011). Neoliberal ideology is perpetuated because it functions as an ideology in terms of a “fantasy construction structuring reality itself” (Žižek 1989, 2011). While ideology is characterised by a series of political and social logics, fantasies represent the psychological elements sustaining them. That is, a fantasy pertains to an idea of reality (i.e., the ideological reality) that is not necessarily consistent with real experience. Fantasies are then a series of motives that do not keep an ideology alive but rather represent the very functioning of ideology and how it becomes internalised in the core beliefs of people about the world and how workplaces should be structured (Bal and Dóci 2018).

Bal and Dóci (2018) elucidate three fundamental fantasies of work in neoliberalism: freedom, meritocracy and social Darwinism, and growth and progress. Neoliberalism provides a fantasy of freedom, in which people can enjoy economic freedom to become what they want to become, to follow their dreams and “passion” and to be an entrepreneur of the self (Hornung and Höge 2019; Shymko and Frémeaux 2022; Tommasi 2023). In this way, the fantasised freedom tricks people into believing that a neoliberal structuring of the economy and workplaces is fair and justified and through it people are “emancipated” to follow their wishes. Similarly, the fantasy of meritocracy and social Darwinism allows individuals to believe that workplaces are actually fair and if one works hard, one will be rewarded in terms of employment, a career and income (Glynos 2008, 2011). In this fantasy, people get what they deserve and work is therefore also survival of the fittest, where those who work hardest will thrive (Shymko and Frémeaux 2022). In neoliberalism it is unfair to protect the weakest, as this is done at the expense of those who work hard, while the “weak” are not incentivised to work harder and grasp their opportunities in life. Competition should decide who is the winner; losers are losers because they did not work hard enough. In this logic, it is not strange to be confronted with the existence of the “losers”, as their presence is a natural effect of neoliberal competition. This helps people not to sympathise with those who are struggling in life due to poverty, homelessness, sickness or other misfortune.

Finally, all this helps to fulfil the fantasy of growth and progress: neoliberalism offers the dream of economic growth for everyone and that progress is available in both material gains (income, wealth) and immaterial gains (e.g., personal or spiritual growth). This also explains why self-exploitation (e.g., the disappearance of permanent employment to be replaced by insecure, precarious work) is not perceived to be problematic, as it is meant to help people make progress towards an idealised future, to grow as individuals and to become entrepreneurs (regarded as the heroes of our time).

Neoliberal ideology has directly influenced workplaces and the structuring of organisational life. For instance, flexibility was introduced as an appealing concept to replace permanent employment (Bal and Izak 2021). This switch to flexible, insecure and precarious work from the stability of permanent employment needed an ideological narrative to make people accept it. To give up employment rights that had been fought for in the Western world through the development of social democracy after World War II could only be done by engaging in a fantasy. Such fantasies are central, as they pertain to the same fantasies that were instrumental in the development of social democracy itself: the notion of secure lifetime employment, with generous sickness and unemployment benefits and pension systems, was exclusive to (Western) European countries anyway, a wealth built on (neo-)colonialism and exploitation of the world (Andrews 2023). However, it is surprising how neoliberalism has become a global ideology, present throughout the world in its hybrid forms and able to adapt itself to local circumstances (Harvey 2005; Žižek 2014). There is the Žižekian element within ideology that pulls people, notwithstanding their backgrounds, into accepting hegemonic ideology. This element also makes people accept the status quo and less likely to resist the detrimental impact of contemporary neoliberal ideology (e.g. rising inequalities, climate destruction). This unfolds through what has been referred to as the fantasy of normality.

Fantasy of normality

One specific fantasy is that of the fantasy of normality (Bal et al 2023). This fantasy is structured psychoanalytically as operating within the Žižekian–Lacanian tripartite model of symbolic-imaginary-Real and explains how (neoliberal but also more general) ideology unfolds at work. Fantasies of normality bridge societal structures, ideologies and work attitudes and behaviours. According to Bal et al (2023), a fantasy of normality results from a confrontation with the absurd nature of life and work. While life itself could be said to be absurd in the meaninglessness of it, given the inevitability of death, the work of Bal et al (2023) focuses particularly on the absurdity of contemporary work practices such as bureaucracy, where due to the desire for consistency and control, workers are no longer able to perform their core tasks because they are overwhelmed by form-filling and bureaucracy (see, for example, Vohnsen 2017).

However, absurdity in organisational life is hardly contested; it is normalised and taken for granted. This is achieved via the development of a fantasy of normality: people invest emotionally and libidinally in a fantasy that all is normal, not absurd and just the natural state of affairs. Via such “hyper-normalisation” (Yurchak 2005) of the absurd, people invest in a sense of normality. Normal is that which is dictated by hegemonic forces in society and workplaces as the standard, acceptable ways of living and behaving. This “normality” is socially constructed through the symbolic and is shaped through authoritative discourse in society. It becomes internalised in the core beliefs of people as an imagined framework for distinguishing between what is within the “norm” and what is outside. This combined symbolic imaginary also serves to deny the traumatic Real, the void that is left within normality. More specifically, a fantasy of normality functions not just to mask the absurd and deny its existence, but also to hide its own emptiness.

A sense of normality is what drives social behaviour in workplaces and society (May and Finch 2009). Engaging in a fantasised normality means denying its inherent emptiness and the fact that normality is by definition formed in an exclusionary way (Bal et al 2023). To describe what is “normal” remains an impossible task; it is done by exclusion or by defining what is “abnormal” or outside the boundaries of the normal. For instance, bureaucracy in organisations remains normalised, whereby any questioning of its actual meaning and effectiveness is bypassed in favour of a normalisation of bureaucracy. To hyper-normalise the status quo, and thus to fully engage in a fantasy of normality, means to accept a situation as-is and not question its absurdity in the dissolution of logic (e.g., when bureaucracy becomes so dysfunctional that evil is done to people; Vohnsen 2017). Meanwhile, the actually existing meaning of normality is not problematised and its inherent emptiness is not exposed. In fact, what is considered to be normal cannot be stated “positively” by defining what it is, but only by what it is not; therefore normality is always defined in an exclusionary manner. For instance, the notion of the “normal” hardworking person is usually employed in populist rhetoric to denote white people and to exclude non-white citizens, foreigners and immigrants (Andrews 2023). Accordingly, a fantasy of normality is used to hide a more racist distinction, which serves as a legitimisation of hostility towards immigrants and so on. It also denotes European/American approaches to ideology, which can be contrasted with the more integrative ideology towards immigrant and refugees present in some Middle Eastern countries ( Alhnaity 2023). The effect of such ideological rhetoric is a normalisation of difference: while white workers are either protected by white privilege or have the opportunity to raise their voice about their neoliberal predicament (e.g., white farmers across Europe violently protesting against climate action), migrant workers are merely expected to be acquiescent and to accept their inferior status in the labour market.

People’s dignity must be protected throughout the world and in workplaces, primarily where migrants are integrated. This entails a real move towards sensible fantasies that secure and protect the wellbeing and dignity of people in the workplace. This can be achieved by gaining a better understanding of people’s neoliberal beliefs and recognising that their fantasies will effectively be reflected in their psychological perspectives. These explain how workers’ ideological investment in neoliberal beliefs leads them to internalise “normalised” self-reliance while maintaining prospects for meritocratic rewards. Pointing to this lens is important to highlight how securing people’s dignity and investing in their ideological perspectives and fantasies can help us understand the psychology of absurdity in workplaces. This results from a perspective that emphasises that ideology presents reality in itself and is not a gateway to seeing reality (Bal and Alhnaity 2024a). Hence, an “escape” from ideology offers a moment when people reveal the reality that they were ignored and merely attempted to avoid negative feelings such as stress, anxiety, depression and loneliness.

What then is this dignity, which may function as a counter-ideology to neoliberalism? Studies on human dignity usually set out with the view that an individual is not a means to an end (e.g., is not to be used as an instrument to achieve corporate profit) but is a sole end in themselves. Individuals have an inherent and intrinsic worth. An extension of this vision can be translated into dignity at work or in the workplace ( Kostera and Pirson 2017). Dignity at work emphasises the importance of committing oneself at an organisational and social level so that primary attention is given to the needs of individuals, their abilities, their desires, their character and their rights. The concept of dignity at work implies the intrinsic and inalienable value of everything, including work (the person, work, environment), which must be respected, protected and promoted. Dignity may also extend beyond the intrinsic worth of people to respect for the planet itself: in this view (Kostera and Pirson 2017), dignity is an attribute not merely of human beings but of the planet itself. This means that the planet is not merely an instrument of exploitation, extraction and economic profit, but must be respected (while being the only source and condition for human survival).

Ideological alternatives to neoliberalism

In this chapter we have discussed how ideology manifests in the workplace using psychoanalytic perspectives to explain ideology as a fantasy structuring reality. With this framework, we offered a diagnosis of how ideology impacts workers and how it is internalised by people showing investment in a fantasy of normality. It appears that, as Freeden (2003) mentions, there is no escape from ideology; to get rid of one ideology is to engage in another. Moreover, while not everything is ideological per se, everything can be studied from an ideological lens.

However, our description of neoliberal ideology and how it shapes contemporary workplaces throughout the world (Bettache and Chiu 2019; Harvey 2005) shows that neoliberalism is not the ultimate ideology that ties up contemporary workplaces. In sharp contrast, the psychoanalytic understanding of the characteristics of neoliberal ideology suggests that these characteristics can be overcome. Overcoming neoliberal ideology at work is a matter of formulating alternative ideologies that protect the dignity of people and the planet (Kostera and Pirson 2017). To do so, Kilroy (2019) advocates a Žižekian parallax view, which means to overcome the binary distinction of the either/or paradox in formulating radical third alternatives. For instance, when politics is about a choice of right-wing vs left-wing, both being caught up in their own fantasmatic structures, overcoming such a binary deadlock means radically moving away from both and postulating a fundamental alternative. This involves the creation of more responsible fantasies such as those of planetary and human dignity (Kostera and Pirson 2017; Bal et al 2023). Before doing so, it is necessary to problematise and denormalise ideological investment in the status quo, hyper-normalised absurdity and neoliberal instrumentality and individualism. This process can be achieved through “estrangement” (Pfaller 2012): the moment when an individual recognises the strangeness of a practice and changes something that seems evident into a question. However, this remains insufficient, as processes of hyper-normalisation become effective especially when attempts to unmask absurdity are brought to the surface (e.g., even the World Economic Forum addressing income and wealth inequalities), merely to engage in contemporary authoritative discourse about the need for urgent action, while in reality business as usual is perpetuated.

The reasons for such inertia may include a hesitation to engage with the Real or the traumatic aspects of our contemporary reality, in which working life is more and more hollow, without meaning and absurd. While attempts to formulate new ideologies and ideological fantasies, such as those of local communities, grassroots social enterprises and meaningful work, may thrive locally, they do not (yet) provide a more encompassing vision for the restructuring of society and economies for greater dignity of the planet and people. Moreover, organisations and workplaces remain structured and operating within neoliberal–capitalist ideology, from which there is no real escape. Therefore, neoliberal imperatives such as the business case remain dominant in organisational life (e.g., organisations can only survive when focusing on profit maximisation) and individuals perceive that their lives are structured to fit in with the dominant ideologies present in the workplace. Therefore, future research should engage more deeply in assessing and investigating the ideological frameworks for more sustainable and dignified workplaces, which help to restructure organisations within the need for a more sustainable economy (Bal and Alhnaity 2024b).

Conclusion

What does the analysis of ideology at work have to offer to ideology analysis more broadly? Žižek offers a contemporary psychoanalytic reading of ideology that suggests two main contributions to the study of ideology. First, Žižek explains ideology not just as a way by which reality is distorted, but as reality itself. This changes the entire ideology–reality relationship to an appreciation of ideology structuring reality itself and thus having a performative effect on reality. Ideology must thus be understood as an intervening factor towards reality and the notion that reality is structured according to ideological preferences. Second, Žižek offers a psychoanalytic reading of ideology, which means that ideology has to be understood and analysed not just at the societal level, but at the individual–psychological level too. It is here where ideological investment and fantasy can be located, an emotional–libidinal investment into an ideological status quo, which among other things explains why ideology is not contested even though people may be disadvantaged by prevailing ideologies. Both ways offer unique additional insights into how ideology can be understood, not only within workplaces but also more broadly within society.

References

Alhnaity, R. A. (2023) The impact of international employment agreements for migrant and Syrian refugee workers on the Jordanian workforce: The role of human resources management in providing decent working conditions, PhD thesis, University of Lincoln, UK.

Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A. (2016) “(Un)conditional surrender? Why do professionals willingly comply with managerialism?”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, vol. 29, no. 1, 29–45.

Andrews, K. (2023) The Psychosis of Whiteness. Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World, Milton Keynes UK: Penguin.

Azevedo, F., Jost, J. T., Rothmund, T. and Sterling, J. (2019) “Neoliberal ideology and the justification of inequality in capitalist societies: Why social and economic dimensions of ideology are intertwined”, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 75, no. 1, 49–88.

Bal, M. and Alhnaity, R. (2024a) “Ideology”, in Bal, M. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Organizational Psychology, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar.

Bal, M., Brookes, A., Hack-Polay, D., Kordowicz, M. and Mendy, J. (2023) The Absurd Workplace: How Absurdity is Normalized in Contemporary Society and the Workplace, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

Bal, P. M. and Alhnaity, R. (2024b) “A psychology of sustainable career development: Hypernormalized ideology or inherently sustainable?”, Sustainability, vol. 16, no. 2, 578.

Bal, P. M. and Dóci, E. (2018) “Neoliberal ideology in work and organizational psychology.”, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, 536–548.

Bal, P. M. and Izak, M. (2021) “Paradigms of flexibility: A systematic review of research on workplace flexibility”, European Management Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 37–50.

Bal, P. M., Matthews, L., Dóci, E. and McCarthy, L. P. (2021) “An ideological analysis of sustainable careers: Identifying the role of fantasy and a way forward”, Career Development International, vol. 26, no. 1, 83–101.

Bettache, K. and Chiu, C. Y. (2019) “The invisible hand is an ideology: Toward a social psychology of neoliberalism”, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 75, no. 1, 8–19.

Briscoe, F. and Joshi, A. (2017) “Bringing the boss’s politics in: Supervisor political ideology and the gender gap in earnings”, Academy of Management Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 1415–1441.

Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2014) The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, London: Verso.

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

Glynos, J. (2011) “On the ideological and political significance of fantasy in the organization of work”, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, vol. 16, 373–393.

Glynos, J. (2021) “Critical fantasy studies”, Journal of Language and Politics, vol. 20, no. 1, 95–111.

Glynos, J. and Howarth, D. (2007) Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, New York NY: Routledge.

Glynos, J. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2008) “Lacan and political subjectivity: Fantasy and enjoyment in psychoanalysis and political theory”, Subjectivity, vol. 24, 256–274.

Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Hornung, S. and Höge, T. (2019) “Dialectics of workplace flexibility between humanistic ideal and neoliberal ideology – Preliminary considerations”, Journal Psychologie des Alltagshandelns/Psychology of Everyday Activity, vol. 12, no. 2, 73–83.

Hornung, S., Höge, T. and Unterrainer, C. (2021) “Ideologies at work in organizations: An emerging critical perspective and reflexive research agenda”, Eurasian Business Perspectives, vol. 16, no. 2, 165–182. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65085-8_11

Johnson, A. F. and Roberto, K. J. (2018) “Right versus left: How does political ideology affect the workplace?”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 39, no. 8, 1040–1043.

Jost, J. T. (2006) “The end of the end of ideology”, American Psychologist, vol. 61, no. 7, 651–670.

Jost, J. T., Blount, S., Pfeffer, J. and Hunyady, G. (2003) “Fair market ideology: Its cognitive-motivational underpinnings”, Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 25, 53–91.

Jost, J. T., Nosek, B. A. and Gosling, S. D. (2008) “Ideology: Its resurgence in social, personality and political psychology”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 2, 126–136.

Kilroy, R. (2019) “A theatre of shadows: Saving, critiquing, psychoanalyzing Žižek”, International Journal of Žižek Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1–36.

Kostera, M. and Pirson, M. (eds.) (2017) Dignity and the Organization, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lacan, J. (1977/2006) Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York NY : W. W.Norton and Company.

May, C. and Finch, T. (2009) “Implementing, embedding and integrating practices: An outline of normalization process theory”, Sociology, vol. 43, no. 3, 535–554.

Mees-Buss, J. and Welch, C. (2019) “Managerial ideologies dividing the corporate elite: A process study of the rise and fall of a counter-ideology” Organization Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, 563–592.

Pfaller, R. (2012) “Interpassivity and misdemeanors. The analysis of ideology and the Zizekian toolbox”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 3, 421–438.

Seeck, H., Sturdy, A., Boncori, A. L. and Fougère, M. (2020) “Ideology in management studies”, International Journal of Management Reviews, vol. 22, no. 1, 53–74.

Shymko, Y. and Frémeaux, S. (2022) “Escaping the fantasy land of freedom in organizations: The contribution of Hannah Arendt” Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 176, 213–226.

Simon, T., Cina, M. and Philippe, X. (2024) “Mal du Siècle. From the disenchanted youth of the romantic age to the disillusionment of today’s young graduates.” M@n@gement, vol. 27, 31–49.

Swigart, K. L., Anantharaman, A., Williamson, J. A. and Grandey, A. A. (2020) “Working while liberal/conservative: A review of political ideology in organizations”, Journal of Management, vol. 46, no. 6, 1063–1091.

Tommasi, F. (2023) “Working objectification and neoliberalism: Recognizing dehumanization processes in the workplace from an ideological perspective”, TPM: Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, vol. 30, no. 2, 203–213.

Vohnsen, N. H. (2017) The Absurdity of Bureaucracy. How Implementation Works, Manchester UK: Manchester University Press.

Yurchak, A. (2005) Everything was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of ideology, London: Verso Books.

Žižek, S. (2006) How to Read Lacan, London: Granta.

Žižek, S. (2011) Living in the End Times, London: Verso Books.

Žižek, S. (2014) Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism, New York NY: Melville House.

18. Analysing ideology in visual messages

Mary Angela Bock

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-24

Introduction: Analysing visual ideology

The use of visuals for ideological purposes starts with the origins of civilization itself. Flags, crowns, thrones, even buildings have supported those in power. Everyday people learned to associate their monarchs with certain colours and symbols, in fact certain colours of clothing were reserved only for royalty. Leaders commissioned coins, sculptures and paintings to visually impart messages of their power and they appeared before the public in buildings whose architecture made it very clear who was in charge, on top and destined to rule (Rosenbloom 1997). As media industrialised, leaders also learned to harness filmic images for their benefit. Abraham Lincoln credited Mathew Brady’s portrait for helping him garner popular support and Robert Fenton was commissioned to cover the Crimean War in 1855 emphasising the military’s perspective (Fenton, Gernsheim and Gernsheim 1954; Wilson 2014). Mediated culture inspired new ways of using clothing and other symbols to establish brands and establish market identities.

In short, visual communication – that is, the use of imagery for public messaging – has always been political. When considered as a mediated artefact, an image is more than its form; a painting is more than its aesthetics; a photograph is more than the event it records. To study visuals in media with a critical lens incorporates, as Matthew Rampley puts it, interest in “the ways in which the practices of visual culture are intertwined with mechanisms of social power and ideology” (Rampley 2005: 135). For example: suffragists and their white dresses and depictions of Lady Liberty aligned these visual symbols to their cause – the symbols were chosen strategically (Borda 2002). During the Great Depression in the US, the federal government hired photographers to document the extreme poverty and hunger in rural areas, which succeeded in garnering support for the New Deal. While its government message may have been truthful, even benign, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project represents a quintessential form of visual propaganda (Finnegan 2000). Asking the documentary photographers to focus their attention on human need was a rhetorical and ideological, act on the part of the US government.

Prior to the mid-1900s, visual artefacts were largely of concern to art historians and critics. Mediated imagery is different, however, as Walter Benjamin (1935) eloquently points out in his classic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Decades later, semiologist Roland Barthes (1977) called for scholarly attention to the rhetorical nature of images, particularly photography, as more than mere decoration. However, John Berger’s ground-breaking documentary series and book, Ways of Seeing (1972) can best be credited with popularising the ideological analysis of images. Berger argues, for instance, that Western paintings historically depicted women in ways that support patriarchal expectations and commodified culture – signifying a break from traditional art scholarship. By the mid-20^th century, as communication scholarship generally matured, visual communication scholarship emerged as a distinct field with specialised divisions established within the field’s major research organisations (Barnhurst, Vari and Rodríguez 2004).

Today, ideology is a key concern for visual scholars. In No Caption Needed (2007), Robert Hariman and John Lucaites use rhetorical analysis to argue that iconic documentary photographs serve as a call to conscience for liberal democracy as they travel various media contexts. Giorgia Aiello and Katy Parry apply social semiotics to understand the way symbol systems operate in mediated culture, as with, for example, the knitted pink “pussy” hats used for feminist protest (Aiello and Parry 2019). Aiello and her colleagues, using the same approach and Paul Frosh (2001), using a more classic semiotic lens, have similarly shown how something as seemingly mundane as stock image services sustain hegemony by creating generic worldviews that diminish human diversity while centring commercial interests (Frosh 2001; Aiello, Thurlow and Portmann 2023). Another analytical approach popularised by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001) emphasises the multi-modal nature of visual communication: that is, the way words, images and other symbol systems work together in a form of socially accessible grammar. Many media scholars also favour content analyses, which for visuals may involve many multi-modal variables (Bock 2020).

Whether researchers apply rhetoric social semiotics or content analysis, studying images through an ideological lens is complicated by their unique properties. Images are often discussed in binary relation to words, as in text and image, words and pictures, voice and visibility. Media scholars often analyse social media posts stripped of their imagery in order to employ computational methods. Binary approaches to multi-modality suggest that the two mediated forms run parallel, along two separate but equal tracks. Historically, media producers like photographers and writers worked along these parallel tracks, further extending the sense that words and images are separate and equal.

Yet they are neither.

As Kress and Leeuwen (2001) emphasise, words and images are not separate but operate symbiotically. When they are read, after all, words are consumed visually. Their presentation in terms of pagination, text design and font are all matters of visual design. In media, images are presented in conjunction with some text, whether on a web page, with a caption or a simple ad slogan. For an image to have significance in public discourse, words are essential labels. Text tells us who made an image and why; who is depicted and where; even the digital “meta data” of an image is imparted through words. Words are used to tag photos for searching algorithms, which can shape the way so-called “prosumers” participate online.

Nor are text and images equal. Images incite emotions more powerfully than words. They are more memorable. Images and words don’t even share the same space in the human brain, as words are processed in the logic centre and images are perceived first near the limbic system – where our instincts lie (Barry 1997). Think, in terms of bytes, of the amount of information in even the dullest digital photo conveys compared with Word-doc. Images can be used as symbols and/or they might depict symbols. Photographic images seem to true to life; they inspire what is known as “naïve realism”, which occludes their constructed nature (Ross and Ward 1996; Ristovska 2016). They are indeed accurate recordings of light, offering often unimpeachable evidence in the realms of health care, science, sports and social justice. The perfect camera recording creates an sense objectivity that clouds its constructed nature (Zelizer 2005) To complicate things even more, photographic artefacts are doubly constructed, first by the human who employs a camera and again by the human who crafts a message using the image. Humans choose where to point the lens, how close to stand or, even more basically, what to photograph; then they choose where to put it on a page, share it on social media or incorporate it into a video. This is why they can serve ideology and why they are especially effective in that service. Consequently, whether analysing visual ideology through a rhetorical, semiotic or critical approach, it is helpful to consider the mechanics of their construction and the way they are used or recontextualised in media.

Images can be recontextualised by words; their interpretations can vary almost infinitely according to the words used to describe, label and explain them. Visuals have multiple dimensions that must be taken into account for the sake of ideological analysis. Because they are not separate, nor equal, words and images work in symbiosis and this makes images especially ideologically dangerous. The emotion they incite can inspire an irrational response (Barry 1997). They cannot be unseen and when harmful or stereotypical, their intractability in memory can perpetuate unfair judgment (Lester and Dente Ross 2003). Their contingency makes it possible to use an accurate image to distort the truth, if not lie outright.

Yet when used carefully, images can be helpful. They can incite the kind of emotion that compels democratic publics to act They can give us icons to remember together in grief or pride (Zelizer 2011). Their contingency can be fun, too, when we use and re-use the same photo of “grumpy cat” to make unique jokes for our friends. This duality of their power is the reason I’ve likened images to fire – because their power can be used for good or ill. As affordances for ideological messaging they are unmatched. For this reason, research that focuses only on symbols, signs or texts divorced from their origins is limited in what it can offer ideological inquiry. Because ideology reflects power in a larger social system, it is essential to tend to the human activity within that system.

In this chapter, I first describe a theoretical foundation for the ideological analysis of images that combines two concepts: affordances and framing. This theoretical foundation does not conflict with semiotic or rhetorical approaches to ideological studies but provides a supportive analytical construct. Analyses that focus on symbols, signs and texts alone can detect the what of ideology, but are less useful for considering the how and why. If ideology is part of a social system, it seems essential to consider the processes by which it is constructed. The model described here does that, taking cues from a foundational concept of constructivism, affordance theory and the bridging concept known as framing, which can help to uncover ideological messages. Next, I provide examples of ideological analysis using a typology rooted in this foundation. Finally, I offer suggestions for researchers and non-researchers alike to practise “defensive driving” against visual mis- and disinformation as they navigate the contemporary digital public sphere.

Theorising images and ideology

Before proceeding, it is essential to define the way I use the concept of ideology. I base it on the work of Stuart Hall, who defines it as “those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and ‘make sense’ of some aspect of social existence” (Hall 2021: 180). While this definition elides the connection between ideology and power, it sets up the perspective that ideology is “built in” to messages. Ideological analysis is the identification of those dimensions of a message that uphold, assert, cultivate or otherwise reflect power. Hall’s constructivist perspective diverges with the earliest conceptions of ideology as the lofty study of ideas; its Marxist version as “false consciousness”; and strict Althusserian uses of the word as the extension of a “state apparatus” (Althusser 1998; Malpas 2013; Eagleton 2014). I am further influenced by Hall’s conception of ideology as produced by human beings using symbol systems to establish ways of thinking. This constructivist view focuses attention onto the human actions necessary to work with and use symbols, whether to encode messages or to decode them (Hall 1980). As philosopher Susan Langer (1957) argues, our penchant for converting feelings into symbolic systems is at the very root of our human-ness. If ideology is the expression of power in messages generally, how is it manifest in the visual realm? Affordance theory, in combination with the constructivist concept of framing, offers a useful analytical construct for the ideological analysis of visual materials.

Affordances

The work of James Gibson (2015), the psychologist who first offered the theory of affordances (which posits that humans attach meaning to objects according to the way those objects can be used) offers a way of thinking about the mechanics of image-use in ideological messages. Conceiving of an image as an affordance supports constructivist analysis by asking how an image is used in a message. As a helpful illustration? As evidence? As décor? One of the founding theorists of visual communication, Paul Messaris, points out – significantly – that an image can be used to “say” something that would not be appropriate to express in words ( Messaris 1997). For example, in the early 1900s anti-suffrage postcards depicted suffragists as ugly old bullies. The words could remain civil, but the depictions were hardly so (Florey 2016).

When they stand alone, images say little. With or without labels or stories attached, they must be understood through language. As Hall noted in the essay cited above:

Language and ideology are not the same … since the same linguistic term (‘democracy’, for example, or ‘freedom’) can be deployed within different ideological discourses. But language, broadly conceived, is by definition the principal medium in which we find different ideological discourses elaborated.

(Hall 2021: 180)

Images have ideological power because of all three of their unique properties: they inspire emotion, are accessible to memory and rely on context, but is the third, contingency, that is perhaps the most potent within this constructivist framework. This theoretical foundation focuses attention on the way images are used in conjunction with language and therefore points to the way for deconstructing, or undoing, their power.

Framing

Framing analysis offers the most useful construct for considering the ideology of an image. Framing, what Stephen Reese called a “bridging concept”, is one of the primary methodological approaches in media studies (Reese 2007; Cacciatore, Scheufele and Iyengar 2016). One of the most often-cited definitions of framing was crafted by Robert Entman, who explained it as the crafting of messages “… in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Typically frames diagnose, evaluate and prescribe …” ( Entman 1993: 52 italics in the original). Framing is a constructivist concept and scholars use it to describe the differences between reality and media depictions. To report on, photograph or film an event requires myriad choices, all of which contribute to the eventual representation’s frame. Framing is also, at heart, an ideological construct, considering Entman’s emphasis on “moral evaluation” and “problem definition”.

Word-based framing studies often reflect ideological questions, overtly or not. For example, political communication scholars have employed framing to study rhetorical tropes in news such as the “horse race frame” to cover elections, contrasting with a more democratically supportive “issue” frame (Iyengar 1994; Cappella and Jamieson 1997). The “protest paradigm” offered by Chan and Lee (1984) describes the way media have traditionally framed protests as deviant and troublesome and has been extended to studies around the world (Brasted 2005; Gondwe and Bhowmik 2022; Masullo, Brown and Harlow 2023). Some studies have also examined framing as a “verb”, that is, examined how the very work of producing media creates ideological frames that favour elites (Tuchman 1978; Usher 2021).

Even before ideological concerns, visual framing analysis is complicated, for all the reasons that images are different than words (Coleman 2010; Dimitrova and Rodriguez 2011). Coleman (2010) defined visual framing as “… the selection of one view, scene or angle when making the image, cropping, editing or selecting it. When a journalist chooses which photograph or piece of video to use, it is an act of framing” (Coleman 2010: 237). Creating an image, especially a photograph, and recontextualising it into a media artefact, requires many different kinds of decision, both discursive and physical, whereas linguistic framing is largely a matter of selecting and ordering words. As with any artefact, images can be analysed according to form and style, but style might be symbolic or phenomenological. Dimitrova and Rodriguez (2011) identify four possible types of visual frame: content, style, symbolism and ideology. Studies of the differences in the first two, content and style or what Roland Barthes called denotation and connotation, predominate in the literature (Barthes 1977). Scholars might investigate the effects of differently framed content, for example, testing whether the inclusion of enthusiastic spectators in images of athletes with disabilities increased viewer support (it did) (von Sikorski and Schierl 2012). Questions about content and style lend themselves well to content analyses of news that examine the visual coverage of war or politics (Grabe and Bucy 2011; Huang and Fahmy 2013). Semiotic scholars might use qualitative methods to examine the way symbols appear in media, such as protest placards and police equipment in representations of demonstrations (Krstić, Parry and Aiello 2020). A review of the visual framing literature in 2020 found that the method is increasingly popular, yet most tend to neglect the analysis of visual ideology (Bock 2020).

An analytical construct

In sum, affordance theory or thinking of images as artefacts used to communicate, when combined with the concept of framing or the way of thinking about how messages are constructed to convey a particular perspective, offers a map for the ideological analysis of visuals. This analytical construct engages with the contingent nature of visual artefacts and allows the analyst to focus on the mechanics of ideological communication. As a constructivist lens, it also leads an analyst to consider the verb of framing – that is, who is using images to, in Hall’s word, “make sense” of “some aspect of social existence”?

Visual frames and ideology

The ideological analysis of linguistic texts requires a scholar to carefully examine the way language is used to frame its subject. Something as simple as word choice, for example “illegal alien” versus “undocumented person”, reflects an ideological difference. Metaphors and other rhetorical tropes, modes of address, euphemisms and other word choices offer a way to uncover ideology in text ( Wodak 1999; Brummett 2010; Fairclough 2013). Framing is a bit more complicated by the addition of images, however, because of the unique nature of the visual and those things that set them apart from words: the way they can tap into the unconscious with their emotional pull; plant themselves into memory; or travel from context to context. Here, it becomes useful to focus on framing as a verb and to consider just how an image is used in the encoding or decoding of a message. In previous work I identified three metaphorical modes of visual framing: first, when images serve as a decoding device that guide a viewer to solve a message “puzzle”. A second metaphor “act” of visual framing is design; that is, how does a creator, such as a journalist, advertiser or artist, use an image in a larger production? A third metaphor, which I label the “viewfinder”, considers how a photographer or artist uses a camera or canvas to reflect reality – the “literal framing” of a shot which adds connotative information to its basic denotation. These three acts of framing – whether solving a symbolic puzzle, designing a message that uses an image or creating an image – offer a starting point for ideological analysis. Each of these metaphors for framing suggests sites for ideological analysis according to the human agency involved in the encoding and decoding of visual messages. The constructivist view of ideology commands attention to the role of agency or power, involved with communicating. Table 18.1 organises the metaphors, the choices involved with visual message encoding and decoding and just some of the sources of power influencing those choices. This typology is not suggested as an end-point for ideological analysis, but as a way for researchers to start thinking about how visual messages may reflect the flow of power in social systems.

Table 18.1 Three metaphors of visual framing

Metaphor	What is the human agency?	Where is the power?
Puzzle, or the decoding of ideology	Deconstructing and interpreting symbol systems; having the cultural knowledge for perceiving symbols; considering a response to an artefact or message	Symbols, connotations, juxtapositions of an image in context or within the image itself
Design, or the recontextualisation of an image in a production/artefact	Choosing which image to use, how to place it, how to size it, how to label, caption or textually contextualise it; which medium to use for production & distribution	Choices of image and contextualisation, choices of publication medium, distribution, production
Viewfinder, or the creation of a visual artefact	Choosing what to depict and how, what to include in the image and how to use a particular medium, whether ink, pen or photograph. If a camera, where to place it, where to stand/sit, how to use camera settings, when and how to move	Technological and medium-related choices, choices of where to stand, access to scenes

As illustration of the way these three modes of visual framing serve ideological analysis I offer a photo of Donald Trump, one that became internationally famous the day it was released, as it was the first of its kind for a former US president: his mugshot (Figure 18.1). In 2023, Trump was compelled to appear in court in Fulton County, Georgia, on charges that he participated in a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election (Bailey, Gardner and Arnsdorf 2023). That day the former president was booked in the county jail just like any other defendant, which meant that he had to stand for a mugshot. This unique artefact was a matter of fascination for his supporters and detractors. It is a very specific type of public record, embedded with symbolism associated with the American criminal justice system (Finn 2009; Ellenbogen 2012). It was released digitally, which meant it could be recontextualised in multiple ways. It was also created by a human being using technology within a set of authorised conditions. Each of these framing conditions offers a different insight into the artefact’s ideology.

A close-up image of Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie, with a serious expression on his face, and a Fulton County Sheriff’s Office logo in the top left corner.

Figure 18.1 Donald Trump mugshot, 24 August 2023.

Source: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office.

The puzzle metaphor

The puzzle metaphor for visual framing conceptualises the mechanism of visual framing effects. Ideology is in the eye of the beholder. Does a viewer detect and understand the denotative and connotative elements of an image? Do they accept the dominant codes associated with such symbols and connotations? Framing effects are often tested in experiments. Von Sikorski and Schierl, (2012), for example, tested audience responses to photographs of disabled athletes. Some photos included fans watching from the stands and others focused only on the athletes. The experiment’s results suggested that images that included fans increased support for disabled athletes (von Sikorski and Schierl 2012). The audience “caught” the symbolic meaning of the audience and came up with an answer to the metaphoric puzzle, decoding this visual frame. Similarly, ( Hellmueller and Zhang 2019) examined audience attitudes about migrants that tested audience support for migrants after the release of the tragic photo of Alain Kurdy, which portrayed his tiny, lifeless body face down in the sand. One of many migrants who drowned making a desperate trip to safety in Europe, his image quickly travelled the global public sphere and shocked the conscience of Western audiences. Hellmueller and Zhang’s study found that, for a time, this image did indeed increase sympathy for the migrants’ situation (Hellmueller and Zhang 2019).

What of Trump’s mugshot? Mugshots constitute their own genre in American culture, as portraits specific to the criminal justice system (Ellenbogen 2012). Mugshots carry the connotation of criminality even though they are generally released before people are found guilty. These visual public records are often seen as their own punishment, a public shaming or modern “Scarlet Letter” ( Lashmar 2014). This specific mugshot has contemporary markers of the genre: a straightforward portrait with a simple background. This particular mugshot also has a watermark from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, adding a mark of criminality. Trump appears to be scowling into the camera in this image. The “puzzle” is easily solved, as viewers are able to discern the mugshot’s inherent criminal “frame”. In this case, the frame can serve as a political litmus test. There is a difference between knowing what a symbol represents and accepting a particular meaning. Everyone can see this is a mugshot, normally a marker of criminality, but Trump’s supporters are likely to see his arrest as an unfair setup, while his detractors will celebrate it.

The design metaphor

The design metaphor for visual framing is the first of two encoding modes of visual framing, ideology as constructed using an image. It represents the way media producers recontextualise or use an image in a message – on TV, a webpage or in an ad. While the affordances of an image are always part of its interpretation, here the image serves as an affordance for a surrounding message. Many of the choices for this type of framing are associated with the job of photo editors at a newspaper, such as selection, sizing, cropping or page placement. Digitisation enables nearly infinite forms of recontextualisation. The photo of Alan Kurdi, for example, went viral as it was shared across social media and in news (Hellmueller and Zhang 2019). Iconic images are often recontextualised across platforms because their cultural meaning is so instantaneously understood. For instance, the FSA’s depression-era portrait of Florence Thompson, known as Migrant Mother, carries a symbolic weight all its own; an icon for poverty’s call to conscience (Hariman and Lucaites 2007). Images can be recontextualised in misleading ways, too, which today is as easy as a keystroke. In 2020 many social media users misrepresented the police accountability protests around the world, using photos from other conflicts to malign the protesters ( Lytvyenenko and Silverman 2020). Even Fox News was criticized for using a photo from Minneapolis of a building on fire to illustrate news about Seattle, superimposing the shot with text that said “crazy town”, a move critics charged was a bald-faced attempt to unfairly frame the Seattle protests as violent (Darcy 2020).

Donald Trump’s 2023 mugshot travelled too and in fact the former president turned it into a fundraiser. Within hours of the photo’s release, his supporters attached it to tee shirts, bumper stickers and yes, coffee mugs, many using the caption “never surrender”( Friedman 2023; Isenstadt 2023). Even though Trump’s opponents also used the mugshot in contexts that maligned him, he won the public relations victory in this case to the tune of at least seven million dollars (Isenstadt 2023). It was in many ways a brilliant move, flipping the usual criminality frame to bolster his image as a martyred fighter. The photo offered an affordance for this ideological message, framing him as – well, to turn a phrase, unfairly “framed”, and continues to help sell merchandise.

The creation metaphor

The third metaphor for visual framing is that of creation – the actual framing of a scene by an artist or photographer. Ideology is manifest in an image-maker’s choices of content and style. Artists may have the most leeway when determining how to visually represent a scene, as they can harness their imagination as they wield their chalks or brushes. Photographers are limited in part by the scene before them and their access to it, but they still have myriad choices to make in terms of camera placement, focal length, literal framing within the viewfinder, shutter speed – the list goes on. While many of these choices seen largely a matter of technology, ideology is, as always, in play. The photographer may have an ideological goal in mind, as when Dorothea Lange photographed Migrant Mother to illustrate human suffering for the sake of drumming up support for the New Deal (Hariman and Lucaites 2007; Davis 2020). The photographer might also be working within an ideological social system that grants or denies them the physical access to scenes for the sake of a powerful entity’s public image. Embodied gatekeeping is a concept that describes the way powerful institutions control photographic access for their purposes (Bock 2021).

Consider, for instance, the way musical performers constrain the photographers assigned to cover concerts (Lough 2019). Photojournalists are allowed access to a pit area in front of a stage, tightly packed, usually for two or three songs. Today’s credentialling agreements place extensive limits on a photographer’s work and the literal use of their body in space. Yes, the artists want publicity, but they want a certain kind. Because photographers are usually lower than the stage, the performers appear more regal – which is why politicians usually place the photo press below the stage as well (Bock 2009). Photographers do have their own power, of course, and the most experienced news photographers carefully consider the way light, shadow or even symbolic objects in the background might add connotational meaning to a candidate’s photo (Bock 2008; Marland 2012).

To return to the Trump mugshot, consider the choices available to the photographer working for the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia. The mugshot photo is usually part of a larger ritual for processing people who’ve been arrested, along with fingerprinting and recordkeeping. Sheriff’s offices are usually nondescript institutional spaces and the mugshot camera is generally placed in front of a wall with some kind of fabric or screen as a background. They are routinised and use the same, recognisable format in order to meet the needs of the criminal archive (Sekula 1986; Ellenbogen 2012; Hagins 2013). In this instance, the person who pulled the shutter to photograph Trump during processing had very few choices in how to create that photo; most were institutionally imposed. One choice the mugshot technician did have, however, was when to hit the shutter and capture Trump’s now-iconic – and ideologically significant – scowl.

Analysing visual ideology

The three metaphors of framing reflect the constructivist view that ideology is the product of human practices for the sake of ordering society (Hall 2021). Whether we “solve” the puzzle embedded in a visual frame, consider the use of an image in message design or investigate the way an image was originally crafted, we can better understand the various ways images are coded and decoded ideologically. Because images have multiple layers of meaning that are useful for the creation of ideological frames, namely content (denotation), style (connotation) and symbols, it is useful to consider framing as a verb and take note of who is constructing or interpreting the frames. Focusing on who is doing the work of framing enables the systematic ideological analysis of visual artefacts.

Resisting visual mischief

Investigating the way images impart ideology can help to untangle some of the more vexing problems of mis- and disinformation online. Visual trickery has always been part of photography and propagandists used analogue techniques for their work long before Photoshop® was invented. The Cottingley Fairies, one of the earliest photographic hoaxes involving superimpositions, dates back to 1917 (Bown 1996). Josef Stalin used a crude darkroom technique to “rub out” his allies from group portraits when they fell out of favour (King 1997). The difference with digitisation and now, with Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a matter of scale. Today it is possible to harness the emotional and mnemonic power of imagery in all manner of recontextualisations, some of which have no tie to reality at all. Those that appear real, however, harness the emotional and mnemonic power of the visual in ways that range from the silly, as with the memes showing fake “sharks” in Houston after a hurricane; to the harmful, as when a person’s face is superimposed on pornographic scenes; or the downright undemocratic, as with the propagandists who create websites to look like news and use perfectly accurate photos to lie. AI and “deep fake” videos are even more frightening for their additional audio and kinaesthetic information. The camera’s verisimilitude has been toppled, but the effects of naïve realism and our very human responses to visual information remain.

Conclusion

The analytical model described here does not conflict with semiotic or rhetorical approaches to ideological analysis. It supports ideological inquiry for the way it compels consideration of the way images are used for human purposes by rejecting any hint of naïve realism. By blending affordance theory, which describes the way humans interact with the material world and the three metaphors of framing activity, this approach emphasises the constructed nature of visual messaging. These metaphors reflect the constructivist view that ideology is the product of human practices for the sake of ordering society (Hall 2021). Studies of artefacts alone, without regard for their origins, are limited in what they can offer. Signs, symbol systems and photographs do not fall from the sky: they are created by and interpreted by human beings in a social system that involves power. Considering images as affordances for the activity of framing directs attention to power in that social system, thereby revealing their role in cultivating ideology. Because images have multiple layers of meaning that are useful for the creation of ideological frames, namely content (denotation), style (connotation) and symbols, it is essential take note of who is constructing or interpreting the frames. Focusing on who is doing the work of framing enables the systematic ideological analysis of visual artefacts and offers a deeper understanding of the role of power in communication.

The constructivist lens for ideological analysis also provides a remedy for the camera’s increasing irrelevance in this era of AI and image manipulation. To ask who made an image and how and who is using an image and how turns attention to the act of framing in service of ideology. As this chapter has shown, asking these questions can help media users “drive defensively” as they cruise the mediated public sphere. Long before everyday users could use AI to create realistic images without a camera, photographic theorist Fred Ritchin argued that photo and video photographers should be considered as authors rather than illustrators ( Ritchin and Wise, 2024). Doing so would constitute a course correction for photo and video journalism, which has traditionally kept visual processes behind the scenes – the root of naïve realism. As the examples from this chapter have shown, however, ideological framing is a verb, a matter of human action. Only when we analyse visuals according to their construction can we deconstruct their messages understand the way power is being cultivated, expressed or undone.

References

Aiello, G. and Parry, K. (2019) Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture, Los Angeles CA: Sage.

Aiello, G., Thurlow, C. and Portmann, L. (2023) “Desocializing social media: The visual and media ideologies of stock photography”, Social Media + Society, vol. 9, no. 1. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231156363

Althusser, L. (1998) “Ideology & ideological state apparatuses”, in Storey, J. (ed.) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Harlow UK: Pearson/Prentice Hall: 153–164.

Bailey, H., Gardner, A. and Arnsdorf, I. (2023) “Trump surrenders at Fulton County Jail for his first mugshot”, Washington Post, 25 August, [Online], Available: www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/24/trump-georgia-surrender-fulton-county-jail/[23 Febr 2024].

Barnhurst, K. G., Vari, M. and Rodríguez, Í. (2004) “Mapping visual studies in communication”, Journal of Communication, vol. 54, no. 4, 616–644. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460–2466.2004.tb02648.x

Barry, A. M. S. (1997) Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image and Manipulation in Visual Communication, Albany NY: State University of New York Press.

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music Text, New York NY: Hill & Wang: 32–51.

Benjamin, W. (1935) “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, in: Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Durham, M. G. and Kellner, D. M. (eds) West Sussex UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: BBC & Penguin Books.

Bock, M. A. (2008) “Together in the scrum: Practicing news photography for print, television and broadband”, Visual Communication Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3, 169–179. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/15551390802235511

Bock, M. A. (2009) “Who’s minding the gate? Pool feeds, video subsidies and political images”, International Journal of Press & Politics, vol. 14, no. 2, 257–278.

Bock, M. A. (2020) “Theorising visual framing: Contingency, materiality and ideology”, Visual Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 1–12. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2020.1715244

Bock, M. A. (2021) Seeing Justice: Witnessing, Crime and Punishment in Visual Media, Oxford UK, Oxford University Press.

Borda, J. L. (2002) “The woman suffrage parades of 1910–1913: Possibilities and limitations of an early feminist rhetorical strategy”, Western Journal of Communication, vol. 66, no. 1, 25–52. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310209374724

Bown, N. (1996) “‘There are fairies at the bottom of our garden’: Fairies, fantasy and photography”, Textual Practice, vol. 10, no. 1, 57–82. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502369608582239

Brasted, M. (2005) “Framing protest: The Chicago Tribune and the New York Times during the 1968 democratic convention”, Atlantic Journal of Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, 1–25. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15456889ajc1301_1

Brummett, B. (2010) Techniques of Close Reading, Los Angeles CA: Sage.

Cacciatore, M. A., Scheufele, D. A. and Iyengar, S. (2016) “The end of framing as we know it … and the future of media effects”, Mass Communication and Society, vol. 19, no. 1, 7–23. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2015.1068811

Cappella, J. N. and Jamieson, K. H. (1997) Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Chan, J. M. and Lee, C. C. (1984) “The journalistic paradigm on civil protests: A case study of Hong Kong”, in Arno, A. and Dissanayake, W. (eds.) The News Media in National and International Conflict, London: Westview Press: 183–202.

Coleman, R. (2010) “Framing the pictures in our heads”, in D’Angelo, P. and Kuypers, J. A. (eds.) Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, New York NY: Routledge: 233–261.

Darcy, O. (2020) “Fox News publishes digitally altered and misleading images of Seattle demonstrations”, CNN, [Online], Available: www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/media/seattle-fox-news-autonomous-zone-protest/index.html[7 Apr 2022].

Davis, L. (2020) “Migrant Mother: Dorothea Lange and the Truth of Photography”, Los Angeles Review of Books, [Online], Available: www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/migrant-mother-dorothea-lange-truth-photography/[11 Jul 2021].

Dimitrova, D. V. and Rodriguez, L. (2011) “The levels of visual framing”, Journal of Visual Literacy, vol. 30, no. 1, 48–65.

Eagleton, T. (2014) Ideology, London: Routledge. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843469

Ellenbogen, J. (2012) Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton and Marey, University Park PA: Penn State Press.

Entman, R. M. (1993) “Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm”, Journal of Communication, vol. 43, no. 4, 51–58.

Fairclough, N. (2013) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London: Routledge.

Fenton, R., Gernsheim, H. and Gernsheim, A. (1954) Roger Fenton, Photographer of the Crimean War, his Photographs and his Letters from the Crimea. London: Secker & Warburg, [Online], Available: https://search.lib.utexas.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991004392019706011&context=L&vid=01UTAU_INST:SEARCH&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=any,%20contains,%20Helmut%20and%20Alison%20Gernsheim%20%20Roger%20Fenton:%20Photographer%20of%20the%20Crimea&offset=0[2 Mar 2024].

Finn, J. M. (2009) Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mugshot to Surveillance Society, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Finnegan, C. A. (2000) “Social engineering, visual politics and the new deal: FSA photography in ‘survey graphic’”, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 3, no. 3, 333–362.

Florey, K. (2016) American Woman Suffrage Postcards: A Study and Catalog, Jefferson NC: McFarland.

Friedman, V. (2023) “The dangerous marketing of the Trump mugshot”, The New York Times, 29 August, [Online], Available: www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/style/trump-mug-shot-marketing-merch.html[29 Feb 2024].

Frosh, P. (2001) “Inside the image factory: Stock photography and cultural production”, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 5, 625–646. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/016344301023005005

Gibson, J. J. (2015) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York NY: Psychology Press.

Gondwe, G. and Bhowmik, S. (2022) “Visual representation of the 2020 black lives matter protests: Comparing US mainstream media images to citizens’ social media postings”, Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, vol. 12, no. 4, e202238. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/12494

Grabe, M. E. and Bucy, E. P. (2011) “Image bite analysis of political visuals”, in Bucy, E. P. and Holbert, L. (eds.) Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods, Measures and Analytical Techniques, New York NY: Routledge: 209–237.

Hagins, Z. R. (2013) “Fashioning the ‘born criminal’ on the beat: Juridical photography and the Police municipale in Fin-de-Siècle Paris”, Modern & Contemporary France, vol. 21, no. 3, 281–296. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2013.781143

Hall, S. (1980) “Encoding/Decoding”, in Hall, S. et al. (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London: Hutchinson; Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham: 128–138.

Hall, S. (2021) “The Whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media”, in Brunsdon, C. and Hall, S. (eds.) Writings on Media: History of the Present, Durham NC: Duke University Press: 177–200. [Online], Available: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/monograph/book/85832[22 Feb 2024].

Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hellmueller, L. and Zhang, X. (2019) “Shifting toward a humanized perspective? Visual framing analysis of the coverage of refugees on CNN and Spiegel Online before and after the iconic photo publication of Alan Kurdi”, Visual Communication, 1470357219832790. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357219832790

Huang, Y. and Fahmy, S. (2013) “Picturing a journey of protest or a journey of harmony? Comparing the visual framing of the 2008 Olympic torch relay in the US versus the Chinese press”, Media, War & Conflict, vol. 6, no. 3, 191–206. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635213495601

Isenstadt, A. (2023) Trump raised $7.1 million after Georgia booking, mugshot, POLITICO, [Online], Available: www.politico.com/news/2023/08/26/trump-mugshot-fundraising-00113118[29 Feb 2024].

Iyengar, S. (1994) Is Anyone Responsible?: How Television Frames Political Issues, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

King, D. (1997) The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, 1^st edition, New York NY: Metropolitan Books.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Krstić, A., Parry, K. and Aiello, G. (2020) “Visualising the politics of appearance in times of democratisation: An analysis of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade television coverage”, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 165–183. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417743042

Langer, S. K. K. (1957) Philosophy In A New Key: A Study In The Symbolism Of Reason, Rite And Art, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Lashmar, P. (2014) “How to humiliate and shame: A reporter’s guide to the power of the mugshot”, Social Semiotics, vol. 24, no. 1, 56–87. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2013.827358

Lester, P. M. and Dente Ross, S. (2003) Images that Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, P. M. Lester and S. Dente Ross (eds) Westport CT: Praeger.

Lough, K. (2019) “A gate in the wall of sound”, Journalism Practice, vol. 13, no. 2, 247–262. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2018.1423629

Lytvyenenko, J. and Silverman, C. (2020) Here are the Hoaxes about the Police Brutality Protests and Death of George Floyd, [Online], Available: www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/hoax-misleading-claims-george-floyd-protests [29 Feb 2024].

Malpas, S.and Wake, P. (ed.) (2013) “Ideology”, in The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2^nd edition, London: Routledge: 244–245. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203520796

Marland, A. (2012) “Political photography, journalism and framing in the digital age: The management of visual media by the Prime Minister of Canada”, The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 17, no. 2, 214–233. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161211433838

Masullo, G. M., Brown, D. K. and Harlow, S. (2023) “Shifting the protest paradigm? Legitimizing and humanizing protest coverage lead to more positive attitudes toward protest, mixed results on news credibility”, Journalism, 14648849231200135. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231200135

Messaris, P. (1997) Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

Rampley, M. (2005) Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474471879

Reese, S. D. (2007) “The framing project: A bridging model for media research revisited”, Journal of Communication, vol. 57, no. 1, 148–154.

Ristovska, S. (2016) “The rise of eyewitness video and its implications for human rights: Conceptual and methodological approaches”, Journal of Human Rights, vol. 15, no. 3, 347–360. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2015.1132157

Ritchin, F. and Wise, A. (2024) “Ethics and visual journalism”, Santa Fe Workshops, 8 February.

Rosenbloom, J. D. (1997) “Social ideology as seen through courtroom and courthouse architecture”, Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts, vol. 22, 463–524.

Ross, L. and Ward, A. (1996) “Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding”, in Reed, E. S., Turiel, E. and Brown, T. (eds) Values and Knowledge, Hove UK: Psychology Press: 103–135.

Sekula, A. (1986) “The body and the archive”, October, vol. 39, 3–64.

Tuchman, G. (1978) Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, London: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan Publishing.

Usher, N. (2021) News for the Rich, White and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism, New York NY: Columbia University Press.

von Sikorski, C. and Schierl, T. (2012) “Effects of news frames on recipients’ information processing in disability sports communications”, Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods and Applications, vol. 24, no. 3, 113–123. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000069

Wilson, R. (2014) Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, London: Bloomsbury.

Wodak, R. (1999) “Critical discourse analysis at the end of the 20^th century”, Research on Language and Social Interaction, vol. 32, no. 1–2, 185–193. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.1999.9683622

Zelizer, B. (2005) “Journalism through the camera’s eye”, in Allen, S. (ed.) Issues in Journalism, Maidenhead UK: Open University Press: 167–176.

Zelizer, B. (2011) “Photography, journalism and trauma”, in Zelizer, B. and Allan, S. (eds) Journalism After September 11, 2^nd edition, London: Routledge.

19. The political psychology of ideology

Examining the palliative effects of ideology in the public

Danny Osborne and Joaquín Bahamondes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-25

Introduction

“The king is dead; long live the king!”

Much like the seemingly contradictory statements used to demarcate the ascension of a new monarch to the throne, ideology has been viewed through opposing lenses in political psychology. On one hand, scholars dating back to – and even before – Converse’s (1964) influential treatise on belief systems in the public have lamented the frailties of citizens’ ideology. Indeed, contemporary work reveals that only one out of every four or five citizens thinks about politics in constrained ways ( Kalmoe 2020). On the other hand, Jost (2006) and others demonstrate that ideology is alive and well in the public and that it correlates with people’s underlying personality traits (Osborne, Satherley and Sibley 2024) and important socio-political outcomes, including vote choice (Jost 2006) and affective polarisation (Mason 2018). How, then, can these two seemingly incompatible statements both be true?

We argue that scholars have spoken past each other by referring to distinct constructs when examining the presence (or absence) of ideology in the public. We begin by reviewing the literature in political science to show that, when it comes to coherent, inter-connected beliefs (i.e., the operational component of ideology; see Federico et al 2012; Stimson 2004), most citizens lack the constraint needed to pass the threshold of ideological thinking. We then introduce work in psychology to demonstrate that people can nevertheless reliably self-identify as liberal or conservative and that this symbolic, identity-based feature of ideology has a profound impact on socio-political attitudes, wellbeing and protest support. We conclude by proposing directions for future research, including the need to a) use consistent terms in the literature; b) further investigate the relational roots to ideology; c) expand examinations of ideology beyond the currently Western-focused literature; and d) identify the nuanced ways in which ideology impacts wellbeing. Throughout our chapter, we argue that the key to understanding how ideology can be both dead and sitting atop a throne as a concept par excellence in political psychology is to acknowledge that the debate has focused on different operationalisations of ideology.

The King is dead: Ideology as a constrained network of beliefs

It is a near truism that most citizens lack a coherent belief system in which one policy position is functionally related to other policy positions – or that people even take the same position on an issue over time. Early grumblings on the frailty of citizens’ ideological beliefs can be seen in the pioneering work on The American Voter, where Campbell and colleagues (1960) note that people’s “awareness of political events is limited and [their] concern with ideological problems is only rudimentary” (Campbell et al 1960: 151). When making this point, Campbell and colleagues conceptualise ideology as a hierarchically organised attitude structure containing inter-related beliefs that help voters understand various political phenomena. For example, the abstract desire for limited government, a central tenant of conservatism, has implications for lower-order, policy-specific attitudes including support for state-controlled utilities and rent control. If one were to hold ideologically consistent (i.e., constrained) beliefs, a conservative belief system would include opposition to state-controlled utilities and rent control, as these policies require government intervention. But Campbell and colleagues highlight that “the types of attitude structure presumed in ideological accounts of political behavior are not very prevalent in the American electorate” (Campbell et al 1960: 215). The authors thus conclude that partisanship, rather than ideology, was the driving force of public opinion.

Although The American Voter provided early warnings about the (in-)coherence of belief systems in the public (Campbell et al 1960), Converse’s (1964), subsequent treatises on ideology reveal that an alarming proportion of the electorate fails to think about politics in constrained ways. After interviewing respondents, Converse identified five types of voter (see Table 19.1). The first group, Ideologues, were rare (3.5 per cent of voters) and had a conceptual, abstract grasp of politics. Near-ideologues were slightly more prevalent (12 per cent of voters) but did not fully comprehend the abstract terms they used when discussing politics. The largest proportion of voters (45 per cent) viewed politics through the lens of Group interest. These voters conceptualised politics based on the groups perceived to benefit from an issue or party (e.g., Democrats tend to support minorities’ rights; Republicans tend to support big business) but failed to communicate a deeper understanding of politics. The next most common type of voter (22 per cent), Nature of the times, blamed the party in power for current hardships and were attuned to only a few select issues. Finally, 17.5 per cent of voters lacked awareness of the issues and were devoid of political knowledge (No issue content). Alarmingly, the two least-aware groups (i.e., Nature of the times and No issue content voters) had a disproportionate impact on election outcomes and could decide elections.

Table 19.1 Different types of voters identified by Converse (1964), their defining features and their estimated proportion of the voting population

	Defining feature(s)	Proportion of voters (%)
Ideologues	Deep, conceptual understanding of politics	3.5
Near ideologues	Uses abstract terminology to discuss politics but fails to fully comprehend the underlying meaning	12.0
Group interest	Views politics as a competition between groups	45.0
Nature of the times	Attributes current socio-political conditions to the party in power and focuses on a select few issues	22.0
No issue content	Lacks any knowledge of politics and is unaware of contemporary issues	17.5

Since Converse (1964), research has sought to either further expose the frailties of the public or defend its competence. For example, Bennett (1996) reveals that the competency of the electorate has changed very little over a 50-year period and that most citizens would fail a basic civics test. This has led some to conclude that “the mean level [of political knowledge] is very low but the variance is very high” (Converse 2000: 331). That is, most voters pay little attention to politics but a select few follow politics closely and are attuned to the day-to-day happenings of the polity. Conversely, Popkin (1994) notes that, although most voters are uninformed about policy details, they “satisfice” by using heuristics to make “good enough” decisions. For example, voters can use a politician’s party affiliation to predict their stance on a range of issues including abortion, immigration and tax reform. Nevertheless, the shortfall in people’s awareness about politics, coupled with its persistence over time, raises important questions about the presence of ideologies in the public. Simply put: How can citizens have constrained belief systems if they lack the basic knowledge needed to think in ideological terms?

Long live the king: Ideology as a symbolic identity

Although extant work questions the prevalence of ideologically constrained belief systems in the public, writers including Gramsci ([1971]2005), Moscovici (1961) and Puga and Moya (2022) note that ideologies establish a shared reality and are ubiquitous in society. Jost (2006) in particular re-invigorated contemporary work in this area by arguing that “end of ideology” scholars like Converse (1964) and Bennett (1996) operationalised ideology with criteria that were too stringent for most citizens to pass. Additionally, because the positions conservatives and liberals take on issues are a product of the zeitgeist, what is “conservative” in one context could be “liberal” in another. For example, the racial realignment in the US which saw the Democratic and Republican parties switch positions on race relations (see Schickler 2016) reveals the dynamic nature of policy positions taken by the political left and right. Jost argues that, when you look past these peripheral, policy-specific attitudes that vary across time and place, conservatism consists of two core features: a) opposition to change and b) acceptance of inequality. When viewing ideology through this more loosely defined lens, Jost argues that ideology is both deeply rooted in the human psyche and has important socio-political consequences.

In defence of his position that ideology is alive and well in the public, Jost (2006) reveals that, since 1996, more than 75 per cent of participants in the American National Election Study self-identify as liberal or conservative on a Likert-type measure of ideology. Thus, most people in the US can place themselves on a one (extremely liberal) to seven (extremely conservative) scale when asked to identify the types of political views they hold. Even more impressive, over 90 per cent of university students can do the same. Accordingly, Jost argues that “people can be both highly ideological and generally uninformed” (Jost 2006: 657). That is, Jost notes, that political knowledge is a separate feature of ideology and that self-identification as liberal or conservative – arguably the most popular measure of ideology in political psychology – is nevertheless a strong predictor of political behaviour.

Consistent with Jost (2006), research reveals that ideology is a potent political force. For example, ideological identification correlates positively with various core socio-political attitudes including nationalism (Osborne, Satherley et al 2019; Reyna et al 2022), (right-wing) authoritarianism ( Bizumic and Duckitt 2018; Nilsson and Jost 2020) and sexism (Huang et al 2014; Prusaczyk and Hodson 2018), to name just a few belief systems often assessed in the literature. Conservatism also fosters feelings of political nostalgia (Rigoli in press) and heightens affective polarisation – even for those low in ideological constraint (Mason 2018). Finally, ideological identification predicts voter preferences both in the US (Jost 2006) and internationally (Chirumbolo and Leone 2010). Thus, the symbolic, identity-based component of ideology plays a powerful role in contemporary politics even in the absence of constrained political beliefs.

Corroborating this point, Brandt, Sibely and Osborne (2019) examined seven annual waves of longitudinal panel data from New Zealand including attitudes towards 11 symbolic (e.g., feelings towards the political parties and ideological self-placement) and 38 operational (e.g., policy support) components of ideology. Network analyses of participants’ voting behaviour revealed that the symbolic components of ideology were more central than the operational components of the belief system to vote choice. Moreover, these results replicated across the seven annual assessments. Thus, relative to the operational components of ideology, the symbolic components of a political belief system are a stronger, more central, motivator of political behaviour.

Additional work illustrates the deeply embedded nature of the symbolic component of ideology. Specifically, Jost (2006) notes that people endorse conservative beliefs because the acceptance of inequality and opposition to change satisfy underlying epistemic, existential and relational needs (see also Jost et al 2003). That is, opposition to change offers certainty and predictability in an otherwise unstable environment, helps manage threat by providing definitive answers and responses to danger that mitigate risk and increases one’s sense of belonging by strengthening (in-group) norms. In short, ideological identification is a process of motivated social cognition in which people adopt certain political beliefs to satisfy their underlying motivational needs.

As for the epistemic roots of conservatism, various operationalisations of epistemic needs including need for closure (Golec 2002; Kemmelmeier 1997), low-effort thought (Eidelman et al 2012) and low levels of belief updating (Bowes et al 2024) correlate positively with conservatism (see also Jost 2017). Individual differences in the Big Five Personality Trait’s Openness to Experience, a personality trait capturing interest in and appreciation of novel and diverse (cultural) experiences, also correlates negatively with conservatism (Jost et al 2003; Carney et al 2008; Osborne et al 2017). For example, one study demonstrates that moving from the 20^th to the 80^th percentile of Openness to Experience increases the likelihood of identifying as very liberal by ~71 per cent (De Neve 2015). A recent meta analysis of 232 independent samples with over half a million participants from 70 nations confirms that Openness to Experience is the strongest personality correlate of conservatism (namely, r = –.145; Osborne, Satherley and Sibley 2024). Specifically, higher levels of Openness to Experience are associated with lower levels of conservatism. Thus, ideology is deeply ingrained in personality and satisfies a fundamental epistemic need for certainty.

Other research identifies the existential and relational needs underlying conservatism. For example, studies examining ideological shifts following exposure to terrorism find that conservatism increases in the aftermath of an attack ( Echebarria-Echabe and Fernández-Guede 2006; Nail and McGregor 2009). Participants experimentally exposed to threat also experience an increase in closed-mindedness which, in turn, correlates positively with conservatism ( Thórisdóttir and Jost 2011). Jost, Stern et al’s (2017) meta analysis of 134 samples with approximately 370 000 participants confirms these results by showing that various measures of threat, including mortality salience (r = .08 to .13), perceptions of threat (r = .12 to .31) and actual exposure to objective threats (r = .07 to .14), correlate positively with conservatism. Finally, Jost et al (2018) note that conservative belief systems meet relational needs by encouraging conformity to in-group norms, increasing (inaccurate) estimates of consensus and eliciting support for punishing norm violators. Conservative ideologies are thus deeply ingrained in people’s underlying constitutions.

Although the symbolic, identity-based conceptualisation of ideology impacts political attitudes and is rooted in personality traits, educational attainment (Osborne and Sibley 2015), political interest (Leone, Chirumbolo and Desimoni 2012) and political knowledge and/or sophistication (Federico, Fisher and Deason 2011; Osborne et al 2017) help people identify the political attitudes that best resonate with their personality. Indeed, Federico, Fisher and Deason (2011) show that political knowledge moderates the positive relationship between authoritarianism and conservatism. For those low (i.e., one standard deviation below the mean) in political knowledge, the correlation between authoritarianism and conservatism is unreliable. But authoritarianism correlates positively with conservatism for those high (i.e., one standard deviation above the mean) in knowledge. Osborne and Sibley (2015) also reveal that Openness to Experience correlates positively with six distinct political attitudes including support for LGB rights, support for affirmative action and liberal ideological self-placement. These associations are, however, often confined to the most educated. Political sophistication also strengthens the relationship between Openness to Experience and vote choice in two-party (Bennett 2003; Osborne and Sibley 2012) and multi-party (Osborne and Sibley 2012) systems. Indeed, whereas ideology explains under 5 per cent of the variance in vote choice for the least knowledgeable in the US, 43 per cent of the variance in vote choice is explained by ideology among the most knowledgeable (Kalmoe 2020). Thus, although people are capable of self-identifying with ideological labels (Jost 2006), political knowledge increases a person’s ability to find the label that resonates best with their underlying personality traits.

Palliative benefits of (symbolic) ideology

Evidence that the symbolic component of ideology is present in the population also emerges from research on the palliative effects of (conservative) belief systems. Specifically, a burgeoning literature demonstrates that the endorsement of system justifying ideologies – conservative belief systems that reinforce the status quo including meritocracy, the Protestant Work Ethic and conservatism (Jost and Hunyady 2003, 2005) – improves people’s wellbeing by fostering the perception that society is fair (see Napier et al 2020). For example, Napier and Jost (2008) found that conservatism correlates positively with both life satisfaction and subjective wellbeing using representative data from the US and the World Values Survey. Napier et al (2010) likewise conducted a multi-country analysis of the relationship between two conservative gender ideologies (namely, hostile and benevolent sexism (Glick and Fiske 1996) and wellbeing. Notably, the endorsement of both hostile and benevolent sexism correlated positively with life satisfaction across 32 countries. The authors reasoned that both ideologies independently provide wellbeing benefits because they help explain away gender-based inequities that would otherwise be uncomfortable to acknowledge.

Subsequent work has sought to directly demonstrate why conservative belief systems provide wellbeing benefits, focusing on their ability to dampen the blow of unfair treatment. For example, Osborne and Sibley (2013) reveal that system-justifying beliefs mitigate the harmful effects of individual-based relative deprivation on satisfaction with one’s standard of living and psychological distress. Although there are conflicting results in the literature (see Brandt 2013), members of structurally disadvantaged groups are particularly likely to benefit from system-justifying ideologies because these conservative beliefs increase perceptions of control (McCoy et al 2013; Vargas-Salfate 2019) and reduce the perception of group-based discrimination (Bahamondes et al 2019). Longitudinal work confirms that system-justifying beliefs precede perceptions of discrimination for ethnic minorities which, in turn, undermine wellbeing (Bahamondes, Sibley and Osborne 2021). Importantly, the longitudinal palliative effects of system-justifying beliefs on wellbeing replicate across 18 countries (Vargas-Salfate et al 2018). Thus, conservative belief systems can improve wellbeing by reducing perceptions of injustice among the structurally disadvantaged.

Although symbolic ideologies that justify the status quo can lead people to overlook group-based injustices, recent work has begun to examine status-based asymmetries in these effects. For example, Bahamondes, Sibley and Osborne (2021) reveal that system-justifying beliefs and perceptions of discrimination correlate negatively for structurally disadvantaged groups, but positively for structurally advantaged groups. Related work demonstrates that the desire for group-based dominance underlies perceptions of discrimination among the structurally advantaged (Bahamondes et al 2022). Thus, conservative belief systems foster a sense of competitive victimhood among the structurally advantaged and undermine the motivation for social change among the structurally disadvantaged by reducing their perceptions of injustice and increasing their wellbeing. Collectively, this work further demonstrates the presence of ideology in the public by showing that the symbolic component of conservatism affects wellbeing.

Ideology and social change

Further evidence that ideology is alive and well in the public is seen when examining the literature on social change. Until recently, contemporary models of collective action mostly overlooked the role of ideology in the promotion – and prevention – of social change. For example, van Zomeren, Postmes and Spears’ (2008) influential integration of the literatures on social identity theory, relative deprivation theory and resource mobilisation theory reveals that group identification has both direct and indirect effects on collective action support via perceptions of injustice and the belief that one’s group can effect change. Indeed, these three factors correlate positively with support for collective action on behalf of a range of issues including women’s rights (Ochoa et al 2019), anti-discrimination causes (van Zomeren et al 2011), pro-environmental efforts (Thomas, Mvor and McGarty 2012) and indigenous rights ( Houkamau et al 2024). Longitudinal work further corroborates that group identification, perceptions of injustice and political efficacy precede collective action support amongst the disadvantaged and can even explain why those who are structurally advantaged support protests on behalf of the system (Thomas et al 2020).

Although identity, efficacy and perceptions of injustice play an instrumental role in fostering support for collective action (van Zomeren, Postmes and Spears 2008), others note that ideology is essential for understanding how social change does – and does not – occur (e.g., see Puga and Moya 2022). For example, Jost et al (2017) argue that the symbolic component of ideology helps explain the push-and-pull dynamics of social change. Indeed, whereas some (i.e., liberals) are motivated to change the system to redress structural inequities, others (i.e., conservatives) are motivated to support the system to further codify inequalities. Consistent with this theorising, conservative belief systems undermine support for progressive collective action and motivate support for reactionary forms of protest (e.g., collective action on behalf of the rights of whites) in both New Zealand and the US (Osborne, Jost et al 2019).

Subsequent work further demonstrates the critical role that ideology plays in shaping the direction of collective action (for reviews, see Becker 2020; Thomas and Osborne 2022). Indeed, the symbolic aspects of ideology explain support for reactionary, system-supporting collective action in myriad countries including Canada (Choma et al 2020), Chile (Gonzáles et al 2022), Germany ( Liekefett and Becker 2022) and New Zealand (Lilly et al 2024). For example, Lilly et al (2024) used nine annual waves of longitudinal panel data to examine different growth trajectories of support for collective action on behalf of whites. Results revealed a small group of participants (namely, Reactionaries) whose support had steadily increased over time. Most notably for this chapter, multiple symbolic (and conservative) ideologies including conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation independently predicted membership in the Reactionary group. These studies collectively illustrate that ideology not only affects wellbeing but also fundamentally shapes the direction of social change.

Reconciling inconsistencies and mapping future research directions

Given the conflicting claims across the literature, one is likely to be confused about the presence of ideology in the public. On one hand, scholars have long lamented citizens’ apparent inattention to politics (e.g., Campbell et al 1960). On the other hand, Jost (2006, 2021) and others demonstrate the myriad manifestations of ideology in the public. We believe, however, that both traditions rest on solid empirical grounds. Indeed, although most citizens are uninformed about politics (see Bennett 1996) and fail to demonstrate constraint across issues (Converse 1964; Kalmoe 2020), self-identification as liberal or conservative is a powerful force in politics (Jost 2006, 2021; Rigoli in press). How, then, can ideology be both dead and alive?

In our view, much of the debate centres around how ideology is operationalised (see Table 19.2). Whereas political scientists often focus on the consistency of one’s attitudes across policies (Federico, Deason and Fisher 2012), the stability of one’s responses across time (Sears and Funk 1999; Sears and Valentino 1997) or the relationship between higher-order, abstract political beliefs and lower-order issue positions (Converse 1964), psychologists take a more forgiving approach and focus on self-identification (Jost 2006; Rigoli in press) or other highly stable intergroup attitudes like right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer 1996) and social dominance orientation (Ho et al 2015). Indeed, the single-item measure of ideological self-identification is arguably the most commonly used measure of ideology in political psychology (for an excellent review of this literature, see Jost 2021). Thus, the debate isn’t about ideology per se, but rather, conceptually distinct psychological phenomena that unfortunately use the same terminology.

Table 19.2 Non-exhaustive list of the different operationalisations of ideology commonly used in the literature

	Operationalisation	Example citation
Operational ideology	Average level of liberal vs conservative stances across two or more issue positions	Federico et al (2012); Stimson (2004)
Symbolic ideology	Self-identification as liberal or conservative; affective attachment to a political orientation or party	Conover and Feldman (1981); Brandt et al (2019)
Conservatism	Self-identification as liberal or conservative	Jost (2006); Rigoli (in press);
Ideological constraint	Strength of the relationship between two or more political attitudes (horizontal or vertical); interdependence between multiple political attitudes	Converse (1964)
Horizontal	Strength of the relationship between two or more issues at the same level of abstraction (e.g., policy support)	Federico et al (2012)
Vertical	Strength of the relationship between broad, abstract beliefs (e.g., liberal vs conservative self-identification) and policy-specific attitudes	Converse (1964)
Longitudinal	Stability of a response across assessment occasions (e.g., support for welfare assessed 6 months apart)	Sears and Funk (1999)
Belief network	Strength of the relationship between network of nodes or attitudes that functionally interact with each other	Brandt et al (2019)
Social ideological attitudes	Stable individual differences in two foundational intergroup attitudes	Duckitt (2001)
Right-wing authoritarianism	Tendency to a) follow conventions, b) submit to authorities and c) aggress against norm violators	Altemeyer (1996); Choma et al (2020)
Social dominance orientation	Preference for group-based hierarchy	Ho et al (2015)

Given that scholars have mostly spoken past each other when debating the presence (or lack) of ideology in the public, future research must develop a shared definition of ideology. Although this is an obvious suggestion, numerous operationalisations of ideology pervade the literature, including a) two or more functionally interdependent issue positions (Campbell et al 1960); b) a network of beliefs (Brandt, Sibley and Osborne 2019); c) social ideological attitudes like right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation (Duckitt 2001); and d) self-identification (Jost 2006), to name just a few (see Table19.2). And while each of these research traditions has made important contributions to the understanding of ideology, the confluence of diverse concepts using the same term has created unnecessary confusion in the field. One potential solution to this problem is to reserve the term “ideology” for studies examining a set of inter-connected beliefs and to reference the more identity-based measures (e.g., self-identification as liberal to conservative) as “symbolic ideology”. We suspect that additional inter-disciplinary collaborations between political scientists and psychologists will help further refine the operationalisation of ideology.

In addition to finding common ground between concepts, future research will need to acknowledge that the over-reliance of data from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD; see Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan 2010) nations has hampered our understanding of ideology. Indeed, emerging work reveals that the symbolic aspects of social and economic conservatism correlate positively in only a few select countries (e.g., see Malka, Lelkes and Soto 2019). Likewise, a recent meta analysis containing over half a million participants from 70 nations demonstrates that the negative association between Openness to Experience and conservatism is attenuated in non-WEIRD nations (Osborne, Satherley and Sibley 2024). Finally, the association between the symbolic component of ideology and political knowledge varies greatly by culture, with six distinct patterns emerging across 45 nations (de Keersmaecker et al 2024). These (and other) findings highlight the problems of assuming research pursued almost exclusively in North American and Western European nations provides universal truths and illustrates the need to expand our research focus beyond such a narrow database (see also Rivera Pichardo, Vargas-Salfate and Jost 2022).

Multi-level examinations are also needed to identify how the macro-level context impacts individual-level associations between ideology and its antecedents and consequences (see Osborne, Sengupta and Sibley 2019). Indeed, research reveals that the relationship between system-justifying ideologies and wellbeing is stronger for those who live in neighbourhoods marked by high (versus low) levels of inequality, presumably because these individuals have the most to gain from overlooking structural inequities (Sengupta et al 2017). Factors like the looseness or tightness of a culture – a measure of how strongly social norms and sanctions operate within a society (see Gelfand, Nishii and Raver 2006) – could also impact both mean levels and the strength of the relationship between symbolic ideology and important socio-political outcomes. Indeed, state-level cultural tightness correlates positively with Conscientiousness and negatively with Openness to Experience (Harrington and Gelfand 2014) – two traits that reliably correlate with conservatism (albeit in opposing directions; see Osborne, Satherley and Sibley 2024). Thus, the broader macro-level context can impact the relationship between individual-level psychological processes and ideology in ways that are currently poorly understood.

Additionally, further research is needed to examine the relational underpinnings of the symbolic component to ideology. Indeed, multiple meta analyses have examined both the epistemic (Jost et al 2003; Osborne, Satherley and Sibley 2024; Sibley, Osborne and Duckitt 2012) and existential (Jost, Stern et al 2017) correlates of symbolic ideology, showing that the respective need for certainty and the salience of threat correlate positively with conservatism. However, related work examining how the need to belong contributes to political beliefs is comparatively lacking. Bahamondes et al (2021) do, however, show that individual differences in the relational approach motivation correlate positively with felt belongingness, both directly and indirectly, via the endorsement of a conservative belief system (namely, system justification). Moreover, these results replicate across ethnic majority and ethnic minority group members. Nevertheless, more research is needed to explicate the relational underpinnings of political belief systems.

Finally, more work is needed to unpack the ways in which people understand society through an ideological framework. To these ends, Bahamondes et al (2024) assess how people’s lay understanding of society impacts their wellbeing and attitudes towards inequality in Chile. Across two studies involving face-to-face interviews and content analyses of participants’ free responses to the question “what is society?”, Bahamondes et al reveal that most participants (76.9 per cent) view society as a mechanism for fostering social harmony, cooperation and interactions with others. These participants also reported the highest levels of wellbeing and the least support for challenging the system. In contrast, two smaller groups of participants emerged who focused on distinct aspects of society. One group (7.5 per cent) viewed society as a set of informal structures that support people’s welfare and create social norms, whereas another group (15.6 per cent) took a critical approach and highlighted the ways in which society foments inequality, distrust and myriad other social problems. These results provide a nuanced, mixed-method validation of the palliative effects of ideology and further demonstrate that the ideological lens through which people view society critically shapes their attitudes toward social change.

Conclusion

Depending on their disciplinary background, researchers are likely to come to very different conclusions about the vitality of ideology within the electorate. On one hand, scholars including Converse (1964), Bennett (1996) and Kalmoe (2020) demonstrate that most voters fail to think about politics in a constrained way. On the other hand, prominent theorists like Moscovici (1961) argue that ideologies and other meaning-making systems are foundational to our understanding of human behaviour. Accordingly, Jost (2006, 2021) and others illustrate the varied ways in which ideology affects political life. We reconcile these conflicting perspectives by conceding that ideology as a constrained belief system is confined to the most politically knowledgeable (see Osborne, Satherley and Sibely 2022). But the symbolic, identity-based component of ideology (namely, self-placement on a liberal-to-conservative scale) is nonetheless an omnipotent force in politics that is rooted in underlying motivational needs (and personality traits) and impacts various outcomes including wellbeing and support for social change. Moving forward, scholars will need to work together to develop a mutually agreed-upon definition of ideology, examine more closely the antecedents and consequences of political belief systems across WEIRD and non-WEIRD nations, assess the multi-level, contextual factors that impact the manifestation of ideology in the public and identify why ideology impacts wellbeing. By taking these core steps, scholars will increase our understanding of the multi-faceted nature of political belief systems and help ideology retain its throne as a concept par excellence in political psychology.

References

Altemeyer, B. (1996) The Authoritarian Specter, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bahamondes, J., Osborne, D., Obregón, F. Ortiz, R., Álvarez, J., Herrán, N. and Ávila, I. (2024) “Can lay representations of society confer palliative benefits? A mixed-methods approach from a system justification perspective”, Manuscript in preparation.

Bahamondes, J., Sengupta, N. K., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2021) “Examining the relational underpinnings and consequences of system-justifying beliefs: Explaining the palliative effects of system justification”, British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 60, no. 3, 1027–1050. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12440

Bahamondes, J., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2019) “‘We look (and feel) better through system justifying lenses’: Evidence of the palliative function of ideology among the disadvantaged”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 45, no. 9, 1391–1408. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219829178

Bahamondes, J., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2021) “System justification and perceptions of group-based discrimination: Investigating the temporal order of the ideologically motivated minimisation 325.(or exaggeration) of discrimination across low- and high-status groups”, Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 12, no. 4, 431–441. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620929452

Bahamondes, J., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2022) “System justification or social dominance? A multilevel test of the ideological motivators of perceived discrimination”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 48, no. 7, 1134–1148. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211036020

Becker, J. C. (2020) “Ideology and the promotion of social change”, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, vol. 34, 6–11. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2019.10.005

Bennett, S. E. (1996) “‘Know-nothings’ revisited again”, Political Behavior, vol. 18, no. 3, 219–233. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01498600

Bennett, S. E. (2003) “Is the public’s ignorance of politics trivial?”, Critical Review, vol. 15, no. 3–4, 307–337. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/08913810308443585

Bizumic, B. and Duckitt, J. (2018) “Investigating right wing authoritarianism with a Very Short Authoritarianism scale”, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, vol. 6, no. 1, 129–150. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v6i1.835

Bowes, S. M., Clark, C. J., Conway III, L. G., Costello, T., Osborne, D., Tetlock, P. E. and van Prooijen, J.-W. (2024) “An adversarial collaboration on rigidity of the right, rigidity of extremes or symmetry: The answer depends on the question”, Manuscript under review.

Brandt, M. J. (2013) “Do the disadvantaged legitimize the social system? A large-scale test of the status–legitimacy hypothesis”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 104, no. 5, 765–785. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031751

Brandt, M. J., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2019) “What is central to political belief system networks?”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 45, no. 9, 1352–1364. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218824354

Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E. and Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American Voter, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Carney, D. R., Jost, J. T., Gosling, S. D. and Potter, J. (2008) “The secret lives of liberals and conservatives: Personality profiles, interaction styles and the things they leave behind”, Political Psychology, vol. 29, no. 6, 807–840. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467–9221.2008.00668.x

Chirumbolo, A. and Leone, L. (2010) “Personality and politics: The role of the HEXACO model of personality in predicting ideology and voting”, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 49, no. 1, 43–48. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.03.004

Choma, B., Hodson, G., Jagayat, A. and Hoffarth, M. R. (2020) “Right-wing ideology as a predictor of collective action: A test across four political issue domains”, Political Psychology, vol. 41, no. 2, 303–322. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12615

Conover, P. J. and Feldman, S. (1981) “The origins and meaning of liberal/conservative self-identifications”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 25, no. 4, 617–645. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.2307/2110756

Converse, P. E. (1964) “The nature of belief systems in mass publics”, in Apter, D. E. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, Glencoe IL: The Free Press of Glencoe, 206–261.

Converse, P. E. (2000) “Assessing the capacity of mass electorates”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 3, 331–353. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.331

de Keersmaecker, J., Schmid, K., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2024) “The association between political orientation and political knowledge in 45 nations”, Scientific Reports, vol. 14, 2590. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53114-z

de Neve, J.-E. (2015) “Personality, childhood experience and political ideology”, Political Psychology, vol. 36, no. 1, 55–73. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12075

Duckitt, J. (2001) “A dual-process cognitive-motivational theory of ideology and prejudice”, in Zanna, M. P. (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 33, Amsterdam: Academic Press, Elsevier: 41–113. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(01)80004–6

Echebarria-Echabe, A. and Fernández-Guede, E. (2006). “Effects of terrorism on attitudes and ideological orientation”, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 36, no. 2, 259–265. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.294

Eidelman, S., Crandall, C. S., Goodman, J. A. and Blanchar, J. C. (2012) “Low-effort thought promotes political conservatism”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 6, 808–820. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212439213

Federico, C. M., Deason, G. and Fisher, E. L. (2012) “Ideological asymmetry in the relationship between epistemic motivation and political attitudes”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 103, no. 3, 381–398. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029063

Federico, C. M., Fisher, E. L. and Deason, G. (2011) “Expertise and the ideological consequences of the authoritarian predisposition”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 4, 686–708. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfr026

Gelfand, M. J., Nishii, L. H. and Raver, J. L. (2006) “On the nature and importance of cultural tightness-looseness”, Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 91, no. 6, 1225–1244. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.6.1225

Glick, P. and Fiske, S. T. (1996) “The ambivalent sexism inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 70, no. 3, 491–512. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.491

Golec, A. (2002) “Need for cognitive closure and political conservatism: Studies on the nature of the relationship”, Polish Psychological Bulletin, vol. 33, no. 4, 5–12.

Gonzáles, R., Chayinska, M., Plaza, A., Bargsted, M. and Miranda, D. (2022) “A longitudinal examination of the factors that facilitate and hinder support for conservative and progressive social movements”, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 52, no. 1, 1031–1046. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2893

Gramsci, A. (1971/2005) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Hoare, Q. and Smith, G. N. (trans.), New York NY: International Publishers.

Harrington, J. R. and Gelfand, M. J. (2014) “Tightness–looseness across the 50 United States”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111, no. 22, 7990–7995. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1317937111

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. and Norenzayan, A. (2010) “Most people are not WEIRD”, Nature, vol. 466, 29. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1038/466029a

Ho, A. K., Sidanius, J., Kteily, N., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Pratto, F., Henkel, K. E., Foels, R. and Stewart, A. L. (2015) “The nature of social dominance orientation: Theorizing and measuring preferences for intergroup inequality using the new SDO₇ scale”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 109, no. 6, 1003–1028. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000033

Houkamau, C. A., Bahamondes, J., Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (2024) “Region-level Pākehā warmth towards Māori enhances collective action intentions: An extension of the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA)”, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, vol. 98, 101918. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2023.101918

Huang, Y., Osborne, D., Sibley, C. G. and Davies, P. G. (2014) “The precious vessel: Ambivalent sexism and opposition to elective and traumatic abortion”, Sex Roles, vol. 71, no. 11–12, 436–449. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-014-0423-3

Jost, J. T. (2006) “The end of the end of ideology”, American Psychologist, vol. 61, no. 7, 651–670. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.7.651

Jost, J. T. (2017) “Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political psychology”, Political Psychology, vol. 38, no. 2, 167–208. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12407

Jost, J. T. (2021) Left and Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jost, J. T., Becker, J. C., Osborne, D. and Badaan, V. (2017) “Missing in (collective) action: Ideology, system justification and the motivational antecedents of protest behavior”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 26, no. 2, 99–108. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417690633

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W. and Sulloway, F. J. (2003) “Political conservatism as motivated social cognition”, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 3, 339–375. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339

Jost, J. T. and Hunyady, O. (2003) “The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology”, European Review of Social Psychology, vol. 13, no. 1, 111–153. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280240000046

Jost, J. T. and Hunyady, O. (2005) “Antecedents and consequences of system-justifying ideologies”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 14, no. 5, 260–265. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963–7214.2005.00377.x

Jost, J. T., Stern, C., Rule, N. O. and Sterling, J. (2017) “The politics of fear: Is there an ideological asymmetry in existential motivation?”, Social Cognition, vol. 35, no. 4, 324–353. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2017.35.4.324

Jost, J. T., van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C. and Hardin, C. D. (2018) “Ideological asymmetries in conformity, desire for shared reality and the spread of misinformation”, Current Opinion in Psychology, vol. 23, 77–83. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.01.003

Kalmoe, N. P. (2020) “Uses and abuses of ideology in political psychology”, Political Psychology, vol. 41, no. 4, 771–793. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12650

Kemmelmeier, M. (1997) “Need for closure and political orientation among German university students”, Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 137, no. 6, 787–789. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/00224549709595501

Leone, L., Chirumbolo, A. and Desimoni, M. (2012) “The impact of the HEXACO personality model in predicting socio-political attitudes: The moderating role of interest in politics”, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 52, no. 3, 416–421. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.10.049

Liekefett, L. and Becker, J. C. (2022) “Low system justification is associated with support for both progressive and reactionary social change”, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 52, no. 7, 1015–1030. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2883

Lilly, K. J., González, R., Houkamau, C. A., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2024) “Examining the antecedents, prevalence and trajectories of reactionary collective action intentions among Europeans over time”, Manuscript under review.

Malka, A., Lelkes, Y. and Soto, C. J. (2019) “Are cultural and economic conservatism positively correlated? A large-scale cross-national test”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 49, no. 3, 1045–1069. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000072

Mason, L. (2018) “Ideologues without issues: The polarizing consequences of ideological identities”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 82, no. S1, 866–887. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfy005

McCoy, S. K., Wellman, J. D., Cosley, B., Saslow, L. and Epel, E. (2013) “Is the belief in meritocracy palliative for members of low-status groups? Evidence for a benefit for self-esteem and physical health via perceived control”, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 43, no. 4, 307–318. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1959

Moscovici, S. (1961) La psychanalyse: Son Image et son public, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Nail, P. R. and McGregor, I. (2009) “Conservative shift among liberals and conservatives following 9/11/01”, Social Justice Research, vol. 22, no. 2, 231–240. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0098-z

Napier, J. L., Bettinsoli, M. L. and Suppes, A. (2020) “The palliative function of system-justifying ideologies”, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, vol. 34, 129–134. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.03.002

Napier, J. L. and Jost, J. T. (2008). “Why are conservatives happier than liberals?”, Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 6, 565–572. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467–9280.2008.02124.x

Napier, J. L., Thorisdottir, H. and Jost, J. T. (2010) “The joy of sexism? A multinational investigation of hostile and benevolent justifications for gender inequality and their relations to subjective well-being”, Sex Roles, vol. 62, no. 7–8, 405–419. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-009-9712-7

Nilsson, A. and Jost, J. T. (2020) “The authoritarian-conservatism nexus”, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, vol. 34, 148–154. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.03.003

Ochoa, D. P., Manalastas, E. J., Deguchi, M. and Louis, W. R. (2019) “Mobilising men: Ally identities and collective action in Japan and the Philippines”, Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, vol. 13, no. e14. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/prp.2018.30

Osborne, D., Dufresne, Y., Eady, G., Lees-Marshment, J. and van der Linden, C. (2017) “Is the personal always political? Education and political knowledge strengthen the relationship between Openness and ideology”, Journal of Individual Differences, vol. 38, no. 3, 133–143. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000230

Osborne, D., Jost, J. T., Becker, J. C., Badaan, V. and Sibley, C. G. (2019) “Protesting to challenge or defend the system? A system justification perspective on collective action”, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2, 244–269. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2522

Osborne, D., Satherley, N. and Sibley, C. G. (2022) “Lost in the supermarket? A commentary on Gries, Müller and Jost (2022)”, Psychological Inquiry, vol. 33, no. 2, 95–100. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2022.2065132

Osborne, D., Satherley, N. and Sibley, C. G. (2024) “Personality and ideology: A meta-analysis of the reliable, but non-causal, association between Openness and conservatism”, in Mintz, A. and Terris, L. (eds) Oxford Handbook of Behavioural Political Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 315–356. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190634131.013.35

Osborne, D., Satherley, N., Yogeeswaran, K., Hawi, D. and Sibley, C. G. (2019) “White nationalism and multiculturalism support: Investigating the interactive effects of white identity and national attachment on support for multiculturalism”, New Zealand Journal of Psychology, vol. 47, no. 1, 65–74.

Osborne, D., Sengupta, N. and Sibley, C. G. (2019) “System justification theory at 25: Evaluating a paradigm shift in psychology and looking forward”, British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 58, no. 2, 340–361. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12302

Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (2012) “Does personality matter? Openness correlates with vote choice, but particularly for politically sophisticated voters”, Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 46, no. 6, 743–751. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.09.001

Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (2013) “Through rose-colored glasses: System-justifying beliefs dampen the effects of relative deprivation on well-being and political mobilization”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 8, 991–1004. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213487997

Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (2015) “Within the limits of civic training: Education moderates the relationship between openness and political attitudes”, Political Psychology, vol. 36, no. 3, 295–313. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12070

Popkin, S. L. (1994) The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns, 2^nd edition, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Prusaczyk, E. and Hodson, G. (2018) “Left-right differences in abortion policy support in America: Clarifying the role of sex and sexism in a nationally representative 2016 sample”, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 127, 22–25. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2018.01.030

Puga, I. and Moya, C. (2022) “Ideology, legitimation and collective action: Evidence from Chile on the mechanism of ideological inversion”, Social Forces, vol. 101, no. 3, 1519–1551. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac032

Reyna, C., Harris, K., Bellovary, A., Armenta, A. and Zarate, M. (2022) “The good ol’ days: White identity, racial nostalgia and the perpetuation of racial extremism”, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 25, no. 3, 81–103. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211057454

Rigoli, F. (in press) “Ideology shapes evaluation of history within the general population”, Political Psychology. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12971

Rivera Pichardo, E. J., Vargas-Salfate, S. and Jost, J. T. (2022) “Political psychology in the global South: Collective memory, intergroup relations, ideology and political participation”, in Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (eds) Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 601–623. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779104.041

Schickler, E. (2016) Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965, New York NY: Princeton University Press.

Sears, D. O. and Funk, C. L. (1999) “Evidence of the long-term persistence of adults’ political predispositions”, Journal of Politics, vol. 61, no. 1, 1–28. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.2307/2647773

Sears, D. O. and Valentino, N. A. (1997) “Politics matters: Political events as catalysts for pre-adult socialization”, American Political Science Review, vol. 91, no. 1, 45–65. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.2307/2952258

Sengupta, N. K., Greaves, L. M., Osborne, D. and Sibley, C. G. (2017) “The sigh of the oppressed: The palliative effects of ideology are stronger for people living in highly unequal neighbourhoods”, British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 56, no. 3, 437–454. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12192

Sibley, C. G., Osborne, D. and Duckitt, J. (2012) “Personality and political orientation: Meta-analysis and test of a threat-constraint model”, Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 46, no. 6, 664–677. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.08.002

Stimson, J. A. (2004) Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, E. F., Mavor, K. I. and McGarty, C. (2012) “Social identities facilitate and encapsulate action-relevant constructs: A test of the social identity model of collective action”, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 15, no. 1, 75–88. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430211413619

Thomas, E. F. and Osborne, D. (2022) “Protesting for stability or change? Definitional and conceptual issues in the study of reactionary, conservative and progressive collective actions”, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 52, no. 7, 985–993. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2912

Thomas, E. F., Zubielevitch, E., Sibley, C. G. and Osborne, D. (2020) “Testing the social identity model of collective action longitudinally and across structurally disadvantaged and advantaged groups”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 46, no. 6, 823–838. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219879111

Thórisdóttir, H. and Jost, J. T. (2011) “Motivated closed-mindedness mediates the effect of threat on political conservatism”, Political Psychology, vol. 32, no. 5, 785–811. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467–9221.2011.00840.x

Van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T. and Spears, R. (2008) “Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: A quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives”, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 134, no. 4, 504–535. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.4.504

Van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T., Spears, R. and Bettache, K. (2011) “Can moral convictions motivate the advantaged to challenge social inequality? Extending the social identity model of collective action”, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 14, no. 5, 735–753. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430210395637

Vargas-Salfate, S. (2019) “The role of personal control in the palliative function of system justification among indigenous and non-indigenous Peruvian students / El rol del control personal en la función paliativa de la justificación del sistema entre la población indígena y no indígena de estudiantes peruanos”, Revista de Psicología Social, vol. 34, no. 1, 168–201. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/02134748.2018.1537650

Vargas-Salfate, S., Paez, D., Khan, S. S., Liu, J. H. and Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2018) “System justification enhances well-being: A longitudinal analysis of the palliative function of system justification in 18 countries”, British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 57, no. 3, 567–590. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12254

20. Non-human ideology

Samuel Johnson and animal studies

James P. Carson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-26

Introduction

In this chapter I show how animal studies or the non-human turn in scholarship enables us to understand the Enlightenment man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709–84) as a more modern figure than he has often been thought. Johnson is a major author in the English literary canon, whose stature was emphasised in the post-World War II period in college courses on “The Age of Johnson.” He was the centre of a circle of authors and artists in the famous Club established in 1764, a club that included Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell and such luminaries as Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith. Johnson’s literary works are representative both of neoclassicism (poetic imitations of Juvenal) and of the Enlightenment (the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, a widely disseminated, alphabetically organised compendium; and three sets of periodical essays, in the tradition of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator, a work that brought philosophy into the bourgeois public sphere). Animal studies can either support or challenge a view of the Enlightenment as based on the domination of nature. Johnson, however, is not merely representative of his time. He is idiosyncratic, even more in his life than his works; and, because he is the subject of the greatest biography in the English language (Boswell’s 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson), Johnson the man is better known than any author of his time. Several Johnson texts deserve a place in the canon of animal studies: Idler, No. 17 (devoted mostly to a condemnation of vivisection); Idler, No. 22 (the vulture’s view of humankind, a fable featuring talking animals); and Rambler, No. 41 (the advantages of memory). The subject of Johnson’s most read work – the oriental tale Rasselas – is the choice of life. That narrative suggests that Johnson would agree with Adam Phillips’ contribution to the list of exclusively human characteristics: “people … could be understood as seemingly the only animals that might … think of themselves or describe themselves, as choosing their lives” (Phillips 2024: 46). Another reason to consider Johnson in a chapter on animal studies is that he is famous as the companion of a cat named Hodge. Previous critics have not specifically addressed the question of the animal in Johnson.

After offering some comments on animal studies and on ideology in literary criticism, I place Johnson’s thinking about animals in relation to his political ideology. I situate Johnson in relation to other 18^th-century writers on animals, pre-eminently the natural historian Georges-Louis Lelerc, Comte de Buffon. Johnson’s project of defining the human – an aim central to his designation as a moralist – relies on a hierarchical opposition between man and beast. However, I examine how other dimensions of Johnson’s life and thought work against the sharp divide between humans and animals – especially Johnson’s concerns about cruelty, hunting as a contradictory practice in terms of social class and of relations with indigenous populations, Johnson’s conviction that animals are happier than human beings and his interactions with pets. My analysis constitutes a prehistory of the postmodern interrogation of the distinction between humans and animals.

A monstrous thinking device unhappily attached to a suffering animal body

The Life of Johnson is a great literary work, in part because of the way it presents both the affection and the conflict between biographer and biographical subject. Readers have been struck by Boswell’s account of Johnson’s physical peculiarities. From early adulthood, the large and ungainly Johnson developed tics and convulsions. Boswell uses animal similes to describe these eruptions of corporeality. Johnson is like a cow, a hen and a whale:

In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen … . Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a Whale.

(Boswell 1970: 343)

The capacity of speech, that defining characteristic of humanity, is diminished in Johnson’s case by involuntary vocalisations resembling those of livestock, poultry and marine mammals. The “half whistle,” though not an animal sound, is inarticulate and often refers to the human–canine relationship. The sixth definition of the noun whistle in Johnson’s Dictionary is “A call, such as sportsmen use to their dogs”. When Johnson “talks for victory” in competitive conversation, Boswell represents him metaphorically as a bull, tossing and goring his opponents (Boswell 1970: 400). Because of the roughness of his conversational manner, Johnson resembled a bear. The relationship between Boswell and Johnson is tied up with animals. On an individual psychological level, the biographer’s simultaneous hero-worship of and (unconscious) antagonism toward his biographical subject are similar to the ideological legitimation of and resistance to the dominant social order. While Boswell’s animal imagery may derive from Oedipal aggression, Boswell’s insistence on Johnson’s physical peculiarities is a conscious nod to Johnson’s own theory of biography. In his essay on biography in The Rambler, Johnson praises Sallust’s portrait of Catiline for using the body to delineate the mind (Johnson 1969: 3: 321).

Boswell does not reduce a great writer to a bestial object of ridicule but presents instead a strikingly modern view of the tragic human condition. The modernist Franz Kafka “saw both himself” and the talking ape from his story A Report to an Academy “as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies” (Coetzee 2003: 75). This unhappy conjunction of body and mind is fundamentally a human disease. Non-human animals live in greater corporeal–mental harmony. They seem “to have their minds exactly adapted to their bodies” (Johnson 1969: 3: 222). According to Boswell, the human being is “a composite animal” (Boswell 1970: 1135) – a version of what Buffon calls “homo duplex”, the human beset by the mind–body conflict from which non-human animals are happily free (Buffon 1780: 3: 264, 270–71).

Theories and debates in animal studies

Animal studies is an inter-disciplinary field, marked by debates and ideological conflict. Significant work has been done in philosophy, history, literary and cultural studies, biology and science studies, anthropology, sociology, religious studies and political science. The main concepts for addressing the question of the animal are opposition, hierarchy, rights or welfare, relationality and hybridity. The most influential theorist in the field is Jacques Derrida, who argues that in the history of Western philosophy humans have been defined in opposition to the animal (in the general singular) and that this binary opposition entails a hierarchy, which goes back to Genesis and the granting to “man” of dominion over animals. This tradition, moreover, denies the animality of the human – animality like that which Boswell identified in Johnson. The general singular animal makes no distinctions among species, so that great apes and cetaceans are lumped together with insects and worms: “Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of this definite article (‘the Animal’ and not ‘animals’) … are all the living things that man does not recognise as his fellows, his neighbors or his brothers” (Derrida 2008: 34).

Since “animal” is just a word (un mot), Derrida coins the term animot, a term in which one also hears the French plural animaux – thus confronting the problem of the general singular. Derrida describes how he is seen naked by his pussycat, “this irreplaceable living being,” “an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (Derrida 2008: 9). Derrida thus distinguishes between a theoretical ideology, which conceptualises the animal, and practical consciousness, which understands the cat in its irreducible singularity. He denies the abyssal rupture between man and animal in favour of “a heterogenous multiplicity of the living” (Derrida 2008: 31). In criticizing the dominant discourse about “man”, Derrida confronts an ideology in the sense of a philosophy. He re-inscribes the conventional opposition between reason and instinct as that between human response and animal reaction. Reaction is “the law of nature” and response “the law of freedom” (Derrida 2008: 83). From response derives responsibility, the possession of an ethical stance. But Derrida everywhere interrogates binary oppositions that bring hierarchy along with them, leading him to insist on a paradox about ethics: the essence of ethics resides in “casting doubt on … one’s own being-ethical” (Derrida 2008: 126). That is, at the same time as the human is defined as a moral being, the arrogance of assuming such a status calls into question one’s moral standing.

In its engagement with the question of the animal, the Anglo-American tradition of moral philosophy has focused on animal rights and welfare. Peter Singer, the author of the best-selling Animal Liberation, is a utilitarian philosopher, influenced by Jeremy Bentham and his famous footnote on animals in The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Although Singer’s work derives from a different tradition than Derrida’s, both thinkers cite Bentham with approval and both deny the gulf between humans and non-human animals. In Singer’s view, the moral calculations involved in determining the greatest aggregate good necessitate the inclusion of non-human animals. Singer cites Bentham’s formula about equal consideration – “Each to count for one and none for more than one” (Singer 1995: 5) – in his argument that “each” should include non-human animals, who now have a place in the sphere of moral concern. All sentient beings have interests that ought to be recognised. Singer objects to “speciesism”, a term coined by Richard Ryder to refer to the human prejudice involved in weighing human interests more heavily than those of animals.

Though Bentham does not use the term speciesism, in his critique of cruelty to animals he had already formulated the concept, on the model of racism. Before his concluding queries about animals – “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” – Bentham states that “the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being” should be made to suffer. Moreover, he provides the foundation for Singer’s controversial claim that if their lack of speech and reason justifies experiments on animals, then we could with equal justice experiment on human infants or brain-damaged or senile individuals; according to Bentham, “a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant” (Bentham 1948: 311n1).

The objections to utilitarian ethics include its quantitative nature and its de-emphasis of individuals in favour of the aggregate. A Kantian philosopher like Tom Regan rejects Singer’s animal welfare in favour of animal rights, though he agrees with Singer and Bentham that rights (or interests) belong not only to those animals that possess rational autonomy but those that reach the lower standard of sentience (Regan 2007: 26–27, 28). A philosopher like Cora Diamond, in the tradition of Wittgenstein, thinks that Singer is on the wrong track in assessing the empirical characteristics of different animal species – for example, attending “to research indicating that a scallop is more sentient than an oyster and therefore less edible” in ethical dining (Sanneh 2024: 61). For Diamond, what matters is what we have made of animals culturally and historically. This “contextualist approach” is based on “the actual practices and relationships that give our lives meaning” (Finlayson 2023: 8).

Donna Haraway, whose work is grounded in science studies, thinks about animals in terms of relationality and hybridity. She is famous for the concept of the cyborg, for theorising the way in which “The machinic is internal to the organic and vice versa in irreversible ways” (Haraway 2007: 363). Haraway borrows from Bruno Latour the concept of nature’s cultures. Cultures are not secondary phenomena based on an unchanging, singular nature. Challenging the ideological tendency to naturalise what is historically contingent, Latour and Haraway deny that cultures are any more relativistic than different conceptions of nature (Latour 1993: 97–98). On the ontogenetic level, Haraway details her relationship with companion animals like her Australian Shepherd, Cayenne Pepper. Engaged in the shared activity of agility training, Haraway and Cayenne form a relationship that transforms both woman and dog – as if down to the level of DNA in “symbiogenesis” (Haraway 2008: 15).

On the phylogenetic level, Haraway challenges the conventional narrative of the domestication of wolves leading to the making of dogs. Rather than a story of human dominance in making animals for guarding and hunting, Haraway proposes the concept of co-evolution, in which there is considerable “dog agency in the drama of genetics and co-habitation” (Haraway 2007: 365). Haraway aims to see the evolution of dogs from the canine point of view. She challenges anthropo-centrism by arguing that “If dogs are a human technology, so also is the reverse true” (Haraway 2007: 367). Humans not only provide food, shelter and medical care for their companion animals, but they also seem subservient to them in cleaning up their poop.

Another way that science has challenged the conventional account of evolution is by situating the Darwinian struggle for existence within a 19^th-century ideology of male-dominated capitalist competition. Based on studies of canid play, Marc Bekoff finds more cooperation and altruism than competition in evolution. He is led to speculate “I also wonder if our view of the world would have been different had Charles Darwin been a female”, given that “Women tend to ‘see’ more cooperation in nature than do men” ( Bekoff 2007: 84). In the context of ideology analysis, we might be dissatisfied with Bekoff’s recourse to identity politics, as if the single characteristic of biological sex invariably determined the direction of scientific observation. In a later work, co-authored with Jessica Pierce, Bekoff discusses Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902). Identifying Kropotkin as a “Russian anarchist”, Bekoff and Pierce cite his argument that “increased fitness” and “reproductive success” result less from aggressive competition than from “cooperation and mutual aid”. In similar phrasing to that about women scientists, Bekoff and Pierce state “we might wonder what the intellectual history of evolution would look like had Kropotkin’s ideas been taken more seriously” ( Bekoff and Peirce 2009: 57). The phrasing of these two instances of counterfactual historical speculation – “I also wonder”; “we might wonder” – suggests similarly simplified analyses of the social determination of thought: an explicit political commitment (to anti-capitalism, cooperation, egalitarianism and the creative genius of the masses) structures scientific observation in the same way as does biological sex.

Ideology in literary study

In literary and cultural study, ideological analysis has mostly been the province of Marxist critics. In the last half-century such critics have questioned the definition of ideology as “a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge” (Williams 1977: 55). A critic like Raymond Williams rejects an unexamined conception of science (equivalent to historical materialism) that is free from “ideological bias” (Williams 1977: 64). Avoiding economic determinism, he views ideology, consciousness and culture as part of the social material process, not a second-order reflection of the mode of production. Literary works and other aesthetic productions should not be understood in terms of “reduction, abstraction or assimilation” (Williams 1977: 71). Instead, they should be analysed as integral parts of the social material process, which are accessible to us only in material form.

Terry Eagleton defines ideology as the aspects of culture used to legitimate the dominant social order. Legitimation entails making “humanity … feel reasonably at home in the world” by finding harmony between personal identity and the natural and social environment (Eagleton 1990: 123). At the same time as cultural products can legitimate, they pose a challenge to the dominant ideology by the very fact that “in an increasingly instrumentalised world”, art and the aesthetics foster a “harmonious realisation of one’s powers as a delightful end in itself” (Eagleton 2024: 5). Ideology analysis must deal with cultural formations that embody the contradiction between legitimation and resistance. In modernity, the division of labour, fragmentation and specialisation have made society incomprehensible and unrepresentable. In these circumstances, ideology supplies “an imaginary model” of social life that can “be grasped … by everyday consciousness” (Eagleton 1991: 150–51). In its examination of both the centring (feeling at home) and decentring (alienation) of humanity, Eagleton’s analysis of ideology shares the project of animal studies.

Stuart Hall defines ideology as “the mental frameworks – the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought and the systems of representation – which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.” Like Eagleton, Hall defines ideology as a way of making sense of an incomprehensible modern world. Also like Eagleton, he is concerned with ideology as both legitimation and resistance. Hall formulates the legitimating function of ideology by referring to “its role in the generation and maintenance of hegemony” (Hall 2021: 140). The concept of hegemony has proven valuable in the analysis of literature and other cultural productions because it examines the ways in which the dominant order is sustained by ideological means rather than directly by force. Instead of maintaining control primarily through “‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination’”, hegemony operates through the “saturation of the whole process of living” (Williams 1977: 110). Hegemony, moreover, foregrounds the idea of contestation.

The most powerful ideological analysis of 18^th-century English literature in particular is that by Michael McKeon. In a definition close to that of Hall, McKeon considers ideology to be

discourse whose purpose is to mediate and explain apparently intractable social problems. … To explain the condition of status inconsistency is not to explain it away, but to render it intelligible. In fact, the very plausibility of ideological explanation depends on the degree to which it appears to do justice to the contradictory social reality that it seeks to explain.

(McKeon 2000: 392–93)

Ideology for McKeon is not false consciousness, as that would be merely “to explain … away” social problems. The capacity of an ideology to account for contradiction is crucial in McKeon’s Marxist version of ideological analysis. No author, text or literary period is monolithic; no convincing historical account is mono-causal. Contradiction and contestation appear both in the simultaneity of different ideologies (residual, dominant and emergent) and in the dialectical formation (the sublation of thesis and antithesis) of any particular ideology.

For the period 1600 to 1740, McKeon elaborates a dialectical progression from aristocratic to progressive to conservative ideology – a pattern of reversal on the model of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Around 1740, these three ideologies were simultaneously present as residual (aristocratic), dominant (progressive) and emergent (conservative). Aristocratic ideology maintains that birth equals worth. This equivalence finds semantic expression in words (like noble, gentle and honour) that refer to both social rank and moral character. However, in the 17^th century, aristocratic ideology faced a crisis in the relationship between social status and inner moral worth. This crisis of status inconsistency appears, for example, in the figure of the younger son in the system of primogeniture. Despite having the same birth, the elder and younger brothers in landed or titled families have very different wealth or property to support their status. Also, the inflation of honours (including the purchase of aristocratic titles) and increasing social mobility call into question the equivalence of social status and virtue. Moreover, two different modes of determining social status come into conflict – the qualitative criterion of birth and the quantitative measure of class.

Confronting status inconsistency and the diminishing plausibility of aristocratic ideology, middle-class writers like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson helped to formulate progressive ideology. In this ideology, social status ought to be determined by virtue and talent, whereas “elevated birth is an arbitrary accident which should not be taken to signify worth” (McKeon 2000: 391). Conservative ideology accepts the progressive critique that birth is accidental. However, conservative authors like Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding go on to argue that progressive ideology has merely replaced the equivalence of birth and worth with a cruder determination of status by wealth. In partisan terms, Samuel Johnson is a Tory. In ideological terms, he is a conservative, given his fears that in a commercial society few are able to distinguish “virtue … from wealth” and “money receives all the honours which are the proper right of knowledge and of virtue” (Johnson 1963: 383, 227). In a world in which a debased hierarchy of wealth has replaced a hierarchy of birth, conservative thinkers wish to retain “the ideas of inherited honor and gentle birth as useful fictions that had an instrumental social value” (McKeon 2000: 391). Although birth and title may be accidental, the education and breeding of gentlemen qualify them for the professions and positions of authority.

Many of the character sketches and narratives in Johnson’s periodical essays exemplify conservative ideology. Johnson tends to focus on the figure of the younger son. The most common kind of status inconsistency is that between birth and wealth; thus, Johnson introduces “Lentulus, a man whose dignity of birth was very ill supported by his fortune” (Johnson 1963: 381). While Johnson maintains respect for birth and family, his conservative ideology leads him to question whether a gentleman possesses any real superiority: “Reason, indeed, will soon inform us, that our estimation of birth is arbitrary and capricious and that dead ancestors can have no influence but upon imagination” (Johnson 1963: 452). Respect for high birth rests not on inherent qualities of persons but merely on opinion. However, since opinion has great influence in society, Johnson denies that merit is all that matters and not “fortune and rank” (Boswell 1970: 311). Besides, in many cases, merit cannot easily be determined. Johnson prefers custom to systematic rationalisation. Like Edmund Burke, he generally values long continuance of institutions and disapproves of change.

Hunting

In early modern Europe, hunting was situated at the confluence of several conflicts. The game laws conferred on a class of individuals, qualified by substantial land ownership or personal estate, the possession of game animals and, in the gentleman’s role of justice of the peace, the ability to control poaching by prohibiting and confiscating arms, nets, snares and even dogs. In Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), William Blackstone notes that “by the law of nature every man, from the prince to the peasant, has an equal right” to hunt but that restrictions on this right serve the purposes of labour discipline and social control: discouraging “idleness and dissipation in husbandmen, artificers and others of lower rank” and “preventing … popular insurrections and resistance to the government, by disarming the bulk of the people” (Blackstone 1979: 2: 411, 412). While the electoral franchise had severe property restrictions prior to the British reform acts, Blackstone ironically remarks that the requirement of a freehold estate of ₤100 per annum means that there were “fifty times the property required to enable a man to kill a partridge, as to vote for a knight of the shire” (Blackstone 1979: 4: 175). Hunting was a site of class conflict based on extreme inequality. Also, with the growth of humane sentiments toward animals, a development that would lead to the establishment of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, hunting became controversial for its cruelty.

Contact with hunting and gathering societies in the age of discovery introduced Europeans to novel practices of hunting for subsistence rather than sport. Marcy Norton has shown how the “modes of interaction” between humans and animals were strikingly different for Europeans and for the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and Greater Amazonia at the time of first contact. Norton, a historian of the early modern Atlantic world, comes to the topic of inter-species relations from the history of commodities (chocolate, tobacco). (The non-human encompasses things as well as beasts.) Norton argues that the fundamental opposition for Europeans was that between humans and animals, whereas for indigenous Americans it was between the tame and the wild. The main “modes of interaction” (a concept related to everyday ideology) between European humans and animals were hunting and livestock husbandry. Norton maintains that in the hunt Europeans treated prey animals as subjects with agency. There was a near equality between hunter and prey. At the same time, hunting with dogs, hawks and horses created a hierarchy of vassal animals, who often received better food, housing and medical care than human beings of the lower orders. Collaboration between humans and animals in the hunt often involved “mutual affection” and “a merger of subjectivities” (Norton 2024: 34, 35). If human beings “identified with vassal and prey animals”, they were alienated from livestock (Norton 2024: 64). In European livestock husbandry, animals were objectified in the process of domestication. They were regarded as resources for the use of humans. The practice of livestock husbandry “generated notions of human distinctiveness” (Norton 2024: 149). Animals raised to be butchered “were not recognized as having interests” (Norton 2024: 55). If Europeans could understand the hunting practices of the indigenous people they encountered in the Americas, a greater gulf appears between the European practice of domestication and the indigenous use of iegue or “familiarization”. For the indigenous Americans, once an animal had been fed and familiarised (usually a woman’s role), it could no longer be eaten. Iegue “were viewed as persons” capable of communication with their human relatives (Norton 2024: 136, 138). In general, the indigenous people of the Americas discovered “personhood and subjectivity” throughout the natural world (Norton 2024: 107).

Eighteenth-century English novelists, even those (like Henry Fielding) whose ideology is conservative rather than progressive, tend to present the hunt in terms of domination and subordination, in the gentry’s oppression of farmers and in men’s sexual pursuit of women. Typical scenes include the chase crossing into a farmer’s field whereupon horses and hounds trample grain and poultry. Or pet dogs of cottagers may be killed, ostensibly to prevent their being used in poaching. Moreover, novelists create parallels between women pursued by men and the hares and deer hunted to death. For Johnson, hunting serves primarily as a means for the rural leisured class to dispose of their time without any intellectual, social or philanthropic benefits. In his view, the turn away from human morality to the breeding and pursuit of animals in the hunt signifies triviality and uselessness. He wonders about how those who are freed from the necessity of manual labour “fill up the vacuities of life” (Johnson 1963: 476). Those who have more time and money “than they know how to use” may follow the hounds (Johnson 1963: 93).

In Rambler, No. 192, Johnson depicts a family of gentry that, owing to several generations of extravagance, was forced to mortgage the patrilineal estate. Eventually, “the woods were felled” and “the fishery let to farmers” – hence yielding the gentleman’s privilege of rights over animals, since a fishery has a similar legal status to a manor or chase. The younger brother grows rich through trade, whereupon he repurchases part of the family estate that had been sold off. He becomes oppressive to his tenants: he “began to show his rural sovereignty, by breaking the hedges of his tenants in hunting and seizing the guns or nets of those whose fortunes did not qualify them for sportsmen” (Johnson 1969: 5: 241). This usurper of “rural sovereignty” is a paradigmatic figure for the exponent of conservative ideology. He is doubly a figure of social mobility: the downward mobility resulting from the decay of the ancestral estate and the upward mobility founded on the profits of trade. The oppressive gentleman in conservative narrative typically gains his estate through purchase and not inheritance. The non-human enters Johnson’s conservative ideology through the hunt, which is everywhere a mark of privilege and unproductive leisure.

Defining the human

Johnson mostly defines the human against the animal, but there are hints of a shared life in the world and doubts about the superiority of the human. Difference may not always imply hierarchy. The characteristics that are supposedly exclusive to human beings include reason, language, consciousness, numeracy, history, culture, religion, morality, progress, tool-making, laughter, mourning, architecture, contract and property, clothing, cooking, the ability to lie or deceive, anticipation of death and friendship. These are some of the properties found in the ideology of human exceptionalism. Citing Benjamin Franklin as the source of tool-making as the defining human quality, Boswell proposes instead the culinary arts: “Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats” (Boswell 1984: 180n1). In the initial number of the Idler, Johnson dismisses reason and laughter as the defining qualities of the human, in part because reason may be “a quality of which many creatures partake”. Instead, Johnson advertises the name of his periodical in facetiously proposing that “man may be more properly distinguished as an idle animal” (Johnson 1963: 4). If laughter were the “distinguishing faculty of man”, Johnson might not qualify as entirely human, since his “remarkable” laugh, according to Boswell, “was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros’” (Boswell 1970: 637). Adam Smith claims that yet another quality “common to all men and to be found in no other race of animals” is “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another” (Smith 1981: 1: 25). However, Smith’s advocacy of free trade and defence of self-interest make the trading propensity sound like an ideological concept that transforms a historical characteristic into one founded in nature.

The art of building houses removes human beings from nature, providing both security and shelter from the elements: thus, “The mason is exercising one of the principal arts by which reasoning beings are distinguished from the brute” (Johnson 1963: 479–80). However, the 18^th century had a particular fascination with an animal that called into question this property of the human. The beaver became especially prominent given the value of its pelt. Thus, the growth of imperial trade with the First Nations in Canada – trade that Johnson condemns, given his view that the European “commercial powers” denied to Native Americans any “right of nature or of nations” (Johnson 1977: 148). Here is Johnson’s first definition of beaver in the Dictionary: “An animal, otherwise named the castor, amphibious and remarkable for his art in building his habitation; of which many wonderful accounts are delivered by travellers. His skin is very valuable on account of the fur.” Given the primary European use of the pelts, the word beaver, as Johnson notes in his second definition, came to mean “a hat of the best kind”.

The beaver is of particular interest to Buffon, because it forms a link between taxonomical categories – in this case, “between quadrupeds and fishes” (Buffon 1780: 5: 28). Beavers’ monogamous mating practices make it sound as though they are capable of individual friendships: “each couple join not by chance, nor by the pressing necessities of nature, but unite from choice and from taste” (Buffon 1780: 5: 35). Exhibiting a degree of superiority to humans, beavers live simply, without luxury, in a state of “universal peace”:

the society … at first, laboured jointly, in raising the great public building and afterwards in select tribes or companies, in making particular habitations. In this society, however numerous, an universal peace is maintained. … They enjoy every possible good, while man only knows how to pant after it” (Buffon 1780: 5: 33). What makes possible the utopian beaver society of intelligence, labour in common and progressive improvement is isolation from humankind, the beavers’ residence in “distant and desert regions where, for a long succession of ages, they have received no disturbance from man . …The beavers afford, perhaps, the only subsisting monument of the antient intelligence of brutes (Buffon 1780: 5: 22).

We do not know the abilities of non-human animals, because as soon as we live in their vicinity we change their nature and cause their degeneration. While invalidating the exclusive human entitlement to architecture, friendship and choice, the beaver resides at the intersection of several ideas relevant for non-human ideology: the science of natural history, empire, a monopoly corporation (the Hudson’s Bay Company) profiting at the expense of an indigenous population, the process by which the names of an animal (castor as well as beaver) are transferred to animal products worn by humans and the way that humans cause the degeneration of non-human animals.

Johnson and Hodge

In a Rambler essay on parental tyranny, Johnson condemns paternal cruelty as motiveless, given that affection is inherent in a father’s relationship with the child he has brought into existence and fostered in its helplessness. In elaborating on the psychology of such affection, Johnson turns to an analogy in our love of pets:

I believe no generous or benevolent man can see the vilest animal courting his regard and shrinking at his anger, playing his gambols of delight before him, calling on him in distress and flying to him in danger, without more kindness than he can persuade himself to feel for the wild and unsocial inhabitants of the air and water. We naturally endear to ourselves those to whom we impart any kind of pleasure, because we imagine their affection and esteem secured to us by the benefits which they receive.

(Johnson 1969)

With pets, as with children, the parent or human companion should abide by “the great law of social beings, by which the individual is commanded to consult the happiness of others” (Johnson 1969: 5: 24). If the human being is defined as sociable, that does not only mean that we rely on the assistance of others for conveniences that take us beyond the savage state, but also that we find our own happiness in making others happy. In emphasising human altruism, Johnson offers an attractive explanation for our love of pets, though we may only imagine their love for us.

The standard historical account finds a rise in bourgeois pet-keeping with increased urbanisation in the late 18^th century. In this account, domesticated animals were omnipresent in rural life, but they were generally raised for food and other animal products or they fulfilled the various roles of working and sporting animals. They were supposedly regarded in utilitarian terms. It has sometimes been thought that with the alienation from nature and from neighbours in urban life, city dwellers found compensation by keeping pets in the household. Kathleen Kete argues that “bourgeois petkeepers employed the characteristics of pets to point to … the problems of modernity” (Kete 1994: 39). The fidelity of the dog was thus set against human relationships increasingly structured by the cash nexus. The rise of a humanitarian sensibility, also connected to the urban bourgeoisie, led to sympathy for mistreated animals in blood sports and for the prey in hunting. It also led to growing affection for animals kept as pets.

There has long been a stereotypical opposition between dogs and cats. Dogs are known for their loyalty, protection, unqualified affection and susceptibility to training. The cat, on the other hand, was apparently not “disposed to acknowledge human dominion” ( Ritvo 1990: 22). Buffon’s contrast is typical: “Very different from that faithful animal the dog, whose sentiments totally centre in the person and happiness of his master, the cat appears to have no feelings which are not interested” (Buffon 1780: 4: 50). The cat “was the anti-pet of nineteenth-century bourgeois life, associated with sexuality and marginality” (Kete 1994: 114). Given the cat’s association with feminine luxury, sexuality and insubordination, it might be surprising to learn that Johnson was a cat person. Indeed, famous English cats of the 18^th century include “Horace Walpole’s Selima, Samuel Johnson’s Hodge and Christopher Smart’s Jeoffrey” (Brown 2010: 69). But then cats are associated with intellectuals: “the cat a sign for the literary life” (Kete 1994: 124). One thinks of Montaigne’s cat who may possess more agency in play than the essayist, Bentham’s cat named Sir John Langborn (Thomas 1984:115) or the cat who gazes at the naked Derrida.

Readers of Boswell’s Life also think of Hodge. Boswell establishes a hierarchy of Johnson’s humane sentiments: “love of little children,” “uncommon kindness to his servants”, and “fondness … for animals … under his protection” (Boswell 1970: 1216). Boswell elaborates at greatest length on what seems to be the least important instance of humanity:

I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

(Boswell 1970: 1216–17)

As human companion to Hodge, Johnson took upon himself the task of acquiring pet food, in order to keep the cat in the good graces of the servants. Moreover, as Peter Singer notes, oysters are among the least sentient of animals – hence, seafood appropriate for moral philosophers and their pets.

Boswell’s account reveals an intimate connection between Johnson and Hodge. Johnson knew his cat well, confident that he would take pleasure even in having his tail pulled. His giving the benefit of pleasure to Hodge leads him to imagine Hodge’s affection for him and Johnson responds by “smiling and half-whistling”. We recall that Johnson’s animal corporeality in the midst of intellectual conversation emerged in the form of “giving a half whistle” (Boswell 1970: 343). Boswell’s repetition of a half whistle transfers Johnson’s animality from the initial reference onto his relationship with his cat. Johnson has a corporeal, animal relationship to Hodge. Affection for pets is bodily and instinctual rather than rational. Perhaps, most importantly, Boswell imagines a hypothetical Johnsonian perception that Hodge understands language and might therefore be anxious when Johnson states that he had had cats whom he liked better. As Johnson expresses the animal quality of affection, Hodge takes on the human capacity for language. In this great and characteristic passage from the Life, we have access to Johnson’s voice as he expresses concern for the feelings of his cat and attempts to reassure the animal whose feelings he may have hurt.

The passage is as much about Boswell as about Johnson, since the biographer insists on his own uneasiness in the presence of a cat. Other evidence for Boswell’s dislike of cats appears in an exchange with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in responding to Boswell’s confession of a feline aversion, states that one’s attitude toward cats “is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do” (Boswell 1953: 261). For Rousseau, an index to the moral standing of human beings is to be found in their attitudes toward animals – specifically, toward cats. The antipathy toward cats seems to be authorised for Boswell by one of Johnson’s Ramblers, the series of moral essays that Boswell re-read every year. Rambler No. 30 is written from the perspective of a day of the week – Sunday. The Sabbath was a day on which gambling is forbidden and hence the personified Sunday writes, having recourse to a feline analogy, “I have as natural an antipathy to cards and dice, as some people have to a cat” (Johnson 1969: 3: 164). Even when insisting on his opposition to Johnson in their respective feelings toward cats, Boswell borrows from Johnson the idea and indeed the phrasing of feline antipathy. This opposition goes beyond taste to ideology, given that, for Rousseau, a person’s moral character can be determined based on his or her attitude toward cats. Even while Johnson seeks to define the human against the animal, he is, unlike Boswell, very fond of cats. Johnson recognises animals as fellow creatures and as neighbours.

Conclusions and directions of future scholarship

The kind of ideology analysis I have explored in this chapter seeks complexity and emphasises contradiction. The question of the animal as shown in hunting, the fur trade, pet-keeping and corporeality resides at the confluence of numerous developments characteristic of modernity. Literature both legitimates and resists the dominant ideology. There is no simple determinism or causation by a single, static object or characteristic. Residual, dominant and emergent ideologies are present at any given historical moment.

Animal studies is an inter-disciplinary academic field with broad public appeal. Hence, there is potential for future work on animals and ideology in the public humanities. More work remains to be done in addressing legal and ethical questions involving animals – for example, legislation on animal rights and personhood in scientific experimentation, exhibition, hunting and intensive agriculture. Bans on certain breeds targeting “dangerous dogs” remain controversial. Questions of diet in connection with the health of individuals and of the planet are bound together with the treatment of animals. Thus, both scholarly and popular works will continue to be written on veganism, vegetarianism and ethical eating. The ethics of pet-keeping and methods of canine training have been subjects of controversy beginning in Johnson’s time, when Buffon insisted that domestic animals were slaves (Buffon 1780: 3: 301) and when the condition of caged birds provided a standard trope for oppressive domination.

Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild indicates a direction for future historical research on animals, given Norton’s exploration of the “entanglement” between indigenous Americans and European colonisers and her sense of both the distinctiveness of the past and its connections with present concerns. Comparative religious studies can illuminate the diverse treatment of animals in global cultures, while challenging the view that Judeo-Christian tradition unequivocally authorises human dominion over animals rather than humane stewardship. At the same time, modernity involves a shift from the dominance of the church to that of the school, even if recent studies have questioned whether or not the Enlightenment should be defined as essentially secular. The increasing universality of education in the late 18^th century, along with the rise of children’s literature and animal toys, led to socialising children in the proper treatment of animals. In this case, what is “proper” is also contradictory: avoid cruelty to animals while keeping them firmly in a position of inferiority to the human.

I refer in my title to the “non-human” since I intend a broader perspective than the animal, evoking “thing theory” and an examination of how agency and subjectivity are distributed beyond the human and indeed beyond animate creatures, even while certain classes of human beings have been denied agency. Angela Davis has memorably described how the ideology of human exceptionalism is among the causes of injustice in human society: “The prioritising of humans also leads to restrictive definitions of who counts as human and the brutalisation of animals is related to the brutalisation of human animals” (quoted in la Berge 2023: 22). Both natural science and Derridean philosophy call into question the binary opposition between animal and human. Post-structuralist and scientific critiques of human exceptionalism offer different modes of ideology analysis that will extend beyond the field of animal studies.

References

Bekoff, M. (2007) “Wild justice and fair play: Cooperation, forgiveness and morality in animals”, in Kalof, L. and Fitzgerald, A. (ed.) The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, Oxford: Berg: 72–90.

Bekoff, M. and Pierce, J. (2009) Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bentham, J. (1948) The Principles of Morals and Legislation, New York NY: Hafner. Hafner Library of Classics, No. 6.

Blackstone, W. (1979) Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Boswell, J. (1953) Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, Pottle, F. (ed.) New York NY: McGraw-Hill.

Boswell, J. (1970) Life of Johnson, Chapman, R. (ed.), Fleeman, J. (corr.), London: Oxford University Press.

Boswell, J. (1984) Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Chapman, R. (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, L. (2010) Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Buffon, G-L. (1780) Natural History, General and Particular, by the Count de Buffon, translated into English, 8 vols, Edinburgh: William Creech.

Coetzee, J. M. (2003) Elizabeth Costello, New York NY: Penguin.

Derrida, J. (2008) The Animal that therefore I am, Mallet, M-L. (ed.), Wills, D. (trans.) New York NY: Fordham University Press. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy.

Eagleton, T. (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.

Eagleton, T. (2024) “Where does culture come from?” London Review of Books, 25 April, 5–7.

Finlayson, L. (2023) “Let them eat Oysters”, Review of Animal Liberation Now, by Peter Singer; and Justice for Animals, by Martha Nussbaum, London Review of Books, 5 October, 3–8.

Hall, S. (2021) “The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees”, in McLennan, G. (ed.) Selected Writings on Marxism, Durham NC: Duke University Press: 134–57. Stuart Hall: Selected Writings.

Haraway, D. (2007) “Cyborgs to companion species: Reconfiguring kinship in technoscience”, in Kalof, L. and Fitzgerald, A. (eds) The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, Oxford: Berg: 362–374.

Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet, 3 vols, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Posthumanities.

Johnson, S. (1755) A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols, London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, Vol. 2.

Johnson, S. (1963) The Idler and the Adventurer, 2 vols, Bate, W., Bullitt, J. and Powell, L. (eds) New Haven CT: Yale University Press. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.

Johnson, S. (1969) The Rambler, 3–5 vols, Bate, W. and Strauss, A. (eds) New Haven CT: Yale University Press. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.

Johnson, S. (1977) Political Writings, 10 vols, Greene, D. (ed.) New Haven CT: Yale University Press. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.

Kete, K. (1994) The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-century Paris, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

La Berge, L. (2023) Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary, Durham UK: Duke University Press.

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Porter, C. (trans.) Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

McKeon, M. (2000) “Generic transformation and social change: Rethinking the rise of the novel”, in McKeon, M. (ed.) Theory of the Novel: An Historical Approach, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press: 382–399.

Norton, M. (2024) The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Phillips, A. (2024) “On getting the life you want”, London Review of Books, 20 June, 41–46.

Regan, T. (2007) “The rights of humans and other animals”, in Kalof, L. and Fitzgerald, A. (eds) The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, Oxford: Berg: 23–29.

Ritvo, H. (1990) The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian age, Cambridge MA, 1987. London: Penguin.

Sanneh, K. (2024) “Beastly matters: Where the logic behind the concern for animal welfare begins and ends”, The New Yorker, 6 May, 61–65.

Singer, P. (1995) Animal Liberation, 2^nd edition, London: Pimlico.

Smith, A. (1981) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Campbell, R. and Skinner, A. (ed.), 2 vols. Oxford, 1976. Indianapolis IN: Liberty Classics.

Thomas, K. (1984) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, Harmondsworth UK: Penguin.

Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Section VI: Technology and futurity

Introduction

In a volume that explores how key social institutions, processes and era-defining phenomena both shape and are shaped by ideology, chapters that address current and potential relationships between technology and ideology are bound to be of interest. Social scientists, philosophers and humanists have been intrigued by the social and cultural power of technology since antiquity. Its ideological dimensions have been less often appreciated and identified than its promises have been celebrated and hyperbolised, though there is no shortage of critical accounts of the former across the humanities and social sciences (Alexander 1990; Balbi 2023; Castells 1996; Ellull 1964; Heidegger 1962/1927; Kozinets 2008; Marcuse 1964; Marx 1997; McLuhan 1962; Segal 1985; Winner 1986). A frequent theme in such accounts is that our visions of technologies in the future, not just our understanding of those in the present, do much to shape our actions. While “the future” refers to what is yet to come, “futurity” emphasises the ways in which expectations, perceptions and beliefs actively shape that future. In this sense, reflections on ideologies of technological futurity are very much at home in a volume canvassing different approaches to ideology analysis.

Since Benedict Anderson’s path-breaking account of how “print capitalism” transformed the conditions under which nationalism grew and spread following Gutenberg’s 15^th-century invention of the printing press (Anderson 1983), ideology studies have been increasingly attuned to the long historical impacts of technology on ideological production and consumption. Axel Gelfert’s Chapter 21 provides a nuanced demonstration of how technology discourse is deeply intertwined with the experience of novelty in culture, with ongoing ideological struggles and with influential perspectives on our expectations for attractive futures. Gelfert examines social-psychological mechanisms and “socio-technical imaginaries” through which individuals, organisations and collectivities shape perceptions of emerging technologies at meso and micro levels of ideological experience. He zeroes in on recent public policy for nanoscience to reveal their underlying ideological thematics, contrasting “Cornucopian” and “neo-Malthusian” ideological framing of technological responses to resource scarcity. And he sketches several discursive strategies now employed to legitimise new technologies, highlighting their unavoidably yet often largely implicit ideological narratives. Gelfert shows that this complex field of interaction between new technology and ideology offers valuable lessons for not just ideology analysis but also careful construction of a policy framework in which new technologies can beneficially operate. Readers will find closely related analyses in chapters by Benjamin Tainturier and Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael Williams.

Apolline Taillandier’s Chapter 22 addresses a set of modern and post-modern perspectives on the prospects for and desirability of employing technology to transcend the limits of the human condition. While for many this seems a new prospect promoted by dominant Silicon Valley businessmen and made possible by nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and advanced computing systems and programs, Taillandier reminds us that a transhuman aspiration has a deep historical lineage. She contends that contemporary transhumanism can be understood as an internally diverse and primarily liberal ideological landscape, with specific conceptual features and contests that reflect the variety of ways in which contemporary liberal imaginaries of the collective have been recast. Drilling down into the techno-political character of influential dimensions of contemporary ideological contestation, Taillandier shows how technology and politics are co-constitutive, with techno-scientific practices playing important roles in remaking liberal political imaginaries. Her guidelines and suggestions about a morphological study of transhumanism that draws together insights from ideology analysis and the social study of science and technology suggest another way in which stepping beyond canonical texts and thinkers enriches our study of ideology. Once again, chapters by Tainturier as well as Drolet and Williams provide suggestive complements to this chapter.

In Chapter 23, Sherryl Vint provides a fascinating account of science fiction’s historical use as an instrument for promoting both left- and right-wing political projects and presciently identifies how a right-wing libertarianism popular among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has roots in inegalitarian, authoritarian futures foreshadowed in niche science fiction writing. As James Carson points out in Chapter 20, literary criticism has a long history of engaging the ideological character of both highbrow literature (Williams 1960; Eagleton 1996; Jameson 2019; Barthes 1957) and many elements of popular culture, including everything from music and drama (Benjamin 1968) to wrestling and cinema (Barthes 1957) and much in between (Williams 1976). In this tradition of explaining how “all fiction engages in worldbuilding”, Vint adopts a Marxist cultural studies perspective to underscore the material and ideational power of science fiction futurity and to help explain the struggles among science fiction authors and organisations over the nature and purposes of the “socio-technical imaginary” within science fiction. After influential Silicon Valley billionaires Marc Andreessen and the oddly technocratic libertarian Elon Musk (Lepore 2021, 2025) did so much to shape Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, perhaps we should take the ideological power of fictive technological futurity seriously.

References

Alexander, J. (1990) “The sacred and profane information machine: Discourse about the computer as ideology”, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, vol. 35, no. 69, 161–171.

Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.

Balbi, G. (2023) “Introduction: Understanding the digital revolution as an ideology”, in McClellan-Broussard, B. (ed.) The Digital Revolution: A Short History of an Ideology, Oxford: Oxford Academic. [Online], Available: https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1093/oso/9780198875970.003.0001[6 Mar 2025].

Barthes, R. (1957/2012) Mythologies, trans. Howard, R. and Lavers, A., New York NY: Hill and Wang.

Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, edited and with an introduction Arendt, H., New York NY: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Cambridge MA: Blackwell.

Eagleton, T. (1996) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.

Ellul, J. (1964) The Technological Society, New York NY: Random House.

Heidegger, M. (1962/1927) Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E., New York NY: Harper & Row.

Jameson, F. (2019) Allegory and Ideology, London: Verso.

Kozinets, R. V. (2008) “Technology/ideology: How ideological fields influence consumers’ technology narratives”, Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 34, no. 6, 865–881.

Lepore, J. (2021) “Elon Musk is building a Sci-Fi World and the rest of us are trapped in it”, New York Times, 4 November, [Online], Available: www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/elon-musk-capitalism.html[4 Apr 2025].

Lepore, J. (2025) “The failed ideas that drive Elon Musk”, New York Times, 4 April 2025, [Online], Available: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html[4 Apr 2025]

Marcuse, H. (1964) One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston MA: Beacon.

Marx, L. (1997) “Technology: The emergence of a hazardous concept”, Social Research, vol. 64, no. 3, 965–988.

McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Segal, H. P. (1985) Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Williams, R. (1960) Culture and Society, 1780–1950, New York NY: Columbia University Press.

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Winner, L. (1986) The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

21. New and emerging technologies as the locus of ideology

Axel Gelfert

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-28

Introduction

Technology shapes the sphere of human thought and action, not only through its immediate physical effects, functions and affordances, but also through how it is perceived. The very fact that a particular technology is perceived as holding out hope for human progress, or as inevitable in light of what a community considers a range of conceivable futures, legitimises certain individual and collective projects while delegitimising others. This applies especially to new and emergent technologies, whose potential and reach have yet to fully come to fruition. As a result, new and emergent technologies (such as nanoscience, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology) give rise to narratives that, on one hand, are infused with ideological presuppositions and, on the other, can be co-opted in the service of (prior) ideological commitments. This chapter reviews a range of ideological orientations associated with novel and emergent technologies, both by way of concrete examples and by identifying some of the mechanisms that stabilise existing affinities between the realms of ideology and technology. It shows how the emergence of ideology is associated with a fundamental need for the development of “world views” in general and how such (individual and collective) sense-making can both enable and distort our assessment of the relationship between technology and human flourishing. This opens up the possibility of new approaches to the study of ideology that simultaneously draw on the analysis of public and political discourse, social psychology and intellectual history, with implications also for the communication of science and technology.

The chapter proceeds as follows: First, the overarching significance of novelty for modern thinking about science and technology – from Francis Bacon’s vision of a New Atlantis to Herbert Marcuse’s proposal of a “new” (socially progressive) science – is reviewed in Section II. After this historical perspective, Section III looks at recent analyses coming from the field of science and technology studies (STS), of how societies and individuals within them (e.g., decision-makers), collectively conceive of possible future trajectories through socio-technical imaginaries. Section IV demonstrates, by way of the example of nanoscience and technology, how policy-making can mobilise such diffuse expectations and imaginaries in the service of agendas with a clear ideological affinity. In Section V, this is related to ideologically contrasting outlooks on what has been called the “ontology of the planet”, that is concerning the relationship between human ingenuity and planetary resources – which, in their most extreme, may be contrasted as a form of “Cornucopianism” and its opposite, neo-Malthusianism. Section VI, finally, presents a snapshot of several discursive strategies at play in the mutual reinforcement of technology and ideology.

Technology, science and the politics of novelty

The quest for novelty, enabled by science and prized within science itself, has a long and respectable ancestry. In his New Atlantis (1626) – which, like his theoretical work Novum Organum (1620), carries novelty already in its title – Francis Bacon developed, in a narratively compelling form, a utopian vision of a collaboratively organised future science dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and scientific discovery and driven by a desire for novelty and an impulse to lead to a betterment of humankind (Bacon 1905). Bacon envisions a systematic and collaborative approach to science, vividly depicted in Solomon’s House, the centrepiece of his narrative, which prefigures modern research institutions and brings together researchers motivated by the continual pursuit of new and transformative insights. Via the organised pursuit of theoretical knowledge, scientifically minded innovators can survey the range of possibilities and “gather from the whole store of things such as make most for the uses of life” (Novum Organum, in Bacon 1905: 232).

The very fact that Bacon’s vision of science was not driven by a purely epistemic motivation, but instead embodies a political programme, was evident to later critics such as Victorian moralists who sought to invalidate his vigorous defence of the primacy of science by indicting Bacon’s moral and professional character – an easy task, given his political missteps (which included bribery and deceiving former benefactors) and scientific misjudgements (such as his rejection of Copernicanism). Bacon’s programme of an ideology of scientific progress, aimed at redirecting the course of human endeavours away from past authorities towards the uncharted territory of a new world of scientific knowledge, is most iconically represented in the frontispieces of his Novum Organum and the Great Instauration: a ship sailing out past the pillars of Hercules, the “pillars of fate set in the path of knowledge”, as Bacon puts it in the opening sentences of The Great Instauration (1620).

As this historical vignette indicates, any suggestion that science and technology – whether by historical origin or by virtue of their epistemic–instrumentalist characteristics – can be conceived of as “ideologically neutral” is bound to be illusory. Science and technology, because they are human endeavours, of necessity come with an attendant “politics of knowledge” and any attempt to declare them separate and distinct from politics and ideology involves heavy idealisation. Yet, in order to analyse how science and technology on one hand and politics and ideology on the other intersect with, and influence, one another, some degree of rational reconstruction is needed. On one such account, according to Jürgen Habermas, science and technology are both necessary aspects of modern life but also require containment to preserve other dimensions of human value (Habermas 1971). Humans relate to the world and to other humans via two distinct, irreducible modes of action, work and interaction. These are deeply ingrained into our existence as a species of finite, limited beings who need to provide for the bare necessities of life, but are also invested in and dependent on interaction with other members, in a joint quest for achieving mutual understanding. Whereas instrumental reason focuses on the means to achieve specific ends and thus is appropriate within the sphere of purposive–rational behaviour, communicative reason guides the process of deliberation among two or more individuals and aims not only at the coordination of goal-oriented joint action but also the cultivation of self-expression, mutual acknowledgment and the pursuit of normative questions.

For Habermas, the very success of science and technology, while no doubt a pre-condition for our successful interventions in the empirical world, also poses a threat to those aspects of human life that can only be realised via communicative deliberation, not by scientific representation and technological intervention. The dominance of instrumental reason, with its focus on efficiency, control and means–end calculations, threatens to colonise the lifeworld, which is constituted by shared meanings, cultural traditions and social norms and which is so crucial to our sense of identity and to cultivating relationships with others. By expanding into areas of human life traditionally governed by communicative action, not only may social bonds be eroded but genuine communication will be distorted as interactions are being transformed into strategic actions aimed at individual objectives according to means–end calculations. Technological development, Habermas writes, “follows a logic that corresponds to the structure of purposive–rational action regulated by its own results, which is in fact the structure of work” (Habermas 1971: 88). As science and technology pervade ever more aspects of human life, a general tendency exists for this logic to “colonise” the human lifeworld, a move that society needs to guard against by creating spaces and institutional frameworks that put up robust defences for open and pluralistic dialogue, thereby prioritising the open-ended pursuit of consensus and deliberation over the efficient realisation of fixed deliverables.

Yet, for Habermas, ideological tendencies towards, say, technocratic arrangements of power are not the inevitable result of an inner logic of science and technology – which, within its proper domain of application, remains entirely legitimate – but reflect the erosion of other sources of ideological cohesion. It is because existing legitimations have become fragile that new ones spring up, “appearing in the mantle of modern science and … deriving their justification from the critique of ideology” (Habermas 1971: 99) – that is, by proclaiming themselves to be objective scientific systems rather than expressions of social and political interests. While this allows “technocratic consciousness” to conceal its ideological character, it is nevertheless a matter of social and political processes that are subject to human influence. It would, therefore, be misguided to blame such developments on the fundamental structure of science: the mere fact that science lends itself to the generation of “exploitable knowledge” (ibid.) does not, of necessity, render it complicit in exploitation in the political sense – just as construing science, in Baconian fashion, as an exercise in “dominating nature” likewise amounts to a category mistake, since “concepts such as ‘domination’ and ‘liberation’ are applicable only to relations between subjects and the nature that is the object of science and technology is not a subject” (Vogel 1995: 29).

The latter reflects a criticism levelled against Herbert Marcuse’s calls for a “New Science” that would do away with the “repressive mastery” of nature entrenched in contemporary techno-scientific practices and instead would disrupt the nexus between work and exploitation (of nature and of others), liberating not only humans but nature itself. As Marcuse puts it in An Essay on Liberation (1969), such a liberated consciousness under the precepts of a New Science “would promote the development of a science and technology free to discover and realise the possibilities of things and men in the protection and gratification of life, playing with the potentialities of form and matter for the attainment of this goal” (Marcuse 1969: 24). For Habermas, this vision of a New Science “will not stand up to logical scrutiny ..., if indeed science is to retain the meaning of modern science inherently oriented to possible technical control” (Habermas 1971: 88) – which it must, however, lest humans deprive themselves of their most effective means of bending reality to conform to their individual and collective needs.

The latter observation – that we must not sacrifice the ideals of modern science, in spite of their tendency to intrude on other areas of human flourishing – reflects a deeper point about ideologically loaded projects in general: what one might call their problematic inevitability. That is, we accept the inevitability of certain arrangements as speaking to fundamental human needs, even as we regard aspects of these arrangements as problematic in ways that call for steps to alleviate them – in the full knowledge that such steps cannot be fully successful. Ideology, then, may well serve as a way of rationalising choices that need to be made in such situations of trade-off, where not all desiderata can be simultaneously realised to their full extent. We acquire and subsequently internalise discursive and non-discursive patterns of thinking and behaviour that we may explicitly turn to (e.g., in situations of uncertainty), or that may operate tacitly, whenever external circumstances call for a way of breaking a stalemate. Indeed, this is one of the guiding assumptions of this chapter and there are examples of this in subsequent sections. In this regard, the present approach to the concept of “ideology” is inspired by a theoretical perspective that acknowledges its descriptive, pejorative and positive dimensions (see Geuss 1981). Whereas the first two point to (or, in the case of the pejorative use, call out as wrong) the way in which social, theoretical or tacit assumptions are being safeguarded via specific power relations, while typically being concealed from view, the positive dimension acknowledges that ideology arises from a fundamental human need to construct “a global overview of, ideally, the whole of the universe and of the world which we inhabit” ( Geuss 2020: xiii). Whether such constructions are ultimately successful is a contingent matter; yet acknowledging their contingency, while a cultural achievement, does little to alleviate the impulse to seek at least partial unification of our world picture.

It is this impulse of (individual and collective) sense-making that, at its most basic level, distinguishes ideological orientations from more ad hoc cognitive representations of the world. Science and technology, with their promise of representing and intervening in the world around us, have from their early modern beginnings onwards been deeply intertwined with emancipatory projects of liberating humankind (whether from nature or from oppression by others). Yet their increasing powers have also stoked concerns of an over-reach and of technological determinism. The dual role of scientific and technological progress as an end in itself and as a source of economic value creates the strong (but, as Habermas argues, misleading) impression that science and technology follow an immanent logic of development from which the human lifeworld not only cannot extricate itself, but which actively shapes and deforms human experience in deterministic ways. At the same time, modern critics of techno-scientific over-reach are as prone to co-opting the desideratum of novelty (like Marcuse’s “New Science”) as were early-modern defenders of reshaping society in the image of science and technology (such as Bacon in his New Atlantis). And in both camps there are those who pair such appraisals of novelty with a belief in the nigh-infinite malleability of human existence and the natural world – a theme that, as is discussed in Section V, recurs in contemporary discourses of new and emerging technologies.

Emerging technologies and socio-technical imaginaries

The term “emerging technologies” has acquired a wide use both within and outside academia. Any quick corpus-based database search (e.g. via Google’s n-gram viewer) will reveal a steep rise from the 1980s onwards and, after a period of relative decline, a subsequent increase from the mid-2000s onwards, especially of the plural “emerging technolog*ies*”. One philosophical analyst of the concept records a doubling of the number of newly published academic papers using the term between 2005 and 2015, from 224 to 470, across the most common academic databases (Villaseñor Terán 2018: 28). Used most commonly at the intersection of disciplines such as innovation studies, STS, economics and philosophy of technology, its meaning is highly contested and conceptual analyses of the term are still few and far between. Nonetheless, the career of the term in academic discourse casts a light on why talk of “emerging technologies” has, to some extent, supplanted more traditional terminology.

A first distinct use can be found in business and innovation studies where “emerging technologies” were conceived as being linked to the creation of new industries or the transformation of existing ones. An emerging technology, thus understood, may just be a particular key invention. By contrast, in the field of STS the term is largely understood as referring to (a select number of) entire techno-scientific fields of study, most prominently “information and communication technologies (perhaps three decades ago) and more recently, biotechnology, genomics and nanotechnology” ( Einsiedel 2009: 3).

It is evident that the extension of the term “emerging technologies” is, of necessity, evolving. What it is emerging is always relative to temporal and contextual factors: a novel technology is emerging at a certain time and from the backdrop of contingent disciplinary arrangements. At the time of writing, in 2024, machine learning and AI-based technologies such as GPT language generators surely need to be counted among emerging technologies, rendering the above list ever more heterogeneous. What, one might ask, do all these technologies – from genomics and nanotechnology to machine learning and AI content generation – have in common? Surely not any object-level similarities, given the heterogeneity of their targets. What instead characterises emerging technologies is a combination of dynamic factors relating to their development and their wider influence. As a group of policy researchers puts it: “Emerging technologies are defined by five attributes: radical novelty, fast growth, coherence, prominent impact and uncertainty and ambiguity” (Rotolo, Hicks and Martin 2015: 1828). Importantly, the prominence of their impact need not be measured in terms of their material deployment or tangible outcomes, but often relates to their broader cultural significance as a canvas onto which stakeholders project their visions for possible technological futures. In this more recent understanding, emergent technologies are not to be identified with specific “key inventions”; rather, it is precisely the lack of visible products that leads to an overall “abstractness” or “virtual character of the emerging technologies” (Bogner and Torgersen 2014: 732).

Emerging technologies – or rather, judgments concerning which technologies are to be treated as emerging – feed directly into what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (2009) have dubbed “sociotechnical imaginaries”, that is, “collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures … [that are] animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff 2015: 4). Through socio-technical imaginaries, societies, states and institutions render certain technological futures attainable and attractive; in doing so, they shape decision-making processes and, by extension, influence the course of technological and social development. Rather than being descriptive estimates of ongoing technological developments, or intra-scientific predictions of future ones, socio-technical imaginaries hold normative significance as alternatives to the present that a technologically savvy society can envision for itself. As Stephen Hughes puts it, socio-technical imaginaries “do not ‘merely’ imagine alternative ways of living and being, but play active roles in materializing those alternatives” (Hughes 2024: 3). This performative aspect of socio-technical imaginaries also creates an affinity to pop-cultural discourses on technology, including in the realm of artistic and literary production (e.g. by surfacing in science fiction). Socio-technical imaginaries thereby become enmeshed in collective processes that shape the development and adoption of new technologies.

As an analytic tool within STS, the notion of “socio-technical imaginary” was meant to help explain “why, at significant forks in the road, societies opt for particular directions of choice and change over others and why those choices gain stability or, at time, fail to do so” (Jasanoff 2015: 14). In this regard, the introduction of the term aligns with other recent attempts to overcome an impasse which had developed over time in the critical study of science and technology. Initially, the emphasis had been on exposing the self-professed objectivity of science as a vehicle of ideology. As Georges Canguilhem puts it rather pointedly: “Distinguishing between ideology and science prevents us from seeing continuities where in fact there are only elements of ideology preserved in a science that has supplanted an earlier ideology” (Canguilhem [1968] 1988: 39, quoted in Latour 1993: 92–93). Yet as scholars of science and technology increasingly emphasised the neutrality of sociological explanations of scientific belief with respect to the truth or falsity of the purported scientific hypotheses – most famously in the form of the “symmetry principle” (Bloor 1976), which demands that explanations of true beliefs be no different in kind from explanations of false beliefs – the achievements of the scientific enterprise and its emancipatory promise of human betterment gradually receded from view.

Hence, some 30 years later Bruno Latour observed that, in the face of growing science denialism and an ideological onslaught against science, the tables had turned; he argued that we may need to consider a political–epistemic reality where “the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact ... but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases” (Latour 2004: 227). Thus, a need arose from within STS and related scholarly disciplines to develop the conceptual resources that would allow for the meaningful and insightful discussion of the contrastive question of why, at significant junctures in the development of science and technology, certain paths rather than others emerged as stable and conducive to human projects. The concept of “socio-technical imaginaries”, in this light, may be seen as one way of negotiating the tension between the realist temptation to settle such contrastive questions by fiat and the social-constructionist “bracketing off” of Nature (see Latour 1993: 94).

Early applications of the concept of socio-technical imaginaries by Jasanoff and Kim focused on the “design and fulfilment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects”, such as the US establishing itself as a nuclear power in the second half of the 20^th century. This, again, indicates a deeper kinship with more political notions of ideology, which have traditionally upheld the stabilising influence it exerts on collectives and its role in legitimising the overarching conception of the state. “State” here is to be understood not only as a source of coercion, i.e. in terms of power, but also as being co-constituted by an ideological state apparatus (Althusser 1971); importantly, it also includes institutions of civil society: education, religion, popular culture and similar social forces all provide “an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how” (Althusser 1971: 156) to those who engage with them, thereby inculcating in them ideological patterns that serve to stabilise and reproduce existing (e.g., capitalist) forms of production. This, one might argue, applies also – and, in the case of emerging technologies, perhaps especially so – to the inculcation of technological know-how.

While not all technological developments can be fruitfully analysed through the lens of competition among nation–states, it seems fair to say that socio-technical imaginaries also overlap and intersect with broader political and ideological projects. In the case of Cold War “Big Science”, this ideology–technology nexus is self-evident; however, as we shall see in the next section, a similar dynamic plays out in how nanotechnology was being pursued as an emerging technology in the early 2000s and will likely continue to drive the adoption of new “green technologies”, say, as countries compete for the status of “zero-carbon economies”.

The case of nanotechnology

The case of nanotechnology illustrates how emerging technologies can be co-produced by top-down policy decisions and broader shifts in socio-technical imaginaries. Neither of these is ideologically neutral; indeed, they influence one another and sometimes such influences can be traced to specific actors, who latch on to technological developments as a vehicle for promoting their broader worldviews.[58]

On the face of it, nano-level science and technology (or “nanotech” for short) appears to be as neutral a characterisation of a scientific–technological domain as one might hope for. After all, it precisely and objectively characterises a spatial domain – measured in nanometres (10^-9 m, roughly the diameter of simple molecules) – at which a variety of physical, chemical and biochemical phenomena can be fruitfully analysed. Correspondingly, nanotech is often colloquially referred to as the “science of the very small” and popular presentations often trace its ancestry to a lecture given by Richard Feynman in 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. In this lecture, Feynman mused about which scientific breakthroughs would be needed to carry miniaturisation all the way through to the atomic level, along the way speculating about “[w]‌hat would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them” (Feynman 1960: 34). More than 30 years later, Eric Drexler, an American engineer and nanotech proponent, echoes this sentiment when he asserts that “[t]he ill, the old and the injured all suffer from misarranged patterns of atoms, whether misarranged by invading viruses, passing time or swerving cars”; hence, a “[d]evice able to rearrange atoms will be able to set them right” (Drexler 1990: 99).

However, much of the growth of nanoscience and technology in the early 2000s was driven not so much by intra-scientific considerations as by the provision of funding made available, within the US, by the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) unveiled by President Bill Clinton at the start of his final year in office. Eager to leave office on a forward-looking note, after a scandal-ridden second term, Clinton included nanotechnology as a political goal in his 2000 State of the Union address, reportedly against the advice of his speech writers. In particular, he regarded the NNI as a “centerpiece of a much broader research initiative to address the growing imbalance in federal funding for biomedical research and the physical sciences and engineering” (Lane and Kalil 2007: 82). Through the redesignation of existing budget items, as well as the injection of new funds, US$422 million were provided 356.by Congress for nanoscale science and engineering in the fiscal year 2001; ten years later, the amount had more than quadrupled to US$1.8 billion in FY2011 (see NNI 2010).

As during previous shifts in technology policy, national competition was a key driver. A report in 1994 noted that Japan, thanks to a decade-long funding programme, should be regarded the leader in “miniaturization of more traditional (non-lithographic) machining processes”, for which there was “no comparable US effort” (JTEC 1994). While the rhetoric of this report (and subsequent ones like it) was moderate, their implications were clear: if the US was to keep up with international scientific developments, it would have to restructure its haphazard funding system to make it as systematic and comprehensive as that of its competitors, Japan and Europe.

When it moved into the centre of science and technology policy debates in the early 2000s, nanotech had all the marks of a “promising technology”, in the sense distinguished by Harro van Lente (1993). As in the case of “emerging technology”, this term may refer to a specific – real (current) or hypothetical (future) – key invention, or it may refer to the overall Baconian promise that science and technology will contribute to the wellbeing of humankind. In the case of a promising technology, van Lente writes, “scientists seem to be obliged to mention perceived potentials in opening and closing paragraphs of their research articles” – obliged, one might plausibly add, by the expectations from funding bodies and policy initiatives – as a result of which “research problems are embedded in more general scenarios about the direction of information technology and in visions of a future society” (van Lente 1993: 6–7). Labelling a technology “promising” in this way underscores how initial engagements with emerging technologies hinge on extensive assurances of future pay-offs, furnishing a developmental outlook and mobilising diverse sources of resources and investments to galvanise them under a unifying label, e.g. “nanotechnology”. The attendant assurances serve as a unifying theme for a variety of stakeholders and facilitate the coordination of joint actions even across divergent interests. Rather than striving for precision, such labelling endeavours to influence social dynamics, generating justification for contemporary research by appealing to the promise of innovative potential. Ultimately, it projects an improved future while assuaging apprehension about unwanted side effects, construing the ideologically amenable line of development as the only rational course to be pursued.

It is, of course, not unusual for proponents of particular lines of technological development to highlight their societal benefits. Mike Roco, a leading nanotech advocate, proclaimed that the “main reason for developing nanotechnology” was the advancement of “broad societal goals such as improved comprehension of nature, increased productivity, better healthcare and extending the limits of sustainable development and of human potential” (Roco 2003: 181). Where nanotechnology discourse takes on an unmistakably ideological flavour, however, is in its tendency to adjudicate normative questions and to make invisible the deliberative dimension of social and political issues. The normative ambition is evident in the reductionist belief, voiced by Drexler, that “throughout history, variations in the arrangement of atoms have distinguished the cheap from the cherished, the diseased from the healthy” (Drexler 1990: 3); normative questions are thus being redescribed as descriptive matters of fact. This results in a denial of the very possibility of reasonable disagreement about goals and values, which explains Drexler’s insistence that institutions of deliberation will become irrelevant, since nanotech-based “[s]‌elf-replicating systems [will …] provide food, health care, shelter and other necessities” – all “without bureaucracies or large factories” (Drexler 1990: 235).

By “naturalising” highly contentious and speculative technological concepts such as “nanobots” – for example, by likening them to evolved intra-cellular processes – nanotech proponents are able to tap into the tropes of the science fiction genre, activating socio-technical imaginaries that link miniaturisation, automation and scientific progress to dreams of overcoming our natural and physical limitations. At the same time, the emphasis on “bottom-up” processes such as self-assembly and self-replication resonates with Hayekian political conceptions of self-organisation, spontaneous order and the absence of central control. The way in which the promise of future applications was woven into a rhetoric of political urgency in the race towards economic exploitation of such applications closely parallels ongoing discourses about which role AI technologies should be allowed to play and which technologically infused futures they herald.[59] In all such cases, the promise of emerging technologies activates broader social-political hopes and allows its advocates to tap into and reshape existing socio-technical imaginaries, thereby “build[ing] networks of people and institutions through determinist talk and action and in doing so [conjuring] up the thick social ties that make such determinism plausible” (Mody 2004: 103).

Cornucopianism and the Californian ideology

As the example of nanotechnology already highlights, judgments concerning what is technologically possible and which among those possible technological futures are desirable are informed by competing visions of our relation to the world at large. If the world around us is seen as a standing reserve of infinitely malleable resources, judgments concerning the deployment of newly emerging technologies will be different than they would have been had one assumed that technologies operate under hard external constraints.

What might such external constraints be? At the most basic level, technologies are constrained by the laws of physics – e.g. thermodynamic principles such as the conservation of energy – which delimit the space of what can, in principle, be achieved by intervening in the causal fabric of the world. While this may be regarded as trivially true, some hypothetical technologies that inform socio-technical imaginaries ignore this basic constraint. At a more contingent level, limitations of available natural resources, combined with environmental constraints and socio-economic pressures (e.g. due to demographic changes such as population growth) equally exert pressure on which technologies can be deployed. Ideological outlooks that view the world through the lens of scarcity advocate for conservation, improvements in efficiency, sustainable practices and generally favour policies that address the finitude of Earth’s resources. If humanity has made great progress in creating production and supply systems that, so far at least, have been able to overcome, or compensate for, perceived limitations, then this is thanks to science and technology. Eventually, however, hard limits exist and there is no guarantee that such progress will continue indefinitely – at least not in a way that is able to give an ever-increasing proportion of people a share in at least moderate prosperity.

Yet hard external limitations are not only due to absolute scarcity, but may also arise from the long-term impacts of unwanted side effects. If past forecasts – from the food shortages predicted by Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18^th century to contemporary concerns about peak oil – have turned out to be false, this is not because there are no such limits, but merely because the upper limits of production capacity were underestimated. Moreover, it would be simplistic to view the category of “limits to growth” (following the eponymous 1972 Club of Rome report) only in terms of an impending shortage of raw materials. After all, when it comes to anthropogenic climate change, it is the abundance of fossil fuels (produced in part by new extraction techniques such as fracking) that imposes hard limitations on which types of technologies are compatible with human civilization.

By contrast, proponents of Cornucopianism (from Latin cornu copiae, “horn of plenty”; for a genealogy of the term, see Albritton Jonsson 2014) hold the view that the Earth’s resources can be considered unlimited for all practical purposes. As the economist Julian Simon puts it:

There is no reason to believe that at any time in the future the quantity of a natural resource or service available at current prices will be significantly less than it is today, or that it will no longer be available at all.

(Simon 1981: 48)

While some critics speak of “The Cornucopian School” ( Nasong’o 2017), proponents of cornucopians – among them economists, scientists and science fiction authors – are united not so much by a coherent, overarching theoretical framework but by a shared belief that technological innovation and human ingenuity, especially under the political and economic conditions of capitalism, can be counted on to answer any problems or limitations that humanity may face along the way. When it comes to worries concerning the depletion of scarce resources, Cornucopians argue that population growth, far from being part of the problem, offers a solution to scarcity and environmental degradation, since – so the argument goes – a larger population affords greater human ingenuity which, through the invisible hand of the free market, will unleash greater imagination and innovation, eventually leading to technological solutions to what were merely perceived to be problems of scarcity. Even seemingly hard limitations are not written in stone but can potentially be overcome by market-based innovation, since resource utilisation over time becomes more efficient and new substitutes become available.

This Cornucopian outlook on the relationship between humans and nature is premised on a highly idiosyncratic ontology of the planet, according to which the Earth, as one critic of Cornucopianism puts it, is seen as “an endlessly malleable resource, which when we apply our dazzling ingenuity to it, can yield ever increasing wealth for humans” (Krakoff 2011: 165). On one hand, this is associated with an exceptionalist view of humans as an “ultimate resource”, comprised of “skilled, spirited, hopeful people, exerting their wills and imaginations …, thereby inevitably contributing to the benefit of everyone” (Myers and Simon 1994: 33); on the other hand, this reduces humans to their function as the carriers of knowledge, which is seen as “[t]‌he main fuel to speed the world’s progress” (Myers and Simon 1994: 33). The Cornucopian expectation that human knowledge and ingenuity will allow humanity “to go increasing forever” (Myers and Simon 1994: 33), thus, operates on a purely functional conception of humans as agents of innovation, where the latter is construed narrowly along existing technological pathways. In doing so, it leaves out a full consideration of human lifeworlds and the vast array of human values and projects beyond the realm of the technologically feasible. In this regard, Cornucopianism is aligned with the ideology of transhumanism, which likewise replaces the richness of the human lifeworld with a set of separable domains (e.g. “healthspan”, “cognition”, “emotion”; Bostrom 2008: 107–8), focusing on the goal of transcending, in one or more of these domains, “the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means” (Bostrom 2008: 107–8).

While the post-human ideal promoted by transhumanists taps into the imagery of science fiction, Cornucopianism can also serve to legitimise the status quo. This occurs when the emancipatory promise of liberation turns away from the goal of changing society towards the escapist fantasy of the seamless satisfaction of individual desires; where the former would involve material intervention in the world, the latter may be achieved in a seemingly virtual way – whether by immersing ourselves in digital simulations or by continuously adapting our preferences to match the (evolving) cutting edge of technology. In a prescient paper in 1996, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron characterise such a shift among the then-nascent dot-com industry as the “Californian ideology”: “Instead of openly rebelling against the system, … digital artisans now accept that individual freedom can only be achieved by working within the constraints of technological progress and the ‘free market’” ( Barbrook and Cameron 1996: 58). Whereas previous social movements, such as the 1960s hippie movement, saw self-realisation as contributing to social liberation, the Californian ideology “is ultimately pessimistic about fundamental social change” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996: 62), seeking solace instead in the construction of digital niches where individuals can reap the benefits of integrating themselves into ever-more personalised digital experiences: “The Californian Ideology, therefore, simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship” – an unforeseen combination “made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996: 50).

Discursive strategies of ideological reinforcement

One of the recurring insights of the history, sociology and philosophy of technology is the realisation that neither technology in general, nor individual technolog*ies* – let alone emerging technologies, which have yet to settle into a determinate overall shape – have an “essence”, or “identity”, over and above how they manifest themselves in specific, socially and historically contingent ways. Rather, technologies are constituted and shaped by continuing negotiations among different stakeholders, who may variously draw on past technological controversies, current socio-technical imaginaries and narratives concerning potential technology futures in order to bolster their interests and agendas. As a result, technology discourse cannot be divorced from broader cultural–intellectual struggles along ideological fault lines. This section discusses three ways in which discourse about emerging technologies may be shaped by discursive strategies with the aim of reinforcing and stabilising ideological commitments.

The first case concerns the use of framing, that is of using cognitive schemata to organise messy and conflicting information by granting certain considerations priority over others (see Nelson, Oxley and Clawson 1997). This is familiar from media studies and political discourse analysis, where the choice of an interpretative frame may determine how a piece of information is received by a broader public (Berinsky and Kinder 2006); yet it also applies to science policy, whenever different technological options and trajectories need to be weighed against each other (Nisbet and Mooney 2007). Frames, thus, are intimately connected to the socio-technical imaginaries discussed in Section III. Whether a new technology is portrayed as a scientific innovation, a means of social progress, an environmental hazard or a source of economic growth, may influence its overall level of acceptance for better or worse, depending on the target audience (see also Druckman and Bolsen 2011). By shifting the focus away from the details of the particular technology at hand towards broader social, political and economic aims, technology discourse is itself moved to a higher level of abstraction. As a result of such abstraction, “debates frequently remain on a generic level with no or only minimal reference to [the specifics]”; instead, they involve the exchange of “statements about technological progress, its desirability and potential impacts that could apply to any emerging technology” (Bauer and Bogner 2020: 503–504, referring to Swierstra and Rip 2007: 4). This renders them ideologically flexible, ready to be integrated into any reasonably comprehensive set of socio-political commitments.

A second, more specific, discursive move is the selective adjustment of epistemic standards to favour certain ideological tenets. For example, adherents of a Cornucopian worldview might grant arguments from scarcity less credence than would be warranted by the scientific evidence, whereas neoMalthusians might systematically underestimate the potential of new technologies. As social psychologists have shown, evidence which poses a threat to deep-rooted beliefs tied to one’s sense of identity (and which would thereby inject cognitive dissonance into a subject’s belief system) tends to be disregarded; cognitive reflection may even increase such distortion, since it may promote the individuals’ interest in demonstrating loyalty to their ideological standpoint (see Kahan 2013 and references therein). Indeed, it has been argued that such cognitive dissonance reduction can border on the irrational, e.g. when evidence-based scientific consensus (e.g., concerning the reality of anthropogenic climate change) is being dismissed, while speculative technologies that lack evidence of their effective deployability (e.g, geo-engineering) is being touted as an infallible “techno-fix” (on this point, see Gelfert 2013a). This, once again, emphasises that neither the adoption of new technologies nor the refusal to act on available information can be fully explained without factoring in their ideological value-laden-ness. At the same time, by taking seriously the phenomenon of motivated cognition, the social psychology of belief formation holds out the promise of new insights for ideology analysis by grounding ideological formations at the collective level in cognitive mechanisms that operate at the individual level, albeit in a socially and historically situated way.

Third, to broaden the perspective again, there is a cluster of discursive strategies that are performative of technological determinism, either concerning intra-technological development or the effects of novel technologies on society and the societal adjustments they demand. Typically, such strategies operate on the idea that – either as a matter of principle, or due to practical constraints – technology and society form separate domains, with the former following a logic of its own and the latter being at the receiving end of technological changes. In our earlier discussion of nanotechnology (Section IV) we came across one way in which such a dualism between technology and society (or rather: the negation of meaningful social influence) can be manufactured: by portraying the adoption of the newly conceived nanoscience and technology as an inevitable step in the economic competition between nation–states. While scholars in the sociology of science and technology have presented numerous case studies disproving such a technical/social divide, for example under the rubric of the “social shaping of technology” (see Williams and Edge 1996), it remains a persistent feature of public and media discourse on technological development ( Örnebring 2010; Appelgren 2023). Given that what is collectively deemed inevitable, or realistic, is itself subject to framing, it is easy to see how technologically deterministic rhetoric affords a way of manufacturing and stabilising ideologically motivated consent to certain technological trajectories rather than others.

Conclusion

As this chapter has aimed to show, technology shapes human thought and action not only through its direct effects and affordances, but also through the way it is perceived by the various stakeholders involved. Such differences in outlook can, in turn, legitimise certain perceived courses of technological development while delegitimising, or downplaying, others. This applies all the more to new and emergent technologies, which have yet to settle into a determinate overall shape and, for this reason, can be mobilised as a screen on which to project narratives infused with ideological presuppositions. Such “projections” need not be deliberate or explicit, but can themselves be influenced by historical context and prevalent socio-technical imaginaries. Importantly, they are mediated by social-psychological mechanisms that operate at the individual level, albeit in a socially and historically situated manner; attending to these factors promises to enrich the toolbox of ideology analysis and will likely have a significant impact on the communication of science and technology (and, by extension, on policy-making in these areas) as well. Technology discourse can thus be seen to be deeply intertwined with cultural and ideological struggles, shaped by framing strategies that render emerging technologies adaptable to a range of ideological perspectives. Only close attention to specific cases can reveal how ideological biases influence the interpretation of evidence and, on occasion, lead to irrational dismissal of scientific evidence or over-reliance on speculative technologies.

References

Albritton Jonsson, F. (2014) “The origins of Cornucopianism: A preliminary genealogy”, Critical Historical Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1–18.

Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)”, transl. by Brewster, B. in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Press: 127–186.

Appelgren, E. (2023) “The No-Go Zone of journalism studies: Revisiting the concept of technological determinism”, Digital Journalism, vol. 11, no. 4, 672–690.

Bacon, F. (1905) The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Robertson, J. M., 12 vols, London: Routledge.

Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. (1996) “The Californian ideology”, Science as Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 44–72.

Bauer, A. and Bogner, A. (2020) “Let’s (Not) talk about synthetic biology: Framing an emerging technology in public and stakeholder dialogues”, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 29, no. 5, 492–507.

Berinsky, A. J. and Kinder, D. R. (2006) “Making sense of issues through media frames: Understanding the Kosovo crisis”, Journal of Politics, vol. 68, no. 3, 640–656.

Bloor, D. (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery, Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Bogner, A. and Torgersen, H. (2014) “Emerging technologies and the interpretative turn in technology assessment”, Teorija in Praksa, vol. 51, no. 5, 726–741.

Bostrom, N. (2008) “Why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up”, in Gordijn, B. and Chadwick, R. (eds) Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Dordrecht: Springer 107–137.

Canguilhem, G. (1988/1968) Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, transl. Goldhammer, A., Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Drexler, E. (1990) Engines of Creation, New York NY: Anchor Books.

Druckman, J. N. and Bolsen, T. (2011) “Framing, motivated reasoning and opinions about emergent technologies”, Journal of Communication, vol. 61, no. 4, 659–688.

Einsiedel, E. F. (2009) “Making sense of emerging technologies”, in Einsiedel, E. F. (ed.) Emerging Technologies: From Hindsight to Foresight, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press: 3–11.

Feynman, R. (1960) “There’s plenty of room at the bottom: An invitation to enter a new field of science”, Engineering and Science, vol. 23, 22–36.

Gelfert, A. (2012) “Nanotechnology as ideology: Towards a critical theory of ‘converging technologies’”, Science, Technology and Society, vol. 17, no. 1, 143–164.

Gelfert, A. (2013a) “Climate change, epistemic dissonance and the ethics of uncertainty”, Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series), vol. 3, no. 1, 167–208.

Gelfert, A. (2013b) “Synthetic biology between technoscience and thing knowledge”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 44, no. 2, 141–149.

Geuss, R. (1981) The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Geuss, R, (2020) Who Needs a World View? Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Habermas, J. (1971) “Technology and science as ‘ideology’ (1968)”, in Habermas, J. (ed.) Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (transl. by Shapiro, J. J.), Boston MA: Beacon Press: 81–122.

Hughes, S. (2024) “Hearts and minds: The technopolitical role of affect in sociotechnical imaginaries”, Social Studies of Science (Online First). DOI: 10.1177/03063127241257489

Japanese Technology Evaluation Center (1994) “JTEC panel report on microelectromechanical systems in Japan” (Abstract), [Online], Available: https://de.scribd.com/document/167604530/Mems-in-Japan[23 Jul 2024].

Jasanoff, S. (2015) “Future imperfect: Science, technology and the imaginations of modernity”, in Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S.-H. (eds) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press: 1–33.

Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S.-H. (2009) “Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea”, Minerva, vol. 47, no. 2, 119–146.

Kahan, D. (2013) “Ideology, motivated reasoning and cognitive reflection”, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 8, no. 4, 407–424.

Krakoff, S. (2011) “Parenting the planet”, in Arnold, D. G. (ed.) The Ethics of Global Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 145–169.

Lane, N. and Kalil, T. (2007) “In the beginning: The U.S. national nanotechnology initiative”, in Allhoff, F., Lin, P., Moor, J. and Weckert, J. (eds) Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology, Hoboken NJ: Wiley: 80–88.

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter, C., Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. (2004) “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 225–248.

Marcuse, H. (1969) An Essay on Liberation, Boston MA: Beacon Press.

Mody, C. (2004) “Small, but determined: Technological determinism in nanoscience”, Hyle: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, vol. 10, no. 2, 101–130.

Myers, N. and Simon, J. (1994) Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment, New York NY: Norton.

Nasong’o, W. (2017) “Environmental policy and practice in Kenya: Between Cornucopians and Neo-Malthusians”, The International Journal on Green Growth and Development, vol. 3, no. 1, 1–19.

National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) (2010) “Supplement to the President’s FY 2011 Budget”, [Online], Available: www.nano.gov/sites/default/files/pub_resource/nni_2011_budget_supplement.pdf[23 Jul 2024].

Nelson, T. E., Oxley, Z. M. and Clawson, R. A. (1997) “Toward a psychology of framing effects”, Political Behavior, vol. 19, no. 3, 221–246.

Nisbet, M. C. and Mooney, C. (2007) “Framing science”, Science, vol. 316, no. 5821, 56.

Örnebring, H. (2010) “Technology and journalism-as-labour: Historical perspectives”, Journalism, vol. 11, no. 1, 57–74.

Roco, M. C. (2003) “Broader societal issues of nanotechnology”, Journal of Nanoparticle Research, vol. 5, no. 3–4, 181–189.

Rotolo, D., Hicks, D. and Martin, B. R. (2015) “What is an emerging technology?” Research Policy, vol. 44, no. 10, 1827–1843.

Simon, J. (1981) The Ultimate Resource, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Swierstra, T. and Rip, A. (2007) “Nano-ethics as NEST-ethics: Patterns of moral argumentation about new and emerging science and technology”, Nanoethics, vol. 1, no. 1, 3–20.

van Lente, H. (1993) Promising technology: The dynamics of expectations in technological developments, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Twente.

Villaseñor Terán, M. (2018) “Philosophical explorations for a concept of emerging technologies”, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, vo. 22, no. 1, 28–50.

Vogel, S. (1995) “New science, new nature: The Habermas-Marcuse debate revisited”, in Feenberg, A. and Hannay, A. (eds) Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press: 23–42.

Williams, R. and Edge, D. (1996) “The social shaping of technology”, Research Policy, vol. 25, no. 6, 865–899.

22. Transhumanism as ideology

Apolline Taillandier

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-29

Introduction[60]

Having ventured into the 1980s American transhumanist milieu, the journalist Ed Regis wrote:

man had always been aiming at some type of transhuman condition, whether on earth or in heaven. But if the desire to become more than human was as old as the hills, it was nevertheless true that a new element had been brought into the picture by the cryonicists, by Eric Drexler, by Hans Moravec and the rest: what they’d given us (or soon would) was the ability to satisfy those desires.

(Regis 1990: 277, emphasis in original)

Regis’s book, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990) was to be praised, one argued, despite the irony in the title, for “put[ting] the word transhuman into the dictionary” (Levy 1991: 47). For the transhumanists, space technology, nanotechnology and computer science were about to realise global harmony, material abundance and physical immortality. As the “new entity in evolution” (Esfandiary 1974: 298) would emerge, humanity would become transhuman, something more and other than itself, eventually ushering to post-humanity, an unknown yet utopian future.

Transhumanism as ideology is not easy to grasp. Both the term and the idea it captures have a long history. As Regis notes, transhumanism revitalises ancient dreams of immortality and modern visions of scientific progress with contemporary technological imaginaries. Use of the word to qualify a distinct creed – the aim to transcend humanism as well as humanity – has been traced to a 1957 essay by Julian Huxley, a prominent British biologist and the brother of novelist Aldous Huxley (Huxley 1959). Earlier occurrences can be found in writings by the French engineer Jean Coutrot during the 1930s (Dard and Moatti 2016) and transhumanists have traced its origin back to Dante (Vita-More 2012). The late 1980s saw transhumanism become a rallying category with a US-based group called “extropians,” many of whom claimed to have been transhumanists before knowing the term. The extropians, a transnational network of activists primarily active on the internet, debated ways to bring about “homo superior” characterising the “transhuman” or “post-human” stage of evolution (1991). Post-humanity defined a new biological condition “when we have made such fundamental and sweeping modifications to our inherited genetics, physiology, neurophysiology and neurochemistry, that we can no longer be usefully classified with Homo Sapiens” (More 1994b). A decade later, many transhumanists grown wary of the “T-word” were unwilling to reclaim it (Dorthe 2019: 400 sqq; O’Connell 2017: 51). Some insisted that their ideas percolated into adjacent projects with no explicit transhumanist affiliations, such as “AI safety” – a fusion of computer science, machine-learning engineering, policy expertise and public science recasting long-standing transhumanist ambitions to achieve artificial “superintelligence” (Bostrom 2014) – and “effective altruism”, a strand of philanthropy aiming to maximise the impact of donations on global welfare (MacAskill 2015), sometimes described as “the continuation of transhumanism in a much wider sense” (Sandberg 2017).[61] With its most vocal advocates among prominent entrepreneurs, credentialled “visioneers” (McCray 2012) and public intellectuals across the US and Europe, transhumanism today is predominantly an Anglo-American phenomenon.

There is now a flourishing scholarship on transhumanism, its history, techno-scientific imaginaries and political dimensions. Scholars have explored visions of human transformation through a range of technological projects including life extension (McCray 2016), cryonics (Bernstein 2019), nanotechnology (McCray 2012), space expansionism ( Deudney 2020), artificial intelligence (Geraci 2010) and genetic enhancement (Baillie and Casey 2005; Vallor 2016). Historians and philosophers have analysed transhumanism’s relationship to the Enlightenment (Hottois 2017; Le Dévédec 2018), early 20^th-century Darwinism, evolutionary biology and eugenics (Linett 2023; Bashford 2024; Dunér 2025), and secularisation (Hurlbut and Tirosh-Samuelson 2016; Calheiros 2019). The political meaning of transhumanism is less clear: some have described it as a “dangerous idea” threatening the biological foundations of liberal democracy (Fukuyama 2004); others as a libertarian distortion of liberal ideals ( Barbrook and Cameron 1996; Deprez 2019); others as a form of Lockean liberalism pushed to its final logics (Hayles 1999; Braidotti 2013). Recent studies ( Taillandier 2021a; Bell and Taillandier 2025) have analysed the ideological variety within transhumanism: whereas inter-war and mid-century transhumanists such as Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane and John Bernal were socialists or social liberal reformers, most contemporary advocates emphasise transhumanism’s commitment to liberalism. The latter itself has taken various forms. Transhumanists concerned with individual freedom, justice, responsibility or the foundations and limits of sovereignty have mobilised different and partly conflicting understandings of these concepts – with some claiming that there is no true liberty short of the complete abolition of the state and the privatisation of law, security and money; and others insisting that redistribution of biological or digital resources is part and parcel of an inclusive and democratic post-human future. However, the conceptual arrangements that made these re-descriptions possible and the meaning of such ideological variations for the analysis of transhumanism have remained largely unexplored.

In this chapter, I aim to contribute to bridging the gap between ideology analysis and the social study of science and technology. It is a lieu commun of science and technology studies that technology and politics co-constitute each other (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Latour 2003; Jasanoff and Kim 2015), and technology has been a central problem for 20^th-century political thinkers (Ashcroft 2024; Gelfert 2025). Yet political theorists have rarely examined how techno-scientific practices themselves convey political visions and ambitions (for notable exceptions see Bell 2021; Deudney 2020; Freeden 1979). Drawing on well-established contextualist methods in the history of political thought (Skinner 2002; Pocock 2016), I analyse transhumanism as an ideological segment: a cluster of ideas and projects that intersect with, modify, repurpose and transform existing political concepts, constellations of concepts and traditions (Freeden 1979: 670; Freeden 1996). This approach sidesteps the question of whether transhumanism expresses some final exclusionary logic or essential tension within liberalism as ideology or a betrayal of its emancipatory ambitions. Rather, it focuses on describing how transhumanists in different times and locations advocated post-humanity by mobilising broader political languages, particularly variants of liberalism and socialism. In addition, I modify standard ideology analysis by examining transhumanism’s techno-political character. Combining political theory with the sociology of techno-science, the study of techno-politics sheds light on the role of techno-science in shaping both conceptual and material dimensions of ideology. As such, it helps clarify how technological projects, imagined and actual, produce and transform political meaning.

I adopt a comprehensive definition of transhumanism.[62] This definition includes self-described transhumanists, such as members of transhumanist organisations and regular participants to transhumanist events, publications, mailing lists, online fora and so forth. It also includes others who did not call themselves transhumanists but were reclaimed as such by self-described transhumanists, for instance the British biologists J. B. S. Haldane and John Bernal, often deemed “the first direct intellectual precursors of transhumanism” (Hughes 2004: 158) or the American computer scientist Marvin Minsky, both featured in recent efforts to establish a transhumanist canon (Bostrom 2005; More and Vita-More 2013). It excludes broader influences such as Pico della Mirandola, Condorcet, Leon Trotsky, H. G. Wells or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Jones 1999; Hughes 2004: 127; Bostrom 2005). Expanding the study of political ideology beyond conventional intellectual spaces, it gives centre stage to engineers, entrepreneurs, policy experts and amateur scientists as ideology producers. I examine a heterogeneous cast of sources including online manifestos, opinion pieces, popular science essays, technical reports, research articles in engineering subjects, self-help manuals, company blogposts and interviews.

The chapter has three sections. The first reviews existing scholarship on transhumanism and points out some of its limitations for ideology analysis. The second charts transhumanism’s political languages and explains how it brings the study of ideology to new, techno-political terrains. The third section briefly examines transhumanism’s techno-liberalism,[63] showing how it reflects distinct and partly conflicting liberal conceptions of the self and the world. In conclusion, I suggest some further directions for analysing techno-science as political ideology.

Delimiting transhumanism

The first obstacle to analysing transhumanism lies in the variety of views to which it gives a name. The term, often deemed polysemic or vague, seems to characterise a polymorphic imaginary rather than a structured ideology (Dard and Moatti 2016: 92; Bourcier 2019: 6). For Huxley, it captured the secular belief that “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself” (Huxley 1959: 17). For the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) created in 1998, it meant “a radical new approach to future-oriented thinking … based on the premise that the human species does not represent the end of our evolution but, rather, its beginning” (Bostrom and Alii 1999). Transhumanist visions of the future have also ranged widely. Some involve progressive alterations of humanity’s genetic makeup in the name of “morphological freedom” (Sandberg 2013), the right to change one’s body or mind at will. Others prefigure the final overcoming of its biological and planetary limits. A common transhumanist scenario is the “technological singularity” (Vinge 1993), a breakthrough in artificial capacities making human intelligence irredeemably obsolete. Another is “mind uploading”, a hypothetical technique for transferring human minds onto digital substrate and ultimately leading to artificial superintelligence and digital immortality – a future which advocates noted “could in no sense be considered any longer human” (Moravec 1988; Moravec 1993: 7). Rather than a systematic body of thought, transhumanism is a highly syncretic collection of ideas about human nature, biology, techno-science and the social order.

Scholars of transhumanism have discussed the ethical implications of “enhancement” and the concepts of self, technology, language and time underlying visions of a post- or superhuman future. Interpretations of its meaning and location within the history of thought diverge significantly. Some have described it as a fundamental departure from humanist and Enlightenment ideas of progress and emancipation (le Dévédec 2018), others as “an intensification of humanism” (Wolfe 2009: xv, emphasis in original). Those noting continuities between humanism and transhumanism disagree on their political implications. The philosopher Gilbert Hottois claims that the ambition to enhance individual capacities helps re-evaluate the role of material technologies in humanist traditions (Hottois 2017). For post-humanist theorists, transhumanism, despite its claim to change humanity and end the tyranny of nature, reinforces hierarchical and exclusionary notions of the human. N. Katherine Hayles has influentially described the mind-uploading scenario as a product of the cybernetic “informational” idea of the self, but also the ultimate expression of a deeper contempt for the flesh and the body in the Western philosophical tradition. The transhumanist post-human, she concludes, remains “graft[ed]… onto a liberal humanist view of the self” (Hayles 1999: 286) defined by autonomy and property. Variants of this critique can be found across the post-humanist literature and beyond. Contrasting transhumanist techno-genesis to her critical post-humanism, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has argued that transhumanism is shaped by and reproduces a “hegemonic model of the posthuman” (Braidotti 2013: 97). Reinforcing masculine, White and able-bodied understandings of the body and individualist ethics, it reflects more generally the limitations of liberal thought: its notion of the (post-)human self is disembodied and solipsist, its universalist claims highly parochial and its understanding of technology limited to a tool for extending biological control, self-ownership and domination over the non-human world.

Transhumanism has also been described as a product of widespread technological narratives and imaginaries. Science studies scholars have shown how transhumanist narratives and metaphors about techno-science and society draw on broader imaginaries of final frontiers (O’Connell 2017), industrial convergence (Dupuy 2011), entrepreneurial prescience (Boenig-Liptsin and Hurlbut 2016; Jasanoff 2016) or digital salvation (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012). Transhumanism shares a rhetorical style and ideological logics with techno-scientific ideas and practices that largely exceed it. For instance, its investment of technologies with promissory, salvific or apocalyptic meaning is typical of a “post-secular” hybridisation of religious and secular registers, the reflection of a new historical condition defined by anxiety and the irruption of truly unprecedented events (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012; Simon 2019; see also Taillandier 2021b). Broaching the broader question of transhumanism’s relationship to time and agency, this strand of critique points out the apocalypticism in “existential risk” scenarios predicting uncontrolled future technological developments leading to the destruction of humanity. As the political theorist Joe Davidson puts it, such forms of apocalypse “from above” (Davidson 2025: 480) hide the range of action available to the dominant groups who produce them, foreclosing political possibility and further marginalising those already denied projective capacities. Transhumanism sheds light on the symbolic and material interests of the new technology elite and contemporary manifestations of oppressive logics that have roots in a longer history of Western colonialism, patriarchy and capitalist extraction (Thomas 2024). Culturally significant rather than ideologically original, it offers a useful entry point for criticising dominant ideological constellations.

Both strands of scholarship have limited value for making sense of transhumanism’s distinctive character. Post-humanist and Science and Technology Studies critics generally describe transhumanism as old wine in new bottles, a particular instantiation of a narrowly constructed humanist tradition “fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy” (Hayles 2011: 225). Philosophical histories, on the other hand, tend to offer a consistent picture of transhumanism, even while tracing the diversity within its philosophical or political views. In what follows I borrow from Michael Freeden’s morphological analysis to account for the ideological variety within transhumanism. Freeden’s method takes discursive contestation as its focal point. Like the Cambridge School and other contextualist approaches, it takes ideology to mean a language used to legitimise political action, and I argue that it can be extended to concepts not typically analysed as political. I draw two additional insights from Freeden’s work. First, not unlike eugenics or nationalism (Freeden 1996: 7; Freeden 2005: 135), transhumanism is not a systematic conceptual body but a loose set of themes and ideas articulated to distinct and partly conflicting ideologies over time and space – from fully fleshed traditions such as socialism to less-defined ideological configurations such as anarcho-capitalism ( Taillandier 2021c). As such, it can be described as an ideological segment articulating the desirability of a post-human future to existing ideologies. Second, transhumanism sheds light on the shifting and contested nature of broader, more stable ideological families. Descriptions of transhumanism as a liberal phenomenon, neither logically determined nor purely contingent, thus reflect the complexity and hegemony of liberalism in contemporary Western politics (Bell 2014). I return to this latter point in the third section.

Transhumanist politics and the study of techno-politics

Transhumanism has come in a variety of political shades across time and locations (Damour and Doat 2018, Fuller 2018, Levin 2021). Inter-war transhumanists such as Bernal and Haldane advocated “biological socialism” (Freeden 1979: 669), a combination of eugenic and social policies which they hoped would abolish individuality, the root cause of capitalist class struggle. The late 1980s saw the formalisation of transhumanism as a distinctly libertarian creed, its “extropian” supporters directly linking post-human evolution to the abolition of state sovereignty (More 1990). Many extropians favoured anarcho-capitalism – replacing all state institutions by free markets – and the settlement of independent communities in spaces not yet claimed by nation–states, such as the digital, international seas or outer space.[64] Not all transhumanists agreed. A declaration by the WTA released in 1998 states, for instance, that “transhumanism does not support any particular party, politician or political platform”, all the while identifying individual freedom, pluralism and fairness as its core values (WTA 1998). The philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of its lead authors, prescribed moving transhumanism away from the extropian “proto-transhumanist fringes, which … had imbibed too deeply of the Californian spirit” (Bostrom 2005: 11) and recommended social welfare provisions to counter the “inequality-increasing tendencies of enhancement technology” (Bostrom 2003: 503). Others located transhumanism firmly to the left, opposing traditional conservatism and anti-enhancement liberals on a new “biopolitical” cleavage (Hughes 2004; Fuller and Lipinska 2014). Notable strands within contemporary transhumanism thus depart from possessive individualism. Mobilising social liberal ideas of collective salvation, flourishing and moral obligation, they express, as one advocate wrote, a commitment to “a utilitarian ethical position and liberal-democratic social order” ( Sorgner 2021: 11).

Other dimensions of transhumanist ideology remain largely unexplored. First, while many commentators have examined the relationship between humanism and transhumanism, how transhumanists themselves constructed and reclaimed intellectual lineages has received little attention. Many transhumanists trace their ideas to a heteroclite collection of ancient and modern figures ranging from Gilgamesh to Bacon and Picco della Mirandola, through to Emerson and Nietzsche. In the US they often invoke a distinctly American imaginary – cryonics advocate Robert Ettinger, one wrote, was “the latest spokesman for a worthy American tradition going back as far as Benjamin Franklin” (Gruman in Ettinger 1964: xiii).

Transhumanists were also conflicted about the humanist and Enlightenment traditions. In 1994, libertarian transhumanist Max More described extropians as “the torchbearers of Nietzsche’s radical program of reassessment and self-constitution”, which he opposed to the “failure of courage and vision” in humanism and its tendency to “fear the promethean urge” (More 1994a: 4; 1994b; see Pilsch 2017 and Sorgner 2021: 57–72). An extropian conference a few years later offered a more nuanced view, proposing to lead a “cultural counter-offensive” against opponents to genetic engineering by “restor[ing] and refin[ing] the Enlightenment values” (Extropy Institute 2001). Others rejected the Nietzschean genealogy altogether. For Bostrom, transhumanism, “despite some surface-level similarities with the Nietzschean vision … ha[d]‌ as much or more in common with Nietzsche’s contemporary J. S. Mill, the English liberal thinker and utilitarian” (Bostrom 2005: 4). Combining “traditional means of improving human nature such as education and cultural refinement” with a “more radical” ambition to use biotechnology, it was best described as “secular humanist thinking” (Bostrom 2003: 494). For most social liberals, transhumanism was “part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies” – its libertarian and millenarist elements an incidental deviation from its humanist and democratic core (Hughes 2010: 622). Further work would help clarify how transhumanists deployed historical arguments to justify particular variants of the post-human future.

Second, studies of transhumanism generally adopt a narrow definition of what constitutes political language. In doing so, not only do they leave aside the political in a broader sense – for instance, the disciplinary power of discourse on nature and the body (this, by contrast, has been largely discussed by post-humanist critics) – but they also exclude important transhumanist strands from conceptual analysis. For instance, scholars have pointed out the anti-political ambition of American Iranian Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, an active lobbyist for space expansion and cryonics during the 1970s ( Goffi 2019: 51–53). Esfandiary looked to future technology as a post-ideological realm located “upward” rather than right or left and he predicted that humans would evolve into transhumans “not because of capitalism or socialism but in spite of them” (Esfandiary 1973: 10, emphasis in original). Thoroughly technocratic, his transhumanism was also unquestionably utopian: it projected a world without suffering, scarcity or wars through a conjunction of planetary-scale environmental planning, advances in space technology and complete transformation of reproduction through cloning, ectogenesis and genetic engineering. Yet it also drew on political languages of the day, such as libertarian rejections of nationalist sentiment and radical feminist and anti-racist visions of a “cybernated” future freed from families, nations and “biostatic” identities (Esfandiary 1973: 9; Esfandiary 1974: 298). Many other transhumanists, although they did not engage in political activity in the conventional sense, shared key concerns with professional philosophers or policy-makers of their time: they asked which procreative choices could be reconciled with autonomy and fairness (Bostrom and Roache 2010) or how a world with disruptive technology could be governed (Bostrom et al 2020). By defining ideology as collective thought practices, morphological analysis offers valuable tools for studying future ideas as sites of ideological struggle (Andersson 2018; Warde 2018).

Transhumanist politics are enmeshed with ideas about technology. Historians of political thought have delineated several avenues for analysing the interactions between technology and politics without dissolving the boundary between the two. They have studied how artefacts express political meaning (Skinner 1987) and how representations of the material world shape and transform political theories (Forrester and Smith 2018; Charbonnier 2021). Scholars of ideology also broached the subject, noting that the medium of political discourse affects both rhetorical style and ideological content (Finlayson 2020). Introduced by historians and sociologists of technology, the notion of techno-politics suggests that actors in some instances specifically do politics by means of technology (Hecht 2009). Technology determines what political agents deem politically feasible or desirable and the cultural practices through which they publicly perform their preferred political, social and techno-scientific orders (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) or because the normative intentions of designers are inscribed within technological objects themselves and the social practices they shape (Winner 1980; Akrich 1992). Although not all transhumanists engaged in techno-scientific practice, many were scientists, engineers or amateur technologists (McCray 2012, 2017; Dorthe 2019). Tied to visions of technology and of the materiality of the world, their political ideas were also materially shaped by various tools for predicting or foreknowing the future. As nanotechnology advocate Eric Drexler argued, “no political act, no social movement can change the law of gravity one whit” (1986: 41). Even while future nanotechnology promised material abundance and pacified international relations, scientific practice and interactions between nation–states remained bound by the laws of physics. The study of techno-politics sheds light on these complex interfaces between techno-science and political ideas.

Transhumanism’s techno-liberal languages

Transhumanism today, I have argued elsewhere ( Taillandier 2019, 2021a), mostly speaks the language of liberalism. Drawing on Freeden’s “liberal languages” (2005) and the notion of techno-politics sketched above, this can be analysed in terms of a variety of techno-liberal languages. Transhumanist techno-liberal languages shed light on two key features of contemporary liberalism. First, they signal the rise of new conjunctions of libertarian elements with radical views of the self and thick visions of sociality. Scholars of ideology have generally rejected libertarians’ pretence to inclusion in the liberal canon (Freeden 1996: 276–297). Recent historiography, which emphasises the reactionary and hierarchical elements within libertarianism, lends further ground to its exclusion from the liberal family (Slobodian 2019; Cooper 2019; Jensen 2022). Transhumanist libertarianism offers a more complex picture. The extropians, like other libertarians, sought to expand the realm of individual freedom and to create a social order free of coercion. But contrary to influential libertarian figures such as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, they rejected biological essentialism or the idea of natural rights. They found the “tyranny of aging and death” (More 2013: 450) and the tyranny of the state equally unbearable. Echoing several features of 1990s Californian cyberculture (Turner 2006; Coleman 2012), they saw individuals and societies as “living systems” ( Chislenko 1999) constituted through interactions with surrounding organisms and machines and they espoused the promise of cyberspace and computer networks to realise both individual and communal emancipation. Extropians’ view of freedom, rather than strictly negative, was thus conditioned to specific technological, social and political arrangements. Their abolition of state control over drug use or encryption techniques and the privatisation of rights enforcement expressed typical libertarian critiques of the state but also a positive social ontology, advocating public science and deliberation to increase collective rationality (Bour 2022) or claiming to advance LGBTQ+ and disability rights through enhancements. The ideological complexity of techno-libertarianism, alongside its rising political and cultural support in Silicon Valley and beyond, suggests that its advocates may be now in a position to reclaim the liberal mantle.

Second, transhumanism exhibits changing conceptions of the world in contemporary liberalism. Universalist in their ambitions, transhumanists almost invariably developed a form of “cosmos-politanism” (Bell and Taillandier 2025): an understanding of humanity’s special location and “cosmic duty” to explore and expand human nature beyond its current limits (Huxley 1959: 17; Bostrom 2014; Rees 2018). Their visions of the world, specifically biological and technological in their inflections, generally took humanity and life itself, rather than the state, as the main units of global politics ( Amadae 2021). Some were explicitly hierarchical: the cryonicist Robert Ettinger, who predicted in 1964 that the “freezer program” would eventually allow “modern man” to “continue to ascend … both racially and individually”, thought it more likely to appeal to Western countries than to the communist and “retarded” nations (Ettinger 1964: 75; 125). Others supported more implicit forms of Western domination through inter-governmental cooperation and cultural exchange. Most, however, sought to guarantee peace, prosperity, technological progress and individual freedom through an institutional framework that would ensure social stability and collective welfare, such as a global planning agency under the aegis of the United Nations, corporate-led technology governance or scientific stewardship. Recent debates about AI safety reflect a variety of liberal commitments. Arguments for a “superintelligence Leviathan” (Bostrom 2014: 182) capable of optimising individual preferences, enforcing international treaties and redistributing wealth, reflect procedural arrangements of liberal justice within analytic political theory. By contrast, claims that blockchain technologies could approximate “classical-liberal governance utopia” (Buterin 2023) draw on a techno-libertarian motive that endows decentralised technologies with the power of realising both individual freedom and world equilibrium. Across differences, these techno-liberal languages share key features: they take individual autonomy and flourishing as core values, emphasise value pluralism, defend market economies and (in most instances) promote soft rules to circumvent, rather than fundamentally remake, nation–states. As such, they take part in the disjunction between welfare provision, world peace and the state that historians have traced in mid-20^th century neoliberal attacks on Keynesianism ( Rosenboim 2017, Slobodian 2019). The study of transhumanism shows how techno-scientific futures contributed to this history by producing and transforming liberal views of world order.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined transhumanism as an ideological segment, a loose collection of ideas about the post-human future that draw on and repurpose a variety of more established political traditions. While many transhumanists envisioned how technology would radically transform politics, longing for a future in which the roots of conflict would be overcome and the need for political arrangements finally abolished, they generally drew on and re-articulated ideological languages of the time. I have sketched a broad landscape for conducting a morphological study of transhumanism. Attentive to the diversity of its conceptual arrangements and (de-)contestation, it traces how transhumanists mobilised and redefined political categories and traditions in response to real or imagined technological breakthroughs. Shedding light on the role of engineering, public science and expertise in the remaking of political concepts, it moves further away from canonical histories of ideas. Scholars of ideology have notably refused to abstract political thinking from the murky reality of politics, insisting that “the analysis of political concepts as ideologies is positioned at the juncture of the historical and the contemporary” (Freeden 1996: 277). In doing so, however, they have typically left unchallenged the boundary between the political and the non-political (Brett 2002; Kelly 2016). Analysing the techno-political dimension of ideology makes visible some of the contestations that produce, maintain or displace this boundary.

Between the mid-20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st, transhumanism was primarily recast through variants of liberalism. While most commentators described this liberal character as a Lockean or libertarian creed, morphological analysis helps resist both simplifications by showing the diversity of transhumanism’s techno-liberal languages. Moving the study of thought away from today’s dominant “fable of liberalism” (Stanton 2018), it brings attention to the transhumanist biologists, engineers and philosophers who sought to continue key aspects of the liberal tradition. Transhumanism’s techno-liberalism, I have argued further, reflects broader reconfigurations of liberal thought; in particular, the disconnection of welfare imperatives from the nation–state, the rise of new forms of cosmopolitanism untied to planetary boundaries and the re-articulation of autonomy, rights and property away from notions of human nature. It gives flesh to conceptual analyses of liberalism’s polyphonic and fragmented character and sheds light on the role of techno-scientific practice in the remaking of political ideas.

Other dimensions of transhumanism deserve further attention. One is the social history of transhumanism. A protean discourse and milieu spanning conventional philosophical, technological and industrial fields, transhumanism as ideology hardly characterises a particular social group, class or subject position. Yet, like other spheres of intellectual production, it is shaped by gender, race and class dynamics as well as immense disparity in symbolic and material resources. Most transhumanists were men, identified as Western and born and educated in Europe or the US, including members of the cultural and economic elite – world-acclaimed scientists and intellectuals such as Julian Huxley or renowned entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk – but also countless anonymous activists and practitioners. The study of ideology could contribute to an account of this heterogeneity, for instance by tracing flows of capital across fields of intellectual production and across national spaces (Faure 2021; Skornicki and Tournadre 2015). Another is the transnational dimension of transhumanism as well as the global hierarchies, conceptions of modernities and articulations of national and universal claims which its advocates articulated in the name of (post-)humanity. A third is the complex ways in which ideology and utopia intersect within transhumanism: beyond common understandings of the totalising ambitions and foreclosing effects of the former and of the emancipatory, critical and subversive power of the latter, the study of transhumanism can contribute to the exploration of utopianism across liberal variants (Caré 2009; Leopold 2012). Finally, one may think of the study of transhumanism as itself a form of political theorising, seeking to understand the utopias and dystopias unfolding in today’s world and asking what comes next.

References

Akrich, M. (1992) “The de-scription of technical objects” in Bijker W. E. and Law J. (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge MA: MIT Press: 205–224.

Amadae, S. M. (2021) “Life as algorithm” in Kemp, S. and Andersson, J. (eds) Futures, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 462–483.

Andersson, J. (2018) The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ashcroft, C. (2024) Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Atanasoski, N. and Vora, K. (2018) “The surrogate effect: Technoliberalism and whiteness in a ‘post’ labor era”. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 4, no. 1, 1–13.

Baillie, H. W. and Casey, T. (2005) Is Human Nature Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering and the Future of the Human Condition, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. (1996) “The Californian ideology”, Science as Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 44–72.

Bashford, A. (2024) The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bell, D. (2014) “What is liberalism?”, Political Theory, vol. 42, no. 6, 682–715.

Bell, D. (2021) “Cyborg imperium, c. 1900”, in Chapman, A. and Hume, N. (eds) Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present: Scrambled Messages, London: Routledge: 48–70.

Bell, D. and Taillandier, A. (2025) “Cosmos-politanism: Transhumanist visions of global order from the First World War to the digital age”, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 23, no. 3, 1071–1088.

Bernstein, A. (2019) The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Boenig-Liptsin, M. and Hurlbut, J. B. (2016) “Technologies of transcendence at Singularity University”, in Hurlbut, J. B. and Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (eds) Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, Wiesbaden: Springer: 239–268.

Bostrom, N. (2003) “Human genetic enhancements: A transhumanist perspective”, Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 4, 493–506.

Bostrom, N. (2005) “A history of transhumanist thought”, Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 14, no. 1, 1–25.

Bostrom, N. (2014) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bostrom, N. (1999) The Transhumanist FAQ, [Online], Available: https://web.archive.org/web/20000817094531/www.transhumanist.org/ [4 Oct 2024]

Bostrom, N. and Roache, R. (2010) “Smart policy: cognitive enhancement and the public interest”, Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, vol. 2, no. 1, 68–84.

Bostrom, N., Dafoe, A. and Flynn, C. (2020) “Public policy and superintelligent AI: A vector field approach”, in Liao, S. M. (ed.) Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, New York NY: Oxford University Press: 293–326.

Bour, S. (2022) “On Max More’s extropianism”, in Jorion, P. (ed.) Humanism and its Discontents: The Rise of Transhumanism and Posthumanism, Cham Switzerland: Springer: 131–49.

Bourcier, B. (2019) “Les théories politiques du transhumanisme”, Raisons Politiques, vol. 74, no. 2, 5–12.

Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brett, A. (2002) “What is intellectual history now?”, in Cannadine, D. (ed.) What is History Now? New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan: 113–131.

Buterin, V. (2023) My Techno-Optimism, [Online], Available: https://web.archive.org/web/20231127214628/https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html [4 Oct 2024]

Calheiros, C. (2019) “Aspirations métaphysiques et attentes eschatologiques chez les transhumanistes”, Revue d’Éthique et de Théologie Morale, vol. 302, no. 2, 43–57.

Caré, S. (2009) La Pensée libertarienne: Genèse, fondements et horizons d’une utopie libérale, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Charbonnier, P. (2021) Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas, Cambridge: Polity.

Chislenko, A. (1999) Living Systems, [Online], Available: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117065638/www.etext.org:80/Politics/Extropy.Institute/chislenko.090292[4 Oct 2024].

Coleman, E. G. (2012) Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cooper, M. (2019) Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, New York NY: Zone Books.

Damour, F. and Doat, D. (2018) Transhumanisme: Quel Avenir pour l’Humanité?, Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu.

Dard, O. and Moatti, A. (2016) “Aux origines du mot ‘transhumanisme,’” Futuribles, no. 413, 85–94.

Davidson, J. P. L. (2022) “Extinctiopolitics: Existential risk studies, the extinctiopolitical unconscious and the billionnaires’ Exodus from Earth”, New Formations, no. 107–108, 48–65.

Davidson, J. P. L. (2025) “The apocalypse from below: The dangerous idea of the end of the world, the politics of the oppressed and anti-anti-apocalypticism”, American Political Science Review, vol. 116, no. 1, 479–491.

Deprez, S. (2019) “Le transhumanisme peut-il échapper au libertarianisme? Le cas de James Hugues”, Raisons Politiques, vol. 74, no. 2, June, 29–50.

Deudney, D. (2020) Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dorthe, G. (2019) Malédiction des Objets Absents: Explorations Épistémiques, Politiques et Écologiques du Mouvement Transhumaniste par un Chercheur Embarqué [PhD Thesis], Lausanne, Paris: Université de Lausanne, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

Drexler, K. E. (1986) Engines of Creation, Garden City NY: Doubleday.

Dunér, I. (2025) Julian Huxley, Evolutionism and the History of Transhumanism, Cham Switzerland: Springer.

Dupuy, J.-P. (2011) “Cybernetics is antihumanism: Advanced technologies and the rebellion against the human condition”, in Hansell, G. R., Grassie, W., Blackford, R., Bostrom, N. and Dupuy, J.-P. (eds) H±: Transhumanism and its Critics, Philadelphia PA: Metanexus Institute: 227–248.

Esfandiary, F. M. (1973) UpWingers: A Futurist Manifesto, New York NY: John Day.

Esfandiary, F. M. (1974) “Transhumans-2000”, in Tripp, M. (ed.) Woman in the Year 2000, New York NY: Arbor House: 291–298.

Ettinger, R. C. W. (1964) The Prospect of Immortality, Garden City NY: Doubleday.

Extropy Institute (2001) Extro 5: Shaping Things to Come, [Online], Available: https://web.archive.org/web/20010303031141/http:/www.extropy.org/ex5/extro5.htm[4 Oct 2024].

Faure, J. (2021) “A Russian version of reactionary modernism: Aleksandr Prokhanov’s ‘spiritualization of technology’”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 26, no. 3, 356–379.

Finlayson, A. (2020) “YouTube and political ideologies: Technology, populism and rhetorical Form”, Political Studies, vol. 70, no. 1, 62–80.

Forrester, K. and Smith, S. (2018) Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Freeden, M. (1979) “Eugenics and progressive thought: A study in ideological affinity”, The Historical Journal, vol. 22, 645–671.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2005) Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fukuyama, F. (2004) “Transhumanism”, Foreign Policy, no. 144, 42–43.

Fuller, S. (2018) “The posthuman and the transhuman as alternative mappings of the space of political possibility”, Journal of Posthuman Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 151–165.

Fuller, S. and Lipinska, V. (2014) The Proactionary Imperative, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gelfert, A. (2025) “New and emerging technologies as the locus of ideology”, this volume.

Geraci, R. (2010) Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goffi, J.-Y. (2019) Contours et courants de la politique transhumaniste”, Raisons Politiques, vol. 74, no. 2, 51–71.

Hayles, N. K. (1999) “How we Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. K. (2011) “Wrestling with transhumanism”, in Grassie, W., Blackford, R., Bostrom, N. and Dupuy, J.-P. (eds) H±: Transhumanism and its Critics, Philadelphia PA: Metanexus Institute: 215–226.

Hecht, G. (2009) The Radiance of France: Nuclear power and National Identity after World War II, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Hottois, G. (2017) Philosophie et Idéologies Trans/Posthumanistes, Paris: Vrin.

Hughes, J. J. (2004) Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, New York NY: Basic Books.

Hughes, J. J. (2010) “Contradictions from the Enlightenment roots of transhumanism”, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, vol. 35, no. 6, 622–640.

Hurlbut, J. B. and Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (2016) Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman visions and Technological Imaginations, Wiesbaden: Springer.

Huxley, A. (1959) New Bottles for New Wine, 2^nd edition, London: Chatto & Windus.

Jasanoff, S. (2016) “Perfecting the human: Posthuman imaginaries and technologies of reason”, in Hurlbut, J. B. and Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (eds) Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, Wiesbaden: Springer: 73–95.

Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S. H. (2015) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Jensen, J. (2022) “Repurposing Mises: Murray Rothbard and the birth of anarchocapitalism”, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 83, no. 2, 315–332.

Jones, R. (1999) A History of Extropic Thought, [Online], Available: https://web.archive.org/web/19990128230304/http:/www.extropy.org/e2reilya.htm[4 Oct 2024].

Kelly, D. (2016) “Intellectual history and the history of political thought”, in Whatmore, R. and Young, B. W. (eds) A Companion to Intellectual History, Chichester UK: Wiley Blackwell: 141–154.

Latour, B. (2003) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Le Dévédec, N. (2018) “Unfit for the future? The depoliticization of human perfectibility, from the Enlightenment to transhumanism”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 21, no. 4, 488–507.

Leopold, D. (2012) “A cautious embrace: Reflections on (Left) liberalism and utopia” in Jackson, B. and Stears, M. (eds) Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 9–33.

Levin, S. B. (2021) Posthuman Bliss?: The Failed Promise of Transhumanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levy, S. D. (1991) “And the chickens shall lead them”, Extropy, no. 7, 47–48.

Linett, M. (2023) “Making us new: From eugenics to transhumanism in modernist culture”, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 30, no. 1, 177–200.

MacAskill, W. (2015) Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference, New York NY: Penguin Random House.

McCray, P. (2012) The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies and a Limitless Future, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

McCray, W. P. (2016) “Timothy Leary’s transhumanist SMI2LE”, in Kaiser, D. and McCray, W. P. (eds) Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation and American Counterculture, Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press: 238–269.

McCray, W. P. (2017) “Futures perfect and visioneering: A re-assessment’, NanoEthics vol. 11, no. 2, 203–207.

mehums.doc (1991). Extropians, [Online], Available: https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/extropians/raided-mailing-list-archives/other-docs/[4 Oct 2024].

Moravec, H. (1993) “Pigs in cyberspace”, Extropy, no. 10, 5–7.

Moravec, H. P. (1988) Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

More, M. (1990) “Transhumanism: Towards a futurist philosophy” Extropy, no. 6, 6–12.

More, M. (1994a) “Editorial”, Extropy, no. 12, 4.

More, M. (1994b) “The Promethean attitude: On becoming posthuman”, Free Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 4, 38–41.

More, M. (2013) “A letter to mother nature” in More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds) The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell: 449–450.

O’Connell, M. (2017) To Be a Machine: Adventures among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, London: Doubleday.

Pilsch, A. (2017) Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Pocock, J. (2016) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rees, M. (2018) On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Regis, E. (1990) Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, Boston MA: Addison Wesley.

Rosenboim, O. (2017) The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sandberg, A. (2013) “Morphological freedom: Why we not just want it, but need it”, in More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds) The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell: 56–64.

Sandberg, A. (2017) Author interview, Oxford.

Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Simon, Z. B. (2019) “Two cultures of the posthuman future”, History and Theory, vol. 58, no. 2, June, 171–84.

Skinner, Q. (1987) “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The artist as political philosopher”, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 72, 1–56.

Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics: Volume 1 Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skornicki, A. and Tournadre, J. (2015) La nouvelle histoire des idées politiques, Paris: La Découverte.

Slobodian, Q. (2019) “Anti-’68ers and the racist-libertarian alliance: How a schism among Austrian school neoliberals helped spawn the alt right”, Cultural Politics, vol. 15, 372–86.

Slobodian, Q. (2023) Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the dream of a World Without Democracy, New York NY: Metropolitan Books.

Sorgner, S. L. (2021) On Transhumanism, University Park PA: Penn State University Press.

Stanton, T. (2018) “John Locke and the fable of liberalism”, The Historical Journal, vol. 61, 597–622.

Taillandier, A. (2019) “Lectures et langages du transhumanisme” Raisons Politiques, vol. 74, no. 2, 73–81.

Taillandier, A. (2021a) “From boundless expansion to existential threat: Transhumanists and posthuman imaginaries”, in Kemp, S. and Andersson, J. (eds) Futures, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 333–48.

Taillandier, A. (2021b) “‘Staring into the singularity’ and other posthuman tales: Transhumanist stories of future change”, History and Theory, vol. 60, no. 2, 215–33.

Taillandier, A. (2021c) In the Name of Posthumanity: Visions and Justifications of Liberal Order in Contemporary Anglophone Transhumanism, PhD Thesis, Paris: Sciences Po.

Taillandier, A., Stephens, N. and Vanderslott, S. (2025) “Effective altruism, technoscience and the making of philanthropic value”, Economy and Society, vol. 54, no. 1, 1–25.

Terranova, T. (2024) “Technoliberalism and the network social”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 41, no. 7–8, 89–104.

Thomas, A. (2024) The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism: Techno-human Evolution and Advanced Capitalism, Bristol UK: Bristol University Press.

Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (2012) “Transhumanism as a secularist faith”, Zygon, vol. 47, 710–34.

Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Vallor, S. (2016) Technologies and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vinge, V. (1993) The Coming Technological Singularity, [Online], Available: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html[4 Oct 2024].

Vita-More, N. (2012) Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman/Posthuman, PhD Thesis], Plymouth UK: University of Plymouth.

Warde, P. (2018) The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c.1500–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Winner, L. (1980) “Do artifacts have politics?’ Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1, 121–36.

Wolfe, C. (2009) What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis MN: University Of Minnesota Press.

World Transhumanist Association (WTA) (1998) The Transhumanist Declaration (2.4), [Online], Available: https://web.archive.org/web/19980702105748/ www.transhumanism.com/declaration.htm[4 Oct 2024].

23. Science fiction and/as ideology

Sherryl Vint

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-30

Introduction

The representative mode known as science fiction (SF) is notoriously difficult to define. Frequently identified as a literary genre, it has increasingly been understood as a mode: this shift in terminology recognises that the discourse named “science fiction” functions not as a set of genre tropes but as “a kind of rhetorically precise thick description of the Westernised technoscientific future-present whose outlines have been coming into focus since the mid-twentieth century” (Hollinger 2014: 139). Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr describes this as “a kind of awareness” of the contingency of given reality that has extended from a way of reading texts set in non-mimetic realities into a more generalised sensibility, “a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction” ( Csicsery-Ronay Jr 2008: 2). Understanding SF as a rhetorical mode speaks to the genre’s myriad entanglements with the ideologies foundational to capitalist modernity: its elevation of reason and science over other epistemological frameworks; its imbrication in discourses of progress, growth and transcendence that served as alibi for Western colonialism; and the massive restructuring of previous ways of life as the forces of racial capitalism spread across the globe (cf. Vint 2021). Works of SF have both celebrated such discourses, projecting them into imagined futures, and challenged the naturalisation of a universal humanity premised on liberal ideals that centre white, cis-gendered, masculine, able-bodied and property-owning humans.

There is thus no single ideology of SF; rather, it has served as a vehicle for a wide range of political beliefs, which range from the embrace of mid-20^th-century technocracy to critiques of settler colonialism in Indigenous SF. At times SF authors have been included in partisan think tanks, such as Ronald Reagan’s Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy chaired by SF author Jerry Pournelle. Genre works have also been the inspiration for activist movements seeking a more just social order, such as the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a social justice organisation founded by Dr Ayana Jamieson (see also Brown and Imarisha 2015).

This chapter conceives the ideological through a Marxist cultural studies lens that understands ideology as a social relation that has material effects in shaping how people understand themselves and their world, differentiating between what is taken to be natural and what seems open to change, and informing what people do in the world as much as what they believe about it (see Williams 1978; Foucault 1980; Freedman 2000; Miéville and Bould 2009; Jameson 2007; Suvin 2017; Hall 2019) . It concludes with a case study on the degree to which SF has influenced Silicon Valley cultural norms. The decision to focus on this case study is not to suggest that it is the most representative – indeed, a crucial premise of this chapter is that there is no single centre or definition of SF – but rather to suggest that it is one of the places where we see the most significant impact today of a distinct type of SF-inflected ideology. Equally important to my argument in this chapter is the assertion that the polysemy of SF demonstrates its potential for promoting a range of ideological identifications and naturalised worldviews, thus highlighting the power of the genre as rhetorical mode, not as embodiment of any specific ideological standpoint. This chapter provides a history of how struggles over the purpose of SF as a new genre form have been ideological from the start, noting significant moments in this history before providing a brief analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017) as an example of recent SF used to provide anti-racist ideals. It concludes with a longer case study of real-world projects initiated via Silicon Valley as emblem of how SF powerfully motivates ways of acting based on the political futures one wishes to enact.

Ideological parameters of science fiction

Celebrated SF author Kim Stanley Robinson argues that SF is “the realism of our time” (Beukes 2017: 330), using the metaphor of 3D glasses to describe how the genre frames perception by overlaying two distinct foci: we view the present with one eye, and with the other we see the possible futures our socio-technical choices will bring into being. This metaphor helps us grasp why there is no single SF ideology but rather a depiction of a range of futures, both desired and feared, which seek to catalyse affective attachment, shape understanding and promote ways of being that will either transform such visions into materiality or resist their arrival. This range of ideological identifications depends not only on the text’s perspective but also on the audience’s reception as it “decodes” figurations in myriad ways, depending on positionality. SF has given us some of our most celebrated critiques of totalitarianism, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), and among its most influential authors is Ursula K. le Guin, whose 2014 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundational Award acknowledged the genre as an overlooked but essential discourse of radical social change. Refusing to concede that the future of ever-more-intensified capitalist extraction was inevitable, she argued: “I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being” (le Guin 2014: np). Yet around the same, within SF fandom, an extremist group of right-wing writers and fans decried the ruination of SF by social justice infiltration, a conflict that has come to be known as puppygate (and has been resoundingly repudiated by the larger SF community) (Reid 2024).

SF has given us tropes that reinforce colonial appropriation and Western visions of racial hierarchy through sub-genres such as space opera, whose earliest pulp forms cultivated fantasies of space adventure that became templates for the first Cold War space race on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and which are evoked anew today in fantasies of the wealth to be accumulated via the new privatised space race promoted by billionaire CEOs Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (SpaceX). Such rhetoric often blurs the line between reality and SF, as exemplified by the National Geographic Channel series Mars (2016–2018), which blends a fictional documentary about Mars colonisation in 2033 and interviews with people involved in the space industry today, who emphasise the plausibility of diegetic technologies. Although Mars emphasises only technological change, the roughly contemporary series For All Mankind (Ronald Moore, 2019) uses alternative history to narrate a different future in which the US establishes a lunar colony in 1973, an outcome reliant on social as well as technological change.

For All Mankind’s alternative US includes women and people of colour in its space programme from the beginning, suggesting an ideological alliance with liberal notions that became dominant in some SF circles with the success of the Star Trek franchise. Moore’s series also implies that the success of this alternative NASA is largely because it was allowed to profit through the commercialisation of spin-off technologies in a market-capitalist system, belying the post-scarcity fantasy central to Star Trek’s utopianism. Star Trek itself has itself been critiqued for projecting a colour-blind future that, although premised on equality, presumes a cultural default in which all peoples are aligned with white heteronormative bourgeois cultural values (Seitz 2023).

As a discourse invested in notions that the world might be otherwise, SF cannot easily be categorised as either left- or right-wing. Its tools and techniques have been mobilised to support a range of ideologies. Yet there is perhaps something inherently ideological about SF in that it emerges from centring non-mimetic realities, which can easily tip into the articulations of how things should be otherwise. As John Rieder unpacks in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, early stories about things we now recognise as SF icons, such as voyages to the moon, mark a shift not only in scientific thinking but also a “disturbance of ethnocentrism, the achievement of a perspective from which one’s own culture is only one of a number of possible cultures” (Rieder 2008: 2). This recognition can be mobilised equally to insist that one’s culture is inherently superior or to critique its failings and advocate for something better.

SF has produced trenchant critiques of militarism written in response to the US occupation of Vietnam, such as Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) and le Guin’s decolonial The Word for World is Forest (1972), but it has also fostered long-running military series that celebrate a human exceptionalism easily read as white supremacy. The genre attracts authors who overtly support socialism and create their visions through a Marxist lens, such as China Miéville, and libertarians who promulgate neoliberal market fundamentalism such as Robert Heinlein, whose The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) popularised the saying “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” before Milton Friedman proffered a grammatically correct version in the title of his 1975 book There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

These examples might suggest that older SF was more right wing and conservative than newer SF. This is not so. The genre now has a greater diversity of authors, a result of less rigid gatekeeping in publishing and media industries and of the emergence of distinctive SF traditions across the globe, broadening the viewpoints the genre embodies. As early as 1939, however, at the first “world” SF convention organised by fandom to coincide with the New York World’s Fair, polarisation was evident, related to an ongoing debate about defining what this new literature – and the community cohering around it – would be. The Science Fiction League, organised in 1934 through the efforts of Hugo Gernsback, an influential editor who created the first SF pulp magazine Amazing Stories, took the view that the genre’s core was technological extrapolation in service of a coming future in which technocrats would be given their rightful place as leaders. Adherents to this view advocated a focus on informed scientific extrapolation and had little interest in social change, beyond the possibility of making the postulated technologies a reality and profiting along the way.

In contrast was the view articulated by John Michel in a speech entitled Mutation or Death at a convention in 1937, in which he insisted that those who invested in SF needed to extrapolate new visions of social life, that they should be committed to anti-fascism and a socialist future. Announcing, “how sick we are at base of this dull, unsatiSFying world, this stupid asininely organized system of ours which demands that a man brutalize and cynicize himself for the possession of a few dollars in a savage, barbarous, and utterly boring struggle to exist,” Michel called for “smashing the present existing forms of economic and social life!” (see also Cashbaugh 2016).

Michel’s speech ended with a resolution “that science fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life.” Although this resolution was narrowly defeated, those supporting it went on to form the Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction (later the Futurian Science Literary Society). Its members included figures such as Judith Merril and Donald Wollheim, both of whom would become influential editors. They countered the gatekeeping role of earlier editors such as Gernsback and ultra-conservative John W. Campbell, who helmed the influential magazine Astounding from 1937 until his death in 1971. Gernsback and Campbell notoriously shaped which writers and futures were welcome in their magazines’ pages. Campbell’s editorship was akin to a purge of the field, prompting some authors to exit and fuelling conflicts about what counts as SF that continue to this day. Samuel R. Delany, celebrated as the first African American SF writer, has written of Campbell’s role in rejecting Delany’s work because “he [Campbell] didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.” Delany describes this rejection as among his first encounters with “the slippery and always commercialised form of liberal American prejudice” (Delany 2000: 387).

Campbell had a heavy hand in shaping Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, first published in Astounding in 1954. It narrates the fate of a stowaway girl who must be jettisoned from a spaceship’s airlock to ensure needed medical supplies arrive on a distant colony: her added mass would otherwise mean they had too little fuel to reach their destination. Campbell required rewriting to achieve this stark conclusion, helping to craft a story that deliberately elides how different economic or policy decisions could have enabled a changed outcome, thus reinforcing an ideology embedded in technocratic SF that it is “neutral” or non-political. The story implies that the “cold equations” of physics, not human sensibilities, dictate its conclusion, but this vision is made possible by naturalising the actual politics it promotes as merely the reality of the material universe (cf. Vint and Bould 2008).

At the 1939 World’s Fair, these conflicts prompted the SF League to expel the Futurians, trying to instantiate technocratic scientific extrapolation without social critique as the only legitimate SF. Yet despite this early victory for conservative forces, one could argue that SF has mutated as Michel hoped, going on to foster important traditions of Black SF and activism, of feminist and queer SF communities, of SF that critiques the forces bringing us climate change, colonial appropriation, militarism and capitalism. But it simultaneously did not mutate, continuing to produce technocratic and colonial fantasies fostered by influential gatekeepers that have, unfortunately, often dominated mainstream perceptions of and beliefs about SF.

In contrast to this conservative gatekeeping, academic engagement with the genre centres SF more aligned with the Futurians, massively influenced by Darko Suvin, who theorised the genre as allied with critical tools emerging from Frankfurt School cultural studies. He defined SF as the “literature of cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 2017: 15), extrapolating from Bertolt Brecht. Suvin suggested that SF was defined by what he called the novum, which marked its difference from mimesis. The properly conceptualised novum requires rethinking the entire social world in which the story is set in light of the transformation. This required Suvin to dismiss the majority of commercial SF as not truly belonging to the genre, since much of that writing left existing social relations intact and simply added new gadgets to an unchanged social world. The SF that Suvin promoted both denaturalises the quotidian world and prompts the reader to grasp the created world through an analysis of how and why the world became different. Such SF aligns with utopian critique in ways that have been central to the academic study of the genre, although most later critics refuse the hierarchy among kinds of speculative writing that Suvin also articulated, which privileges SF (linked to materiality and rationality) over fantasy (which Suvin contends reconciles us to the injustices of the material world by setting its stories in a mystified elsewhere).

Carl Freedman builds on this framework to suggest that SF is “devoted to the historical concreteness and rigorous self-reflectiveness of critical theory” (Freedman 2000: xvi), a genre interested in the ideological import of the gap between its world and quotidian reality. Similarly, Fredric Jameson explores the political potentiality of SF, especially its world-building, in his major treatise Archaeologies of the Future (2007). Such SF and related criticism have emphasised and amplified voices aligned with the left-wing tradition, but they have always existed alongside a right-wing and technocratic tradition. The latter has recently had an outsized impact due the technophilic cultures cultivated by Silicon Valley since the dotcom era.

World-building as critique

Before turning to my main case study regarding the effects of SF thinking on Silicon Valley culture, I want first to briefly consider a starkly different example, the world-building in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy: The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017).

The features of Jemisin’s created world are designed to help us see how certain ideologies are naturalised in Western modernity, interrogating especially the degree to which scientific discourse produced under coloniality is inevitably racialised. Her world is characterised by periodic and catastrophic seismic activity – the seasons – that results in unstable political formations because polities are periodically disrupted by the need to move to enclaves that offer protection against violent and unstable climatic conditions. Jemisin weaves this shifting political landscape together with the production of certain morphologies into “races” with distinct positionalities within the power structure. She shows how racialisation works as an ideology by reifying certain embodied traits as markers of a different category of personhood. Rather than simply paralleling material history in which skin colour has served as such a marker, Jemisin creates a group of humans, Orogenes, who have the capacity to attune their bodies to seismic forces. She demonstrates through world-building how this embodied capacity, in the context of political struggle, produces a notion of the Orogenes as a distinct – and denigrated – race of people. Despite the fact that an Orogene can be born into any family and thus they do not have any unique, visible bodily traits, the created science of Orogeny regards them as substantively different from the rest of the population, a sub-category of personhood. The Orogenes’ power to shape seismic forces makes them dangerous but also desired, in the sense that their labour is needed to protect the accumulated property and the physical safety of the powerful. This knowledge rests on a hierarchical social structure in which Orogenes are enslaved in a rigid system that controls their physical capacities for the benefit of others, brutally socialising them to understand themselves as inferior through a combination of physical punishment and cultural myth. Jemisin’s world-building also shows how the privileged peoples, the Sanzed, come to have distinct morphologies due to the specific lifestyle their wealth enables.

My main point is to convey how important world-building itself – not the events of the narrative – is to the ideological critique the trilogy enacts. It shows how cultural ideologies manifest themselves in material ways by narrating how Sanzed and Orogene came to be understood as distinct races. The trilogy teaches us to move beyond viewing race as an essence and to recognise it is a phenomenon that materialises through racialisation as a cultural process of discrimination that produces different kinds of embodiment via the specific histories people live. Jemisin is careful to represent racialisation in such a way that there are no simple one-to-one mappings onto the history of racialisation in our world, thereby drawing attention to how power shapes phenotype. The Sanzeds have a distinct appearance – that is, they emerge as a race – based on a history in which certain capacities better enable them to survive the harsh environment and a history in which their ability to accumulate power resulted in specific physical traits, such as a tendency toward height due to better nutrition. Jemisin’s protagonists frequently comment on how people look and on what this appearance suggests about their ancestors, and she includes world-building appendices such as definitions of in-world terms and analyses of historical occurrences prior to the narrated events. In this way, Jemisin simultaneously critiques the injustice of racism while showing that “race” as a cultural phenomenon emerges due to both environmental factors and cultural ideologies that transform mere facts of materiality into systematised hierarchy. Jemisin’s trilogy exemplifies the complex relationship between SF affordances and ideology, as it makes visible the ideological operations of racialisation, critiques their injustice, and offers another framework for understanding race beyond its naturalisation in much of Western culture.

Science fiction ideologies in materiality

As I turn to the case study of Silicon Valley, my emphasis changes from looking at examples of SF that engage in ideological critique toward ways SF can cultivate a single vision of future possibility as inevitable and natural. Whereas the critical SF exemplified by Jemisin and central to academic studies accomplishes its cultural work by emphasising the gap between the world of the text and the world from which the text is written, the technocratic version of Silicon Valley futurism does the opposite. These texts minimise or erase their origin in SF fabulation, insisting that they represent achievable and even necessary visions of the future, while also seeking to make that future more likely through their rhetorical impact. (An earlier example of this move from SF to reality can be found in Dianetics, whose central ideas about self-programming were first articulated in SF stories published by L. Ron Hubbard.)

From the very beginning, as we have seen, SF has always been multiple, although the commercial success of a sub-set of its writers, editors and fans as the genre first moved out of the pulps and into wider cultural circulation means that the commonplace image of SF is often associated only with the technocratic, often militaristic, and distinctly masculine and colonial kind of SF they celebrated. My point is this was not evitable, but a result of intensive proselytising, beginning with Gernsback’s insistence in the 1920s that SF was the vanguard of a coming future emblematised by the banner above his editorial column in Amazing Stories: Extravagant Fiction Today, Cold Fact Tomorrow.

Today another influential group of proselytisers continue to promote a certain kind of SF as harbinger of the project of technological progress, building on the idea that SF provides models for techno-scientific developed (Kirby 2010, Johnson 2011), disguising its own investments in capitalist and liberal (often libertarian) ideologies by claiming its politics are neutral ones of universal betterment. Take as example James Pethokoukis’s The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised (2023). Pethokoukis is not a literary or media culture critic but a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a public policy think tank predicated on a neoliberal view of the world. Its website describes AEI as “dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world”, statements that connote a science-fictional futurity. The website affirms the AEI’s belief in “democracy, free enterprise, American strength and global leadership, solidarity with those at the periphery of our society, and a pluralistic, entrepreneurial culture.” Here, utopian ideals associated with SF are wedded to advocacy of a specific vision of what constitutes a just world: liberal ideals of universality, American hegemony and neoliberal capital as signified by the elevation of entrepreneurship. Pethokoukis enrols a certain kind of SF into this project while claiming to be neither left wing nor right wing but rather “up wing,” an orientation he describes as “a solution-oriented future optimism, for the notion that rapid economic growth driven by technological progress can solve big problems and create a better world of more prosperity, opportunity, and flourishing” ( Pethokoukis 2023: 18). While these goals are laudable, the emphasis on technology as ideologically neutral hides the embedded investment in neoliberalism and economic hierarchy that is elsewhere evident on the AEI website.

Like SF author Neal Stephenson’s manifesto Innovation Starvation (2011), Pethokoukis centres imagination as a material force. “Too many of us started obsessing about the environmental downsides of technological progress and economic growth,” he opines, “ignoring how progress and growth can also ameliorate or solve the very problems they create” (Pethokoukis 2023: 13). This perspective embodies what theorist Evgeny Mozorov describes as “technological solutionism,” that is, “[r]‌ecasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimised – if only the right algorithms are in place” (Morozov 2013). Morozov notes this viewpoint, which he associates with Silicon Valley, “presumes rather than investigates” (Morozov 2013) and reduces the complexity of the world to the simplicity of its framings. Solutionism fuels the cultist belief that Silicon Valley is saving the world by disrupting previous technologies – and the social orders constructed on them. This politics that denies its ideology is endemic to the tech industry’s strategies of accumulation and was recently codified in an SF-like manifesto published by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen entitled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (posted 16 October 2023).

This manifesto begins by labelling as “lies” any critique of how technology drives inequality and exacerbates problems such as environmental damage or structural racism, then asserts that any good thing humanity has achieved has emerged due to technology. It goes on to explain technology as a source of endless growth, markets as the only way to lift people out of poverty, and intelligence as “the ultimate engine of progress”, particularly in its coming form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Promising abundance and adventure, and asserting that this will all be made possible through a socio-technical order premised not only on “ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness – strength” but also “merit and achievement,” Andreessen’s manifesto names itself “a material philosophy, not a political philosophy” (in a sub-section entitled The Meaning of Life) and insists that it is neither left wing nor right wing but merely committed to liberation.

Like Heinlein before him, Andreessen names neoliberal ideologues as fellow travellers in a document that reads like the fusion of a report to hedge fund investors and a pitch for an SF story-world. This document seeks not so much to describe the world as to call a different kind of world into being, one that is furnished with imagery and rhetoric drawn from SF. Its ideological purpose exemplifies the neoliberal orthodoxy that Michel Foucault describes as emerging from a shift in how governance of the economy was conceived in a way that naturalised the market:

The idea was not, given the state of things, how can we find the economic system that will be able to take account of the basic facts peculiar to European agriculture? It was, given the fact that economic-political regulation can only take place through the market, how can we modify these material, cultural, technical, and legal bases that are given in Europe? How can we modify these facts, this framework, so that the market economy can come into play?

(Foucault 2008: 141)

In this context, it is worth considering the mission statement of Andreessen’s firm, on whose website he published his manifesto. The firm’s investment strategy is premised on supporting “bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology” and the list of its investment interests include AI, an as-yet-unproven technology that is central, we can now see, to both Andreessen’s techno-optimism and to the profitability of his venture capital firm.

To be clear, my point here is not simply to point out that this rhetoric is self-interested but also to draw attention to the fact that the imagery of techno-optimism has its roots in SF narratives of transcendence, whose history of affectively attaching people to certain visions of the future and the good life is sedimented here into materiality in a way that calls on us to take seriously the ideological work done by SF. To return briefly to Pethokoukis, he names Walt Disney as one of his favourite futurists, regretting that Disney’s ambition to create the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) as a utopian but autocratic company town was abandoned after the mogul’s death, becoming instead the theme park we know today. But perhaps Pethokoukis need not have despaired. The Disney Corporation is currently advertising its construction of a series of gated communities it calls Storyliving, whose website invites those with the requisite credit score to “Be a part of a vibrant, inspiring community catering to the unique desires of those who have learned what’s really important.”[65] The marketing language that suffuses the site remains vague on precisely what is “really important”, but we get hints in features such as “enriching enclaves” and “legendary service” and the promise that the communities will be managed by Disney staff, whom the company has taken to calling Cast Members.

In such projects, material life blurs with live-action role-playing (LARPing), a staple activity of SF fan communities in which communities participate in an alternative reality in which all agree to interact with one another as if part of a scripted story-world. The practice has its roots in SF fandom but has grown to embrace a range of story-worlds. Of interest in this context is a long-running feudal world LARP that has been central to the social life of David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, a committed libertarian who “argued in his 1973 Machinery of Freedom for creating a system in which governments would compete for citizens” (Craib 2022: 218). This opt-in Charter City ideal has much in common with libertarian SF as well. Quinn Slobodian points out that “the historical LARPing of anarcho-capitalists had real-world outcomes. They invite us to speculate but to do so concretely – to play for real” (Slobodian 2023: 128). This fusion of imaginative and material realities in a deeply ideological version of the future embodies what Mark Fisher named capitalist realism, that is, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it (Fisher 2009: 2). Fisher draws on SF examples, arguing that among the symptoms of this cultural malaise is a shift in the function of dystopian fiction such that the “world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it” (Fisher 2009: 2).

While SF is not reducible to this version, the tendency that Fisher diagnoses is evident not only in the kind of dystopian SF he discusses, such as Children of Men (2006), and in several recent YA franchises, such as The Hunger Games films (2012–2023). This political anti-utopianism also underlines the techno-optimism that functions as if it were SF: while in this case the narratives suggest a coming future that is better rather than worse (at least for the favoured), what such narratives share with those discussed by Fisher is the sense that the future is just an intensified present, not an open world that might be different. That is, both defeatist dystopian and Silicon Valley techno-optimism operate out of a logic that posits a structural relation between SF and materiality.

We can see evidence of this future-as-sf-LARPing in the recent attempts to create a new community in Northern California, initially called California Forever, later renamed East Solano, a rebranding that followed after journalistic accounts called into question the motives of the tech billionaires behind the project, who tried to hide their purchase of land via shell companies (see Skolnik 2024; Silverman 2025), and more recently once more branded as California Forever.[66] Andreessen’s venture capital firm is among the list of disclosed investors. The updated website for the project moves away from the original promise of a smart city of the future, now stressing its commitment to bringing homes and jobs to the local community, urgent needs within a state that has one of the highest rates of unhoused citizens in the country. The FAQs address many of the critiques made when journalists uncovered the intent behind the land purchase, promising community engagement to shape how the town materialises and offering “a safe and walkable” community “with homes and apartments for sale and for rent”, without dwelling on the details of the cost of such homes, eliding the fact that rising housing prices have much to do with the crisis of homelessness in the state in the first place.

Buried in some of the responses to FAQs, for those attuned to these structural realities, is the fact that the developer seeks to compel the state to provide needed infrastructural improvements, the same strategy of socialising costs and privatising economic gains that built the tech industry in Silicon Valley in the first place (see O’Mara 2019). In response to a question about the impact on local highways, for example, they promise that the development is “by far the best chance to ever improve Highway 12 and Highway 113”, suggesting that California Forever will pay “more than its proportional share” but also promising that no costs will fall on residents of East Solano County via direct taxes. How the portion to be paid for by “state grants, and federal grants” without a need for tax revenue is left unexplained.

Although the details of East Solano are no longer as science-fictional, they retain traces of their origin in a kind of technocratic vision of the future first articulated in the pages of Amazing Stories, hinted at in the development company’s name, California Forever. This project speaks to the convergence between a mode of SF futurism and wider culture, a fusion that has been fuelled since the late 1990s by IT culture, especially in the rhapsodic anticipation of a coming age of universal abundance via technology and the New Economy that was inculcated in Wired magazine (Vint 2024). It exemplifies an increasing tendency to look to SF as a storehouse of potential technologies – or a way to foster desire for as-yet-unimagined ones – which has variously been called “science-fiction prototyping” by Brian David Johnson, “diegetic prototyping” by David Kirby and “design fiction” by Julian Bleeker. Building on practices of corporate foresight, these frameworks see SF less as a genre of storytelling and more as a mode of research analysis that helps technology designers think through a range of possible futures and seek to influence which one materialises. Bleeker (2009) argues that design fiction can “[r]‌eveal new experiences, new social practices, or ... reflect upon today to contemplate innovative, new, habitable futures” (Bleeker 2009: np).

Such embrace of SF within industry and by scholars of science and technology studies (STS) reflects the increasing recognition of the role of the imagination in shaping social and material reality, something that STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff calls “the sociotechnical imaginary”, defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff 2015: 4). These “publicly performed visions of desirable futures” tend to rely on well-established tropes within SF, the cultural mode that first took science and technology as appropriate subjects for art. As Gernsback once hoped, visions of technological possibility that first appeared as imaginative projections in SF have become the basis of real-world technological projects, such as the various kinds of human augmentation once termed Extropianism, now embraced as transhumanism and articulated, since the 1990s, through the SF language of Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology and Spontaneous Order, the five fundamental commitments of transhumanism articulated by movement founder Max More and still archived online (More 1995).

Transhumanist, life extension and cryptocurrency communities all emerged out of the same heady mix of dotcom boom, SF, AI/singularity boosterism and neoliberal fundamentalism in the 1990s. In documenting this, Finn Brunton argues that neoliberal theorist Friedrich von Hayek

spoke not to a science-fictional subject but to a science-fictional sensibility: the economy as a machine directed to unknowable ends, ungovernable and computationally irreducible, beyond human ability to steer or outguess, a machine made of whole populations of desires, impulses, fantasies, hungers, and other subjective drives that consumes and transforms everything set before it.

(Brunton 2019: 125)

This SF sensibility, once the province of fringe-movement zines and cadres of young white men dreaming of a technocratic future, is now a widespread cultural sensibility that disavows its SF roots, although they nonetheless remain evident in numerous projects of accumulation by dispossession and of what Raymond Craib calls “libertarian exit” (Craib 2022: 7 and passim). They are increasingly central to the economy – and thus to social life – today.

The desire to rename this rhetorical use of SF figuration via terms such as “design fiction” betrays a discomfort with acknowledging that these ideologies have emerged from SF. Yet even as we acknowledge the deadly serious way in which they are embraced by their advocates, it is important not to lose sight of these roots; to continue to insist on both the power of the imagination to shape social reality and on the tendency of this Silicon Valley version to make invisible the labour and bodies of those who are needed to make this frictionless fantasy future conceivable, yet whose embodied presence does not align with the aesthetics Silicon Valley futurism crafts. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora give the name “techno-liberalism” to the SF-inflected fantasies of AI and other automated labour, pointing out that “the stated goal of technological innovation is to liberate human potential (its non-alienated essence, or core) [an ideology] that has always been defined in relation to degraded and devalued others – those who were never fully human” (Atanasoski and Vora 2019: 4). This specific SF fantasy of automated luxury, then, cannot shed its origins in colonial labour appropriation, which unreflexively reproduces the hierarchies and dehumanisations more easily visible in the early, pulp SF stories which inspired such fantasies in the first place. The ongoing but unnamed influence of such SF in ideologies now crafting our future is among the reasons why it is important to understand how and why SF is an important discourse of ideological meaning-making today.

Conclusion

Just as proponents of the Silicon Valley styles of futurism have often sought to disavow their SF roots and promote new names for a cultural mode that is so vital to the social imagination, so too have activists who see in SF techniques powerful rhetorical tools also sought, at times, to rename this mode to avoid the term “science fiction”. While the examples discussed in this chapter seek to emphasise the scientific plausibility of their visions and distance themselves from “fiction”, those seeking radical social change have chafed at the limits of the term “science” fiction, embracing instead the more inclusive term “speculative fiction”. This alternative is freed from the boundary-keeping battles of technocratic vs politically engaged SF and from a colonial history by which Western notions of the scientific have delegitimated and oppressed the knowledge produced by colonised peoples.

In Octavia’s Brood (2015), activists Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown prefer the term “visionary fiction”, arguing that it emphasises the realities of inequality and injustice from which the stories’ speculations emerge and reinforces the fact that these stories can teach us to live otherwise, in ways consistent with such visions. Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto (2024) simply uses the term “imagination”, but her definition implies some science-fictional quality in its interest in both futurity and alternatives to what is given. She writes “an imaginary refers to collective projections of a desirable and feasible future. I find myself invoking imaginaries when I want to cast a critical light on the imposition of a dominant imagination that presents itself as appealing and universal” (Benjamin 2024: vii). Her conclusion also evokes the work of SF author Octavia Butler, understanding Butler not merely as a fiction writer, but as a cultural theorist and activist who used SF as a way to process the world she experienced, critique its inadequacies and communicate other ways of being.

In connecting these various terminologies and traditions to a longer history of SF, it is not my goal to enact some kind of science-fictional imperialism in which I insist they are all really, in the end, the same, all SF. My point is in many ways the opposite, that there is no single way to define SF or to describe its ideology. These myriad social imaginaries – and the wide range of possible future and ideological positions that they promulgate and endorse – all have a relationship to an imaginative practice called SF, and by keeping this connection visible we can trace their historical entanglements with larger movements. This affinity or kinship on the level of technique among a wide range of texts exists in tension with their differences at the level of ideological meaning, differences that extend to diametrical oppositions regarding what kind of world is deemed desirable and valuable. My purpose in discussing them all under the rubric of “science fiction and ideology” is to argue, first, that the SF mode is extremely influential as a set of rhetorical tools in the project of ideological struggle today; and, second, that even as we acknowledge this, we must also keep in mind that there is no single ideology of SF, nor any single ideological effect of SF. Nonetheless, it remains a cultural practice that we ignore at our peril if we seek to understand ideology today.

Although all fiction engages in world-building – and thus in conveying a sense of the purpose of human social life and the ideological dynamics that underpin any specific society – SF foregrounds world-building as its chief narrative strategy. Moreover, realist fiction tends toward mimesis of the given society world, while SF emerges from a recognition of the contingency of any reality accompanied by a commitment to exploring alternative possibilities. As I have outlined above, there is no single ideological stance that is inherently embodied by SF. What is distinctly ideological about SF is its engagement with the project of social change, whether this be imagining better (or worse) societies in the future, alternative pathways via which history might have unfolded, or entirely other worlds in which all that we take to be natural and inevitable (gender, family arrangements, political structures, ecological entanglements) might be conceived of and hence lived entirely differently.

This centrality of world-building, which includes providing cues to the reader to explain how and why the SF world is the way it is (in contrast to quotidian reality) is why ideology suffuses SF, even or perhaps especially when it is not overtly named as such. This ideological capacity of SF can be – and has been – used for a range of ideological purposes, running the gamut from socialist utopias to alt-right authoritarian visions of ethno-racial futures, from low-tech returns to more ecological ways of life to high-tech visions of endless urbanisation. This rhetorical power of SF as a mode of cultural perception is a crucial site of engagement for ideological analysis, especially given the 21^st-first century context.

Further complicating this wide range of ideological viewpoints that might be inflected in any given SF text is the gap between textual theme and audience response to a text. The example of Silicon Valley’s reliance on SF tropes in its rhetoric about the future it seeks to materialise demonstrates that texts written as dystopian warnings of the risks of social malaise “if this goes on” – as Robert Heinlein pithily put it in the title of a 1940 novella first serialised in Astounding Science Fiction – can shift from cautionary tale to business plan with new temporal contexts and with the ideological investments readers bring to the text. In a 2023 keynote address at Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day, Charles Stross points to the growing ideological impact of overly literal readings of SF embraced by much of Silicon Valley.[67] While acknowledging that reactionary ideals are evident in some libertarian SF, he also decries the cynical way that tech CEOs use SF as a marketing strategy, insisting on reading thought experiment tales as future predictions or, more cynically, as marketing tools. The ideological power of SF icons to thus serve as rationalisations for projects of racial capitalist extraction and dispossession – reframed under the banner of techno-optimism – is one of the most consequential and dangerous places where we can see the material effects of the genre today.

Yet this use of SF imaginary does not exhaust the ideological potential of SF as a tool of social change today. World-building in SF relies upon grasping and conveying the ideological forces that entangle political, social and economic power: in this way, SF authors chart the ways infrastructure, institutions and practices of daily life reverberate with one another. In other words, SF makes visible the everyday ideologies that structure the quotidian, using the estrangement of non-mimetic setting to directly name the forces and beliefs that shape social reality and to explain how the textual world differs from our own. Thus, although SF texts do not always have one-to-one correspondences with real-world ideological struggles, they enable a clearer perception of daily life as inevitably engaged in multiple struggles over meaning, value and purpose – that is, as ideological.

References

Andreessen, M. (2023) “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, [Online], Available: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/[16 Oct 2023].

Atanasoski, N. and Vora, K. (2019). Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technologial Futures. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Bandlamudi, A. (2024) “California Forever shells out $2M in campaign to build city from scratch”, [Online], Available: www.kqed.org/news/11984830/california-forever-shells-out-2m-in-campaign-to-build-city-from-scratch[3 May 2024].

Benjamin, R. (2024) Imagination: A Manifesto, New York NY: W. W. Norton.

Beukes, L., Robinson, K., Liu, K., Rajaniemi, H., Reynolds, A. and de Bodard, A. (2017) “Science fiction: When the future is now”, Nature, vol. 552 no. 21/28, December, 329–333.

Bleeker, J. (2009) “Design fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction”, [Online], Available: http://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf

Brown, A. M. and Imarisha, W. (2015) Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, Chico CA: AK Press.

Brunton, F. (2019). Digital Cash: The Unknown History of Anarchists, Utopians and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cashbaugh, S. (2016) “A paradoxical, discrepant and mutant Marxism: Imagining a racial science fiction in the American popular front”, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 10, no. 1, 63–106.

Craib, R. B. (2022) Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian exit from the era of Decolonization to the Digital Age, San Francisco CA: PM Press.

Csicsery-Ronay Jr., I. (2008) The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Delany, S. R. (2000) “Racism and science fiction”, in Thomas, S. (ed.) Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, New York NY: Times Warner Books: 383–397.

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? New York NY: O Books.

Foucault, M. (1980) “Two lectures”, in Gordon, C. (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, New York NY: Pantheon: 78–108.

Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Burchell, G. (trans.) Senellart, M. (ed.) Houndsmills UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Freedman, C. (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Hall, S. (2019) “Culture, the media and the ‘ideological effect,’” in Morley, D. (ed.) Essential Essays, vol. 1, Durham NC: Duke University Press: 298–335.

Hollinger, V. (2014) “Genre vs. mode”, in Latham, R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, Oxford: OUP: 139–151.

Jameson, F. (2007) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and other Science Fictions, London: Verso.

Jasanoff, S. (2015) “Future imperfect: Science, technology and the imaginations of modernity”, in Jasanoff, S. and Sang-Hyun, K. (eds) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imagination and the Fabrication of Power, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Johnson, D. B. (2011) “Science fiction prototyping: Designing the future with science fiction”, Synthesis Lectures on Computer Science, vol. 3, no. 1, April, 1–190.

Kirby, D. (2010) “The future is now: Diegetic prototypes and the role of popular films in generating real-world technological development”, Social Studies of Science, vol. 40, no. 1, February, 41–70.

le Guin, U. K. (2014) “Speech in acceptance of the national book foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters”, [Online], Available: www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal[19 Nov 2014].

Michel, J. B. (1937) “Mutation or death”, [Online], Available: www.imagojournal.com/home/mutation-or-death [Oct 1937].

Miéville, C. and Bould, M. (eds.) (2009) Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Moore, R. (creator). For All Mankind. Television series. Apple+. 2019– [no end date since another season is expected]

More, M. (1995) “The Extropian principle v. 2.6”, [Online], Available: http://www.mrob.com/pub/religion/extro_prin.html#princip_26</verbatim>

Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything Click Here: The folly of Technological Solutionism, New York NY: Public Affairs.

O’Mara, M. (2019) The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Press.

Pethokoukis, J. (2023) The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World we were Promised, New York NY: Center Street.

Reid, R. A. (2024) “Anglophone science fiction fandoms, 1920s–2020s”, in Bould, M., Butler, M. and Vint, S. (eds) The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, London: Routledge: 147–154.

Rieder, J. (2008) Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Seitz, D. (2023) A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine, Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Silverman, J. (2025) Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, New York NY: Bloomsbury Continuum.

Skolnik, J. (2024) “California forever: The billionaire backed city no one asked For”, [Online], Available: www.vanityfair.com/news/california-forever-billionaire-backed-city-silicon-valley[3 Apr 2024].

Slobodian, Q. (2023) Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the dream of a World Without Democracy, New York NY: Metropolitan Books.

Stephenson, N. (2011) “Innovation starvation”, [Online], Available: https://worldpolicy.org/2011/09/27/innovation-starvation/[27 Sep 2011].

Stross, C. (2023) “We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus”, [Online], Available: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html[10 Nov 2023].

Suvin, D. (2017) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, Dublin: Ralahine Utopian Studies.

Vint, S. (2021) Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Vint, S. (2024) “Irrational exuberance: The politics of startup futurism”, in Meneses, J. (ed.) Post-Politics and the Aesthetic Imagination, Minneapolis MN: Minnesota University Press.

Vint, S. and Bould, M. (2008) “There is no such thing as science fiction”, in Gunn, J., Barr, M. and Candelaria, M. (eds) Reading Science Fiction, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave: 43–51.

Williams, R. (1978) “Utopia and science fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 5 no. 3, November, 203–214.

Section VII: Ideological development across the continents

Introduction

Ideologies do not emerge or evolve in uniform ways across the world. The development of ideological frameworks follows distinct trajectories, shaped by historical, cultural and political contexts. By examining cases from various countries and continents, the chapters in this section highlight the plurality of ideological experiences and the diverse tools used to analyse them.

Two key themes emerge across the chapters. First, time and place matter: each chapter demonstrates how ideological developments are rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Many contributions examine the ideologisation of national, ethnic or religious traditions and their recombination over time: Holbig’s (Chapter 25) analysis of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s concept of mankind, Weber’s (Chapter 26) discussion of Confucianism, Bhatia’s (Chapter 27) exploration of Hindutva and “saffronisation” of public space, Wilcox and Williams’ (Chapter 30) study of the American Christian Right and Okyere-Manu and Amissah Abraham’s (Chapter 31) discussion of African Communalism all illustrate how ideology is shaped by and adapts to local traditions.

Second, theorising the relationship between the supply and the demand for ideology presents an ongoing challenge. Several chapters explore how ideological narratives are constructed and mobilised by elites and consumed or contested by the public. Burbano de Lara (Chapter 24) examines Latin American populism’s role in shaping political subjects. Holbig (Chapter 25) and Bhatia (Chapter 27) show how ideological narratives are carefully produced by political elites in China and India. Schmidt-Catran and Czymara (Chapter 28) highlight how European political elites shape immigration attitudes, while Weber (Chapter 26) and Faure and Sauvé (Chapter 29) explore the relationship between intellectual and political circles.

Together, these studies underscore the global diversity of ideological formations and the ongoing challenge to understand their creation, mobilisation and impact.

Latin America has experienced a politically turbulent and ideologically diverse past few decades, with both left- and right-wing populisms and leaders playing prominent roles (de la Torre 2017; Bolivar and Block 2024). In Chapter 24, Felipe Burbano de Lara explores populism’s significance in Latin America’s social and political dynamics, emphasising its historical role in shaping political culture. He argues that Latin American contributions to ideology studies are deeply tied to understanding populism as a discursive phenomenon that constructs political subjects from “the popular”. This shifts ideological debates beyond class structures, redefining ideology as a distinct field of discursive and political practices. Drawing deeply on Ernesto Laclau’s decades of theoretical investigation of populism, the chapter critically reconstructs the Marxist concept of ideology in relation to Latin American populism, highlighting how the popular repeatedly resurfaces as a key discursive construction shaping the region’s political culture. This discussion of Latin American populism productively crosses paths with J. A. Scott’s Chapter 8 in this volume, which also differentiates populism as ideology, discourse and strategy.

To outside observers, Chinese politics since the 1970s has seemed to go through stages of inconsistent commitment to Mao Zedong’s foundational ideological vision (Cheek, Mühlhahn and van de Ven 2021; Lam 2025). In Chapter 25, Heike Holbig analyses the re-ideologisation of Chinese politics since 2013 under Xi Jinping, focusing on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) discourse on the “Common values of all mankind”, which aims to substitute Western universal values with a set of global values rooted in Chinese history and culture. The chapter offers key methodological insights into studying practices of “ideological engineering”. Holbig traces the “escalating authoritativeness” through which the Chinese concept of mankind has evolved along a “ladder of canonisation”, by moving from the periphery to the centre of CCP’s political language. The chapter concludes that ideological engineering is a key force shaping party–state politics, crucial to the CCP’s political strategy, serving both to assert China’s global influence and foster regime legitimacy. This case study complements Ewan Robertson’s theoretical approach to understanding how ideas move across micro-, meso- and macro-levels of policy diffusion (Chapter 16).

Readers familiar with the CCP’s long-standing drive for ideological hegemony in their country may still be surprised to hear that Confucian thought continued to play a role in intellectual and even political life there after the revolution (Wang and Hill 2023). In Chapter 26, Ralph Weber develops a sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism, presenting it as a living ideology rather than a mere reflection of progressive modernity. Focusing on macro- and meso-level analysis, the chapter examines how Confucian thought evolved in the 20^th century, emphasising the role of modern institutional contexts and social networks shaping the production of discourse. This approach reveals how tradition and modernity are mediated in texts and negotiated in lived practice within specific historical contexts, illuminating the nexus between political and philosophical fields.

After many decades of Congress Party rule, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has steered India on a notably ethno-nationalist course since its breakthrough federal election victory in 2014 (Chakrabarty and Jha 2020; Jacobsen 2023). In Chapter 27, Aditi Bhatia examines how the BJP has shaped socio-political discourse in India through the lens of Hindu fundamentalism. The BJP’s advocacy of Hindutva merges religious and national identity, reshaping India’s history through the “saffronisation” of public space. Using critical discourse analysis and the “Discourse of Illusion” (DoI) approach, Bhatia explores how language and ideology have been weaponised by hegemonic groups in India to reinforce dominant societal narratives while marginalising opposing voices. By highlighting the processes of legitimisation that elevate these versions of reality to the status of truth, the chapter enables a productive dialogue with Benjamin Tainturier’s chapter in this volume on cultural hegemony and the radical right.

Over the past three decades, the politics of immigration have upended party competition and public discourse across Europe ( Gianfreda 2021; Bartels 2023; Kriesi, Altiparmakis, Bojar and Oana 2024). In Chapter 28, Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran and Christian S. Czymara explore how political elite discourses shape European attitudes toward immigration. They provide longitudinal evidence spanning 18 years to analyse how within-country variations in political elite rhetoric influence anti-immigration attitudes and contribute to polarisation in the broader public along political and socio-economic lines. Their findings show that, controlling for actual immigration levels, anti-immigrant attitudes rise when elites adopt exclusionary rhetoric and decline with inclusionary rhetoric. Importantly, they show that ideological and discursive factors, specifically how national political elites frame immigration, rather than actual immigration levels, drive inter-group conflict and perceptions of immigration as a threat.

Russia in the 1990s has commonly been described as going through a period of “ideological vacuum”, in stark contrast to the former Soviet ideocratic regime (Hanson 2010). In Chapter 29, Juliette Faure and Guillaume Sauvé argue that this “end-of-ideology” assumption rests on a misconception of ideology as a rigid belief system. Instead, they adopt a broader view of ideological supply, examining not only political parties but also informal organisations, discussion clubs and newspapers. This inductive empirical approach aligns with Section 5’s exploration of ideology’s latent manifestations in places and formats less frequently studied. The chapter identifies three ideological languages – “Westernism,” “national-patriotism” and “managerial centrism” – and highlights their characteristics of eclecticism and malleability, as opposed to rigid belief systems. The authors argue that, despite claims of rejecting, merging or transcending ideology, these narratives remain ideologically charged. Thus, the 1990s represented a period of fluid ideological rearrangements rather than an ideological vacuum.

Among the many reasons for Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the prominence of evangelical Christianity in American public life is the clearest indication of American exceptionalism (Haynes 2025). In Chapter 30, Clyde Wilcox and Leonard A. Williams explore the ideology of the Christian Right in the US, tracing its evolution through successive waves of political mobilisation. Each wave reached its peak with the promotion of specific ideological packages, followed by periods of weakened political activity. The chapter highlights how religious beliefs become ideology, illuminating the Christian Right’s worldview through morphological analysis and survey research. It situates the Christian Right within American conservatism and suggests avenues for further research, highlighting its hybridised beliefs and values. This analysis complements both Michael Williams and Jean-François Drolet’s Chapter 11 and Valentin Behr and Anemona Constantin’s Chapter 15, on the global dimensions of radical conservative movement ideologies.

African leaders as diverse as Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Senghor and Nelson Mandela shared elements of a distinctively African non-liberal ideological orientation, with roots in precolonial indigenous traditions of governance (Wiredu 2004; Martin 2012). In Chapter 31, Beatrice Okyere-Manu and Kow Kwegya Amissah Abraham characterise this shared ideological current as communalism while reflecting on the phenomenon of corruption in Africa. Rather than focusing on the drivers behind corruption, they shift attention to interrogating its ideological dimensions. They situate its varying conceptualisations across political spaces and institutions shaping state functions. The chapter 396.examines communalism as the political ideology embraced by various African ethnic groups and presents it as the ideological perspective from which corruption can be most effectively challenged. Okyere-Manu and Abraham’s ethical analysis explores how moral obligations within communal ideology – such as solidarity, interconnectedness and humanness – shape both the phenomena and perceptions of corruption. The authors hold out the hope that pervasive political corruption is not inherently enabled within societies organised along communalist principles.

References

Bartels, L. (2023) Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens and the Challenge of Populism in Europe, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bolivar, A. and Block, E. (2024) “The Latin American political discourse”, ch. 3 in Andreu Casero-Ripollés, A. and Carlos López- López, P. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Political Communication in Ibero-America, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Cheek, T., Mühlhahn, K. and Van de Ven, H. (eds.) (2021) The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chakrabarty, B. and Jha, B. K. (2020) Hindu Nationalism in India: Ideology and Politics, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

De la Torre, C. (2017) “Populism in Latin America”, chapter 10 in Rovira Kaltwasser, C., Taggart, P., Ochoa Espejo, P. and Ostiguy, P., (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Populism, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Gianfreda, S. (2021) Where do the Parties Stand?: Political Competition on Immigration and the EU in National and European Parliamentary Debates, Cham Switzerland: Springer.

Hanson, S. (2010) Post-imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haynes, J. (ed.) (2025) The Routledge Handbook of Politics and Religion in Contemporary America, New York NY: Routledge.

Jacobsen, K. (ed.) (2023) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Lam, W. (2025) From Confucius to Xi Jinping: The DNA of Chinese Politics, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Kriesi, H., Altiparmakis, A., Bojar, A. and Oana, I.-E. (2024) Coming to Terms with the European Refugee Crisis, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, G. (2012) African Political Thought, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wang, H. and Hill, M. G. (trans) (2023). The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Wiredu, K. (ed.) (2004) A Companion to African Philosophy, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers.

24. Populism, ideology and politics in Latin America

Felipe Burbano de Lara

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-32

Introduction

The modern political history of Latin America cannot be understood without considering populism. Despite the controversy and confusion that the concept still generates, it seems useless to interpret this region’s political dynamics without resorting to the term “populism” (Roberts 2008: 58). In Latin America, democratic ideals and horizons, leadership styles, political strategies, logics of inclusion and exclusion, discursive practices and social and political identities are influenced by the populist experience. Not even the transitions to democracy within the framework of the so-called Third Wave removed populism from the political scene. The post-authoritarian democratic promise aimed to modernise politics through fully institutionalised regimes that could rewrite the history of identities and political practices in Latin America. But populism has repeatedly returned to the region, showing the strength of its interpellation, leadership and social mobilisation models (de la Torre and Arnson 2013; Roberts 2013; Burbano de Lara 2019).

Latin America’s contributions to ideology as a field of study are closely linked to the populist experience. It was precisely the interest in understanding the mobilisation capacity of its discursive styles that opened the way for a critical review of the concept of ideology, as established in social sciences under the influence of Marxism. The problem that attracted the attention of sociologists since the 1960s was the presence of the popular – lo popular – as a discursive field through which populism constituted and mobilised the people as a political subject. The people acquired prominence as a space of political subjectivities above notions such as class (Roberts 2023) or citizenship (de la Torre 2003). Although the category of the people is not exclusive to populism, as it is part of the set of categories upon which democracy is built ( Canovan 2005; Urbinati 2019; Peruzzotti 2024), its constitution as a political subject in an antagonistic relationship with the power structures of society is indeed specific to populism.

The fact that the people, and not class or citizenship, constituted the predominant field of populist discursive practices led to a broader and more complex theoretical discussion about the relationship between ideology and social structures. Since “the people” does not have a direct connection with classes and also provides the realm in which populist rhetoric operates, its understanding led to the conception of ideological phenomena as a specific analytical field not determined by social structures. The reconceptualisation of ideology also redefined its relationship with politics itself. As I show in this article, Latin America’s contribution to ideological studies is closely linked to the problematisation of populism as a discursive phenomenon that articulates a political subject from the popular. My objective is to trace the path through which populism studies in Latin America, starting with the pioneering works of Gino Germani (1968) and later Ernesto Laclau (1977), led to a theoretical shift from ideology to discursive practices. The scope of the transition to what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) called post-Marxism encompasses relationships between politics and society and between ideology and politics.

The chapter is divided into four parts. In the first, I discuss the sociological debate in Latin America around the popular as a problematic dimension of the social structure but central in populist rhetoric since its emergence on the political scene in the early decades of the 20^th century. I show the difficulties faced by sociologists in establishing the connection between the popular and the social structure during the modernisation of Latin American societies. The popular was defined as that component of the social that did not clearly fit within the new class structure in the peripheral capitalism of Latin America. Without a clear social anchor, the sociological definition of the popular turned out to be ambiguous and imprecise. In the second part, I show how the need to explain the popular led, first, to a shift in the conceptual debates on ideology to understand it as a specific field, different from class, of discursive and political practices. This first shift aimed to give relative autonomy to the field of ideology concerning class structures precisely to theorise the popular. In the third part, I discuss the implications of this shift for critically reconceptualising ideology and politics in Marxism. My argument is that the shift led to an understanding of politics as the articulation of discursive practices. In the fourth part, I analyse the current debate between those who define populism as an ideological phenomenon – a thin ideology – or as a discursive logic of constituting the people. I explore some literature that has used those two perspectives in specific cases in Latin America to show the strengths and limits. The contemporary debate picks up the long trajectory of discussion on populism as it began in Latin America but with greater theoretical sophistication. Underlying the chapter is an argument that is tested and evaluated in the conclusions: the contributions from Latin America to the study of ideology bear the mark of the enigmatic presence of the popular as a specific field of discursive interpellation and formation of political culture that repeatedly brings populism to the fore in the region.

The ambiguous social status of the popular

The first explanations of populism in Latin America came from modernisation sociology (Gino Germani 1968; Torcuato di Tella 1973) and Marxist sociology (Cueva 1988; Ianni 1973; Cardoso and Falleto 1969). In both currents, the main idea was that the emergence of populist movements in the 1930s expressed the social changes caused by the transition from a traditional agrarian society to a modern capitalist one. The category of the popular was used to designate the presence of social groups that did not hold a clear class position within the new social structure. The Italian Argentine sociologist Gino Germani, in his classic studies on Peronism, associated the rise of populism with the mobilisation of what he indistinctly called the lower classes or popular sectors (1968, 1973). For Germani, as a good sociologist, the political mobilisation caused by populism represented an aspect of a broader process of social mobilisation (Germani 1968: 106).

The social base of populism caused interpretative difficulties when trying to explain it from the changes in the class structure. Germani opened the debate by referring to the base of Peronism as a combination of the working class and popular classes (Germani 1968: 128). Sociologists followed him by speaking indistinctly of classes, lower classes and/or popular sectors (Germani 1973; Ianni 1973; di Tella 1973; Cueva 1988). Behind the populist movements, they identify social classes emerging with the capitalist development – such as the national bourgeoisies and unionised workers – with peasants impoverished by oligarchic and aristocratic dominance over the land. They also identified social groups linked to the rapid urbanisation processes of the 1930s and 1940s, without precise class anchors. In some cases, under the generic term “popular sectors”, they talk about its “typical components”: the working class, the urban popular mass and the agrarian mass (Cardoso and Falleto 1969: 105). The centrality of the popular varied depending on the weight of the workers in the social structure (Cardoso and Falleto 1969: 117). The greater or lesser weight of the organised proletariat defined the scope of what was called an urban mass society typical of insufficiently industrialised economies (Cardoso and Falleto 1969: 103). Octavio Ianni, another early Marxist theorist of populism, spoke indistinctly of “organized popular sectors,” “unorganized popular sectors,” and “marginal urban popular sectors” to describe the bases of populism (di Tella 1973: 111). In all three cases, the popular described a transversal condition across different social groups which defines them.

The concept was used as a catch-all to describe everything that the notion of class did not explain concerning the new social structures and populist mobilisation. In all these sociological accounts, the concept of class proved insufficient to explain the social base of populism and, therefore, also its political significance. The academic debates of the Latin American left were marked by this social ambiguity of populism, which gave rise to implications for its relationship with democracy and socialism (Laclau 1977; de Ipola and Portantiero 1986). As we will see later, the discussion about class and the people as a problem opened by populism in Latin America will reappear in contemporary debates about its transformation into a global phenomenon. What was initially a hypothesis to explain Latin American populism became a general thesis. As Roberts (2023: 67) says, populism has found fertile ground in social and political scenarios marked by the weakness and disarticulation of popular class subjects.

What caught the attention of sociologists was not only the social bases mobilised by populism but also the seduction of and preference for leadership styles and rhetoric around the popular. The people, not the class, emerged as the political subject constituted and mobilised by populism. As Germani (1968: 43) categorically puts it: the triumph of populism was the failure of class politics. In populist rhetoric, class is displaced as the social subject of discursive articulation (Roberts 2023).

The ambiguity of the popular in social terms led to a debate about whether it was a category that refers to the constitution of political identities in a dimension not anchored in the social structure. The different terms through which populism interpellates (calls into being and gives identity to) the popular and constitutes the people as a political subject show a complex intertwining of economic and social conditions, logics of exclusion and social and cultural hierarchies. Examples of these terms are “lower classes”, “poor”, “low people”, “dispossessed classes”, “disinherited masses”, “shirtless”, “rabble”, “popular majorities”, “plebeians” (Burbano de Lara 2014: 438). Their interpellation from these categories puts on display complex power plots that articulate social relations.

Interpellative forms very similar to those of earlier Latin American populism are present in numerous contemporary populisms. When analysing actual populist politics, de Cleen (2019: 35) highlights the way of interpellating those below: “The populist interpellation of the ‘down’ or ‘low’ powerless people becomes even more explicitly clear in terms such as ‘little people’ or ‘little men,’ ‘ordinary people,’ or ‘common people,’ and ‘average man’ or ‘average Joe’.” This politics becomes visible in the ways populisms present themselves as the embodiment of the people (2019: 35). The complexity of populist interpellation, which incorporates social and cultural elements linked to a power relationship, cannot be reduced to class positions. It also has to do with ways of being and acting in politics, including ways and forms of speaking, dressing and public taste (Roberts 2023: 71; see also Ostiguy 2017).

The other element of populist interpellation highlighted in the earliest studies was the antagonistic nature of the identities constituted through its rhetoric (Laclau 1977). What is specific to populism is not the appeal to the popular democratic – popular democrático – nor to the figure of the people, although it makes them visible as rhetorical fields. What makes a democratic popular interpellation populist is “a peculiar form of articulation of the democratic interpellations … as a synthetic antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology” (Laclau 1977: 172–173); it creates a contradiction between the people and the power bloc as distinct from a class contradiction. In populism, the identity of the people is constituted by a set of reverse signifiers to challenge the powerful groups or elites against which it mobilises: “scrawny”, “thieves”, “miserable”, “immoral”, “exploitative”, “insatiable” (Burbano de Lara 2014: 137). These terms aim to disqualify the elites or power groups and contrast their hierarchical senses of prestige and social honour with the experiences, ways of life, cultural expressions, tastes and traditions of the popular sectors. The identity of the people is expressed as a celebratory discrediting of those above (Roberts 2023: 71). Since its emergence as a category of political discourse, the popular appears as authentically Latin American against the exclusive and enlightened Europeanism of the elites. Populism creates a fracture in the balance of social status expressed in a visceral and passionate manner (di Tella 1970: 294). The status-based power comes into play in the antagonistic mobilisation of the popular.

In strictly political terms, populist mobilisation took place outside the institutional channels of the political system. Germani (1968: 126) defines it as a “primary form” of political mobilisation because it took place outside the institutional framework of representative democracy. Populism expanded political participation spaces in societies with oligarchic power structures and political regimes. The oligarchic appears as the reverse of the people as a political subject. The oligarchic has at least three relevant dimensions for understanding the context of populist antagonism: a) it refers to a political regime that excludes the so-called lower and/or popular classes from citizenship; b) it turns the state phenomenon into an extension of the power of dominant economic groups without democratic institutional mediation; and c) it creates a monopoly of social capital as a condition of natural privileges.

Particular to Latin America was that the political rupture of the oligarchic did not open the way to the expansion of representative democracy but to the constitution of what Germani (1968) called national–popular regimes. The national–popular came to be conceived as a space for configuring a discursive field on the state around three central phenomena: the incorporation of popular sectors into the nation, the constitution of a state in tension/opposition with the power structures of the oligarchies and alternative forms of mobilisations to representative institutional democracies.

The new field of ideology

The need to explain the popular as a category from which political identities are constituted without clear social anchors led to a problematisation of the conceptual and theoretical status of ideology as a field of subjectivity formation. The starting point was a critical review of the relationship established by Marxism between ideology and social classes. Populism exposed the limits of a conception that started from the class structure to understand the configuration of identity processes around the people. From class analysis perspective, populist mobilisation and rhetoric were indecipherable (Laclau 1977). The challenge was to decode the constitution of the people as a category used by populism to politically mobilise popular actors.

Laclau’s response to this challenge was to differentiate the popular from the social class, things that Marxist and modernising sociologists always confused and treated as equivalents. Based on that differentiation, the popular describes a field of identification and mobilisation capable of generating social and political antagonisms different from those of class. More importantly, around the popular a field of antagonisms is constituted that depends not on class economic relations but on the set of political and ideological relations of a social formation. The category of people showed that the popular far exceeds the field of class contradictions, with a long history of struggle traditions, symbols, values and languages derived from different ways of activating the principle of popular sovereignty in modern societies (Laclau 1977: 166) – a plebeian activation of popular sovereignty in a context of precarious democratisation. Those symbols and references do not have a concrete social class base; they can be articulated in many different forms and related to classes in various ways.

Laclau refers to the other field of discursiveness and antagonisms made visible by populism as “popular democratic” (1977, 1985, 2005). The term has maintained continuity in his work but was reformulated to clarify its relationship with the class structure. At first, Laclau (1977) states that the ideological forms of political discourse exist in the field of popular democratic interpellations, but their different modes of articulation depend on class anchors and projects. By themselves – here is Laclau’s initial ambiguity – they lack a principle of articulation that gives them coherence. Laclau notes that the popular democratic dimension is present in connection with the principle of popular sovereignty, but popular sovereignty has no status of its own except in connection with the classes in struggle in a society.

Ideologies [that is, struggles around popular democracy] do not have a class content in themselves; they depend on how they are articulated in specific historical contexts of class struggle. The same ideology can therefore have different class contents depending on how it is articulated with other elements.

(Laclau 1977: 186)

Classes still appear as the main actors, but they can have different ideological and political expressions depending on how they articulate their positions with the popular democratic field.

The discussion on the ideology/class relationship spread out across different intellectual fields. Some authors reconstructed the concept of ideology from Marxism, cleansing it of its most deterministic elements. Stuart Hall (1996: 45), from cultural studies, spoke of “Marxism without guarantees”. He argued that capitalism powerfully configures class experience and relations, but class per se does not determine its members’ ideological perspectives. “Instead, class fixes limits, establishes parameters and defines an operational space, the concrete conditions of existence and social practices its members experience, but not in ways that can be absolutely predicted” (Hall 1996: 45).

In the case of Latin America, the popular democratic field appears with greater clarity precisely because its social structures are weakly anchored in class. Kenneth Roberts (2023) has revisited this postulate to propose a more general thesis on the social conditions that make populism’s rise possible in the 21^st century. He suggests that in the various historical contexts of capitalism, the category of the people rivals that of class as realms of political subjectivity and mobilisation. Thus the recent rise of populism in Europe and the US can be interpreted as a weakening of the working class’s ability to organise the structure of representations in society. In social contexts of greater differentiation and heterogeneity, populism triggers the constitution of identities and contradictions in the strictly political field (2023: 67–70).

In Latin America, populism posed the conceptual challenge of explaining how the people are constituted and mobilised as a collective subject based on the dispersion and fragmentation of the social experiences of those who are dissatisfied with or excluded from the structures of power. The challenge led to a more radical theoretical turn: not only to relativise the weight of classes in the formation of ideologies, but to take ideological practices themselves to the field of representations – the symbolic – as they are organised from discursive practices. This critique, originally directed against Marxism, later took the broader path of an anti-sociologism in relation to the study of ideologies.

Marx and Engels turn around

This anti-sociologism rejects the idea that social actors are constituted in a structure of relations whose nature is defined outside of politics. It does not understand the social structure as something that precedes, conditions and determines politics. On the contrary, the social world is organised from politics and politics operates through the ability to articulate complex identity systems through discursive practices. Anti-sociologism returned, paradoxically, to all that Marx and Engels had denounced as fictions of the world of ideas – false, imaginary – linked to ideological domination in class societies. In their classic text The German Ideology, Marx and Engels refer to ideology as a way of constructing representations and images of social life unrelated to what they define as the real world. Ideology appears as the production of an imaginary, fanciful, illusory, spectral consciousness of social life, but with the power to impose itself on people’s consciousness. “Human beings constantly form false conceptions about themselves, about what they are. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas” (Marx and Engels 1974: 71).

The critique of this posture came from within Marxism, beginning notably with Gramsci and pushed substantially further by Louis Althusser. The anti-deterministic shift of the real placed ideological practices in the field of the symbolic and re-examined the role of language in the configuration of the social world. Inspired by Freud and Lacan’s theories, Althusser (1976) argues that ideology always operates in the realm of the imaginary as an inevitable mediation in people’s perceptions of the social world. Althusser’s critique of Marx and Engels is that they did not take the reality of the imaginary seriously ( Ricouer 1986: 143). In The German Ideology, Althusser maintains, ideology is conceived as pure illusion, as pure dream in contrast to the real world (Ricouer 1986: 143). For Althusser, instead of pretending to abandon the imaginary world, one must think about the reality of the illusory (Ricouer 1986: 143) and the mechanisms through which it operates. Althusser’s most powerful argument is to point out that everything that exists in the social world is over-determined by the symbolic (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 97–98). There is no extra-ideological reality that can be captured by a neutral language; ideology always constructs symbolic fictions from which we cannot escape (Zizek 1994: 10–17). It always configures an imaginary order of identification that classical Marxism considered a fiction from which the scientific discourse of the real/material could liberate us. For Zizek (1994: 17), that claim is itself an ideological fiction.

Laclau stresses the need for a re-evaluation of the role of language in the analysis and explanation of social processes (Laclau 1986: 34); he criticizes Marxist denial of the specific forms of discursivity in society and rejects the idea that language can reflect the objective ordering of the real (Laclau 1986: 32). The real always speaks through mediations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 3). As Stuart Hall argues, the social world carries the mediation of symbolic structures as they are constructed through language and ideologies (1996: 38–39). The permanent presence of ideology – “ideology is eternal”, says Althusser – configures fields of subjectivity where the games of interpellation/constitution of the subject unfold. Interpellations register and name social agents in the order of social formations, designating their places in labour, moral and religious orbits, in the state system and in the nation (Landi 1985: 186). By situating the analysis of politics in the discursive field, social conflicts, antagonisms and contradictions no longer derive from a social structure that operates as their foundation, but from the boundaries established by a given discourse in opposition to other discourses with which it competes. “[T]‌here is no ideology that does not assert itself by means of delimiting itself from another mere ideology” (Zizek 1994: 19). Laclau and Mouffe move from contradiction as inherent to the mode of production and its class structure to the fabrication of political antagonisms in society by means of discursive practices. In discourse theory, all identity is relational, operating through games of difference and opposition. Hence, the identities of subjects are always split, bearing the mark of a void in their own configuration.

Populism as a thin ideology or discursive logic

In the current debate on populism, the concepts of ideology and discursive logic play a central role. Both of the most influential approaches to interpreting populism recognise the importance of ideas in the configuration of the political field (Hawkins 2019); they also agree on defining populism as a phenomenon that polarises society into an antagonistic confrontation between the people and the elite. However, in the two approaches, the concepts of ideas, ideology and discourse refer to theoretical and conceptual frames that take them to different analytical approximations and interpretations of populist antagonism.

The so-called ideational approach (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2011, 2013; Mudde 2015; Rovira Kaltwasser 2015; Hawkins 2019; de la Torre and Mazzoleni 2019) gives a central place to ideas in the definition and explanation of populism (Hawkins 2019: 57). From that starting point, populism is defined as a set of ideas limited in scope and distinct from traditional ideologies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2011: 150). The central concept used by this approach is thin-centred ideology, conceptualised initially by Michael Freeden as “an identifiable but restricted morphology that relies on a small number of core concepts whose meaning is highly context dependent.” As a consequence, thin-centred ideologies are unable to offer complex arguments and often adjust to the perceptions and needs of different societies (Freeden 1998: 751, cited by Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013: 151). As a thin-centred ideology or a discursive frame, populism is defined as a moment in which individuals see politics as the struggle between a reified will of the common people and an evil conspiring elite (Hawkins 2019: 60). The central concepts of populism’s ideational structure are the virtuous people, a corrupt elite and a general will (of and for the people), which is thwarted by the elite (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013: 151).

Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser advocate a minimal, abstract and general definition of populism so that the concept can travel across different realities, apply to a wide spectrum of cases and allow for comparative and empirical studies. The idea of populism as thin ideology assumes an empty container that is filled with content in the concrete struggle of populisms in their respective historical contexts. The content is defined by adherence to ideological frameworks that resonate in the societies where it emerges. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013: 150) echo Paul Taggart’s (2000) definition: “populism has a chameleonic nature: it appears in different times and places but is always constituted by aspects of its environment that resonate with ‘the heartland.’” Whether populism is left wing or right wing, inclusive or exclusive, depends on the ideology with which it aligns and the context where it irrupts.

The ideational approach has been used to compare contemporary populisms in Europe and Latin America (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2011, 2013). They have analysed the ideological contents of the populisms of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, comparing them with the populist experiences of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider, in Austria. The analysis shows that the differences between contemporary European and Latin American populisms vary according to who is included in the people to confront the elites and the ideological frameworks used (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013: 148). From their analysis they conclude that Latin American populisms are inclusive – Americanist in their ideology – in contrast to the European ones, which they define as excluding – ideologically nativism.

Rovira Kaltwasser (2014) has also deployed the ideational approach to point out the differences between Latin American populisms of the 1990s – the so-called neopopulisms, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Fernando Collor de Melo in Brazil – and the radical populisms of the 21^st century (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia; see de la Torre and Arnson 2013). His purpose is to understand the diverse positions of Latin American populisms across the left/right ideological spectrum. His conclusion is that Latin American populism is ambivalent to left and right postures. This is because, being a thin ideology, it necessarily appears attached to other sets of core ideas to develop seductive proposals to voters (Rovira Kaltwasser 2014: 160). In the 1990s, the so-called neopopulisms adhered to neoliberalism, while radical populisms attached to a confusing combination of post-neoliberalism and 21^st-century socialism. Rovira Kalwatsser’s conclusion is that while ideological arrangements are contingent, they exist and are fundamental to characterising populism (Rovira Kaltwasser 2014: 160).

A more holistic and comprehensive application of the ideational approach is found in Hawkins, Carlin, Litvay and Rovira Kaltwasser (2018). The ideational approach is deployed to establish comparative views between Western European and Latin American populisms, to analyse the Venezuelan case and to compare the populist vote in Bolivia and Chile with Spain and Greece.

While the ideational approach offers a minimal definition of populism that can travel across regions and thus contribute to comparative studies of populism, the ideological configurations of populisms are more complex and varied than they appear in the analysis from the ideational approach. It is also difficult to assert that adherence to traditional ideologies provides coherence and political rationality to a phenomenon that is often characterised by its ideological “vagueness and indeterminacy”. Sometimes populisms are more pragmatic than ideological; they can radically and rapidly change their discourse or adapt it to circumstances (de la Torre and Mazzoleni 2023: 5).

Studies using discursive analysis in Latin America defend the idea that populism, more than an ideology, is a logic of antagonistic construction of the political field that appears in moments of crisis of representation (Roberts 2013). Populisms are characterised precisely by mobilising the discourse of the people against the elites or a specific structure of power at times when traditional ideologies have lost their interpellative capacity and society lacks convincing representations of its social and political divisions. The definition of populism as a discursive logic explains the social and political polarisation it generates in a different way. “Logic” here means that the analytical objective is to understand the rules or grammar of its practice. If the logic of populist discourse effectively involves dividing society into two antagonistic positions, what is of interest is to decipher the boundary it establishes between the opposing actors – the people and their enemies. “To look at populism as a political logic means looking at how populism interpellates and mobilises people, how this interpellation constructs subject positions people can identify with and how populist politics are involved in the construction, defense and naturalisation of new frontiers” (Glynos, cited by de Cleen 2019: 29). Populist discourse does not coherently integrate the ideologies circulating in society in a specific historical context. Laclau and Mouffe and their followers (Panizza 2013; de Cleen and Stavrakakis 2018; de Cleen 2019) have long argued that populism’s discursive capacity consists of rearranging the signifiers floating in the field of ideological struggle and rearticulating them into a discourse that polarises society between the people and the elites.

The key concept for deciphering the logic of discourses is articulation, understood as “any practice that establishes a relation among elements so that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 105). From this perspective, each populist discourse is singular within a shared logic. The radical populisms of the 21^st century have in common, for example, their anti-neoliberalism, their refoundational impetus and their particular way of activating popular sovereignty (de la Torre 2009, 2015; Burbano de Lara 2015), but they differ in their discursive practices. The idea of socialism in each one has different meanings and political implications in their agendas.

Discourse analysis investigates the way in which floating signifiers, that is, the signs, concepts, and categories that express points of conflict and political tension in a society, are reorganised in populist rhetoric. The state, for example, was a signifier to which radical populisms gave a new meaning – they spoke of the return of the state – but inserted it in different discursivities: Correa linked it to the idea of refounding the homeland, Chávez to a Bolivarian nationalism and Morales to the pluri-national state (Burbano de Lara 2015). Chávez initially organised his radical discourse around the notion of Bolivarian revolution and only in a second moment connected the idea of popular power with 21^st-century socialism (López Maya and Panzarelli 2013; López Maya 2015). In Latin America, populist rhetorics needed to include indigenous demands in the people with which they gave rise to what has been called ethno-populism (Madrid 2019).

The plasticity of populist discourse around the elements it articulates to construct the people and its enemies derives from the contexts in which it emerges. In crises of representation, political languages, ideologies and their signifiers lose interpellative efficacy and, therefore, their capacity to organise differentiated systems of identity and subject positions. Hence, it can be defined as a force that breaks traditional political alignments and restructures the socio-political space from new competitive axes (Roberts and Ostiguy 2016). The axes of struggle and confrontation are connected with complex forms of ideological hybridisation in their discourses.

Both the ideational and discursive approaches share analytical objectives such as the construction of the people and their enemy, the central theme of populism. The studies that have been included in the discursive perspective try to identify the heterogeneous presence of actors and the incorporated social demands. The idea of the people with radical populisms inspired a series of works to establish how they constructed it and the new frontiers of antagonism they created. Examples are the works of Carlos de la Torre (2015), Burbano de Lara (2015) and Mazzolini (2021) on correism; López Maya and Pazzareli (2013), López Maya (2015), Gotberg (2011), Canno (2009) on chavism (2013); Mayorga (2019, 2012), Stefanoni (2011), Postero (2015) on Bolivia; and Biglieri (2007) on kirchnerism in Argentina, and Stavrakakis and de Cleen (2019). The central problem of populism studies hovers around the following concern: “Who belongs to ‘the people’ and who does not and why; and who belongs to ‘the elite’ and why this ‘elite’ does not represent ‘the people’ depends not on populism per se, but on the specific political program of the populists in question” (de Cleen 2019: 36). The difference between the ideational and the discursive approach to this question is how to establish the specific programmes of populisms. While the former do so from the ideologies that resonate in the respective societies, the latter start from a more complex analysis of discursive articulations.

Studies of populism that have been inspired by discursive logic have also focused on the figure of the leader. The problem is not only how the populist antagonism is constructed, but who speaks on behalf of the people. Populist movements generally describe themselves through the name of the leader (Peronists, Chavists, Evists, Correists). The leader is usually constituted upon the empty signifier around which the chain of equivalences is formed and where the subject people is constituted (Laclau 2005). Populism is constituted upon the leader’s ability to reach those groups that do not have a voice within the political system (Panizza 2013). The leader embodies the people and his practice in the public arena defines and marks the dynamics of antagonism. Their personalised leadership generates passions and fervour in their followers, which adds a strong emotional dimension to populism. Their personal histories, trajectories of struggle, social origins and their training have been studied to explain the differences between them. As Panizza argues, “in the very process of representing the people, the populist leader constitutes them as people” (Panizza 2013: 99). His practice, his actions in the daily exercise of government, his challenge to the traditions and conventions of political life, his charismatic, exceptional gestures, become a key piece of populist discursivity.

Finally, populist mobilisations, with all the elements and practices they bring to the political scene, revolve around the construction of an anti-elitist popular power, with varying degrees of radicality, as shown by the modern history of Latin America. Mobilisation implies that populism is not only a discursive practice but a political practice; or, if you will, a discursivity with mobilising capacity. Mobilisation explains the interpellatory capacity of populist discourse. Jansen defines it as “a flexible way of animating political support” (Jansen 2015: 160). Support is mobilised through a political subject who articulates diverse expressions of the social popular. As Panizza (2013) argues, populism brings the popular to the logic of antagonism through the figure of the people. In Latin America, as a long-lasting effect of populism on political culture, the popular is identified with the social and cultural world, as well as the identity of those from below. Populism articulates the “life experiences” of those from below politically (Ostiguy and Moffit 2021). The popular finds a space of political visibility through the contentious action of populist mobilisation (Jansen 2015: 166–168). This characteristic of Latin American populism defines it as an inclusive phenomenon, in contrast with the Europeans, although with an ambiguous stance towards democracy (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). In 21^st-century populisms, its most recent expression, the construction of popular power was the basis for the sovereign people mobilising to re-found Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have demonstrated the importance of the critical reconstruction of the Marxist concept of ideology for the study of Latin American populism. By centring populist rhetoric on the category of “the people” – and with the people being a political subject without specific social anchors – its understanding required problematising ideological practices beyond their connections to class structures. This shift resulted in a double theoretical shift: on one hand, ideological practices had to be conceived as an analytical dimension with its own problematic and logic; on the other, it forced reconsidering the relationship between ideology and politics. While the first shift redefined ideological practices as the level where political subjectivities are formed – i.e., the ways in which individual and collective subjects recognise themselves within a field of social positionalities – the second shift reconceptualised politics as a struggle to hegemonise the discursive field in society.

The trajectory of the debate over populism in Latin America follows an agenda formulated by Ernesto Laclau, the most important theorist of populism. His starting point was to define the theoretical status of “the popular” as a specific field of populist interpellation, while also being a generator of political antagonisms distinct from those of social classes. As I showed in the first part, “the popular” always appeared as an inscrutable dimension for sociological theories of political modernisation. As a category without clear anchors in class structure, but that related to the low ordinary people, the underdog, which is central to the articulation of populist discourse, its understanding demanded an approach to ideological practices that did not assume them as a mere reflection of the social contexts where the actors are included.

The current debate on populism highlights the relevance of this double shift in the understanding of ideology. On one side are those who define it as a phenomenon that polarises society through a set of moral ideas about the pure people and the corrupt elites, but whose specific political content depends on adherence to the traditional ideologies that circulate in society. On the other side are those who analyse it as a discursive logic that constitutes the people as a political subject opposed to power structures and whose political content depends on how it establishes and reproduces the antagonism between the two positions.

But beyond the relevance of an ideological and/or discursive analysis to understanding populism, the theoretical scope of the debate has placed ideology at the centre of politics as a field of representations, with language as its most important instrument and discourses as a constant practice of articulating the meaning of social life and fixing the positionalities of individuals and groups in an orderly set of relationships. The study of Latin American populism has contributed to the post-Marxist shift in politics to the extent that it freed it from the rigid structural constraints that limited and conditioned its interpretation and defined it as an open field in constant dispute, subject to defining the specific forms of social life through articulatory discourse practices. The great contribution of the shift enabled by the study of “the popular” was to situate ideology as an analytical tool for deciphering the dynamics of antagonism in social and political life through the subjects constituted by the interpellatory game of discursive practices.

The future research agenda on populism should explore complementarities between the main approaches that study the phenomenon. The contributions of ideational theory may well be enriched by adopting some features of discourse analysis, resulting in more rigorous analyses of the political programmes of populisms and their ideological ubiquity. The idea that their classification within the left/right spectrum can result from a conventional analysis of ideologies is poor. Perhaps they should take the morphological approach suggested by Freeden more seriously; he inspired ideational analysts to study ideologies more systematically. Attention must be given to their metamorphoses, their structural richness, their particular ways of inter-relating concepts, the consequences of their idea combinations, their rigidity and plasticity and the discursive domains that they constitute ( Freeden 2006: 15). This step would mean keeping the idea of ideologies adhered to the populist rhetoric of polarisation but without presupposing their coherence and systematicity. In this way, the study of populism will serve to understand how its irruption not only polarises the people against the elite in moral terms, but also expands the ideological and representational horizons of politics.

The step proposed by Ostiguy, Panniza and Moffit (2021) towards a performative approach to populism is another path in the search for complementarities to strengthen the discursive analysis of populism. This situates discourse as a practice embedded in the social and cultural conditions of identification, from which a highly personalistic leadership emerges from the people against the elite (Ostiguy, Panniza and Moffit 2021: 49).

As the recent history of left-wing populisms in Latin America and right-wing populisms in the US shows, the field of ideologies is fundamentally altered by the rhetorical irruptions of characters such as Chávez or Trump. The ideological field never recovers the form it had before the discursive populist transgressions. In turn, complementarity of research methods would demand that the ideational approach emphasises what defines populism as a thin ideology: the mobilisation of the moral people against the corrupt elite. This dynamic loses centrality in the analysis of populisms when the spotlight shifts to the field of ideologies.

Any effort to seek complementarities that strengthens the debate and at the same time builds bridges between the different approaches is promising. This chapter has shown how the discursive approach is enriched when it connects with the different practices involved in populism: construction of the people and the elites, mobilisation, leadership and complexity of social structures. The same would be true if the ideational approach adopts perspectives opened up by discourse theory in its analysis of ideologies.

References

Althusser, L. (1976) “Ideología y Aparatos Ideológicos del Estado”, in Althusser, L. (ed.) Posiciones, México: Grijalvo: 75–139.

Biglieri, P. (2007) “El retorno del pueblo argentino: entre la autorisación y la asamblea. Argentina en la era K”, in Biblieri, P. and Perelló, G. (eds) En el Nombre del Pueblo. La emergencia del Populismo Kirchnerista, Buenos Aires: UNSAN Edita: 61–84.

Burbano de Lara, F. (2014) La Revuelta de las Periferias. Movimientos Regionales Y Autonomías Políticas en Ecuador y Bolivia, Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador.

Burbano de Lara, F. (2015) “Todo por la patria. Refundación y retorno del estado en la Revolución Ciudadana”, Iconos #52, May, 19–41.

Burbano de Lara, F. (2019) “Populist waves in Latin America: Continuities, twists and ruptures”, in de la Torre, C. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, New York NY: Routledge: 435–451.

Canno, B. (2009) “The leader and the led: Hegemonic strategies in the leadership of Hugo Chávez”, in Canno, B. (ed.) Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Populism and Democracy in a Globalized Era, Manchester UK: Manchester University Press: 53–77.

Canovan, M. (2005) The People, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cardoso, F. E. and Falleto, E. (1969) Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina, Argentina: Siglo XXI.

Cueva, A. (1988) “El velasquismo. Un ensayo de interpretación”, in Cueva, A. (ed.) El proceso de Dominación Política en el Ecuador, Quito: Planeta: 135–159.

de Cleen, B. (2019) “The populist political logic and the analysis of the discursive construction of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’”, in Zienkowski, J. and Breeze, R. (eds) Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist Discourses across the Political Spectrum, Amsterdam: John Benjamin.

De Ipola, E. and Portantiero, J. C. (1986) “Lo Nacional Popular y los Populismos Realmente Existentes”, in Labastida Martín del Campo, J. (ed.) Los Nuevos Procesos Sociales y la Teoría Política Contemporánea, México: Siglo XXI.

de la Torre, C. (2003) “Los usos políticos de las categorías de pueblo y democracia”, in Pachano, S. (ed.) Antología: Ciudadanía e Identidad, Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador: 231–248.

de la Torre, C. (2009) “Populismo y Democracia Radical en los Andes”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 1, 24–37.

de la Torre, C. (2015) “El tecnopopulismo de Rafael Correa”, in de la Torreo, C. (ed.) De Velasco a Correa: Insurrecciones, Populismos y Elecciones en Ecuador, 1944–2013, Quito: Universidad Andina y Corporación Editora Nacional: 159–186.

de la Torre, C. and Arnson, C. (2013) Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, Baltimore MD: Woodrow Wilson Center and The John Hopkins University Press.

de la Torre, C. and Mazzoleni, O. (2019) “Do we need a minimum definition of populism? An appraisal of Mudde’s conceptualisation”, Populism, vol. 2, no. 1, 79–95.

de la Torre, C. and Mazzoleni, O. (2023) “Introduction: Towards populism as a dialogical perspective”, in de la Torre, C. and Mazzoleni, O. (eds) Populism and Key Concepts in Social and Political Theory, Netherlands: Brill: 1–21.

di Tella, T. (1970) “Populismo y Reforma en América Latina”, in Cardoso, F. H. and Weffort, F. (ed.) América Latina: Ensayos de interpretación sociológica, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria: 290–297.

di Tella, T. (1973) “Populismo y reformismo”, in Germani, G., di Tella, T. and Ianni, O. (eds) Populismo y Contradicciones de clase en América Latina, México: Era: 38–83.

Freeden, M. (2006) “Ideology and political theory”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 11, no. 1, 3–22. DOI: 10.1080/13569310500395834

Germani, G. (1968) Política y Sociedad en una época de transición. De la Sociedad Tradicional a la sociedad de masas, Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Germani, G. (1973) “Democracia representativa y clases populares”, in Germani, G., Di Tella, T. and Ianni, O. (eds) Populismo y contradicciones de clase en América Latina, México: Era: 12–38.

Gotberg, L. (2011) “The color of the mobs. Racial politics, ethnopopulism and representation in the Chávez Era”, in Smiled, D. and Hellinger, D. (eds) Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy. Participation, Politics and Culture under Chávez, Durham NC: Duke University Press: 219–243.

Hall, S. (1996) “The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees”, in Morley, D. and Kuan-Hsing, C. (eds) Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge: 25–46.

Hawkins, K. (2019) “The ideational approach”, in de la Torre, C. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, New York NY: Routledge: 57–73.

Hawkins, K., Carli, R., Littvay, L. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2018) The Ideational Approach to Populism. Concept, Theory And Analysis, London: Routledge.

Ianni, O. (1973). “Populismo y relaciones de clase”, in Germani, G., di Tella, T. and Ianni, O. (eds) Populismo y contradicciones de clase en América Latina, México: Era: 83–150.

Jansen, R. (2015) “Populist mobilisation: A new theorical approach to populism”, in de la Torre, C. (ed.) The Promises and Perils of Populism. Global Perspectives, Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky: 372–397.

Laclau, E. (1977) Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. Capitalism, Fascism and Populism, London: Verso.

Laclau, E. (1985) “Tesis acerca de la forma hegemónica de la política”, in Labastida Martín del Campo, J. (ed.) Hegemonía y Alternativas Políticas en América Latina, México: Siglo XXI, 19–45.

Laclau, E. (1986) “Discurso, Hegemonía y Política: Consideraciones sobre la crisis del Marxismo”, in Labastida Martín del Campo, J. (ed.) Los Nuevos Procesos Sociales y la Teoría Política Contemporánea, México: Siglo XXI: 30–41.

Laclau, E. (2005) La Razón Populista, Argentina: FCE.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Toward A Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso.

Landi, O. (1985) “Sobre lenguajes, identidades y ciudadanías políticas”, in Lechner, N. (ed.) Estado y política en América Latina, México: Siglo XXI: 172–198.

López Maya, M. (2015) “Popular power in the discourse of Hugo Chávez”, in de la Torre, C. (ed.) The Promises and Perils of Populism. Global Perspectives, Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky: 372–397.

López Maya, M. and Pazzarelli, A. (2013) “Populism, rentierism and socialism in the XXI century: The case of Venezuela”, in de la Torre, C. and Arnson, C. (eds) Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University and The Woodrow Wilson Center Press: 239–268.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1974) La Ideología Alemana, Barcelona: Ediciones Grijalva: 11–70.

Mayorga, F. (2012) “El proyecto estatal del MAS. Dilemas y perspectivas”, in Mayorga, F. (coord.) Estado, Ampliación de la Democracia y Disputa Política. Bolivia 2000–2010, Bolivia: CESU-UMSS: 259–275.

Mayorga, F. (2019) Mandato y contingencia. Estilo de gobierno de Evo Morales, Bolivia: CESU-UMSS Friederich Evert Stiftung.

Mazzolini, S. (2021) “Rafael Correa and the citizens’ revolution in Ecuador: A case of left-wing non hegemonic populism”, in Ostiguy, P., Panizza, F. and Moffit, B. (eds) Populism in Global Perspective. A Performative and Discursive Approach, New York NY: Routledge: 95–117.

Mudde, C. (2015) “Conclusions: Some further notes on populism”, in de la Torre, C. (ed.) The Promises and Perils of Populism. Global Perspectives, Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky: 431–453.

Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2011) Voices of the Peoples: Populism in Europe and Latin America Compared, Notre Dame IN: Kellogg Institute, Working Paper #378.

Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2013), “Populism”, in Freeden, M., Stears, M. and Sargeant, L. T. (eds), Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 493–512.

Ostiguy, P. (2017) “Populism: A socio-cultural approach”, in Rovira Kaltwasser, C., Taggart, P., Ochoa, P. and Ostiguy, P. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Populism, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 73–100.

Ostiguy, P. and Moffit, B. (2021) “Who would identify with an ‘empty signifier’?: The relational performative approach to populism”, in Ostiguy, P., Panizza, F. and Moffit, B. (eds) Populism in Global Perspective. A Performative and Discursive Approach, New York NY: Routledge: 47–71.

Ostiguy, P. and Roberts, K. (2016) “Putting Trump in comparative perspective: Populism and the politicisation of the sociocultural Low”, Brown Journal of World Affairs, vol. 23, 25–50.

Ostiguy, P., Panizza, F. and Moffit, B. (ed.) (2021) Populism in Global Perspective. A Performative and Discursive Approach, New York NY: Routledge.

Panizza, F. (2013) “What do we mean when we talk about populism?”, in de la Torre, C. and Arnson, C. (eds) Latin America Populism in the Twenty-First Century, Baltimore MD: Woodrow Wilson Center and The John Hopkins University Press: 85–115.

Peruzzotti, E. (2024) “Populism and the limits of liberal democracy”, in de la Torre, C., Bernhard, M. and Kreppel, A. (eds) Still the Age of Populism? Re-examining Theories and Concepts, New York NY: Routledge: 175–190.

Postero, N. (2015) “‘El Pueblo Boliviano, de Composición Plur’: a Look to Plurinationalism in Bolivia”, in de la Torre, C. (ed.) The Promises and Perils of Populism. Global Perspectives, Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky: 398–430.

Ricouer, P. (1986) “Althusser (3)”, in Taylor, G. (ed.) Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York NY: Columbia University Press: 142–159.

Roberts, K. (2008) “El resurgimiento del populismo latinoamericano”, in de la Torre, C. and Peruzzotti, E. (eds) El retorno del pueblo, Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador: 55–77.

Roberts, K. (2013) “Parties and populism in Latin America”, in de la Torre, C. and Arnson, C. (eds) Latin America Populism in the Twenty-First Century, Baltimore MD: Woodrow Wilson Center and The John Hopkins University Press: 37–61.

Roberts, K. (2023) “Populism and social class: Constituting ´the people´ and cleaving the political field”, in De la Torre, C. and Mazzoleni, O. (eds) Populism and the Key Concepts in Social and Political Theory, Netherlands: Brill: 67–91.

Rovira Kaltvasser, C. (2014) “Explaining the emergence of populism in Europe and the Americas”, in de la Torre, C. (eds) The Promises and Perils of Populism. Global Perspectives, Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky: 189–227.

Stavrakakis, Y. and de Cleen, B. (2019) “Populismo y nacionalismo: representando al pueblo como ‘los de abajo’ y como nación”, Anales de la Cátedra Francisco Suárez, vol. 53, 97–130.

Stefanoni, P. (2011) “La ‘indianisación’ del nacionalismo o la refundación permanente de Bolivia”, in Polet, F. (ed.) La Bolivia de Evo. ¿Democrática, Indigenista y socialista?, Madrid: Editorial Popular: 31–54.

Taggert, P. (2000) Populism, Philadelphia PA: Open University Press.

Urbinati, N. (2019) Me the People. How Populism Transforms Democracy, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Zizek, S. (1994) “The specter of ideology”, in Zizek, S. (ed.) Mapping Ideology, London: Verso: 1–33.

25. Ideological engineering in the evolution of China’s “Common Values of All Mankind” in the era of Xi Jinping

Heike Holbig

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-33

Introduction

The era of Xi Jinping has been widely characterised by a re-ideologisation of Chinese politics. Since Xi’s ascent to paramount power in 2012, this has become one of the most unmistakable and pertinent trends of his leadership. Moreover, in distinction from earlier decades, the party’s ideological work has been stepped up not only in the domestic but increasingly also in China’s foreign policy context.

In the light of these trends, scholars of China studies have been debating whether ideology is only an expedient tool of party–state politics or whether it plays a more substantial role as a driving force of domestic and foreign policy-making in the Xi era. The former position tends to regard ideology as juxtaposed with truth, as delusion, disguise or distortion of reality, while the latter position tends to understand ideologies as permanent and malleable discursive phenomena that compete over the control of political language, visions and practices. The former see the main purposes of party ideology – and of party propaganda as its extended arm – as manipulating facts, censoring public opinion and distracting public attention away from party–state politics to lower the costs of domestic governance and maintain stability at home (Roberts 2018; Guriev and Treisman 2020). By way of “slogan politics”, party ideology is seen to serve various functions of political communication at home and abroad (Zeng 2020). Externally, its main purposes are seen to provide a rhetorical toolkit designed to advance foreign policy goals (Nathan and Zhang 2021).

Going beyond such a predominantly instrumental view of ideology as delusion and sloganeering, I join others in arguing for a more substantive understanding of ideology as an ideational (re)source that drives party–state politics and shapes political visions both at home and abroad. Prominent studies of the growing role of party ideology in shaping China’s worldview in the Xi era include Brown and Berzina-Cerenkova’s (2018) analysis of the discursive creation of a great nation with the party at its heart, Rolland’s (2020) work on the ideational foundations of China’s vision for a new world order and Cheek’s (2021) contribution on Xi’s reassertion of a form of “ideological governance” in which only the party can save and represent China. More recently, Gore (2023) showed how the “ideological turn” under Xi has strained relations with the US and its allies and Callahan (2025) demonstrated how Chinese world order visions promote both ancient ideals and modern Marxist ideology. Rudd (2022) even argues that the Marxist-Leninist tenets of historical determinism have driven foreign policy in the Xi era. According to Rudd, Xi’s increasingly self-confident global visions have been “turbocharged by a Marxist-inspired belief that history is irreversibly on China’s side”, convincing him that China has entered into the globe’s leading ranks and that he can use the nation’s growing power “to change the course of history” (Rudd 2022: 2, 10).

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “mankind” discourse is a compelling case in point to empirically enrich the ongoing research on the stepped-up role of ideology at the intersection of Xi Jinping’s domestic and foreign policy agendas. While the evocation of “mankind” or “humanity” (人类) is not at all a new topos in party ideology (Schmalzer 2008), it has gained much currency under Xi. Multiple party documents, White Papers and speeches by Chinese diplomats have advertised China’s contributions to “human development” (人类发展), “human society” (人类社会), “human progress” (人类进步), “human civilization” (人类文明), “human history” (人类历史) and, most prominently, to a “community of destiny for mankind” (CDM)[68] (人类命运共同体).

Among those concepts, CDM has been studied most extensively, including by participants of the wider debate on the role of ideology just outlined. While Nathan and Zhang emphasise the concept’s instrumental character as a (rather ineffective) foreign policy tool, regarded by many as a “cover for self-interested strategic motives” (Nathan and Zhang 2021: 14), Zeng’s analysis steers a middle course by elaborating the CDM’s symbolic significance, a slogan that “signals a Chinese aspiration for a globalised world and holds a sacred status in the CCP’s theoretical system” (Zeng 2020: 127). Rolland and Callahan, on the other hand, seem to suggest that the CDM and other ideological formulations have indeed shaped and continue to shape China’s visions of world order and its own elevated place in that order. In Rolland’s words, the CCP’s “increased efforts to develop China’s discursive power also reveal an ideational aspiration, a desire to be acknowledged not only for wealth and the material power that grows out of it, but also as a guiding polestar that others can look up to” (2020: 51). Callahan regards the CDM as integral part of a “composite ideology that combines socialism and Chinese tradition in a zero-sum struggle against liberalism” (Callahan 2025: 37).

A more recent addition to the CCP’s “mankind” discourse has gone largely unnoticed by most China observers outside China. Since 2015, the so-called “common values of all mankind” (*全*人类共同价值) – note the new emphasis on mankind’s totality – have entered official discourse at home and abroad.[69] The set of six values is featured prominently, for example, in China’s Global Civilization Initiative launched in March 2023. The official English version calls upon its audiences to “jointly advocate and carry forward the common values of humanity – peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom are the common pursuit of people of all countries” (Xi 2023).

By focusing on the “common values of all mankind” (CVAM) as one of the most recent formulations of party ideology with a designated global reach, this chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about the role of ideology as an expedient tool or as a more subterraneous driving force and shaping power of party–state politics in the Xi era. It argues that this debate remains futile unless we gain a better understanding of the process of ideological engineering at the intersection of the CCP’s domestic and foreign policy agendas and of the actors and audiences involved in this process. In offering an in-depth examination of the evolving CVAM concept, this chapter dissects the process of its linguistic construction and its integration in party ideology, as well as the main actors and diverse target audiences involved in this engineering process. In a nutshell, the chapter asks how the CVAM have been crafted, by whom and for which underlying purposes – and what this tells us about the role of ideology in the Xi era.

The remaining sections of this chapter are structured as follows. After a brief section on the conceptual framework, methods and data, the chapter examines the ideological engineering of the CVAM. It offers a chronological reconstruction of the concept’s career in official party language, starting with the CVAM’s first mention in 2015 and culminating in its incorporation in the party constitution in late 2022. Based on this longitudinal analysis, the chapter discusses the most contested normative dimensions – in particular the quest to replace identifiably Western “universal values” with a parochial set of global values inspired by Chinese history and culture. I conclude by delineating the CVAM’s evolving target audiences and discussing the wider role of party ideology in the Xi era.

Ideological engineering and the ladder of canonisation

The analytical approach chosen in this chapter has been inspired by Austin’s (1962) How to Do Things with Words and Schoenhals’ (1992) Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics, which focus on formalised language as a form of power. The basic idea of “doing things” with words and perlocutionary acts in the realm of Chinese politics has been captured by, among others, the notion of linguistic engineering, coined in the Chinese context by Ji Fengyuan to denote party leaders’ conscious attempts “to affect people’s attitudes and beliefs by manipulating the language they hear, speak, read and write” (Ji 2012: 90). However, I regard this engineering process not as a merely manipulative endeavour but rather as a dispersed process in which professional hierarchies of academics, party theorists and propagandists keep crafting and recrafting official party language to attune them with the party–state’s shifting claims for regime legitimacy (Holbig 2013). The purpose of engineering is not merely the manipulation of individual beliefs, but the legitimation of party–state rule through the projection of political concepts, visions, norms and values to which its audiences can subscribe collectively.

This is where ideology comes in. According to Freeden,

[a]‌ political ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, opinions and values that exhibit a recurring pattern, are held by significant groups, [and] compete over plans for public policy ... through their competition over the control of political language … with the aim of justifying … the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community. … An ideology attempts to end the inevitable contention over concepts by decontesting them, by removing their meanings from contest.

(Freeden 2003: 32, 54–55)

The idea of decontestation – removing the meanings of political concepts from public contestation and preventing or superseding alternative interpretations – is key here. In line with Freeden’s conceptualisation, I therefore speak of ideological engineering to denote the extra work required beyond the mere linguistic efforts of (re)crafting the official party language. This work includes the recalibration of new political concepts (ideas, beliefs, opinions, values) with existing ones, reconfigurations of old and new concepts and most importantly, the drawn-out drudgery of “decontesting” new concepts while retaining control over the use of official party language at large.

A dynamic understanding of ideological engineering as a process of decontestation also has a methodological advantage for data collection. Instead of amassing huge corpora of mostly repetitive political language, we can use the underlying logic of decontestation which, if successful, translates into a logic of escalating authoritativeness of new political concepts. More specifically, in a sea of redundant political language, we can identify key documents pertaining to the (de)contestation of new concepts – such as the CVAM – along what I propose to call the “ladder of canonisation”, i.e. a ladder of discernible levels of increasing authoritativeness as reflected in the status of involved actors, the centrality of text genres and increasing degrees of self-referentiality (with speech acts by Xi Jinping as key references).

Typically, new concepts or formulations (提法) (Schoenhals 1992: 7) frequently enter CCP jargon from the periphery, via low-profile articles in academic journals or in party theory organs. Some are taken up and aired by party–state elites during on-site inspection trips at the local level or during visits abroad. From there, some find their way into genres closer to the party centre, such as key party organs, leaders’ “important speeches”, study materials for party–state cadres, White Papers, international conferences etc. The most authoritative documents are party resolutions emanating from plenary sessions of the CCP’s Central Committee. Amendments of the party constitution and sometimes of the national constitution may crown this process and bestow supreme authority on the new concept, marking the complete canonisation – and the successful decontestation – of a new concept. From there, the canonised concept is disseminated widely via state media, domestic and external propaganda outlets as well as via the launching of official funding lines for related research, leading to a mass output of even more redundant texts. By focusing on the most authoritative texts emerging chronologically along this ladder of canonisation, we can avoid being inundated by the sheer redundancy of textual production and instead examine a relatively slim text corpus in depth.

The concept’s official career

CVAM’s first mentions (2015)

Searching the Chinese internet for earlier mentions of the CVAM yields zero hits for the years before 2015. The CVAM’s official career began with a speech delivered by President Xi Jinping on 28 September 2015, at the United Nations General Assembly’s 70^th session in New York. In the following passage, the CVAM are mentioned for the first time:

Peace (和平), development (发展), fairness (公平), justice (正义), democracy (民主) and freedom (自由) are the common values of all mankind (全人类的共同价值) and they are the lofty goals of the United Nations (联合国的崇高目标).

(cited from Baidu 2024)

The exact wording and order of the six “common values” in this quote remain the same through to 2024, including “democracy” and “freedom”. The formulation helps to emphasise the totality of humans and to signal the representativeness of China’s reading of a supposedly uncontested set of values in the name of all of humanity. The UN General Assembly in New York must have appeared to be an ideal arena to signal China’s discursive power.

A month later, an article titled ‘Common Values’ of All Mankind and the Socialist Core Values was published in Guangming Ribao, the party organ catering to domestic intellectuals. The author is Dai Mucai, a Qinghua professor affiliated with the Ideological and Political Work Research Institute of the Central Propaganda Department. The article starts with an extended quote from Xi Jinping’s New York speech, in which he calls for “upholding the objectives and principles of the UN Charter … and forging a community of common destiny for mankind” (Dai 2015). At the time, the CDM had already entered the CCP’s lexicon and was now linked to the CVAM. Another ideational reconfiguration can be observed between the CVAM and the existing set of 12 “socialist core values” (社会主义核心价值 (SCV), see Miao 2021),[70] which had been propagated widely inside China since 2012. Connecting the two sets of values, Dai claims that Xi had proposed the CVAM in order “to point out a new direction for the proactive cultivation and implementation” of the SCV (Dai 2015). In Dai’s words, SCV and CVAM, portrayed as a “crystallization of human wisdom” (人类智慧的结晶), form a “dialectical unity” (辩证统一). Developed from global human wisdom, the SCV have then contributed to the development of CVAM, thus enabling the CVAM to “steer the tide of history” (引领历史潮流)” (Dai 2015).

These claims reflect earlier Chinese ambitions to become a world leader of global norms. At the same time, the idea of a “dialectical” relationship between CVAM and SCV straddles the boundaries between the intended international audience of Xi’s New York speech and the domestic audience targeted and educated by the SCV. Hence we have a first indication that the CVAM’s introduction not only serves to signal China’s normative agency abroad but also to buttress the CCP’s authority at home.

CVAM versus “Universal Values” (2016–2018)

In January 2016 the Beiing Ribao published an article by Central Party School professor Zhong Guoxing, titled Raise High the Banner of the ‘Common Values of All Mankind’ (Zhong 2016), which was widely shared on party theory platforms. Formally, this article prompted the lexicalisation of the CVAM as a fixed formulation in party language. Zhong’s main concern is to distinguish the CVAM from so-called “universal values” (“普世价值”, always in quotation marks). While the CVAM as proposed by Xi regards every single country as equal, Zhong argues, the “universal values” had been concocted by “certain countries” whose hidden agenda was to promote their own political model as a “universal model” (普世模式). Xi is praised for having seen through this false claim of universality inherent in values such as “freedom, equality, democracy, justice, rule of law, human rights etc.” (Zhong 2016).

The article also mentions a conversation between Xi and US President Obama about “democracy and human rights”. According to Zhong, Xi made it clear that people worldwide were striving for those values, but that the label of “universal values” actually misrepresented people’s true pursuits. To cope with this challenge, the article demands, China should “proactively and energetically propagate” the CVAM. Zhong calls for the domestic public to heed this important distinction

…in particular to avoid that things originally falling under [the CVAM’s] specific domain (notions such as equality, freedom, democracy or human rights [sic!]) simply are refuted or criticized as ‘Universal Values’, thereby preventing misunderstandings and passivity to arise in domestic and international public opinion.

(Zhong 2016)

Zhong warns against rejecting notions such as freedom, democracy and human rights outright in domestic debates. Instead, they should be freed from false, self-interested Western interpretations and saved for a truly universal application in the name of CVAM. Compared to the more conventional rejection of all things Western, this article offers a nuanced vindication of values usually ascribed to a liberal Western mindset.

In a congratulatory 2018 letter to a symposium commemorating the 70^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Xi celebrates the CVAM:

The Chinese people are willing to work with people of other countries to uphold the common human values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, to safeguard human dignity and rights, promote the formation of a more just, reasonable and inclusive global human rights governance, jointly build a Community of Destiny for Mankind and create a better future for the world.

(Xi 2018)

Reading between the lines, while the CVAM themselves exclude the notion of “human rights”, Xi’s statement explicitly subscribes to the larger objective of “human dignity and rights” (人的尊严和权) in an “inclusive” (包容 – that is, not dominated by the West) sense. Also, to emphasise China’s active contribution to the pursuit of these normative objectives, CVAM and CDM are combined to form a mutually reinforcing set of Xi-style signature concepts. When the CDM was successfully incorporated into UN security resolutions in late 2017, Chinese commentators widely presented this as a diplomatic victory for China (Gao 2017). Ideological engineers might have felt encouraged with this establishment of the CVAM in UN jargon, challenging Western countries’ normative agenda slowly but steadily.

CVAM’s systematic external propaganda in White Papers and conferences (2019–2020)

In September 2019 the CVAM concept is mentioned for the first time in White Papers published by the State Council Information Office, an arm of the CCP’s external propaganda system. Published in multiple foreign languages, these White Papers are designed for international consumption, but their Chinese versions can also be seen as domestic ideological self-assurances. The first one, titled Seeking Happiness for People: 70 Years of Progress on Human Rights in China, celebrates the PRC’s 70^th anniversary. It echoes Xi’s rallying cry to build the CDM and uphold the CVAM, here officially translated as “shared human values” (SCIO 2019a). The second white paper on China and the World in the New Era mentions the CVAM on par with “excellent Chinese and other cultures” in a section on the CDM (SCIO 2019b). Since then, China’s White Papers have frequently included the CDM-cum-CVMA mantra, constituting another significant step in the concept’s official career.

The concept’s growing impact is confirmed by an “International Symposium on Common Values of Mankind and Cross-Cultural Communication” held in January 2020 in Chengdu. According to Chinese media, the event was attended by “one hundred renowned experts from ten countries including the US, Ireland and India” and provided welcome external acknowledgment of China’s elevated authority to promote global norms (Yi 2020: section 3).

Xi Jinping’s next opportunity to disseminate the CVAM abroad was in September 2020 in a virtual speech at the UN General Assembly. CVAM and CDM appear in tandem with Xi’s emphasis on China adhering to the concepts and principles of global governance ( Xi_ 2020). Compared to their first mention in the UN context five years earlier, the CVAM have been systematically trimmed into an integral element of Chinese external propaganda. Their inclusion in White Papers, international conferences and diplomatic speeches across the board indicates increasing ambitions to mobilise international recognition of China’s global normative power.

CVAM as part of the CCP’s historical mission (2021)

The themes of China’s global responsibility and normative agency are developed further from early 2021 onwards, the year of the CCP’s centennial. The CVAM now are given prominence in official speeches far beyond the UN context. In January 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Xi Jinping delivered a much-noticed address at a virtual “Davos Agenda” event of the World Economic Forum, titled Let the Torch of Multilateralism Light up Humanity’s Way Forward. Xi calls for upholding CDM and CVAM “to rise above ideological prejudice” in the face of global challenges. “China must step forward, take action and get the job done” (Xi 2021a).

The CVAM are mentioned again in mid-March 2021 in a diplomatic skirmish between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, that marks a strategic escalation in bilateral relations between the two powers. While Blinken opens the meeting with a two-minute statement addressing the US’s “deep concerns” with China’s human rights situation, Yang responds with a 15-minute tirade. Yang emphasises the CVAM as China’s contribution to global norms, then presents a long list of allegations against the US, denying the US government’s right to represent the international system at a normative level:

The United States itself does not represent international public opinion and neither does the Western world. … I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States … could represent international public opinion and those countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.

(English translation quoted from Nikkei Asia 2021)

A conspicuously enraged Yang goes well beyond previous accusations that the US instrumentalises universal values for self-interested purposes. Yang’s criticism fundamentally questions the US normative hegemony and legitimate representation of humanity’s interests, contrasting it with China’s own, supposedly apolitical set of values in the name of “all mankind”.

Meanwhile, during and beyond 2021, frequent invocations of the “mankind” topos and repeated references to the CVAM can be found in “important speeches” by Xi Jinping at home. The most prominent event is the 100^th anniversary of the CCP’s founding on 1 July 2021. In his widely publicised commemorative speech, Xi Jinping vows that

[t]‌he Party will continue to work with all peace-loving countries and peoples to promote the common values of all mankind – peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom. … We will oppose hegemony and power politics and strive to keep the wheels of history rolling toward bright horizons.

(Xi 2021b)

Once again, the PRC’s opposition to the West’s hegemony is again unmistakably expressed in tandem with the CVAM. The CCP’s principled stance is bolstered by Xi’s lofty promise about “keeping the wheels of history rolling”, a metaphor that brims with visionary passion and impatience to take the initiative in world affairs.

Xi’s commemorative speech is discussed in multiple party theory journals and on party-building platforms. In mid-August 2021, a prominently featured Qiushi article sponsored by the “Xi Jinping Centre for the Study of Diplomatic Thought” discusses the CVAM’s strategic implications. According to the article, they “provide powerful ideological guidance (强大思想引领) for the cause of human progress” as well as “a strong spiritual impetus (强大精神动力) for the realisation of the great unity of the people of the world” (XJP Centre 2021). Authoritative interpretations of the six values are offered for the first time, grouping them into three pairs:

Peace and development are the themes of today’s era and they are also related to people’s right to survival and development. … Fairness and justice are important principles in international relations and they are also related to human dignity. … Democracy and freedom are important contents of modern political civilization and they are also related to personal well-being.

(XJP Centre 2021)

Another commentary on Xi’s 1 July speech is published in September 2021 by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and widely disseminated via the Central Propaganda Department’s party-building website – a clear indication that the CVAM’s claimed international recognition has increasingly been deployed in the service of domestic governance. The article taps into China’s traditional culture and the CCP’s self-sacrificing history, quoting statements by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping dedicated to the topos of “mankind” and elevating the CVAM to moral high ground. According to the commentary, the CVAM put forward by Xi Jinping present

… a comprehensive transcendence (全面超越) of the narrow and hypocritical logic of Western ‘universal values’ which have enhanced the CCP’s image as a big party and its international discursive power, guided (引领) the construction of a future-oriented global discourse system and promoted the reconstruction of the global discourse order.

(Li 2021)

By 2021, the debate on “universal” versus Chinese-inspired “human” values has become a major battleground for the contestation of global discourse power not only vis-à-vis international but also domestic audiences. Domestic party theorists have embraced the idea that the CVAM serves as a vehicle for the CCP, under Xi’s visionary leadership, to “guide” the (re-)construction of the global discourse system.

The CVAM are also featured in the Resolution of the CCP’s Central Committee on Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century adopted at the 19^th Central Committee’s Sixth Plenum in November 2021. This resolution on party history serves as a locus classicus for key segments of the canon of Xi Jinping Thought, in the making since 2017 (Holbig 2024). Here, the CVAM are included as part of “bolstering the diplomatic front”, in a discussion of the CCP’s “historical achievements”. The resolution celebrates the CDM-cum-CVAM formulas as a pledge of China’s good intentions to “steer the tide of human progress” (引领人类进步潮流) (CCP Central Committee 2021: Section 4:13). The resolution concludes that the CVAM constitute

… a banner that leads the trends of time and the direction of human progress (引领时代潮流和人类前进方向). China has broken new ground in its diplomatic endeavors amid profound global changes and turned crises into opportunities amid complex situations on the international stage. These efforts have resulted in a marked increase in China’s international influence, appeal and shaping power (我国国际影响力、感召力、塑造力).

(CCP Central Committee 2021: Section 4:13)

As these passages indicate, by late 2021, CDM and CVAM have become an integral part of the canon of Xi Jinping Thought, serving as a vehicle for China’s contestation of global discourse hegemony and as a pledge to actively shape the future of humanity.

The lofty visionary language surrounding the CVAM also increasingly conveys a strong impulse to counter US hegemony vis-à-vis domestic audiences. In May 2022, the Renmin Ribao published an authoritative comment by Su Changhe, International Relations professor at Fudan University, titled The Profound Implications and Theoretical Contributions of the Common Values of All Mankind. The article claims that the CVAM’s purpose is to bring about a global “value consensus” (价值共识) on which to build the CDM. In the face of growing Western attempts to “monopolize international affairs” and to “cobble together small groups, divide camps or interfere in the internal affairs of other countries under the guise of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’” (Su 2022), Su Changhe exhorts the Chinese government to steer “the world” out of this trap of antagonism with the CVAM:

The world urgently needs ideological guidance at the height of the entire mankind (站在全人类的高度上的思想引领). With a highly responsible attitude towards the future destiny of mankind, President Xi Jinping proposed the Common Values for All Mankind, condensed and summarized the basic value consensus of the entire mankind (全人类的基本价值共识), conformed to the development trend of our times, met the expectations of people of all countries and provided a strong spiritual impetus for the development of human civilization in the correct direction (正确方向).

(Su 2022: 9)

This passage is remarkable in various ways. First, while official Party rhetoric usually tends to dismiss ideological contestations in the global context as an expression of power politics, the article explicitly portrays “ideological guidance” as a positive notion. Second, it suggests that the US and the West at large are no longer able nor qualified to provide that guidance and that China must step in for the sake of mankind’s future. Third, by ascribing this role to Xi Jinping as the heir of the CCP’s historical mission, his status is elevated to paramount authority not only in domestic but also in global terms. Last but not least, in an extension of domestic CCP parlance which categorically distinguishes “correct” from “incorrect”, the last phrase signals that Xi Jinping’s CCP knows the “right” direction not only for the Chinese people but also for humanity. This teleological language indicates a shift of focus towards key domestic audiences – party cadres and leading cadres in particular – who need to know the current canon of Xi Jinping Thought and be able to tell “right” from “wrong” (Holbig 2024). Taken together, these claims highlight how CVAM has been increasingly deployed in the service of elite cohesion and the legitimation of party rule at home.

Completing the CVAM’s canonisation (2022)

From here, it is only a small step to the final canonisation of the CVAM. In his political report to the CCP’s 20^th National Congress in October 2022, Xi mentions the CVAM in the last section on international affairs. First, he rejects “the hegemonic, arrogant and bullying acts of using strength to intimidate the weak” as well as “all forms of hegemonism and power politics, Cold War mentality, interference in other countries’ internal affairs and double standards” (Xi 2022: Section 14). He then proceeds to a more constructive rhetoric. Praising the purposes of the UN Charter and the need for truly multilateral institutions and the building of a CDM, he has this to offer:

China is committed to building a world of lasting peace …, universal security …, common prosperity …, an open and inclusive world … and a clean and beautiful world … . We sincerely call upon all countries to hold dear peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom – the Common Values of All Mankind. … The Chinese people are ready to work hand in hand with people across the world to create an even brighter future for mankind.

(Xi 2022: Section 14)

So in tandem with the CDM, the CVAM have become a token for China’s increasingly broad and strident ambitions to rebuild the world into a better place. More than that, the CVAM serves to mobilise “all countries in the world” (世界各国) to support China’s vision of this better place. While Xi explicitly calls upon the international community, the medium modulates the message. Inaugurating his third term as party leader, this authoritative report to the 20^th Party Congress offered Xi’s rallying cry around the CVAM. It addresses, first and foremost, the CCP itself and its domestic audiences.

The push to mobilise domestic support is underlined by the CVAM’s subsequent inclusion in the party constitution, a step that marks the concept’s successful decontestation and thereby completes the work of its ideological engineers. A new round of amendments to the CCP’s constitutional charter was approved on 23 October 2022. By comparing the previous and amended versions of the party constitution, we can observe the diligence applied by party ideologues. Taken from the foreign policy section of the constitution’s “General Programme”, the following passage is based on the official Chinese and English versions, with the newly inserted elements highlighted in bold script and a conspicuously crossed-out passage visualised, too.

The Communist Party of China shall uphold an independent foreign policy of peace, ... In international affairs, it shall hold dear humanity’s shared values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom (弘扬和平、发展、公平、正义、民主、自由的全人类共同价值), …, work to build a community with a shared future for mankind and advance the building of an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful ~~harmonious~~ world that enjoys of lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity (推动建设持久和平、普遍安全、共同繁荣、开放包容、清洁美丽的世界~~共同繁荣的和谐世界~~).

(CCP 2022)[71]

Notably, the CVAM are inserted as a separate normative entity positioned before the CDM, which had been enshrined in the party constitution five years earlier. More surprisingly, the “harmonious world” (和谐世界) label, a key element of Hu Jintao’s ideological legacy, is deleted in the amended version to make room for Xi’s new global norms and visions. The deletion of Hu’s signature slogan from the constitution represents an exceptional step, echoing the unprecedented act of Hu Jintao being escorted from the congress meeting the day before and underlining Xi’s incontestable power in global affairs.

The CVAM’s incorporation in the party constitution completes a seven-year process of canonisation (see Figure 25.1). It indicates the formulation’s ultimate authoritativeness as a distinct element of Xi Jinping’s Diplomatic Thought and his vision for a better world in the name of “all mankind”. Framed as Xi’s signature contribution to party ideology, the CVAM have been carefully engineered to magnify his role as a visionary leader for both China and the world.

A timeline diagram summarizing the development and use of concepts between 2015 and 2022. It is categorized into five rows: First mentions 2015, Supplanting Univ 2016, Systematic ExtProp 2019, Historical Mission 2021, and Canonization 2022. Each row features several dated events such as speeches, articles, and policy inclusion, detailing the progression of concepts like C V A M Common Values of All Mankind and C D M Community of Destiny for Mankind within Chinese state media and international diplomacy. A legend at the bottom defines several acronyms used in the timeline, including R M R B, U N, and C V A M.

Figure 25.1 CVAM evolving along the ladder of canonisation.

Source: Author.

Grounding domestic legitimacy in a globalised historical mission

As the chronological reconstruction of the CVAM’s ideological engineering process suggests, the concept has been directed at audiences both abroad and at home, though with different messages. Against this backdrop, the following section focuses on the CVAM’s most contested normative claims, allowing us to trace the evolution in the concept’s underlying purposes.

From the very beginning, the relationship between CVAM and the concept of “human rights” has been framed in ambiguous ways. From the outset, neither Xi nor his party ideologues shied away from invoking the CVAM in the larger context of international human rights debates, indicating a strong motivation in the Chinese leadership to contest Western international discursive power. At the same time, however, the Chinese term “human rights” (人权) itself is conspicuously absent from the CVAM. At least hypothetically, party theorists could have opted to reinterpret the concept as they have done with other concepts and incorporated a doctored version of “human rights” among the set of values selected for the CVAM. However, it appears that “human rights” were too much of a hot potato to be enshrined verbatim in the Chinese version of shared human values, despite directly pertaining to humanity’s welfare.

Over the year 2020, human rights were less frequently and explicitly evoked in the CVAM’s international discourse and from early 2021 onwards mention of the CVAM avoided explicit reference to human rights altogether. Facing growing international allegations of China’s human rights violations, circumnavigating the concept might have appeared a wiser choice. The CVAM’s ideological engineers have worked their way around the “human rights” concept in the global context, but without totally denying its legitimising role in the Party’s “mankind” discourse vis-à-vis domestic audiences.

The case is different when it comes to the equally contested concepts of “democracy” and “freedom”, both part of the CVAM from Day One. As the analysis above suggests, various considerations appear to have motivated ideological engineers to include the two concepts as the last of three pairs of values. In Su Changhe’s authoritative People’s Daily article, the concepts are interpreted at the international level in terms of mutually respectful interactions between sovereign nation–states. In this understanding, “democracy means that all countries equally participate in international affairs … and participate in international governance […, while] freedom means that each country has the power to make its own decision regarding its development path and development model” (Su 2022). This is a far cry, of course, from ideas of democratic procedures, civil rights and individual liberties connoted by democracy and freedom in Western discourse.

By inscribing these two contested concepts into the CVAM’s assumed global reach, ideological engineers claim to give an actual proof of China’s global discursive power, win the hearts and minds of audiences in the Global South and lure them away from the “Summit for Democracy” initiated by US President Biden in December 2021. At the same time, the CVAM discourse has significantly contributed to the gradual decontestation of “democracy” and “freedom” at home. What matters most domestically is to authenticate the party’s use of these concepts rather than to vindicate their meanings.

The circumnavigation of “human rights” and the decontestation of “democracy” and “freedom” are paradigmatic of the CVAM’s counter-hegemonic impulse. In the name of the innocuous generic phrase “of all mankind”, party discourse under Xi Jinping has staked out China’s own “counter-universal” interpretations of concepts that had previously been considered as universal values in a liberal world order. Internationally, China is not – at least normatively – challenging Western democracies by presenting an “autocratic” counter-model. Rather, key concepts of the liberal lexicon are deployed in ways to dispute the universality of values claimed by Western democracies. The innocuous discursive battleground of “mankind” and the benevolent promise of a better future for humanity allow the CCP to eschew a direct contestation with the West about global norms and values.

Domestically, the CVAM’s legitimising purposes can be seen more clearly with the benefit of hindsight. What matters vis-à-vis domestic audiences is not only the inclusion or exclusion of specific values but also who is qualified to authoritatively use and decontest them. The vocabulary of global normative agency calls for domestic audiences to rally around the flag of Xi Jinping’s leadership. In particular, the teleological language of Marxism-Leninism used in the 2021 resolution on party history and a “correct“ direction for human progress seem designed to convince domestic elites of Xi’s pivotal role and to ground the CCP’s domestic legitimacy in a globalised historical mandate.

Conclusion

This chapter asked how the CVAM have been crafted, by whom, for which underlying purposes and what this tells us about the role of ideology in the Xi era. It has found that the concept’s ideological engineering has proceeded along a clearly discernible ladder of canonisation from 2015 to 2022. Protagonists involved in this process have been academics and party theorists, first at local then at central levels, soon followed by Xi Jinping mentioning the new formulation during visits abroad. From there, party propagandists at the national level swiftly took up the CVAM for promotion in domestic mass media as well as in White Papers and international conferences. The formulation’s inclusion in Xi’s centennial address in July and in the resolution on party history in November 2021 paved the way to highest consecration. When the 20^th Party Congress approved the CVAM’s inclusion into the party’s constitution in late 2022, it marked the complete decontestation of the concept, which has formed an integral element of party ideology since then.

Our analysis suggests that the CVAM’s underlying purposes have evolved over time. During the initial years of the CVAM discourse, the ambiguous use and eventual circumnavigation of the concept of human rights, the parochial decontestation of “democracy” and “freedom” and the offer of a counter-universal set of global values in the name of “mankind” seem intended to demonstrate China’s global discourse power abroad. From 2020/21 onwards, the emphasis has shifted to the concept’s growing deployment for domestic purposes of elite cohesion and regime legitimation. With the CVAM’s inclusion in Xi Jinping’s centennial speech in mid-2021 and their ensuing canonisation as integral parts of Xi Jinping Thought by late 2022, party and academic elites became the primary intended audiences of the CCP’s mankind discourse. The sense of historical momentum that emanates from the party’s “mankind” discourse might even appeal to those among the wider public who feel pride in the country’s re-emerging role on the world stage.

Our findings about the CVAM’s evolution offer evidence that the CCP’s ideology is much more than an expedient tool of party–state politics. The CVAM’s careful ideological engineering has been crucial to China’s sustained efforts to provide its own version of a (counter-)universal set of values and thereby shape global norms in the long term. At the same time, the canonisation of the CVAM as one of Xi Jinping’s signature contributions to party ideology not only magnifies his stature as a visionary leader for China and beyond. It also substantially reshapes the party regime’s normative claims for domestic legitimacy by grounding party rule in a globalised historical mandate of its core leader and extending the teleological tenets of Sinified Marxism-Leninism far into the 21^st century.

Based on this chapter’s analysis, we can envisage various avenues for further research. First, compared to conceptual history and other analytical approaches that deal with the semantic evolution of concepts, ideas and values, the approach of ideological engineering proposed in this chapter gives more systematic attention to the actors involved in the (re)construction, (re-)interpretation and (de)contestation of concepts and their interactions over time. Moreover, following Freeden (2003), individual concepts can be regarded as modular units embedded in a malleable ideological configuration or “morphology”, being (re-)interpreted, (re-)assembled or shifting between ideological core, adjacency and periphery. With its focus on agency and malleable ideological configurations, this approach can be applied productively to political concepts of all kinds to understand how they travel not only across time but also across national and linguistic borders, regimes and political communities and how they contribute to their (de)legitimation.

Second, this chapter has employed Freeden’s idea of decontestation of concepts as a defining criterion of political ideologies to posit an analytical device labelled the “ladder of canonisation”, denoting a staged sequence of discernible levels of escalating authoritativeness of texts in a given political context or regime. In autocratic regimes with strictly hierarchical and streamlined ideological and propaganda apparatuses such as in contemporary China, selecting data along this ladder of canonisation allows for parsimonious research designs. In regimes with less hierarchical environments for ideological production and dissemination, discerning levels of escalating authoritativeness might be more challenging but should still help researchers to build a relatively slim corpus of texts instead of being inundated by masses of largely redundant materials.

Third, further research might extend beyond the “production” or “supply side” of ideological engineering to include the “consumption” or “demand side” by more systematically examining for whom specific concepts are being engineered and with whom they actually resonate. As this chapter has illustrated, the same (set of) concept(s) can and often does have multiple target audiences, with different intended and unintended messages sent and received. While the analysis of processes of decontestation might be relatively straightforward within the boundaries of linguistically and socially homogeneous political communities, nation–states, regimes etc., conceptual travel across these boundaries comes with additional methodological challenges. In particular, researchers could think about ways to assess the international resonance of ideologically engineered concepts, be it in the United Nations’ or other multi-lateral discursive constellations or in specific countries, regimes, political communities etc.

A more systematic study of these important aspects could complement the qualitative methods used in this chapter with quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. For example, computational text mining, word frequency and co-occurrence analyses using R and other tools for statistical analysis might be employed to tackle large-scale text corpora and capture the changing morphologies of political ideologies. Another avenue worth exploring is (social) network analysis, to examine evolving patterns of interaction among the participants in the realm of ideological engineering (“supply side”) and between them and their multiple audiences (“demand side”). Quantitative or mixed-methods designs might be particularly beneficial for the analysis of international resonances of concepts that travel across national and linguistic boundaries, where processes of contestation and decontestation might occur simultaneously and result in more complex and convoluted ideological reconfigurations.

References

Austin, J. (1962) How to do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Baidu B. (2024) “Quan renlei gongtong jiazhi” (CVAM), Online Encyclopaedia Entry, [Online], Available: https://baike.baidu.com/item/全人类共同价值[4 Oct 2024].

Brown, K. and Berzina-Cerenkova, U. A. (2018) “Ideology in the era of Xi Jinping”, Journal of Chinese Political Science, vol. 23, no. 3, 323–339.

Callahan, W. A. (2025) “China’s traditional, modern and neo-socialist world orders”, Chapter 3 in Mayer, M. et al. (ed.) Routledge Handbook on Global China, London: Routledge.

CCP (2022) Zhongguo gongchandang zhangcheng (Constitution of the Communist Party of China), amended by the CCP’s 20^th National Congress of the CCP, 22 October, [Online], Available: www.gov.cn/xinwen/2022-10/26/content_5721797.htm

CCP Central Committee (2021) “Guanyu dang de bainian fendou zhongda chengjiu he lishi jingyan jueyi” (Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century), adopted 11 November at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Nineteenth Central Committee of the CCP, Xinhuashe (Xinhua News Agency), 16 November, [Online], Available: www.gov.cn/zhengce/2021-11/16/content_5651269.htm

Cheek, T. (2021) “Xi Jinping’s counter-reformation: The reassertion of ideological governance in historical perspective”, Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 30, no. 132, 875–887.

Dai, M. (2015) “Quan renlei ‘gongtong jiazhi’ yu shehuizhuyi hexin jiazhiguan” (‘CVAM’ and SCV)”, Guangming Ribao (Guangming Daily), 28 September, [Online], Available: www.71.cn/2015/1028/844896.shtml

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

Gao, C. (2017) “‘A community of shared future’: One short phrase for UN, one big victory for China?”, The Diplomat, 5 November.

Gore, L. (2023) “Leninism for the 21^st century: Xi Jinping’s ideological party-building”, China: An International Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, 8–25.

Guriev, S. and Treisman, D. (2020) “A theory of informational autocracy”, Journal of Public Economics, no. 186, 104–158.

Holbig, H. (2013) “Ideology after the end of ideology”, Democratization, no. 20, 61–81.

Holbig, H. (2024) “The Chinese communist party’s historical resolutions as mind-engineering projects”, in Shei, C. and Schnell, J. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind-Engineering, London: Routledge: 39–57.

Ji, F. (2012) “Linguistic engineering in Hu Jintao’s China. The case of the ‘Maintain advancedness’ campaign”, Chapter 5 in Brady, A.-M. (ed.) China’s Thought Management, London: Routledge.

Li, Y. (2021) “Hongyang quan renlei gongtong jiazhi tuijin lishi qianjin” (Carry forward the CVAM and promote the progress of history), 13 September, [Online], Available: www.dangjian.com/shouye/sixianglilun/lilunqiangdang/202109/t20210913_6173278.shtml

Miao, Y. (2021) “Romanticising the past: Core socialist values and the China dream as legitimisation strategy”, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 49, no. 2, 162–184.

Nathan, A. and Zhang, B. (2021) “‘A shared future for mankind’: Rhetoric and reality in Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping”, Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 31, no. 133, 57–71.

Nikkei Asia (2021) “How it happened: Transcript of the US-China opening remarks in Alaska”, 19 March, [Online], Available: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/US-China-tensions/How-it-happened-Transcript-of-the-US-China-opening-remarks-in-Alaska

Roberts, M. E. (2018) Distraction and Diversion inside China’s Great Firewall, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rolland, N. (2020) China’s Vision of A New World Order, NBR Special Report #82, [Online], Available: www.nbr.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/publications/sr83_chinasvision_jan2020.pdf

Rudd, K. (2022), “The world according to Xi Jinping. What’s China’s ideologue in chief really believes”, Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec, 2–12.

Schmalzer, S. (2008) The People’s Peking Man, London: University of Chicago Press.

Schoenhals, M. (1992) Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five studies, Berkeley CA: University of California at Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, China Research Monograph no. 41.

SCIO (State Council Information Office) (2019a) Wei renmin mou xingfu: Xin Zhongguo renquan shiye fazhan 70 nian / Seeking Happiness for People: 70 Years of Progress on Human Rights in China, 22 September, [Online], Available: http://english.scio.gov.cn/node_8014390.html

SCIO (State Council Information Office) (2019b) Xin shidai de Zhongguo yu shijie / China and the World in the New Era. 27 September.

Su, C. (2022) “Quan renlei gongtong jiazhi de shenke yiyun yu lilun gongxian” (The CVAM’s profound implications and theoretical contributions), Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), 30 May, 9.

Xi, J. (2018) “Jianchi he hongyang quan renlei gongtong jiazhi” (Uphold and promote the CVAM), Chinese version reprint in Qiushi (Seeking Truth), no. 16, 16 August, [Online], Available: www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2021-08/16/c_1127760380.htm

Xi, J. (2020) “Zai diqishiwu jie Lianheguo dahui yibanxing bianlun shang de jianghua” (Statement at the General Debate of the 75^th session of the United Nations General Assembly”, 22 September, quoted in: Qiushi wang (Seeking Truth Net) (2021) “Xi Jinping shuji tan quan renlei gongtong 428.jiazhi” (General Secretary Xi Jinping talks about the CVAM), 23 August, [Online], Available: www.qstheory.cn/zhuanqu/2021-08/23/c_1127786124.htm

Xi, J. (2021a) “Zai shijie jingji luntan ‘Daweisi yicheng’ duihuahua shang de tebei zhici” (Special address to the World Economic Forum Dialogue on the ‘Davos Agenda’), quoted in Qiushi wang (Seeking Truth Net) (2021) “Xi Jinping shuji tan quan renlei gongtong jiazhi” (General Secretary Xi Jinping talks about the CVAM), 23 August, [Online], Available: www.qstheory.cn/zhuanqu/2021-08/23/c_1127786124.htm Official English translation Available: www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyjh/202405/t20240530_11341510.html

Xi, J. (2021b) “Zai qingzhu Zhongguo gongchandang chengli yibai zhounian dahui shang de jianghua“(Speech at a ceremony marking the CCP’s Centenary), Xinhua wang (Xinhua Net), 1 July, [Online], Available: http://cpc.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0701/c437828-32145969.html

Xi, J. (2022) “Gaoju Zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi weida qizhi—wei quanmian jianshe shehuizhuyi xiandaihua guojia er tuanjie fendou” (Holding high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics and strive in unity to build a modern socialist country in all respects), Report to the 20^th National Congress of the CCP, 10 October, Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), 26 October.

Xi, J. (2023) “Join hands on the path towards modernization”, Keynote address at CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting, 16 March, [Online], Available: http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2023-03/16/content_85171478.htm

XJP Centre (Xi Jinping waijiao sixiang yanjiu zhongxin (Xi Jinping Centre for the Study of Diplomatic Thought)) (2021) “Jianchi he hongyang quan renlei gongtong jiazhi” (Uphold and promote the CVAM), Qiushi (Seeking Truth), no. 16, 16 August, [Online], Available: www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2021-08/16/c_1127760380.htm

Yi, G. (2020) “‘Quan renlei gongtong jiazhi yu kua wenhua jiaoliu’ guoji xueshu yantaohui zongshu” (Summary of International Academic Symposium on ‘CVAM and Cross-Cultural Communication’), Shehuizhuyi yanjiu (Social Science Research), 24 May.

Zeng, J. (2020) Slogan Politics. Understanding Chinese Foreign Policy Concepts, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zhong, G. (2016) “Gaoyang ‘quan renlei gongtong jiazhi’” (Raise high the banner of the ‘Common Values of All Mankind’), Beijing Ribao (Beijing Daily) 25 January, [Online], Available: http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0125/c40531-28081625.html.

26. A meso-level sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism

Ralph Weber

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-34

Introduction

Historically, ideologies are intimately tied to modernity. Reinhart Koselleck, chief architect of the multi-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, identifies the very concept of ideology as one of many “causal factors” and “indicators” (2011: 8) for the “accelerated changes that took place between the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution” (1996: 69). Today, many if not all of these Grundbegriffe are simply global concepts. This is so irrespective of whether one argues for an original and only later globally diffused European modernity, for a European modernity itself already constituted by more global forces, or for a plurality of global modernities according Europe no privileged role. Contemporary efforts at a more entangled and global history, however, continue to be troubled by a host of methodological and conceptual challenges. Similarly, in attempts to explore avenues for a future global philosophy, the parallel demands of striving for globality while taking positionality adequately into account remain largely unmediated (Weber 2025).

Modernity, of course, can itself be understood as an ideology. Alain Touraine describes the “ideology of modernity” as advocating for the “progressive triumph of reason over traditions, of scientific or technological action over systems of social and cultural control, of universalism over particularism and of production over reproduction” (1992: 29–30). He contends that, to the extent that this ideology succeeds, “modernity becomes less active and finally aimless,” as individuals are subordinated to “social utility” and rationality “reduced to mere instrumentality” (1992: 30–31). “Subjectivity,” Touraine explains, thus gets more and more “linked with antimodernist defense of a threatened individual or collective identity” (1992: 34). While some tend to identify “the West with universalism and third-world countries with particularism,” Touraine finds all historical versions of modernity, whether British, French, German or American, to be “strongly particularistic” with “universalistic orientations.” In view of non-European contexts, he sees “no reason to consider that the influence of Buddhism or Confucianism is only particularistic” (1992: 37–38).

So what about Confucianism? And particularly modern Confucianism? At first glance, modern Confucianism certainly qualifies as a non-European ideology. In primary and secondary literature, it is often presented as a kind of anti-modern ideology, a particularistic tradition-based corrective to perceived ills of modernity. Yet such a view might be all too simplistic. Thomas Fröhlich, in his monograph on Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909–1978), suggests that “the juxtaposition of Confucian traditions and Western modernity” is but a “byproduct of earlier Western criticisms of modernity, which had been introduced to China alongside the dominant Western models of modernisation” (2017: 23). Fröhlich warns against the still prevalent sort of anachronistic reductionism in the study of modern Confucian thinkers that easily creeps in when understanding them merely as spokespersons of “stereotypical Confucian models of modernity” built on “allegedly perennial [Confucian] concerns” (2017: 23–24). Reminiscent of Touraine’s point against a merely particularistic reading, Fröhlich contends that a presentation of “Tang’s modern Confucianism” along such lines risks becoming the sheer prolongation of a clichéd traditional horizon of thought, “accommodat[ing] expectations that a cultural code of ‘Confucian China’ can be deciphered” (2017: 24). Not that elements of such a perspective would not matter at all, but the consequence of such a simplistic reading, Fröhlich insists, is “one of not addressing topics and questions that actually constitute key issues in the body of texts under examination” (emphasis in original, 2017: 23–24). What, according to Fröhlich, makes Tang’s thought distinctly modern is that he offers piercing criticism of earlier traditional Confucian ideas, points out what the tradition has overlooked, engages with his own time, for instance with the Holocaust and so forth. Tang is not a sage-like figure fallen out of time (he does not even sport the long white beard any self-respecting Chinese philosopher is fancied to have), but writes Confucian philosophy while being dressed in suit and tie and immersed in markedly modern institutions.

A sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism takes the “universalistic orientations” of its proponents seriously. This allows it to uncover a more precise understanding of modern Confucianism as a living ideology, one that is not simply the mirror image of a progressive and triumphant modernity. Randall Collins (1998) and Heidegren and Lundberg (2010) distinguish between a macro, a meso and a micro level of analysis at which philosophical thought is shaped. The meso level is particularly relevant. Not only did the Confucians of the 20^th century work in modern institutional contexts that were previously absent in China (universities, with their faculties and departments, administrations and meetings, newly created disciplines, with their journals and associations). But it is also at the meso level that social relationships play out in all their complexity (the search for recognition and prestige, attempts at acquiring and clinging on to power, etc.) and where ideologies find their real-world anchorage. This chapter first introduces the sociology of philosophy approach as distinct from a Cambridge approach to the “history of ideologies” (Skinner 1978: xi), taking up a French debate on the prospects of a social history of political ideas. I then turn to the study of modern Confucianism and uncover macro-level structural and meso-level social conditions of possibility for philosophical knowledge production in China, that is, the institutional infrastructures and personal networks enabling and constraining the production of texts and fundamentally shaping their philosophical content. Two illustrations, both featuring Confucian scholars in events occurring around 1957 on the Chinese mainland, conclude the chapter, showcasing the contours of a meso-level sociology of philosophy approach.

Sociology of philosophy as ideology analysis

Within political theory, Michael Freeden has led the effort to study ideology understood as “a ubiquitous and permanent form of political thinking” (2013: 116). Steering away from “men (and a few women) of genius or of contemporary significance”, Freeden sets sight on “the social and cultural milieux that contributed to shaping them” and to the study of groups (2006: 9). This foregrounds historical context, which is also paramount for a meso-level sociology of philosophy approach and brings to mind the Cambridge approach, particularly in Quentin Skinner’s version, which continues to be highly influential in the study of the history of political thought (see Beckstein and Weber 2022: 81–88). Quite unlike Freeden’s emphasis on the milieux shaping the political thought of authors, Skinner sees the political thought of authors “as a polemical intervention in the ideological conflicts” of the time, where an author “identifies his allies and adversaries, to indicate where he stands on the spectrum of political debate” (2008: xvi). Skinner’s focus on argumentative context is criticized in the literature. He is said to offer “’precious little advice’ on how to study context, suggesting merely that we look for similarity in the subject matter of the texts themselves” (Goodhart 2000: 542). Recent discussions in France on a social history of political ideas engage and add sociological complexity to Skinner’s work.

Arnault Skornicki (2017) discusses the sociological dimension of Skinner’s contextualism. Taking up a remark by Skinner (2002: 143) on his view on social action being similar to that of Max Weber (1864–1920), Skornicki (2017:117) stresses how Weber defines social relationship as “the meaningful content of the mutual disposition of several persons and comportment arising from such an orientation” (Weber 2019: 103). Such a social relationship may be more transitory or long-lasting. For the latter, Skornicki mentions “institutions as large, regulated and endurable as the State, the Church or the university” (2017: 117). These “collective constructs”, Skornicki quotes Weber, “have a quite powerful, often even dominating, causal significance for the manner in which the action of real persons occurs” (2017: 118, Weber 2019: 90). The Weberian concepts of “social relationship” and “social order”, Skornicki suggests, may help grasp the collective nature of social action. Skinner’s conceptualisation of society ignores these “intermediary levels” such as the plurality of institutions where the linkages between the authors and politics are actually configured, that is, the university, a club, a parliament or a chamber of commerce (Skornicki 2017: 126).

Mathieu Hauchecorne (2017) brings to bear the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) on Skinner’s contextualism. Bourdieu emphasises the relationships of domination within which the production of political ideas effectively happens and the ways in which that production reproduces and reconfigures these relationships (2017: 131). He is after “what ties a text and its object to a history and society”, especially “the hierarchies instituted in things and in brains” (2017: 131; Bourdieu 1983: 45, 51). Hauchecorne foregrounds the notion of strategy in Bourdieu, emphasising the objective relations of proximity among authors, “structured by the relative distribution of different forms of capital” (2017: 138), even if these authors might mutually ignore each other. Instead of the author, the co-production of texts in the social history of ideas is stressed (Hauchecorne 2017: 139). The freedom of an author is constrained by the forces of the field or fields that he or she participates in, i.e. the already occupied positions as well as the dispositions of habitus; it should therefore be less understood as embodied in “reasons”, but more along a playful sense, “a sensitive apprehension of the available options” (Hauchecorne 2017: 139). Recovering these contexts requires social science tools; Hauchecorne mentions prosopographic enquiries, observations, interviews and archival work (2017: 141). Texts have to be understood against the political and institutional relations from within which they are produced, the position that their authors occupy and the type of recognition or authority with which these are invested (Hauchecorne 2017: 142).

Skornicki and Hauchecorne showcase how a social history of political thought might significantly enrich Skinner’s contextualism. Through Weber, they highlight the meso level. Through Bourdieu, they emphasise relationships of domination. Unlike micro- and macro-level approaches (see Beckstein and Weber 2022: 29), a meso-level approach gives prominence to those social and institutional contexts that constitute Bourdieu’s philosophical field. Bourdieu himself explicitly mentions information on institutions – for example the academies, journals, galleries, publishers, newspapers, etc. – and on people, on their relationships, their liaisons and their quarrels, information on the ideas and problems which are current and which circulate orally in gossip and rumors.

(Bourdieu 1983: 50 fn. 20)

Ignoring the “spirit of the times” leads to “a de-realisation [déréalisation] of works” and furthers an “intellectualism or empty humanism” (Bourdieu 1983: 50 fn. 20). Bourdieu imagines a “social history of thought” that reinserts philosophy back into the field of cultural production and beyond, thus accentuating the effect of mechanical constraint on the causes, which he also refers to as “the imposition of thought from the exterior” (Bourdieu 1983: 49). This emphasis on the exterior of philosophy aligns well with a sociology of philosophy.

In contemporary sociology of philosophy, the work of Bourdieu and that of Randall Collins, particularly the latter’s The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), is central (for an overview, see Heidegren and Lundberg 2024). Martin Kusch (1995, 2000) might be the proponent who has most stressed the philosophical importance of the approach, beyond the otherwise dominant idea that the sociology of philosophy is “first and foremost” and should remain “a sociological project” (Heidegren and Lundberg 2010: 16). There is a great variety of concrete methodological approaches, largely depending on the adopted version of sociology of philosophy, particularly with regard to the causal role accorded to the macro level in addition to the meso level (with Collins arguing against giving socio-political and cultural factors too much weight) and to how autonomous the philosophical field is considered to (have to) be. Bourdieu himself has proposed a “dual reading” (1991: 3), studying the political sphere and the philosophical field simultaneously and looking for correspondence between them. The study of the macro and meso levels is certainly an empirical affair, therefore possibly involving the entire social science toolbox. What can thus be uncovered goes beyond what the involved individuals might have themselves perceived. Historians and sociologists, Skornicki (2017: 116) contends, might be in a better position to grasp the authors’ conduct. As Hauchecorne (2017: 138) reminds us, the efficacy of the strategies of reproduction or subversion characteristic of a field rests on their being partly unrecognised or denied. The use of digital humanities provides great resources for retrieving and making visible personal networks and institutional contexts and potentially even capturing hints at what has otherwise not left any record, but circulated orally or manifested in action rather than in words.

Collins (1998: 324) distinguishes three different “layers of causality” that impact philosophical thought, where macro-level “economic-political structures” shape meso-level organisations, which provide the base for “networks among participants in centres of attention on intellectual controversies.” Heidegren and Lundberg (2010: 9) refer to the meso level as the “material infrastructure of philosophical thought”. If the micro level is taken to capture actual individual philosophical knowledge production, then the macro-informed meso level can be understood as supplying the social conditions of possibility for that production. These conditions might be constraining, even forcing limits upon the production, from censorship to more informal pressures, to the possibly restrictive elements of social roles and deeply held self-understandings. But they might also be enabling, providing platforms for social action, opening up fields of action for gaining reputation or authority over others. Those contexts where relationships of domination are likely to occur are of particular importance. Tensions, as much as correspondences, between what texts appear to say and what they mean as interventions (Skinner) as much as reflections of the social and cultural milieux that contributed to shaping them (Freeden) provide the ground on which a meso-level sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism can be fruitfully applied.

Uncovering the macro and meso levels of modern Confucianism

Modern Confucianism (xiandai rujia 现代儒家)[72] refers to a cluster of 20^th- and 21^st-century scholars and intellectuals who to varying degrees have self-identified as Confucians, but who have all produced writings that present Confucianism as a resource of continuing value in the face of strong modernisation pressures and agendas. Philippe Major argues against a “predominant narrative” that conceives of modern Confucianism as a movement emerging in the 1920s as the defender of tradition and as a reaction against the May Fourth Movement[73] and its anti-tradition iconoclasts. The narrative then portrays the latter as those wishing for a wholesale modernisation and Westernisation of China. But Major contends that such a “strict dichotomy” is ignoring “important continuities between the so-called ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ intellectuals of the Qing and early Republican periods” (2023: 1–2). These early 20^th-century modern Confucians were not against modernisation as such, recognising for instance the value of science and democracy. However, they were thinking intensively about how to adapt tradition for the modern period (Major 2023: 2). This brought with it questions of authority, of who can speak in the tradition’s name and who embodies its true spirit. Major approaches “Confucianism” and “modernity” as “contested sites of power relations” and is interested in how “tradition” is “reshaped by the discursive space in which it is inserted” (2023: 2). For all the differences that separated the May Fourth thinkers from Confucians, Major finds “that a number of May Fourth tropes were adopted by and adapted to, the modern Confucian discourse to legitimise it within a discursive milieu significantly shaped by May Fourth assumptions” (2023: 2). Their texts showcase “similar discursive means”, among which iconoclasm figures prominently, as these decidedly modern Confucians also spoke out against traditions as potential contributors to individual emancipation and modernisation, with the exception of the Confucian (and partly the Buddhist) tradition, which they took as “traditions that can point the way to a liberation from tradition”, aka (Major follows Edward Shils in this) “antitraditional traditions” (2023: 3).

At the macro and meso levels, social, cultural, political and therefore discursive milieux would shift quite dramatically throughout the 20^th and early 21^st centuries, as different generations of modern Confucians continued to grapple with modernity. An important split occurred after the victory of the Communist Party on the mainland and the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), when some modern Confucians relocated to Hong Kong and Taiwan. In fact, their exile experience after 1949 has been identified as a crucial context for philosophical knowledge production (Fröhlich and Knüsel Adamec 2013), which aligned with a discursive milieu in which, as we have seen, modern Confucians like Tang Junyi were able to take up a position criticising the Confucian tradition in new ways, somewhat in variance with the anti-traditional tradition trope. For those Confucians who remained on or, like Feng Youlan 冯友兰 (1895–1990), even returned to the mainland, the situation was very different, as the field of philosophy underwent major restructuration and censorship reigned. Later, after the difficult period under Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1893–1976), modern Confucianism was to take new roots in places such as the US, witness a “revival” on the Chinese mainland, be immersed via Singapore in an Asian values debate and become the object of party–state projects and various attempts at instrumentalisation from Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 to Xi Jinping 习近平, all while continuing to develop with some autonomy in places such as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and, of course, Taiwan.

For all of the difference that comes with these discursive milieux (which of course are much more fine-grained, variegated and sometimes transnational), in view of a sociology of philosophy approach, the markedly modern contexts, particularly with regard to meso-level institutions, in which all these Confucian scholars and intellectuals worked should be highlighted. They were more often than not part of wider groups and formed collaborative networks through universities, associations and other institutions, newly introduced to China and assuming new forms there. Still, a transfer of sociological theory to a context such as 20^th- and early 21^st-century China might come with challenges of its own. Can the work of sociologists engaged in the study of the Euro-American philosophical field be applied to the different locales of modern Confucianism (PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the US etc.)? In the different settings in which modern Confucians have evolved, is philosophy equally consolidated as a relatively autonomous field with a distinct doxa, i.e. “a set of inseparably cognitive and evaluative presuppositions whose acceptance is implied in membership itself” (Bourdieu 2000: 100; see also Chew 2005)? Or is philosophical practice, at least in some of these locales, directly shaped by socio-political factors, without the mediating effects of the meso-level philosophical field?

There is today good scholarship on how philosophy was introduced and developed institutionally in China, particularly for the first half of the 20^th century, from the import of the word itself via Japan (Steben 2012; Sela 2018), the emergence of philosophy departments (Lin 2012), to the development of the concept of philosophy before and after 1949 (Schulz Zinda 2012, 2018). In addition, John Makeham (2008) has given a detailed account of the discourse on ruxue 儒学 (Confucianism) in Chinese academic discourse between 1980 and 2000. Although he considers the so-called New Confucians “extremely influential”, Makeham does not confine his study to this “particular subgroup” (2008: 4), but is broader in scope. In earlier work, Makeham had qualified New Confucianism (xinrujia 新儒家) as “a neo-conservative philosophical movement with religious overtones, which claims to be the legitimate transmitter and representative of orthodox Confucian values” (2003: 2), while questioning to what extent that label and a movement associated with it had been “retrospectively created” (2003: 3). The point, which continues to be debated, is important for the purposes of a sociology of philosophy, since New Confucianism has indeed received a lot of scholarly attention. A substantial amount of scholarship has even (at times uncritically) adopted some of the key framings of New Confucianism. An example is the idea that the “movement” can be divided into three different generations, each comprising teachers and their respective pupils. Yet such a generational logic is easily turned into a strategy of determining who is and who is not a real New Confucian. While the three-generations idea would be a wonderful object for a sociology of philosophy approach to either corroborate or dismiss, it should not figure as an unspoken premise in the study of modern Confucianism.

A meso-level sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism needs, in a first step, to uncover empirically the organisational base and the personal networks in which groups of these scholars and intellectuals are co-producing texts in a historical time- and place-specific context, while looking for relevant relationships of domination. In this undertaking, one does perhaps not get around to investigating individuals (the more prominent Confucian thinkers, say): but they are understood relationally as nodal points; as referents to and reflections of a wider net of groups and relationships (liaisons and quarrels), some transitory, some more long-lasting; and as operating within all kinds of modern institutions, from journals to associations all the way to government. All this translates into specific hierarchies and power relations and motivates quests for recognition and influence, for fending off or giving in to pressure from institutions, for reproducing behaviour and thought that conforms with the expectations of the position held within these structures. In a second step, the wider setting and the specifics of the philosophical field must be held against one or several concrete philosophical texts and the points made in them, looking for correspondences and tensions.

The following two illustrations of a meso-level sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism are informed by a research project and a digital humanities project featuring a database on modern Confucian networks.[74] The database comprises bibliographic data, personal communications, events and photographs around a central group of modern Confucian scholars. At the macro level, the data allows for visualisations that show some of the structural social conditions of possibility that are otherwise often only assumed. If one visualises, for example, the publication locations of literature on modern Confucianism across the 20^th century until today, one clearly sees a movement from the Chinese mainland after 1949 to Hong Kong and Taiwan, to the US, only a little to Europe, almost nothing in places like Latin America, the Near East and South Asia or Africa, with a massive incline in recent decades on the Chinese mainland. At the meso level, institutional and personal networks are revealed beyond what a mere study of the philosophical texts indicates. Philosophical allies might show in shared travelling as documented in private letters or important political support in photographs, without ever explicitly being mentioned in the philosophy itself, while informing the meaning of its contents. Finally, the database is helpful in introducing new angles to established narratives (such as the mentioned presumed generational logic of modern Confucianism). Screening the personal networks of quasi-canonical thinkers might lead to the discovery of “lesser” figures, or to the small number of women who actually did contribute to, but who were simply for a long time written out of, the male-dominated story of modern Confucianism.

Illustrations of a sociology of philosophy of modern Confucianism

(a) Ma Yifu and the politics–philosophy field nexus

The first illustration addresses a persistent macro level cultural element that permeates the meso-level philosophical field and impacts the status of a “philosopher” in this field all across the 20^th century and until today. Gloria Davies (2007) describes the widely shared disposition 436.among Chinese scholars and intellectuals to worry about China and its fate (traditionally encapsulated by the Mengzian notion of youhuan 忧患 and the figure of the Confucian as a scholar–official, a shi 士). This tradition-based and deeply held self-understanding continues to inform modern Confucian scholars and their particular position in the politics–philosophy field nexus. It can be considered a cornerstone of modern Confucian ideology. A sociology of philosophy approach allows taking into account how this nexus changed its specific contours through time and place and shifted the conditions of philosophical knowledge production in ways that a mere study of texts would not be able to reveal.

Take, for instance, the photograph in Figure 26.1 (stored at archives at Zhejiang University), taken on 27 April 1957, which shows a group of people surrounding Confucian scholar Ma Yifu 馬一浮 (1883–1967), standing in the middle sporting a long white beard. The place is the Jiang villa, located at the shores of the famous West Lake in Hangzhou. Ma lived there from 1950 onwards, at the invitation of the also-depicted Jiang Guobang 蔣國榜 (1893–1970), until Red Guards evicted him from the villa in August 1966. Of particular interest are the visitors on the photograph, including Zhejiang Province Governor Sha Wenhan 沙文漢 (1908–1964), Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai 周恩来 (1898–1976) and the Soviet Union Head of State Kliment Voroshilov Климент Ворошилов (1881–1969). The visit took place in the context of the PRC’s efforts to obtain the atomic bomb from the Soviets. Voroshilov met the top leadership in Beijing, but with his delegation also travelled the country far and wide. He stayed in China from 15 April to 6 May and then again from 24 to 26 May.

A black-and-white photograph showing a group of seven men standing on steps. On the left, two men are dressed in dark Chinese-style suits or uniforms, with the leftmost man in light trousers and a dark jacket. The figures in the middle include an elderly man with a long white beard and a distinguished gentleman holding a cane in the foreground. The man on the far right wears a trench coat. The photo has a decorative, scalloped white border.

Figure 26.1 Confucian scholar Ma Yifu (1883–1967). This photo was likely owned by Ding Jinghan 丁敬涵 (1931–2021), grand-daughter of Ma Yifu’s oldest sister, who grew up with and accompanied him throughout his life and later curated and edited many of his writings and literary archive.

Source: The photo was originally printed in Ding Jinghan, Ma Yifu jiaowang lu 馬一浮交往錄 [Records of Ma Yifu’s Social Relationships], Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2013 and is reprinted here with permission.

It is remarkable that a foreign head of state would be brought to a Confucian philosopher to pose for a photograph. It certainly tells a lot about the status given to philosophers like Ma Yifu and the objective relations of proximity between authors and authorities including – to put it in Hauchecorne’s terms – “the relative distribution” of academic and political capital. Together with fellow Confucian scholar Xiong Shili 熊十力 (1885–1968), Ma Yifu is generally considered to have remained at some distance from the Communist Party. During these tumultuous early years of the PRC, keeping such a distance was no easy undertaking. A sociology of philosophy approach, collecting and analysing photographs, allows us to set the philosophical texts that Ma Yifu wrote during this period into the specific contour of the politics–philosophy field nexus of Confucian ideology in the 1950s mainland China under Communist rule. The visit by Voroshilov points to why Ma Yifu and Xiong Shili were perhaps able to continue writing philosophical work with comparatively little constraint and pressure from the authorities (for Xiong, see Suter 2025). In fact, at the meso level of institutions and associations, it is important to mention that they both were members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Moreover, influential leaders like Shanghai mayor and Politburo member Chen Yi 陈毅 (1901–1972) had visited Ma Yifu at the West Lake before, while the most prominent support indeed came from Zhou Enlai himself. As a declared admirer, Zhou would take utmost care of Ma Yifu and Xiong Shili whenever they travelled to Beijing to attend their duties in the CPPCC. In Xiong’s case, Zhou is said to have personally enquired about “what car [Xiong would] like to ride in, what room he’d like to stay in, even going so far as to ask what kind of curtains were best, in order to make preparations for his stay” (Zheng 2015: 109).

Existing work in the sociology of philosophy on modern Confucianism emphasises the porosity between fields and the corresponding possibility of translating cultural capital from one to the other (Chew 2005: 539). Ma Yifu’s case illustrates how recognition in the field of philosophy can be transferred to and be made use of in the field of politics – and/or the other way round, since it remains an open question who is showing off whom in the photograph, given that Ma Yifu also needed some support from politicians like Zhou Enlai. Some sources suggest that it was Ma Yifu who asked for the picture to be taken.

Seen more broadly, in terms of the group of Confucian philosophers on the mainland after 1949, Bourdieu’s emphasis on relationships of domination is certainly relevant. Ma Yifu and Xiong Shili occupy a similar positionality in the politics–philosophy field nexus, even if their philosophies differ quite substantially. The fact that we have their texts from that period, however, is a direct consequence of their choices and self-understanding as scholar–officials, which was quite unlike the situation of others busy in Beijing writing self-criticisms. The near impossibility of avoiding or escaping the politics–philosophy field nexus figures as a macro condition of modern Confucian ideology, even if different times offer different modalities and range of options on how to do so.

(b) A failed speech in Geneva put to good use in the People’s Daily

Around the time when Ma Yifu received his visitor from the Soviet Union, Feng Youlan advanced what became later known as his “abstract inheritance method”. Louie (1986) reads Feng as wanting to show that ancient Chinese philosophy, though idealist, did have “materialist strands” and itself provided “theoretical justifications for philosophers to put their own theories into practice” (1986: 41–42). Even if the concrete content of a saying by Confucius had to be rejected, its underlying abstract principle “could still be utilized” (Louie 1986: 42).[75] This is often taken as Feng’s philosophical position on how to draw on the Confucian tradition for the modern period. A meso-level sociology of philosophy approach, taking Feng’s travel as a representative of Chinese philosophy and his newspaper writings into account, might help add further layers of complexity to this discussion. This second illustration therefore shows how Feng was able to draw on an otherwise failed speech in Geneva to make a philosophical point about the significance of tradition in a newspaper article back in Beijing.

To be sure, Feng was also working under the above-identified macro condition of the Confucian self-understanding of a concerned scholar–official and felt the necessity of positioning himself in the politics–philosophy field nexus. Feng had even returned to the Chinese mainland from a visiting position at the University of Pennsylvania after receiving news of the Communists’ victory. Worrying about the fate of China, he believed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would help the country modernise. Back in China, like many other scholars, Feng was targeted by a campaign that Mao Zedong had launched between 1951 and 1952 “to help those intellectuals who had come over from the old society to change their thinking” (Zheng 2015: 99) and accept Marxism-Leninism. In practice, this meant that he had to participate in “struggle sessions” and write dozens of self-criticisms. The treatment reflected his prominent position in China.[76] He was institutionally well placed in what remained of the philosophical field post-1949 (e.g. through the Chinese Philosophy Association, his grade-one professorship at Beijing University after 1954, which hosted the only remaining philosophy department at the time) and he continued to travel the world representing Chinese philosophy, for example in 1956 as part of an official delegation to India with the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, also joined by Zhou Enlai, or in 1957 to Warsaw to a conference organised by the International Institute of Philosophy (see Feng 2000: 154–159).

In September 1956 Feng was supposed to travel to Switzerland together with esteemed scholar and vice-premier of the PRC Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) to attend the 11^th Rencontres internationals de Genève. The topic of the meeting was “Tradition and innovation: the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the current world”. When Guo could not make it, Western Philosophy specialist Ren Hua 任华 (1911–1998) accompanied him instead as his “secretary”, as Feng (2000: 151) puts it, clearly staking a claim of hierarchy. According to the Swiss press, Feng’s appearance in Geneva did not turn out well. Die Tat (15.09.1956) complained about the phrase-mongering at the event and singled out “the most entertaining (or: pathetic) moment, when Feng Youlan intervened in the ‘discussion’ with a scripted speech read out in English.” La Liberté (21.09.1956) likened Feng’s performance to “an alignment with a Marxism that crushes the free thought of its intellectuals”. L’Essor (28.09.1956) described the Rencontres bluntly as a dialogue among the deaf, with Feng coming all the way from Beijing to spread propaganda. Feng learned about the unfavourable reporting in the Swiss press while still in Geneva. In his 1981 autobiography, he admitted that his talk had been “somewhat off the subject” since he only spoke about “tradition, not innovation”, but he also recalled the difficulties of finding an adequate translator, mentioning that the Chinese embassy in Switzerland “checked [an early translation into French] and made more changes” (Feng 2000: 151). Still, according to one of the above newspaper reports, Feng established in his speech some “absolute incompatibilities” between the teaching of Confucius and Marxism.

Crucially, Feng used the Geneva experience for an intervention soon after returning to China. On 14 November 1956 he published an article in the Philosophy Supplement of Guanming Ribao on the topic of the appreciation of Confucius, followed by another article on 27 November 1956 in Renmin Ribao (the People’s Daily), in which he gave his impressions of the conference in Geneva (Feng 2001). László Ladányi (1914–1990), an avid China observer and Jesuit who had fled from the communists to Hong Kong, recalled “the astonishment with which he read this report the like of which had never appeared in the People’s Daily,” adding that Feng “wrote with obvious pleasure about the important role of humanism at those discussions” (Ladányi 1958: 4). In the article, Feng conveyed how some speakers at these conferences, “people in capitalist countries”, treated Christianity and science not as necessarily opposed, but as in harmonious technical and spiritual development. Some speakers even depicted the new and old Christian spirit as nothing less than the saviour of the cultural crisis (Feng 2000: 80–82). To a question posed to him in Geneva about whether Communist China had rejected Chinese culture, Feng recalled his response in the article as follows:

New China had a fundamental revolution in social and economic regards, but it did not abandon all the old traditions. We will first analyze the old culture and discard its useless parts. Yet, the useful parts, the ones loved by the people, will not only not be discarded, but will also be carried forward.

(Feng 2001: 83)

This is perhaps a more general reference, possibly to Mao’s 1940 use of the proverbial “getting rid of the dross and selecting the refined” (qu qi jinghua, qu qi zaopo 取其精华，去其糟粕), to describe what to do with the old culture. But it also clearly foreshadows Feng’s own emerging thought about the use of China’s philosophical heritage in modern CCP-ruled China: that is, his idea of “abstract inheritance”.

In Ladányi’s anti-communist view, Feng’s use of the Geneva experience in the article was “to convey the idea that people abroad were anxious that Chinese culture should not perish” (Ladányi 1958: 5). Feng’s People’s Daily article also included the remarks of the London Times correspondent, who described the atmosphere at the Geneva event as Marxists, religious believers and agnostics politely and respectfully listening to each other in a spirit that all participants would take home and find useful in everyday life (Feng 2001: 84). It is not that Feng could have expected the opinions of foreigners to count for much in the China of 1956, but it is perhaps easier in an already courageous text to have others from far away say what one would want to say oneself but cannot. The article was courageous, since “[b]‌y claiming a role for themselves in determining actual behaviour, an area for which the Communist Party claimed complete responsibility, academics were inviting reciprocal political interference” (Louie 1986: 42).

The case of how Feng put a failed speech in Geneva to some good use in the People’s Daily illustrates the importance of transnational and meso-level contexts for understanding the subtleties of what appears to be an articulated philosophical position on the relation between tradition and modernity. At the time when Feng was writing, the philosophical field in the PRC was supposed to serve only the revolution. Ai Siqi 艾思奇 (1910–1966), an important authority on Marxist philosophy, had pointed out that Mao’s 1940 directive should be strictly followed, meaning that utility would be determined exclusively from the point of view of Mao’s political project. Based on “a sensitive apprehension of the available options” (Hauchecorne 2017: 139), Feng may be interpreted as rubbing against this new nomos (to use Bourdieu’s terminology) to keep some autonomy of the field and some loyalty to the old nomos. There is an irony to Feng being perceived in Geneva as a CCP propagandist, while using exactly that experience as a form of capital back in Beijing to carve out a space for Confucianism against CCP ideological pressure. Feng was advancing the idea of abstract inheritance not because he wanted to formulate a philosophical position around the concrete and abstract meaning of traditional Chinese philosophy, but because he wanted to reserve a role for Confucianism in modern China under Communist rule, with Confucianism being not necessarily opposed to science, but in harmonious technical and spiritual development. Like what he had heard about Christianity in Geneva, the new and old Confucian spirit could just be the one saviour in the cultural crisis that Feng might not have admitted he saw, but which he must have felt and must have feared.

Conclusions: Modern Confucian ideology

A sociology of philosophy approach to modern Confucianism foregrounds the real-world anchorage of ideology at the macro-informed meso level of the “material infrastructure of philosophical thought”. Studying the organisational base and personal networks that make up this infrastructure and looking for correspondences and tensions with the philosophical texts produced by Confucian scholars and intellectuals unveils complicated modalities of how tradition and modernity are theoretically mediated in texts, but also negotiated in lived practice at a specific certain time and place in historical context.

The two illustrations, both turning on events unfolding on the Chinese mainland at roughly the same point in time, help us to grasp how the philosophical field is differently configured in modern Confucian ideology (for example, if compared with Bourdieu’s depiction of the French homo academicus), as philosophers work against the deeply held self-understanding of having to serve the authorities to save China and, in the 20^th century, to make it modern. Still, Ma Yifu and Feng Youlan also represent two variants of the politics–philosophy field nexus, with the former being of good use to the authorities while writing philosophy relatively undisturbed at the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou and the latter operating more at the centre of attention and of power in Beijing, with the implication of being more closely watched and readily criticized.

The Ma Yifu case illustrates the first step of a sociology of philosophy approach, which is about understanding the macro- and meso-level social conditions of possibility for philosophical knowledge production. The Feng Youlan case illustrates the second step, about how the empirical analysis can be brought to bear on the understanding of the outcome of that production, that is, of a specific philosophical position. A meso-level sociology of philosophy approach provides insights beyond what can be discovered by a mere study of how these authors talk about, for example, modernity and tradition, in their texts, thus revealing connotations and important nuances that are otherwise easily lost or misunderstood.

If ideology today stands as a global concept, then the spectre of a progressive and triumphant modernity as an ideology itself does too. Confucianism should not be conceived as the mere traditionalist mirror image of such a modernity. Historically sensitive and inter-disciplinary approaches to modern Confucianism such as those mentioned by Fröhlich (2017) and Major (2023), or the work assembled in the new edited volume Confucianism at War 1931–1935 (O’Dwyer 2025), are among the most promising attempts at countering a representation of Confucian ideology as a mere cliché or a handy tool for political powers in need of some sanitised history and philosophy. Similarly, regarding work relating to modern Confucianism’s ideological place in contemporary China, several contributions have appeared in more recent times (e.g. Lee 2021; Weber 2024) showcasing new angles on studying the exterior of philosophy by emphasising Confucian ideological struggle in a modern autocratic setting.

References

Beckstein, M. and Weber, R. (2022) Modeling Interpretation and the Practice of Political Theory, New York NY: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1983) “Les sciences sociales et la philosophie”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 47–48 (June), 45–52.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, trans. Nice, R., Stanford CT: Stanford University Press.

Chew, M. (2005) “Academic boundary work in Non-Western academies: A comparative analysis of the philosophy discipline in Modern China and Japan”, International Sociology, vol. 20, no. 4, 530–559.

Collins, R. (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Davies, G. (2007) Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Feng, Y. (2000) The Hall of Three Pines: An Account of my Life, trans. Mair, D. C., Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Feng, Y. (2001) “参加两次国际会议的观感 [Impressions from participating at two international conferences]”, 三松堂全集, vol. 13, Zhengzhou: Henan People’s Press: 78–84.

Freeden, M. (2006) “Ideology and political theory”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 11, no. 1, 3–22.

Freeden, M. (2013) “The morphological analysis of ideology”, in Freeden, M., Sargent, L. T. and Stears, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 115–137.

Fröhlich, T. (2017) Tang Junyi: Confucian Philosophy and the Challenge of Modernity, Leiden: Brill.

Fröhlich, T. and Knüsel Adamec, B. (eds) (2013) “Chinese reflections on the exile experience after 1949, special issue”, Oriens Extremus. Kultur, Geschichte, Reflexion in Ostasien, vol. 52, 3–214.

Goodhart, M. (2000) “Theory in practice: Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes, reconsidered”, The Review of Politics, vol. 62, no. 3, 531–561.

Hauchecorne, M. (2017) “L’histoire sociale des idées politiques peut-elle s’en tenir aux intentions? Une analyse comparée de l’histoire intellectuelle skinnérienne et de la sociologie des idées bourdieusienne”, in Gaboriaux, C. and Skornicki, A. (eds) Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion: 129–146.

Heidegren, C. G. and Lundberg, H. (2010) “Towards a sociology of philosophy”, Acta Sociologica, vol. 53, no. 1, 3–18.

Heidegren, C. G. and Lundberg, H. (2024) What is the Sociology of Philosophy? Studies of Swedish and Scandinavian Philosophy, London: Routledge.

Koselleck, R. (1996) “A response to comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” in Lehmann, H. and Richter, M. (eds), The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 59–70.

Koselleck, R. (2011) “Introduction and prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe”, trans. Richter, M., Contributions to the History of Concepts, vol. 6, no. 1, 1–37.

Kusch, M. (1995) Psychologism. A case study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, London: Routledge.

Kusch, M. (ed.) (2000) The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Ladányi, L. (1958) “Fung Yu-lan: Part One, 1949–1957”, China News Analysis, 15 August (241), 1–7.

Lee, T. M. (2020/2021). “A preliminary overview of Kang Youwei studies in China today”, Oriens Extremus, vol. 58, 175–190.

Lin, X. D. (2012) “Developing the academic discipline of Chinese philosophy: The departments of philosophy at Peking, Tsinghua and Yenching universities (1910s–1930s)”, in Makeham, J. (ed.) Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong: 131–161.

Louie, K. (1986) Inheriting tradition: Interpretations of the Classical Philosophers in Communist China, 1949–1966, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Major, P. (2023) Confucian Iconoclasm: Textual Authority, Modern Confucianism and the Politics of Antitradition in Republican China, Albany NY: State University of New York Press.

Makeham, J. (ed.) (2003) New Confucianism: A Critical Examination, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Makeham, J. (2008) Lost Soul: “Confucianism” In Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

O’Dwyer, S. (ed.) (2025) Confucianism at War 1931–1945, Abingdon UK and New York NY: Routledge.

Schulz Zinda, Y. (2012) “Marxist views on traditional Chinese philosophy Pre-1949”, in Makeham, J. (ed.) Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong: 311–345.

Schulz Zinda, Y. (2018) “On the early Marxist concept of philosophy (1930s–1950s)”, in Steineck, R. C. and Weber, R. (eds) Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World. Volume 1: China and Japan, Leiden: Brill: 90–127.

Sela, O. (2018) “A preliminary overview of the genealogy of zhexue in China, 1888–1930”, in Steineck, R. C. and Weber, R. (eds) Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World. Volume 1: China and Japan, Leiden: Brill: 69–89.

Skinner, Q. (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume 1: The Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics. Volume 1: Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Q. (2008) Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skornicki, A, (2017) “De Skinner à Weber. Contextualisme et sociologie”, in Gaboriaux, C. and Skornicki, A. (eds) Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion: 111–128.

Steben, B. D. (2012) “Nishi Amane and the birth of ‘philosophy’ and ‘Chinese philosophy’ in early Meiji Japan”, in Makeham, J. (ed.) Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong: 39–72.

Suter, R. (2025) “‘The flock of dragons has no head’ – The ‘first and the last word’ of Confucius and the politics of Xiong Shili’s communism”, in Weber, R. and Major, P. (eds) The Exterior of Philosophy? Sociological Approaches to Modern Confucianism, Leiden: Brill.

Touraine, A. (1992) “A critical view of modernity”, in Stehr, N. and Ericson, R. V. (eds) The Culture and Power of Knowledge: Inquiries into Contemporary Societies, Berlin and New York NY: De Gruyter: 29–38.

Weber, M. (2019) Economy and Society: A New Translation, ed. and trans. Tribe, K., Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Weber, R. (2024) “Authority in Confucian politics of religion: Notes on contemporary Confucianism in the People’s Republic of China”, in Döll, S. and Lehnert, M. (eds) Interactions Between Religious and Political Authority, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press: 337–361.

Weber, R. (2025) “Global philosophy, positionality and non-relativist perspectivism”, Philosophy East and West, vol. 75, no. 1, 6–22.

Zheng, D. (2015) “The relationship between modern neo-Confucianism and Marxism on the Mainland following 1949”, in Xingxing, Z. (ed.) Selected Essays on the History of Contemporary China, Leiden: Brill: 93–114.

27. The rise of Hindutva

Contemporary political ideology in India

Aditi Bhatia

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-35

Introduction

The rise in right-wing nationalist sentiment across the globe has produced worrying populist narratives laced with strong protectionist sentiment, drawing on language to evoke emotional, sometimes extreme, responses in audiences. In India’s context, “[l]‌ike the political Right in many countries faced with the globalisation of moral values and the growing influence of Western, especially American, culture, the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] has reactively committed itself to purify Indian society” (Marsh and Brasted 2002: 235–236). Since coming into power in 2014 under the rule of prime minister Narendra Modi, the BJP has redefined India’s national habitus (Bourdieu 1990), suffusing the right-wing nationalist ideology of Hindutva in socio-cultural and political discourse. As conflict and war move beyond physical border clashes to the terrain of ideological thought, with socio-political groups competing to redefine a nation’s identity, it has become necessary to recognise the power of language as “something that people do to and with each other and to the world more generally” (Graham 2018: 188). The resulting discourses become a type of warfare to nullify competing, opposition or minority voices.

In this chapter, I consider contemporary Hindu nationalist ideology – Hindutva. In section one, I discuss Hindutva in the context of BJP’s governance and the appeal of this ideology within India and outside in diasporic communities. In section two, I focus on the transmission of Hindutva through digital discourses, illustrating with some examples its prolificity across news, social media and institutional discourses. In section three, I explore the contributions that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can make to the study of Hindutva and ideology in action. In the final section, I consider possible future theoretical approaches to the study of Hindu ideology.

Hindutva as current political ideology

Dating back to the 1920s, Hindutva conflates religious and national identity and is most prominently championed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a volunteer paramilitary organisation, regarded by some as the progenitor of BJP (cf. Anderson and Damle 2019). At its core, Hindutva seeks to return the nation to “a primordial Hindu community, which transcends regional, language and cultural difference and [that] is bound together by a common history, civilisation and destiny” (Marsh and Brasted 2002: 235). This sentiment was echoed in Modi’s speech at the consecration of the Ram Mandir (a temple devoted to revered Hindu deity Lord Ram built on a contested religious site) in January 2024, where he proclaimed the consecration to be “the foundation of a capable, glorious and divine Bharat [Sanskrit term for India evoking an exclusively Hindu past] … the expansion of consciousness – from the divine to the nation and from Ram to the entire nation!”[77] Whether renaming public spaces that reflect foreign or Mughal etymology, revising history books, facilitating patriotic pop culture or promoting Ayurvedic medicine, the current government continues to take an India First stance using “a soft power approach that highlights the country’s culture and heritage … [and] the mobilisation of the Hindu diaspora through an emphasis on cultural ties as well as material and emotional investment in the homeland” ( Kinnvall 2019: 290).

The narrative centred around BJP’s political ideology has also forged a more muscular tone (Banerjee 2012) that imbues nationalist sentiment with religious values, effectuating a gendered, masculine approach to governance, framing the nation’s ideals as under threat from “Muslims and other minorities … located as the Other of this body politic” (Kaul 2017: 525). This narrative represents the Modi government as New India’s moral compass; a nation that is rebranded as robust, united and fearless. It legitimises their style of governance by highlighting their Hindu roots, positioning them against the rule of a foreign Other (i.e. the ex-president of the Indian National Congress was Sonia Gandhi, who is Italian and was raised Roman Catholic), pushing an “antagonistic divide between ‘the people’ and illegitimately powerful, born-to-rule elites”, conflating these elites with foreigners in the discursive construction of an enemy Other ( Wojczewski 2020: 11). At the heart of this narrative is a belief that “the majority community owns the nation, minority communities being dependents and supplicants rather than carriers of rights” (Kinnvall 2019: 292).

This is a typical feature of right-wing populist politics around the world, herding populations on the basis of an Enemy–Other, often with vigilante overtones. However, in the case of the BJP under Modi’s national leadership, “the construction of enemies is intrinsic to its political existence … [adopting as it has] an expanded notion of the ‘anti-national’: the beef eater, the missionary, the emancipated woman, the leftist, the liberal, the intellectual and even electoral opponents” (Bhatty and Sundar 2020: 4). The Hindutva project has remained a fairly consistent part of its identity and agenda over the decades, treated as an existing truth about the nation’s Self that needs only to be communicated and operationalised. This, combined with a sort of ideological vacuum associated with BJP’s main opposition the Congress Party, which is often accused of indulging in opportunist politics, results in an increasingly narrow notion of the nation’s Self against an increasingly broad definition of a threatening Other.

Anderson’s (2015) key work on the issue has framed this contemporary political ideology in India as neoHindutva, sustained outside institutional structures on unlocated digital platforms where both local and diasporic groups collaborate on and negotiate their nationalist ideals. NeoHindutva, evident in various forms of public discourse, emerges from the “lens of ‘struggles for recognition’”, creating a modern Indian identity driven by “feelings of victimhood and a ‘siege mentality’– crucial tropes for Hindutva within India … [but which have] particular resonance outside of India for marginalised, minority communities” (Anderson 2015: 55).

More notably, Modi’s preference for direct engagement with his public both through X (formerly Twitter), on which he is amongst the most popular political leaders, and through his national radio programme, “appeals to an apprehensive and ontologically insecure electorate, engaging in … ‘emotional governance’” (Kinnvall 2019: 286), nourishing the idea of a collective history marked by shared memories of trauma and achievement. This form of Hindutva Kinnvall (2019) represents in some of her seminal work as anxious nationalism, where national identity frames collate with those of tragedy, trauma and historical roots, transforming minority and outlier groups into threats: “only by reinforcing a certitude about the imagination of a pure self and a polluted other can (an imagined) ontological security be constructed” (Kinnvall 2019: 294).

Anderson (2015) explains that this reformed version of Hindu ideology is “a product of the digital revolution” (Anderson 2015: 60), which exploits the affordances of new technologies to appeal to a variety of communities, including those existing online or abroad. Following his predecessor, former prime minister Atal Bihari Bajpayee, Modi has nurtured a powerful bond with the Indian diaspora, “strengthened by a global political machine … with party offices in dozens of countries and thousands of volunteers … [allowing] Mr Modi to fuse his own image – and his rubric of elevating India with superstar executives” (Cave 2023). That is not to imply that there is no division or strain among diasporic groups or hesitancy about the conservative, Hindu-first nature of the party. However, Modi’s rebranding of India, followed by it becoming one of the largest economies and talent suppliers in the world, has reignited a sense of pride within the diaspora in aligning with this New India. Courting diasporic groups by acknowledging them as “‘brand ambassadors of India’ … Modi [has] attributed to them a higher role and provided a moral justification for leaving the motherland” ( The Economic Times 2023).

This narrative has allowed Indians, especially marginalised diasporic communities abroad, the powerful right to feel outraged at what they may perceive as the misrepresentation of a celebrated and deeply historical civilization. Newly emerged from wanting to downplay their origins due to disparaging stereotypes, many Indian diasporic groups now flaunt being Indian. Consequently, within this new praxis of Hindutva (Reddy 2011), national identity is delocalised and as

Hindutva’s inflections and influences thus expand to grassroots and diasporic contexts, mediated by discourses of rights, development and cultures of multiculturalist ethnic assertions, so also does it become clearer just how much Hindutva becomes a mediating discourse in its own right, drawn upon by Hindutva ideologues, critics, scholars, empathizers, sympathizers, apologists and mere affiliates, each positioning themselves vis-à-vis Hindutva or deploying it strategically to make their own claims.

(Reddy 2011: 421)

In this way, Hindutva appears as a dynamic and constantly evolving construct that is subject to reconceptualisation, metamorphosing with various proliferative mediums and discoursed through a range of linguistic and semiotic means. The following section offers a closer glance at some of the more effective modes through which contemporary Hindu ideology has been dispersed in recent times.

The ideological transmission of Hindutva through digital discourses

The discursive construction of Hindutva in collective social argument has increasingly centred on a reimagined past, often communicated through social media messages, opinion pieces, news channel debates and pop cultural forms like movies and sporting events. In addition, the growing facilitation of socio-political discourse in Hindi illustrates “the rise of communal and identity politics in India” ( Neyazi 2011: 78), as political figures representing smaller towns have grown to prominence. This development follows the “rise in literacy levels, aggressive marketing strategies, better transportation infrastructure, the rising political significance of the Hindi publics and an increasing awareness among the masses about participation in the political process” (Neyazi 2011: 78). It also demonstrates how ideologies of a dominating political party are legitimised in public discourse by both positive and negative political commentary rampant in different news and information sources. For example, popular YouTuber and podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia,[78] the first independent content creator in India to be exclusively featured on Spotify, offers his eight million plus social media subscribers podcasts in Hindi and English, on topics such as spirituality, religion, culture, politics and Hindu mythology. He explains the importance of creating content in Hindi as

the Hindi audience is becoming smarter than the English audience … because the English audience is a little bit arrogant about having grown up in cities and the Hindi audience is just an open sponge to accepting more … [Hindi is a] representation of that part of society and their mindset.[79]

Similarly, establishment of several pro-BJP news channels and papers, colloquially referred to as godi [lapdog] media, indicate the Hindu turn in popular culture and journalism. Some of these are the Republic Bharat, Sudarshan News and Bharat Republic, along with Hindi religious channels such as Aastha, Sanskar TV and Jagran TV. News discourse, whether in Hindi, English or other regional languages, proliferating Hindutva ideology also lends itself as a platform for readers to engage in passionate debate creating echo chambers.

Consider the following reader comments on English-language news articles that talk about government initiatives perceived by opposition groups to be biased again Muslim minorities: Box 27.1 is linked to an article about textbook revisions to minimise Mughal influence on India’s history (Agarwal 2023); Box 27.2 is linked to an article about the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act ( The Economic Times 2024b) perceived as discriminatory against Muslims.

Box 27.1 Quotes from reader comments on NDTV article ‘Textbooks revised because ...’: Top official on Mughals being dropped

“I do not agree removing Mughal chapter. They should show how Hindus were forcibly converted to the Saudi cult … so many temples destroyed.”

APR 04, 2023

“well, how can we allow Hindu kids to know that Mughal kicked us from the thrones … When Mughal came they became slave to them and then to Britishers.”

APR 04, 2023

Box 27.2 Quote from reader comment on Economic Times India article What is Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)?

BJP always treated all Indian citizens equally … Congress and other regional parties (though they are run by Hindus who are pseudo secularists) suppressed Hindus … by promoting Islamic and Christianity … In fact, CAA is nothing to do with Indian Muslims or Christians. Congress fearing to lose the minority vote bank … .

The contentious micro dialogues in the comment sections become part of the narrative of the overall news articles, working to either discredit anti-national stories or enhance nationalistic sentiment. Thus, in Box 27.1 use of words and phrases like “forcibly converted”, “cult”, “temples destroyed”, “kicked us”, “slave to them” reiterates Mughal atrocities and negative stereotypes. Box 27.2 reinforces the conflation of perceived anti-Hindu elites with foreigners, amplifying the Us vs Them rhetoric common in nationalist narratives.

The production and success of powerful frames of reality go beyond a propagandised narrative to what Sajjanhar (2022: 5) credits in her important work as the “double-sidedness of neo-Hindutva … [functioning] as a force that projects aggressive majoritarianism, while simultaneously claiming an anti-political ‘neutral’ face of civilizational purity and inter-religious inclusion”. Hindutva dispersed through intellectual discourse emerging from pro-government think tanks and conferences perpetuates a form of soft Hindutva where organisations may “avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu nationalist linkages but nevertheless pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda” (Sajjanhar 2022: 2). Sajjanhar explains that think tanks, for instance, legitimise the Hindutva ideology “by building a base of both seemingly apolitical expertise and what they call, ‘politically interventionist’ intellectuals” (Sajjanhar 2022: 5).

Consider the announcement in Box 27.3 from the India Foundation think tank which solicits engagement for a Young Thinkers Meet, targeting young Indians to contribute to the development of “New India”, the term evoking Modi’s vision for a rebranded nation. Box 27.4 quotes the India Policy Foundation website that promotes scholarships aimed at promoting Bharat-centric research. This latter think tank also offers seminars and webinars with titles such as Crisis of Hindu civilization, Proliferation of Jihadi elements put Pakistan’s future at stake and Islam in the context of Indianisation,[80] which seem to emphasise stereotypes commonly derived from Hindutva discourses.

Box 27.3 Quote from announcement for Young Thinkers Meet organized by a pro-Hindutva think tank[81]

Indian Foundation is hosting the 13^th Young Thinker’s Meet 2024 ... The annually held event acts as a confluence of young nationalistic minds hailing from varied walks of life across India … India Foundation, a New Delhi based think tank, for individuals … who are driven by the idea of a New India.

Box 27.4 Quote from the description of scholarships offered by the India Policy Foundation[82]

At present, IPF offers the following scholarships and fellowships for quality research and scholarly work on Bharat-centric issues … These scholarships and fellowships are given for promoting Bharat-centric research and scholarly work which could help public policy discourse.

In addition, outside India, far-right Hindu nationalist organisations such as the Indian Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) [World Council of Hindus] conducts workshops, festivals and conferences, including the World Hindu Congress, that proliferate Hindu ideologies. An example of such a conference hosted by the Australian wing of VHP is shown in Box 27.5, where use of words like “taking control of the narrative”, “truth”, “honest reporting”, “accurate”, “positive portrayal” serve to legitimise a positive representation of the community and its Hindu nationalist values.

Box 27.5 Quote from World Hindu Congress 2023 Brochure[83]

Hindus need to be well represented in journalism, news media, social media as well as the cinematic and TV entertainment industries to ensure accurate and positive portrayal of the Hindu community and its interests. Taking control of the narrative about Hindus in the media has never been more important.

Similarly, Box 27.6 quotes an Instagram post by the Hindu Youth Association, also based in Australia, stating its “[d]‌esire to integrate dharma into their Australian lifestyles”,[84] listing pilgrimage, dharma [Hindu duties], Sanskrit classes and spiritual camps as some of its aims and promoting its agenda through social media as a way of engaging diaspora youth.

Box 27.6 Quote from Hindu Youth Organization, South Australia Instagram post[85]

Hindu Youth Australia is a club for Hindu Youth who aspire to be a leader and wish to become movers and shakers of the Australian community. Together we will develop influencing and leadership skills that will help you bring change around you in the community …

The success of BJP’s socio-political machinery arises from the interplay between various networks and contexts: members of supportive think tanks placed within governmental ranks; scholarly activity and published reports that provide the basis of media commentary; prestigious internships and scholarships awarded to scientists and engineers; and cultural fairs and events where laypeople and experts interact (Sajjanhar 2022) (see Landry and Lamy, Chapter 12 this volume, for more on the politics of knowledge and think tanks). Diffusion of this softer, less structured neo-Hindutva is more easily naturalised into everyday discourse. This is also evident, for instance, in contemporary popular culture made up of more pro-Hindutva entertainment focused on a “saffronised” [a political neologism referring to actions of Hindu nationalists] retelling of political issues, religious mythology and political and historical figures (e.g. movies such as Article 370, Mai Atal Hoon, The Kashmir Files, Swatantra Veer Savarka, Adipurush, Ram Setu, Samrat Prithviraj). In fact, even movie reviews left on Google convey Hindu nationalist sentiment. Consider the Google reviews in Box 27.7 for the movie Article 370 (based on the contentious abrogation of Kashmir) [author simply searched for Article 370 reviews], which combine movie critique with political stance through claims such as: “essence of our Sanatani heritage” [Sanatana dharma is often used by Hindu nationalists to refer to Hinduism as an eternal, unified religion that is an inherent part of the Indian nation], “reality of a significant moment”, “staying true to the essence of Sanatani values”, “70 year old problem of India has been solved”, “J&K is flourishing after abrogation”, “watch to know about nation’s constitutional laws”, “Jai Hind” [salutation meaning victory to Hindustan].

Box 27.7 Quotes from Google movie reviews for Article 370

“a film that truly captures the essence of our Sanatani heritage and showcases the reality of a significant moment in our nation’s history … powerful reminder of the importance of preserving our traditions … staying true to the essence of Sanatani values … a film every Hindu should be proud of. ”

“Someone may term it to be expressing certain political ideology, but there is nothing wrong in that if the 70 years old problem of India has been solved … J&K is flourishing after 370 abrogation … believers and non-believers of current government both should must watch it.”

“… please do watch to know about our nation’s constitutional laws … filmed on citizens’ rights, women, & child legal rights … Jai Hind!”

We see in these examples how neo-Hindutva’s soft power appeals to both local and diasporic populations, especially younger digital natives, for whom social media platforms become a symbolic space on which they negotiate tangible and non-tangible expressions of their culture, expand their networks and better educate outsiders about their re-articulated identities. Influencers like British–Indian beauty guru Kaushal,[86] The American Hindu,[87] or even Caucasian–American influencer Drew Hicks (who was honoured with the National Creators Award by Modi in 2024 (The Economic Times 2024a)), transform social media platforms into spaces to come together to communicate reconstructed notions of Indian or Hindu identities, transforming into a global citizenship. These diasporic and youthful communities function as brand ambassadors of a nation, who have “retained a memory and cultural connection with their ‘home’ India” (Bandyopadhyay 2008: 82), a nation which is reconceptualised in the contexts of wider social and cultural, ethnic and commercial, physical and digital communities, to form what Hall (1996) terms new ethnicities. Thapliyal et al (2023: 1527) explain that online spaces allow these diasporic communities “access to any number of imagined Indias … [giving them power] to interpret what it means to be Indian ‘far away from home’… [and become] amongst the most digitally active and politicised migrants in the world”.

In their valuable research, Thapliyal et al shed more light on the “intertwined history” of Hindutva and evolving digital technologies that have contributed to a national identity that is more delocalised and plays “a key role in the cultural work, performative politics and vernacularisation of Hindutva politics and its cultural entrenchment in diverse communities across India and abroad” (Thapliyal et al 2023: 1530).

Bhatia’s (2023) study of authentic ethnic identities online extends work in this area by identifying the challenges of constructing diasporic identities that might have been rooted in the nation to begin with but eventually morph with the global flows of people and trade. For diasporic identities, discourses on social media platforms seek to situate individuals in terms of global landscapes and spatiality. Consequently, re-articulating diasporic identity becomes an exercise in mapping “new identities that can legitimately exist and coexist outside the rigors of nation building” (Madan 2000: 26). Bhatia mentions, for instance, how casual online overuse of the generic term Indian with reference to identity, objects, places, communities and pop cultural forms can be interpreted as an attempt by diasporic communities to hold onto their place across time and space; the word’s conceptualisation complies with its use by different groups across different contexts. Indian becomes a “general signifier of ethnicity, race, culture and nation of origin … used to articulate a collective in which the members see themselves as linked through common heritage of a mythic India and a shared discourse of race, nation, migrancy and hybridity” (Madan 2000: 27).

Digital diasporic communities provide a cyber-refuge to Indian migrants around the world facing segregation and prejudice, providing a way to tap into a collective national consciousness. These shifts have heightened individual “enactments and productions of what it means to be a proud Hindu … linked as much by affect as universal ideology … transforming the relationship between individual and collective activist identities within the Hindutva movement” (Thapliyal et al 2023:1531–32).

It is in this direction that the notable works in the following section drive research, drawing on the critical discourse analytical school of thought to devise and employ nuanced qualitative approaches to the analysis of ideological populist discourses, including those of Hindutva and its dissemination amongst various groups and contexts.

A critical discourse analytical approach to the study of Hindutva

While the current debate centring around Hindutva extends to a vast range of data deriving from social media platforms, political manifestos, campaign materials, speeches and various entertainment forms, it also seems to draw on either theoretical critiques with historical comparisons and readings (e.g., Leidig 2020; Shani 2021; Barthwal and Sharma 2023), or more prominently on content analysis, to break down how the ideology is dispersed (e.g., Thobani 2019; Ejaz and Ilyas 2021; Saleem 2021; de Souza and Hussain 2023; Ghasiya, Ahnert and Sasahara 2023). This section argues for the importance of demystifying how power, privilege and prejudice manifest in discourse by looking at text in context. It focuses on relationships between participants and groups, the creation of norms, values and stereotypes and their proliferation over time through different mediums, instead of conducting purely theoretical critiques or content analysis of language structure, themes and patterns. This is the essence of ideology in action; an in-depth analysis of socio-cultural and political discourse constructed between speaker–listeners and writer–readers, generating meaning that is semantically, cognitively and pragmatically mediated, governed by and reflective of social structures and power dynamics.

This kind of interrogation of the analysis of discourse assumes that discursive events share a co-constitutive relationship with the cultural and political contexts within which they take place (cf. Fairclough 1993). Text and social practice are “mediated by discourse practice” through which the processes of text production, interpretation and social practice leave imprints on one another (Fairclough 1993: 136). Discourse becomes the means through which people construct self, society and system of knowledge, so that meaning creation relies as much on production as on interpretations, reflecting a shared onus on the part of the sender and the receiver. Originating from this theoretical stance, CDA operates at the crossroads between “language and social structure” and often manifests in issues or topics that reveal “power asymmetries, exploitation, manipulation and structural inequalities” (Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000: 451). With its interest in theories of power and ideology, CDA seeks to critically explore the discursive construction of socio-cultural identity labels that legitimate discrimination or structurally enforced power asymmetry.

Van Dijk (2015) further elaborates that the relationship between discourse and society is cognitively mediated, as people rely on their mental models, ideologies and prior knowledge to interpret text and talk. Cognitive structures crucial in the production and interpretation of discourse are: memory of socially shared experiences, attitudes and beliefs; personal mental models of settings, participants and actions; and social cognition in the form of generic knowledge of the world acquired through “the generalisation and abstraction of these mental models, by discourses about such experiences … [and] pedagogical and expository discourse” (van Dijk 2015: 68). Consequently, CDA-based approaches allow researchers a more nuanced analysis of meaning creation both at the macro level, where cognition mediates in terms of socially shared knowledge, attitudes, norms and ideologies between larger groups and communities; and at the micro level, where cognition mediates in terms of personal experiences of social members occurring in their discourse and interaction (van Dijk 2015; see also van Dijk, Chapter 9 in this volume).

During its tenure, CDA has expanded theoretically and methodologically, incorporating some seminal research strategies such as discourse-historical analysis, membership categorisation analysis, critical metaphor analysis and social media analysis, to name a few. These pursue CDA’s broader aims of demystifying power structures in naturally occurring language by real users as part of socially and politically occurring phenomena ( Wodak and Meyer 2009). This has been especially important given how socio-political discourses have evolved over the years. Traditional political genres (e.g. political speeches or press conferences) have been invaded by pop-cultural mediums of expression (blogs, tweets, vlogs etc.), causing fragmentation in communication modes, conversational and professional genres and public narratives. These changes have also encouraged the expansion of CDA into integrative research that enables more multi-perspective analyses of socio-political discourses and evolving ideological standpoints.

It is important to conceive of the language used in the construction of socio-political arguments and identities as representing a particular perspective on reality, belief system and community. This is because discursive hegemony in socio-political argument is an effective means of legitimising these arguments, as well as reinforcing a connection between speakers and listeners. In this regard, political texts are highly context dependent and removing them from these socio-political and historical contexts could render their analysis and meaning half-baked or superficial.

Similarly, the study of evolving forms of Hindutva has also relied on expanded forms of CDA since new narratives of nationalism, national identity and socio-political ideology are most effectively investigated

not so much in political speeches and official national events but buried in the everyday ‘banal politics’ … the political in everyday communication on social media … communication about everyday events, actions, issues and people articulate dominant (and sometimes alternative) ideological discourses about the nature of our society.

(Bouvier and Way 2021: 345)

Bouvier and Way advise that studies of ideological discourses need to consider not just a top-down approach proliferated by social gate-keepers and mainstream actors, but increasingly a bottom-up approach that considers how less prominent actors collaborate through social media discourses to challenge mainstream narratives. This necessitates a focus on the rendition of socio-political discourse in all forms of exchange on social media platforms; “looking deeper at all individual instances, even if at first glance they appear ‘counter’ or ‘voices from below’” (Bouvier and Way 2021: 357). To this end, Way (2021) advocates for a multi-modal critical discourse studies (MCDS) approach to analysis of political ideologies, focusing on “lexica, images and musical sounds … [to reveal] how the mash-up recontextualises the social practices of those involved in and affected” (Way 2021: 492) by political events and narratives. Way implies that digital popular culture, unlike mainstream discourse, tends to be less ritualistic and structured, depending on the affective nature of messages to provide a community and identity to participants.

Social media platforms cater to a community’s ideological distinctiveness by sheltering them from opposing points of view, customising users’ feeds to create an echo chamber that captivates participants “for a brief moment in affective populist political framings of current events” (Way 2021: 503). The choice to engage with certain posts or narratives, tweet or retweet, post or repost, follow or unfollow, subscribe or unsubscribe, as well as the negotiation between the linguistic and semiotic resources employed to articulate a stance, causes the dynamic transformation of one discourse into another, recontextualising facts, stories, anecdotes, assessments and symbolic value on part of the creator, leading to the creation of new ways of thinking, new desires and aspirational lifestyle choices for interactants. From this perspective, “transformations are ideological” (Way 2021: 492) and the choice to re-articulate existing discourses in the context of new ones creates narratives that echo existing ideologies but in updated forms and with renewed poignancy.

Ó hÍr and Strange (2021), also endorsing multi-modal CDA, apply the approach to explore muscular nationalism and the everyday semiotic forms it materialises in, focusing on gender and nation in Irish nationalism. The use of MCDS allows them to gauge the technological affordances used and the ideological purposes they serve. Their analysis reveals that nationalist movements often “serve to install (heterosexual) men in the position(s) of power formerly occupied by the coloniser, particularly at the expense of women” (Ó hÍr and Strange 2021: 469), to establish a nation’s backbone so that manhood is equated with protecting the nation’s ideals. The binary between a masculine being and pure femininity “proves a delicate balancing act, as any (visible) politicisation or militarisation on the part of women reveals its fragility, threatening the basis upon which the nation is ideologically constructed” (Ó hÍr and Strange 2021: 470).

This depiction correlates with contemporary Hindutva frames of reality that often position political representatives and believers as protectors of Bharat Ma [Mother India], seated at the morally superior end of a divisive Us vs Other category pairing. The use of MCDS allows a focus on

[the] ideological work which specific semiotic resources carry out at a more micro level … [combining] muscular nationalism with an ‘everyday nationhood’ framework … [that] pays attention to how ordinary citizens reproduce … the relevance of the nation, with a focus on nationalism ‘from below’.

(Ó hÍr and Strange 2021: 470)

This transforms the practice of nationalism into the achievement of ordinary people within the course of their everyday lives and routine activities though banal politics (Bouvier and Way 2021).

More recently, Bhatia and Arora (2022: 7) have made the case for an expanded cultural toolkit approach, which regards social media platforms as the primary site for “action and engagement”, providing users the resources to “perform their values, ideas and beliefs” in the creation of online narratives. They explain that the “technical realm of X consists of a multiplicity of discourses and the technical affordances are also co-opted as means to an ideological end” (Bhatia and Arora 2022: 7). Thus, combining both critical affordance and critical discourse-based approaches can highlight “the technological possibilities offered by the architecture of X to create and circulate discourse” (Bhatia and Arora 2022: 7). Doing so reveals that the “dominant political rationality” (Bhatia and Arora 2022: 7) behind the Hindu–Muslim relationship hinges on the negative representation of the Other in the preservation of Hindutva. Treating tweets as the smaller units of the over-arching anti-Muslim narrative, the researchers find that Us and Them dichotomies are promoted through X, privileging dominant beliefs in India. Multi-modal analysis is, therefore, useful in explicating how online discourse provides “group schema reflecting the political context in the country and represents the meanings and functionality ascribed to X” (Bhatia and Arora 2022: 8). Shifting the focus from larger nationalist and mob movements to “to the humble everyday acts of soft hatred, those that slip through with a tweet, a laugh, a comment” (Bhatia and Arora 2022: 17), the study attends to the above-mentioned banal politics in everyday life. It reveals online interactants’

strong preference for digital rhetoric that is more esthetic, creative and audio-visual in its forms of engagement. With techniques such as digital editing, photoshopping and more recently, deep fakes, there is rising professionalism in the doctoring of reality. These forms evoke a satisfaction of so-called raw and authentic evidence … [becoming] stand-alone artefacts of discursive consumption.

(Bhatia and Arora 2022: 17)

Arising from this continued need to interrogate power relations and identity politics that result from digital technology, Brock (2018) further expands CDA in the direction of Critical Techno-cultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) that integrates materials stemming from information technology “with an inquiry into the production of meaning through information technology practice and the articulations of information technology users in situ” (Brock 2018: 1013). CTDA considers these aspects concomitantly to provide “a holistic analysis of the interactions between technology, cultural ideology and technology practice” (Brock 2018: 1013). Brock proposes CTDA as an enquiry into digital media discourse that incorporates into the traditional principles of CDA the assumption that online discourses are mediated further by the technological affordances of the social media platforms on which they are created and recontextualised, bringing out “the influence of beliefs about the world that mediate ‘appropriate’ uses of and discourses about ICTs” (Brock 2018: 1019).

Accordingly, Bhatia (2022) draws on Brock’s CTDA approach to explore how right-wing nationalist groups in India use X to reimagine India as a “monolithic Hindu nation adhering to the dictates of the Hindutva ideology” (Bhatia 2022: 1), generating a discourse that vilifies minority and foreign entities as the enemy Other. She argues that the platform’s design and function enable a powerful iteration of Hindu nationalism and that “the discourse of nationalism (content as text) on X and … the artefact (technology as text) in the creation and circulation” (Bhatia 2022: 2) of digital enactments can result in real-world violence and prejudice against Others. The study elaborates that the efficacy of discursive strategies deriving from online spaces is a result of exploiting a core insecurity in both online and offline populations: a fear that Hindu culture is under threat and will dissipate if Muslims and Islam are empowered, and only a strong leader exhibiting a muscular stance on anti-national issues can protect the nation’s identity. The constant exchange of tweets that bolster the nationalist narrative expands Hindutva beyond physical territory as scripted and traditional mainstream representations become conflated with localised perceptions about religion, history and culture. In this way, online nationalist discourses shapes the

collective imagination about political, social and national identities through discursive engagement and everyday on-line practices … . Hindu nationalism is not manufactured merely by people and organizations in power through a pre-planned and systematic media campaign … [it] is practised and articulated by people daily and supported by technological affordances, interface features and protocols.

(Bhatia 2022: 15)

The various findings from the aforementioned works also confirm the ideology fuelling Indian nationalism as dynamic and capable of metamorphosis. Collective consciousness evolves over time and through different mediums, constituting a body politic that snakes into different modes of organisation, reproducing “social systemic durability and flexibility over time … [relying] upon artefacts of narrative histories … to express and sustain the organizing principles” characterised in recognisable forms (Graham and Luke 2003: 152). Taking note of this, the last section of this chapter looks at the possible directions that ideological analysis of Hindutva should tread for a more complete understanding of how language can be and often is weaponised.

Conclusion and future directions in the study of Hindu ideology

Over the last ten years, political governance in India has fostered a powerful sense of nation and oneness, deriving from Hindutva that reinforces the nation’s deeply historical roots and hegemony of the Hindu religion. Woven from protectionist sentiment, it has become the dominant framework through which a collective reconstruction of national habitus is configured. Contemporary socio-political discourse in India has been bolstered by “universalist ambitions and a brand of nationalism whose aim is the advent of a Hindu state in India”, conflating national identity with religious identity to reframe “national belonging in ethnic terms” and foreground “science and technology as pillars of Hindu civilization” ( Therwath 2012: 552).

The analysis of such a complex ideology and its filtration in society requires a CDA-based approach, a principal aim of which is to demystify the weaponisation of language, without imposing or assuming any form of higher moral authority. The threat of any hegemonic narrative that proliferates within a community or society lies precisely in its ability to direct the audience’s actions towards its political subjectivities, making the need to deconstruct socio-political ideologies even more essential. To that end, I propose the Discourse of Illusion (DoI) multi-perspective approach, which derives from the critical discourse analytical school of thought. It can illuminate the weaponising of a nation’s habitus and its memories to frame social issues in support of specific political agendas. DoI can also facilitate pursuit of a more moralistic approach (Graham 2018) to analyses of ideological and hegemonic discourses that transform language into a type of warfare.

Discourse of illusion

DoI (drawing on a combination of the Foucauldian and Faircloughian notions of discourse) is proposed here as an umbrella term to encompass public discourses, particularly those associated with media and politics, as discursive attempts by writers or speakers to legitimise subjective conceptualisations of reality. Examples can include discourses of populism, nationalism, war and invasion, migration, terrorism etc. Creators of discursive illusions (typically, powerful groups in society), with access to proliferative media often employ various linguistic and semiotic resources to legitimise their conceptualisations of reality. Collective illusions arise when specific conceptualisations of reality (be they of an event or issue) become recognised as the hegemonic discursive framework by which understanding and action are formed. These subjective versions of reality are persuasive because they touch on core human weaknesses such as fear, prejudice and doubt, resonating with audiences because they align with pre-existing world views. Of concern here is not the falsity or subjectivity of the offered versions of reality, but the process of legitimisation through which they acquire the status of truth (see also Tainturier, Chapter 4 in this volume, on cultural hegemony and radical right).

To closely explore how discursive illusions are realised, the framework draws on a combined analysis incorporating dimensions of historicity and linguistic and semiotic action, linked to an account of some of the social effects of these actions:

Historicity: recontextualisation of past experiences into present-day action is critical to gauging how perceptions change over time and how “participants enrich the here-and-now of action by connecting it to the past” ( Leudar and Nekvapil 2011: 66). To do so, we borrow from the concept of structured immediacy (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011), with a focus on “the unconscious or conscious reconceptualisation of historical antecedents in an attempt to situate and present specific instances of current reality, often in relation to the future” (Bhatia 2015: 52). Analysis at this level involves looking at temporal references, invocation of past events or socio-cultural history and recontextualisation of present occurrences in terms of past events. In doing so, we discover how situating current activities in history through reference to the past “‘thickens’ the descriptions of people and activities – providing them with meanings they would not have had otherwise” (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011: 80).
Linguistic and semiotic action: through these we discursively construct our subjective versions of reality, most evident in the use of metaphorical rhetoric. The emphasis here is on the speaker or writer’s intention in the creation of metaphor by blending both cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. Analysis at this level involves looking at various metaphorical representations that can “bring to a discourse event traces of previous uses and of previous discourse events” (Cameron 2003: 27).
Social impact: ideological language engenders stereotypes, explicating how people “organize their moral positions and commitments round certain category identities” ( Jayyusi 1984: 24). Analysis at this level involves identifying three classes of membership category: self-organised groups (united by common beliefs and commitments); type categorisation (predicting actions believed to be “embedded in the features of that categorization” (Jayyusi 1984: 24)); and individual descriptor designators (assigning labels with both an ascriptive and descriptive function to types of people in those groups). Analysis of categorisation at these levels reveals the ideologies behind positive or negative representations of Us and Them groups in the context of contentious issues.

DoI is a relevant multi-dimensional framework to adopt in the study of political ideology, as it is concerned with how writers or speakers legitimise ideological versions of reality, going beyond basic text to larger areas of context and socio-political reality. The combined analysis of history, metaphor and categorisation allows for a deeper multi-perspective analysis of dynamic discursive processes at both textual and contextual levels.

In the context of contemporary forms of Hindutva, for example, this approach has been effectively employed in Bhatia’s (2023) most recent study of BJP’s decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, revoking Kashmir’s special status with the aim of integrating it into the unified national habitus of New India. The contentious decision was represented by proponents as a key moment in history that recontextualises a region rife with violence and political instability into a single, united national body. The move gave rise to competing narratives, with supporters hailing the abrogation as a step towards a peaceful, unified India and opponents condemning the move as an assault on democracy. Analysis of political speeches reveals that discursive strategies employed in legitimising the decision imbued Kashmir – and thus India – with “a self-conscious political force … and a new militaristic bodily habitus” (Graham and Luke 2003: 163), with the abrogation depicted as the government’s moral responsibility and a shared national dream. This overarching narrative created a gulf in society between two general ideological groups: selfless patriots vs violent anti-nationals.

Bhatia (2020), similarly, employs DoI to explore in more depth how contemporary Hindu ideology recontextualises the country’s history by saffronising public space, social practice and education. Analysis of news reports of various political leanings reveals the dominant frame as one that projects power in the purity of a new Hindu nation, defended through muscular governance. The increasing use of Hindi-English code-switching and combination of rural-centric policies expressed on urbanised message platforms (e.g. the Gram Swaraj Abhiyan movement to take development to the poorest in villages communicated through X, or Swachh Bharat Mission Gramin which is aimed at improving hygiene and health for women in rural India promoted through Instagram) became the means to diminish polarisation between urban and rural constituencies across the Hindi-speaking belt, creating a third space within which diverging demographics assume a collective socio-linguistic identity. Thus, DoI helped bring into better focus the power struggles between competing narratives in society to generate a singular hegemonic discourse to frame what constitutes nationalism.

Ideological discourses are most persuasively narrativised when they incorporate culture-specific metaphors, categorisation, local language varieties and patterns of representation to illustrate a collective habitus. This habitus must be tapped into through careful linguistic choices to positively present the speaker or argument, in addition to a medium of conveyance relevant to respective audiences. The discursive creation of one-ness in socio-political argument, achieved through collective consent and social validation, is effective in legitimising these arguments, as well as creating a connection between speakers and listeners. Therefore, the study of any ideological text must be considered within the historical, cultural and political context wherein it is conceived to prevent a superficial analysis.

To demystify ideology in action, CDA is effective in exploring the power structures within discourses that shape society. CDA-based approaches, including the ones discussed in this chapter, offer nuanced investigations of discourse and meaning creation beyond singular content, structural analysis or purely theoretical critiques and readings. As a school of thought, its roots lie in interpretation rather than analytical deductions and its strength in the diverse ways it can be operationalised. While there may be no set linguistic categories, approaches rooted in critical analysis (whether incorporating multi-modal, techno-cultural, historical, categorisation, metaphor or content analysis), commonly believe a) investigation should be “problem oriented”, b) theory and methodology should be “ integrated as far as it is helpful to understand the social problems under investigation” and c) there should be “shared interest in social processes of power, hierarchy building, exclusion and subordination” (Meyer 2001: 29–30).

As socio-political conflicts move beyond the physical toward the terrain of ideological thought, it becomes even more crucial to recognise the weaponisation of language in the creation of discursive hegemony. Ideology analysis requires a macro perspective on meaning-making beyond simple linguistic features, to include consideration of aspects such as cultural myths and models, medium of expression and technology, all of which contribute to reshaping social consciousness.

References

Agarwal, V. (2023) ‘Textbooks revised because …’: Top official on Mughals being dropped in NDTV, [Online], Available: www.ndtv.com/india-news/totally-fake-ncert-director-rubbishes-bias-in-school-textbook-revisions-3919499[20 Sept 2023].

Anderson, E. (2015) “‘Neo-Hindutva’: The Asia House M. F. Husain campaign and the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalist rhetoric in Britain”, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 23, no. 1, 45–66. [Online], Available: https://doi:10.1080/09584935.2014.1001721

Anderson, W. and Damle, S. (2019) The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism, India: Penguin Random House.

Bandyopadhyay, R. (2008) “Nostalgia, identity and tourism: Bollywood in the Indian diaspora”, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, vol. 6, no. 2, 79–100. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/14766820802140463

Banerjee, S. (2012) Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914–2004, New York NY: New York University Press.

Barthwal, S. and Sharma, V. (2023) “New-age media and the genesis of Hindutva”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 40, no. 6, 702–724.

Bhatia, A. (2015) Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and Practice, London/New York: Routledge.

Bhatia, A. (2020) “The ‘saffronisation’ of India and contemporary political ideology”, World Englishes, vol. 39, no. 4, 568–580, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12494

Bhatia, A. (2023) “Abrogating Article 370 and Kashmir’s exceptionalism: A critical analysis of India’s bodies politic”, Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 167–182. doi: 10.1080/17405904.2023.2282503

Bhatia, K. V. (2022) “Hindu nationalism online: Twitter as discourse and interface”, Religions, vol. 13, no. 8, 739. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13080739

Bhatia, K. V. and Arora, P. (2022) “Discursive toolkits of anti-Muslim disinformation on Twitter”, The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 29, no.1, 253–272 [Online], Available: https://doi.org/19401612221084633

Bhatty, K. and Sundar, N. (2020) “Sliding from majoritarianism towards fascism: Educating India under the Modi regime,” International Sociology, vol. 1, no. 19. doi: 10.1177/0268580920937226

Blommaert, J. and Bulcaen, C. (2000) “Critical discourse analysis”, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 1, 447–466.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bouvier, G. and Way, L. C. S. (2021) “Revealing the politics in ‘soft’, everyday uses of social media: The challenge for critical discourse studies”, Social Semiotics, vol. 31, no. 3, 345–364, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1930855

Brock, A. (2018) “Critical technocultural discourse analysis”, New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, 1012–1030.

Cameron, L. (2003) Metaphor in Educational Discourse, London/New York: Continuum.

Cave, D. (2023) “Modi and Indiaʼs diaspora: A complex love affair”. New York Times, [Online], Available: www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/world/asia/india-diaspora.html[15 Sept 2023]

De Souza, R. and Hussain, S. A. (2023) “‘Howdy Modi!’: Mediatization, Hindutva and long distance ethnonationalism”, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, vol. 16, no. 2, 138–161. doi: 10.1080/17513057.2021.1987505

Ejaz, K. and Ilyas, I. (2021) “Analytical study of rising Hindutva in Indian Politics (2013–2020)”, Journal of Indian Studies, vol. 7, no. 02, 325–340.

Fairclough, N. (1993) “Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: The universities”, Discourse & Society, vol. 4, no. 2, 133–168.

Ghasiya, P., Ahnert, G. and Sasahara, K. (2023) “Identifying themes of right-wing extremism in Hindutva discourse on Twitter”, Social Media+ Society, vol. 9, no. 3. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231199457

Graham, P. (2018) “Ethics in critical discourse analysis”, Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 186–203. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1421243

Graham, P. and Luke, A. (2003) “Militarizing the body politic: New mediations as weapons of mass instruction”, Body & Society, vol. 9, no. 4, 149–168. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/13570340377368470

Hall, S. (1996) “Introduction: Who needs identity?”, in Hall, S. and Gay, D. P. (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage: 1–17.

Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Kaul, N. (2017) “Rise of the political right in India: Hindutva – Development mix, Modi myth and dualities”, Journal of Labor and Society, vol. 20, no. 4, 523–548, [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-02004007

Kinnvall, C. (2019) “Populism, ontological insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the masculinization of Indian politics”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 32, no. 3, 1–20.

Leidig, E. (2020) “Hindutva as a variant of right-wing extremism”, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 54, no. 3, 215–237 doi: 10.1080/0031322X.2020.1759861

Leudar, I. and Nekvapil, J. (2011) “Practical historians and adversaries: 9/11 revisited”, Discourse & Society, vol. 22, no. 1, 66–85. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926510382840

Madan, M. (2000) “‘It’s not just cricket!’ World series cricket: Race, nation and diasporic Indian identity”, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 24, no. 1, 24–35. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723500241003

Marsh, J. and Brasted, H. (2002) “Fire, the BJP and moral society”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 25, 235–251. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400208723500

Meyer, M. (2001) “Between theory, method and politics: Positioning of the approaches to CDA”, in Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds) Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage: 14–31.

Neyazi, T. A. (2011) “Politics after vernacularisation: Hindi media and Indian democracy”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XlVI, no. 10, 75–82.

ÓhÍr, L. and Strange, L. (2021) “Tiocfaidh Ár Lá, get the Brits out, lad: Masculinity and nationalism in Irish-language rap videos”, Social Semiotics, vol. 31, no. 3, 466–488. [Online], Available: https://doi10.1080/10350330.2021.1930856

Reddy, D. (2011) “Hindutva as Praxis”, Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 8, 412–426.

Sajjanhar, A. (2022) “The double-sidedness of Hindutva: Inside the BJP’s think tanks”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 28, no. 1, 121–141. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2022.2080353

Saleem, R. M. A. (2021) “Hinduism, Hindutva and Hindu populism in India: An analysis of party manifestos of Indian Right wing Parties”, Religions, vol. 12, no. 803. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12100803

Shani, G. (2021) “Towards a Hindu Rashtra: Hindutva, religion and nationalism in India”, Religion, State & Society, vol. 49, no. 3, 264–280.

Thapliyal, N., Khorana, S., Pal, F. and Ghosh, D. (2023). “Resisting Hindutva in the digital Indian diaspora: Notes from Australia”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 46, no. 7, 1527–1550. [Online], Available: https://doi.10.1080/01419870.2022.2115309

The Economic Times (2023) “Why the Indian diaspora loves PM Modi so much on his foreign visits”, [Online], Available: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/why-the-indian-diaspora-loves-pm-modi-so-much-on-his-foreign-visits/printarticle/101138302.cms[24 Sept 2023].

The Economic Times (2024a) Who is Drew Hicks? [Online], Available: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/who-is-drew-hicks-the-bhojpuri-speaking-american-youtuber-honoured-with-national-creators-award-by-pm-modi/articleshow/108322285.cms[8 Mar 2024].

The Economic Times (2024b) What is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act? [Online], Available: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/what-is-citizenship-amendment-act-caa-all-you-need-to-know/articleshow/108400894.cms[11 Mar 2024].

Therwath, I. (2012). “Cyber-Hindutva: Hindu nationalism, the diaspora and the Web”, Social Science Information, vol. 51, no. 4, 551–577.

Thobani, S. (2019) “Alt-Right with the Hindu-right: Long-distance nationalism and the perfection of Hindutva”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 42, no. 5, 745–762, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2018.1468567

van Dijk, T. A. (2015) “Critical discourse studies: A sociocognitive approach”, in Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds) Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage: 63–74.

Way, L. C. S. (2021) “Populism in musical mash ups: Recontextualising Brexit”, Social Semiotics, vol. 31, no. 3, 489–506. [Online], Available:https://doi.10.1080/10350330.2021.1930857

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (eds) (2009). Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage.

Wojczewski, T. (2020) “Populism, Hindu nationalism and foreign policy in India: The politics of representing ‘the People’”, International Studies Review, vol. 22, no. 3, 396–422.

28. Political elite discourses polarise attitudes toward immigration along ideological lines

A comparative longitudinal analysis of Europe in the 21^st century[88]

Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran and Christian S. Czymara

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-36

Introduction

Immigration has become one of the most contested political issues in Europe in recent years (Green-Pedersen and Otjes 2019; Hutter and Kriesi 2021). Far-right politicians have framed immigration as an existential threat to Western societies, with one example being Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán’s statement that “all the terrorists are migrants” in 2015 (Kaminski 2015). Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not, however, limited to far-right parties (Abou-Chadi, Cohen and Wagner 2021; van Spanje 2010) and might even affect left-wing parties (Alonso and da Fonseca 2012). Such discourses can shape political trust (Geese 2024), beliefs about discrimination (Müller et al 2023) and far-right voting (May and Czymara 2024). At the same time, prior research has documented significant differences in public openness toward newcomers between EU member states (Quillian 1995; Semyonov et al 2004; Sides and Citrin 2007; Semyonov, Raijman and Gorodzeisky 2008), as well as a polarising trend in public attitudes toward immigration (Semyonov, Raijman and Gorodzeisky 2006; Bohman and Hjerm 2016; van der Brug and Harteveld 2021). Our goal is to test how variation in national elite discourses polarises certain segments of society over time, based on comparative data over 18 years. We define polarisation as a growing difference in attitudes between groups (similar to, for example, Bail et al 2018).

One of the most common explanations of anti-immigration attitudes is the argument that natives perceive immigrants as a threat to the national status quo (Blumer 1958; Blalock 1967). However, the cause of such threat perception is debated. Some cross-national studies operationalise threat by the stock or the inflow of immigrants (Quillian 1995; Semyonov Raijman and Gorodzeisky 2008; Meuleman, Davidov and Billiet 2009). A growing share of research, however, casts doubt on the impact of actual immigration numbers on hostility toward newcomers (Semyonov et al 2004; Hjerm 2007; Sides and Citrin 2007), not least because natives tend to significantly misperceive immigration numbers (Alba, Rumbaut and Marotz 2005; Wong 2007; Herda 2010; Hopkins 2010; Gorodzeisky and Semyonov 2019). If natives misperceive real-world conditions, these conditions cannot be (directly) the origin of their views. We thus add an important theoretical component that has received less attention in previous research: the country’s political climate shaped by its political elites. Political elites play an important role in defining the semantic space in which the immigration issue is discussed (Blumer 1958; Flores 2018). It seems reasonable to assume that they also shape the perception of immigrants as more or less threatening. In line with this reasoning, prior cross-sectional research found that exclusionary political elites are associated with more hostile public opinion (Hjerm 2007; Bohman 2011), while openness toward newcomers is more common in countries with inclusionary political elites ( Czymara 2020). However, these studies are based on comparisons between countries, which might be plagued by unobserved confounders. There is a lack of longitudinal evidence. Two notable exceptions are Heizmann and Huth (2021), who find that short-term effects on economic threat perceptions are stronger for actual immigration numbers while party positions are better predictors of long-term differences, and Mitchell (2021), who shows that anti-immigration attitudes are higher in countries with patriotic and nationalistic political elites; but this connection is not statistically significant within countries. We want to contribute to this line of research by testing how within-country variation in different types of political elite discourse first: influences anti-immigration attitudes; and, second: polarises the European public along political and socio-economic dimensions. To this end, we draw upon public opinion data from the first eight waves of the European Social Survey (ESS), manifesto data from the Manifesto Project Database and demographic data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In total, our data includes information on over 320 000 respondents from 22 countries over 18 years. Statistically, we employ within-country estimators for both the country-level coefficients and the cross-level interactions ( Giesselmann and Schmidt-Catran 2019), controlling for all time-invariant country characteristics such as national histories or differences in political or legal factors. Our empirical approach thus offers a more thorough test of the impact of national conditions and their polarising effects over time.

Political elite discourses and anti-immigration attitudes

One of the most prominent explanations for the emergence of anti-immigrant attitudes is the group threat paradigm (Blalock 1967; Quillian 1995). According to this reasoning, exclusionary attitudes on the part of the native population are the result of struggles over the allocation of resources. In this view, migrants are threats to the social status quo. These resources are not necessarily economic; they can also be cultural (Sniderman, Hagendoorn and Prior 2004). In fact, cultural concerns have more impact than economic ones on immigration-related attitudes (Sniderman, Hagendoorn and Prior 2004; Sides and Citrin 2007; Card, Dustmann and Preston 2012).

The classic hypothesis derived from the group threat paradigm in comparative social research is that public opinion responds to real immigration ( Ceobanu and Escandell 2010). That is, natives should become more exclusionary as the size of the ethnic out-group increases, because a larger out-group implies a stronger competitor (Blalock 1967). However, empirical evidence of this relationship is mixed at best. While some studies report that greater numbers of migrants are associated with more negative attitudes (Quillian 1995; Semyonov, Raijman and Gorodzeisky 2006; Meuleman, Eldad Davidov and Billiet 2009), others fail to find such correlations (Semyonov et al 2004; Sides and Citrin 2007; Hjerm 2007; Pottie-Sherman and Wilkes 2017). Our first aim is to test the effect of the actual inflow of immigrants on anti-immigrant attitudes. In contrast to much of previous comparative research, which was often based on cross-sectional research designs, we take a longitudinal perspective, estimating models that control for all unobserved time-constant country characteristics. Indeed, prior research indicates that threat arises primarily when the out-group gains a relative advantage, meaning that natives react more to changes in the out-group size than they notice the average level of group size (Meuleman, Eldad Davidov and Billiet 2009; Newman and Velez 2014; Czymara 2021; Heizmann and Huth 2021). Our first aim is to test the classical group threat hypothesis, but from a longitudinal perspective:

Hypothesis 1: Public opinion becomes more negative during times of high in-migration. (Group Size Hypothesis)

Many studies on the group threat paradigm draw upon the work of Blumer 1958, who argues that racial prejudice stems from perceptions about the relative positions of a society’s ethnic groups. However, the lion’s share of these studies has so far neglected an important aspect of Blumer’s original argument. Blumer states that “representatives and agents of the dominant group” play an important role in “characterizing the subordinate group as such” (Blumer 1958: 6). Generating a collective image of the ethnic outgroup through public speakers is hence an important prerequisite of ethnic prejudice. Political elites are one of the key sources of such images because they inform the general public about social and political conditions and developments (Flores 2018). By interpreting such information, political elites influence natives’ understanding of social reality (Chong and Druckman 2007; Careja 2015). This reasoning is corroborated by a literature review by Hainmueller and Hopkins (2014), who conclude that “elite rhetoric play[s a] central theoretical role … in explanations of immigration attitudes” (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014: 244) (italics added).

Following Czymara (2020), we define political elite discourses as “the sum of political elites’ frames, arguments and narratives” and as a “contextual character, in the sense that they are a feature of a country at a certain time point” (Czymara 2020: 1215) (italics added). Individuals are exposed to discourses of political elites either directly, such as through the consumption of mass media ( Czymara and Dochow 2018; Meltzer et al 2020), or indirectly, such as through personal communication (Kalogeropoulos and Hopmann 2018) or the use of social media (Bail et al 2018; Czymara and Gorodzeisky 2024). Political elite discourses hence theoretically concern all natives, although not to the same degree. Accordingly, research has shown that a more negative political climate is associated with more exclusionary public opinion (Hjerm 2007; Bohman 2011). This relationship is not limited to negative views, as countries where political elites are more inclusionary tend to have more open populaces (Czymara 2020). However, the aforementioned studies mostly compare differences between countries, which complicates causal claims. We investigate temporal variation in political elite discourses and variation in public opinion within countries, thereby ruling out time-constant omitted variable bias on the country level (see also Heizmann and Huth 2021; Mitchell 2021). We formulate the following complementary hypotheses:

Hypothesis 2a: Public opinion becomes more negative when political elites are more exclusionary. (Exclusionary Discourse Hypothesis)
Hypothesis 2b: Public opinion becomes more positive when political elites are more inclusionary. (Inclusionary Discourse Hypothesis)

Political orientation and education as predictors of anti-immigration attitudes

We are interested in the role of two individual-level characteristics: political orientation and education. Anti-immigration views have become a core element of the political right’s ideology (de Vries, Hakhverdian and Lancee 2013; Abou-Chadi, Cohen and Wagner 2021; Gessler and Hunger 2021). A right-wing orientation is, thus, one of the most robust predictors in the literature of anti-immigrant attitudes (e.g.: Bohman 2011; Careja 2015; Heizmann and Ziller 2020).

Similarly, research unambiguously shows that individuals with a higher education are more open towards immigrants. The interpretation of this finding, however, gives rise to scholarly debate. On one hand, individuals with higher education are more likely to be economically and socially secure and thus might feel less threatened by newcomers (Quillian 1995; Scheve and Slaughter 2001). On the other hand, higher education may also have a liberalising effect by transmitting values of openness and tolerance ( Hainmueller and Hiscox 2007; Cavaille and Marshall 2019) or higher cultural capital (van der Waal and de Koster 2015). A third branch of research even argues that education itself does not have a causal effect on attitudes, but that those individuals who develop their openness early in life tend to self-select into higher education ( Lancee and Sarrasin 2015; Weber 2022). All three mechanisms predict that those with higher education should be less likely to feel threatened by immigration and thus hold more positive attitudes toward immigrants.

Political orientation and education as moderators

Crucially, the macro- and micro-level determinants we discussed so far can also have a combined effect on anti-immigration attitudes. That is, changes in macro-level conditions might affect certain segments of society more than others, which can lead to polarisation.

Based on the idea of group threat, increasing immigration rates should resonate most with the political right and those with lower education. The political right’s out-group hostility (Abou-Chadi et al 2021; Gessler and Hunger 2021) should be most relevant in contexts where immigration is rising. Hence, those on the political right should react most to immigration. This reasoning has been supported in the context of the 2015/16 refugee influx to Europe (Czymara 2021: 1321 f.).

Hypothesis 3: Polarisation among the political left and right increases in times of high immigration. (Immigration Ideology Polarisation Hypothesis)

Moreover, those with higher education should feel less threatened by immigration, both because of their more secure social status and because they are likely to be more tolerant.

Hypothesis 4: Polarisation between educational groups increases in times of high immigration. (Immigration Education Polarisation Hypothesis)

Social polarisation may not be caused primarily by actual immigration, but by the political elite discourses surrounding it. That is, different types of elite discourse can boost polarisation along pre-existing ideological lines and education levels.

Political elite discourses should have a stronger effect on threat perceptions based on the existing beliefs and values of an individual (Bail et al 2018), ultimately captured by their political orientation. Political information that is congruent with natives’ existing orientations is more likely to be incorporated into their own argumentation and should thus reinforce attitudes, whereas challenging information should more often be rejected (Taber and Lodge 2006; Careja 2015). Being politically right wing implies harbouring more traditionalist values, hence being more negative toward immigration (de Vries et al 2013). Importantly for cross-national research, the political right is associated with traditionalist values across different social contexts, i.e. in Western Europe but also in the Eastern post-communist countries (Thorisdottir et al 2007). This means that people aligning themselves with the political right are likely to feel vindicated in contexts where political elites refer to immigration-related issues more negatively. In the same fashion, those adhering to the political left should feel vindicated in contexts where political elites refer to immigration and diversity more positively (Czymara 2020). Thus, we expect that:

Hypothesis 5: Inclusionary and exclusionary political elite discourses increase the difference between attitudes of the political left and right. (Discourses Ideology Polarisation Hypothesis)

Finally, education can play multiple roles in the impact of political elite discourses. Those with a more secure social standing and an established norm of tolerance and openness should be less receptive toward elite discourse. In addition, education is the main source of political knowledge (Highton 2009), which determines voters’ openness toward political information (Zaller 1992; Schemer 2012). While these mechanisms differ theoretically, they ultimately lead to the same prediction: political elites should be more likely to convince voters with lower education, which is our final hypothesis:

Hypothesis 6: Inclusionary and exclusionary political elite discourses increase the difference in attitudes between educational groups. (Discourse Education Polarisation Hypothesis)

Data

Individual-level data comes from eight rounds of the ESS, covering 2002 to 2019. Instead of the survey rounds, which refer to broad periods (regularly stretching over two years), we measure the exact year of the interviews to construct our indicator of time. This results in a variable which captures 18 consecutive years. Table 28.1 provides an overview of our sample. It shows the countries, years and sample sizes at all levels of the analysis. In total, our sample includes 22 countries, 290 country–time combinations and 322 044 individual observations, of which 35 029 (10.88 per cent) could be included by means of multiple imputation (see below).

Table 28.1 Sample description

Country	Year																			Total
2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019
Austria (AT)		2,162		2,218		2,350							265	1,510	1,985		2,298	174	12,962
Belgium (BE)	1,662	97	1,631	138	1,144	648	997	747	797	896	1,845		1,675	76	1,605	139	1,526	229	15,852
Czech Republic (CZ)	866	349	2,714					1,952		2,322		1,796	670	1,376	2,248		1,127	1,225	16,645
Germany (DE)	221	2,652	2,365	413	2,551	273	2,125	581	1,976	1,001	2,689	196	2,420	583	2,484	324	1,806	514	25,174
Denmark (DK)	1,315	133	1,416	41	1,151	312	1,551	36	1,065	496		1,627	1,464	27			1,536	7	12,177
Estonia (EE)			1,299	535	597	832	433	1,131	1,746		2,209	100	1,986		1,775	205	1,693	191	14,732
Spain (ES)	1,402	233	1,438	144	1,361	483	2,515	15		1,871		1,859		1,907		1,936		1,360	16,524
Finland (FI)	1,972		1,998		1,882		1,921	265	1,862		1,876	313	1,903	170	1,537	373	1,484	251	17,807
France (FR)		1,490	862	922	1,319	648	1,967	89	1,443	265		1,949	1,557	334	1,446	595	1,123	852	16,861
Great Britain (GB)	1,870	140	1,429	325	2,336	16	2,263	41	2,150	144	1,925	234	1,596	568	1,712	158	1,844	267	19,018
Hungary (HU)	1,576			1,451	1,286	149		1,506	1,520		1,817	114		1,662		1,543		1,584	14,208
Ireland (IE)	26	1,959		2,229	585	1,006		1,324	421	2,370	1,120	1,606	1,767	550	177	2,519	390	1,751	19,800
Israel (IL)	2,196	151					1,193	1,176		2,111	2,016	242		2,440	1,858	536			13,919
Iceland (IS)				495							594	148			234	629		776	2,876
Italy (IT)		1,174										901				2,555	106	2,577	7,313
Lithuania (LT)										1,508		1,992		2,126		2,034		1,780	9,440
Netherlands (NL)	2,025	323	1,497	374	1,404	475	1,119	650	1,167	651	1,475	364	1,811	81	1,450	217	1,535	109	16,727
Norway (NO)	1,929	70	1,735	20	1,744		1,515	26	1,347	170	1,436	178	1,427		1,535	1	598	766	14,497
Poland (PL)	1,998		1,662		1,661	2	1,408	168	1,669	32	1,840	13		1,571	1,350	302	946	497	15,119
Portugal (PT)	1,350	95	548	1,424	735	1,323	968	1,305	186	1,916	391	1,709		1,250	236	1,016	107	909	15,468
Sweden (SE)	1,970		1,810	115	1,674	230	1,648	162	1,021	458	1,041	787	1,754	13	1,397	129	1,010	488	15,707
Slovakia (SK)			1,306		817	791	1,066	631	1,267	502	1,364	416						1,058	9,218
Total	22,378	11,028	23,710	10,844	22,247	9,538	22,689	11,805	19,637	16,713	23,638	16,544	20,295	16,244	23,029	15,211	19,129	17,365	322,044

Note: Sample size after multiple imputation of missing values in left–right self-placement. Sample size before imputation was 287 015.

Outcome: Anti-immigration attitudes

Three items in the ESS are surveyed each round and aim to measure anti-immigration attitudes: 1.) ‘Would you say it is generally bad or good for [country]’s economy that people come to live here from other countries?’; 2.) ‘… would you say that [country]’s cultural life is generally undermined or enriched by people coming to live here from other countries?’; 3.) ‘Is [country] made a worse or a better place to live by people coming to live here from other countries?’

While these items tap into economic and cultural issues, factor analyses show that responses form a single factor (e.g.: Billiet, Meuleman and de Witte 2014: 142; Kuntz, Davidov and Semyonov 2017). We therefore construct a one-dimensional index of anti-immigrant attitudes. Originally, the items were measured on 11-point scales where higher values mean more positive attitudes. We reversed the items for the analysis to measure anti-immigration attitudes. The index is based on the average response across the three measures and has been standardised for the analysis. For respondents with missing values on one or two of the items, the index has been constructed from the non-missing observations.

Macro-level independent variables

At the country level, we measure the actual inflow of foreigners as a percentage of the total population. The absolute inflow is taken from the OECD’s International Migration Data Base. To calculate the relative inflow as a percentage of the population, we used additional data from the OECD’s Historical Population Data Base. We control for economic prosperity, using the Gross Domestic Product per Capita (GDP/c). GDP/c is measured in thousands of US dollars and comes from the OECD’s Dataset Gross Domestic Product. To control for short-term economic conditions, we also include the unemployment rate as a percentage of the labour force, which is taken from the OECD’s Annual Labor Force Statistics Summary Tables. The OECD data on unemployment rates had some missing values, which have been imputed by linear inter- and extrapolation (7.2 per cent of the data).

In addition to OECD data, we draw upon the data of the Manifesto Project Database to measure political elite discourses (Werner, Lacewell and Volkens 2015). The Manifesto Project Database is based on quantitative content analyses of party manifestos before elections. In particular, the data reports the share of each party’s manifesto that is devoted to certain pre-defined topics (Klingemann et al 2006). The share could theoretically range from zero (issue not mentioned) to 100 (nothing else mentioned). Importantly, the coding is based on the same instructions across all countries and time points, which makes the data ideally suited for cross-national as well as temporal comparisons (Schmidt and Spies 2014; Careja 2015).

Following Czymara (2020), we use the positive and the negative versions of two broader categories that include immigration-related issues: national way of life and multi-culturalism.[89] A country’s political elite discourse is operationalised in the following way: We first take the values for each of the four items [national way of life positive (per 601), national way of life negative (per 602), multi-culturalism positive (per 607) and multi-culturalism negative (per 608)] for each party in a national election. To account for the fact that statements put forward by larger parties are more likely to influence public opinion, we weight these values with a party’s actual vote share. Based on the values for each party on each issue, we generate four new variables for each country. These variables are the country means for each of the four items over all parties during one election. Finally, we combine these country means to operationalise exclusionary party discourse as the country mean of multi-culturalism (negative) added to the country mean of national way of life (positive) and inclusionary party discourse as the country mean of multi-culturalism (positive) and national way of life (negative).

As our individual data are measured at intervals of one year, while elections are typically less frequent, we impute missing data for the two discourse variables. We use linear inter- and extrapolation, since we assume that these variables proxy the discursive political elite climate but do not cause shifts in the discourse themselves. Overall, we imputed 74 per cent of the discourse measures, reflecting the fact that elections typically happen every four years. Please see Section F in the online appendix[90] for detailed information on the macro-level data and the imputation procedure.

Individual-level independent variables

At the individual level, our interest lies in political orientation, which we capture with the left–right self-placement (11-point scale) and educational level. We differentiate between low (ISCED 0–2), medium (ISCED 3–4) and high (ISCED 5–6) education levels. We furthermore control for age, sex and migration background. We treat respondents as having a migration background if they or at least one of their parents was born outside their country of residence.

Multiple imputation

For the dependent variable as well as the independent variables of sex, age, education and migration background, we find only a small number of missing values, ranging from 0.08 per cent for sex to 1.38 per cent for anti-immigrant sentiments. The latter number holds because we estimated the index of anti-immigrant sentiments whenever the data provides at least one valid response. Following the general recommendation that missing data of less than 5 per cent can be ignored (Schafer 1999), we performed list-wise deletion of our data if any of the aforementioned variables had a missing value. In total this amounts to 2.87 per cent of observations. With the remaining observations (n=322,044), we performed multiple imputations for the left–right self-placement, which has a substantial number of missing values (11.55 per cent). In total, we imputed m=5 values for every missing observation of left–right self-placement. All estimates presented below are based on these multiple imputations, using Rubin’s rules for the combination of multiple estimates (Rubin 2004). Section D in the online appendix provides more details about the imputation procedure.

Standardisation

For the multi-variate statistical analysis, we z-standardised all non-dichotomous variables: anti-immigrant attitudes – the dependent variable – and the independent variables of left–right self-placement, age, GDP/c, unemployment rate, inflow of foreigners, exclusionary discourse and inclusionary discourse. This allows for better comparability of effect sizes across these measures. More importantly, centring around zero is helpful for the interpretation of the complex interaction models.

Method

We pool data from eight waves of the ESS, which provides a data set with a three-level structure in which individuals are nested in country–years, which are, in turn, nested in countries (Schmidt-Catran and Fairbrother 2016). This structure allows for an estimation of within-country effects of macro-level variables (Fairbrother 2014; Schmidt-Catran, Fairbrother and Andreß 2019). Following Fairbrother, we employ a hierarchical mixed-effects model and decompose all country-level variables’ effects into their within- and between-country components. The basic model has the following form:

where is the value of the dependent variable in country j, at year t for individual i. is a vector of individual-level variables with corresponding coefficients . Country-level characteristics are included in the vector Z, which is decomposed into its within and between country components. While the between effects () are based on cross-sectional variation and describe differences between countries, the within effects () are identified from longitudinal variation within countries over time and are controlled for any time-constant characteristics on the country level. This modelling technique has become very prominent, as it combines the virtues of panel data analysis with multi-level modelling and promises to provide better causal estimates (Schmidt-Catran et al 2019).

We have a specific interest in cross-level interaction effects, for which Giesselmann and Schmidt-Catran (2019) have demonstrated that the standard modelling approach proposed by Fairbrother does not work, because it mixes within and between components in the estimation of such interaction effects. We, therefore, employ a model specification that identifies also the cross-level interactions solely from within-country variation. For example, we estimate how the effect of political orientation depends on within-country variation in political elite discourse. This is done via an extension of Fairbrother’s model, which decomposes also the cross-level interaction effects into their within- and between-country components (Giesselmann and Schmidt-Catran 2019). At the country level, this specification controls not only for unobserved heterogeneity, but also for unobserved effect heterogeneity in the individual-level variable of interest. Specifically, we partial out the between-effects of the interaction of interest:

Note that X and Z are vectors of individual- and country-level variables, but the interactions are estimated only for the variables of interest, not the entire vector. To estimate these interactions the model adds a number of terms: decomposes the interaction effect into its within and between components, where is the within and the between effect. partials out the between effect of the individual variable of interest, which is not strictly necessary to decompose the within and between effect of the interaction, but it makes the coefficient a within country estimate. Due to the centring of the interacted variables Z, then provide the average within effect across all countries. As the decomposition only accounts for effect heterogeneity of X that is correlated with Z, we also add random slopes of the individual-level variable of interest ( and ), accounting for the general effect heterogeneity of X. This is important to avoid downward bias in the standard errors (Heisig and Schaeffer 2019) and allows us to quantify the variation explained by the cross-level interactions.

Results[91]

In the first step of our analysis, we ask whether there is a time trend in anti-immigration attitudes and how it is best modelled. Table 28.2 shows four models: M0 is an empty model, which estimates the distribution of variances across the three levels and provides a reference for all following models; models M1 to M3 employ different specifications of time trends. The empty model M0, unsurprisingly, shows that the largest share of variance is located at the individual level (89 per cent). However, it still leaves a substantial part of variance at the contextual levels (11 per cent). Most of the contextual variance is between-country variation, but there is sufficient within-country variation over time to support our estimation strategy, which uses exactly this source of variation to identify the effects of interest: about 23 per cent of higher-level variation, i.e. country and country–year variation, is variation within countries over time.

Table 28.2 Empty model and time trend of anti-immigrant sentiments

	M0	M1	M2	M3
Year dummies (Ref. = 2002)
2003			-0.074
2004			0.044
2005			0.011
2006			-0.035
2007			-0.076
2008			-0.098
2009			-0.107
2010			-0.050
2011			-0.014
2012			-0.099
2013			-0.068
2014			-0.059
2015			-0.049
2016			-0.139	*
2017			-0.092
2018			-0.198	***
2019			-0.173	***
Year					-0.009	***	-0.002
Year²							-0.000
Constant	-0.011		0.065		0.068		0.049
Variance components	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)
Country	0.086	(0.027)	0.087	(0.027)	0.086	(0.027)	0.086	(0.027)
Country–year	0.025	(0.002)	0.021	(0.002)	0.023	(0.002)	0.023	(0.002)
Residual	0.907	(0.002)	0.907	(0.002)	0.907	(0.002)	0.907	(0.002)
Statistics
AIC	883457.932	883450.337	883438.409	883439.309
BIC	883500.662	883674.668	883491.821	883503.403

Notes: * p<.05, ** p<.01, *** p<.001 (two-sided tests). For variance estimates, we report standard errors (se) instead of significance levels.

In Table 28.2, Model M1 accounts for variation over time by means of dummy variables, while M2 imposes a linear time trend and M3 adds an additional quadratic component. The quadratic model does not yield any significant component, while the dummy and the linear specification both show a significant decline in anti-immigration attitudes. Based on the AIC and BIC, which both penalise model complexity, we select the model with the linear function 471.as the preferred specification. Therefore, from here on we treat time as having a linear effect. Overall, the trend is neither very strong nor does it explain much of the variation within countries over time. The dummy specification reduces the residual variation at the country-year level by about 16 per cent, while the linear trend explains about 8 per cent of the variation. Thus, within our sample there is not much of a global time trend in anti-immigration attitudes. Nevertheless, we keep time in the models to avoid attributing any global trend to our variables’ effects.

Table 28.3 Main effects on anti-immigrant sentiments

	M4	M5	M6	M7	M8	M9	M10
Year	-0.005	**	-0.002		-0.006	***	-0.004	*	-0.006	***	-0.003	*	0.004
Individual-level variables
Sex (Ref. = male)
Female	0.033	***	0.033	***	0.033	***	0.033	***	0.033	***	0.033	***	0.033	***
Age	0.076	***	0.076	***	0.076	***	0.076	***	0.076	***	0.076	***	0.076	***
Age2	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***
Migration background (Ref. = no)
Yes	-0.310	***	-0.310	***	-0.310	***	-0.310	***	-0.310	***	-0.310	***	-0.310	***
Education (Ref. = ISCED 5–6)
ISCED 4–5	0.390	***	0.390	***	0.390	***	0.390	***	0.390	***	0.390	***	0.390	***
ISCED 0–2	0.574	***	0.574	***	0.574	***	0.574	***	0.574	***	0.574	***	0.574	***
Left–right	0.085	***	0.085	***	0.085	***	0.085	***	0.085	***	0.085	***	0.085	***
Context-level variables
Inflow foreigners [BE]			-0.165	***							-0.142	**	-0.124	*
Inflow foreigners [WE]			-0.068	***							-0.070	***	-0.059	***
Exclusionary Discourse [BE]					0.135	*			0.148	*	0.097		0.070
Exclusionary Discourse [WE]					0.039	**			0.048	**	0.056	***	0.056	***
Inclusionary Discourse [BE]							0.052		-0.028		-0.018		-0.003
Inclusionary Discourse [WE]							-0.038	**	-0.045	***	-0.038	**	-0.041	***
GDP/c [BE]													-0.064
GDP/c [WE]													-0.072	**
Unemployment rate [BE]													-0.040
Unemployment rate [WE]													0.002
Constant	-0.251	***	-0.270	***	-0.235	***	-0.255	***	-0.240	***	-0.256	***	-0.325	***
Variance components	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)
Country	0.083	(0.026)	0.057	(0.018)	0.071	(0.022)	0.080	(0.025)	0.070	(0.022)	0.052	(0.016)	0.051	(0.016)
Country–year	0.019	(0.002)	0.017	(0.002)	0.018	(0.002)	0.018	(0.002)	0.018	(0.002)	0.016	(0.002)	0.015	(0.002)
Residual	0.831	(0.002)	0.831	(0.002)	0.831	(0.002)	0.831	(0.002)	0.831	(0.002)	0.831	(0.002)	0.831	(0.002)

In the next step, we add all individual-level variables to our model (M4 in Table 28.2) to account for compositional effects first. In models M5 to M10 we add the country-level variables separately and in various combinations. In these models we examine the main effects of the country-level variables. In model M5, we add the actual inflow of foreigners. Both the within and between effects are significantly negative, which is actually the opposite of what the group-size hypothesis (H1) predicts. Interestingly, this negative within effect holds in all model specifications (M5, M9 and M10). In contrast to the unexpected effect of within-country variation in actual immigration, our measures of exclusionary political elite discourse show the positive within and between effects on anti-immigration attitudes that we would theoretically assume (see model M6). The positive and significant within effect of exclusionary discourse also holds in the models controlling for the actual inflow (M9) and additional controls (M10). In contrast to exclusionary discourse, inclusionary discourse is negatively associated with anti-immigrant attitudes within countries. The significant within effect of inclusionary discourse shows up in any of the model specifications (M7 to M10). This means we can confirm Hypothesis H2a as well as Hypothesis 2b, as both discourse variables have the effect we expected.

Looking at the final model M10 in Table 28.3, we conclude that the actual inflow of foreigners has a negative effect on anti-immigrant attitudes, while exclusionary discourses have a positive effect and inclusionary discourses have a negative effect. Interestingly, the within estimates of the positive and negative discourse effects are of a somewhat comparable size. Thus, the net effect of political discourse on anti-immigrant attitudes depends on how the political discourse is balanced. From the control variables, GDP/c and unemployment rate, only GDP/c has a significant effect, while the unemployment rate does not. We therefore excluded the unemployment rate from all further models. For each country-level variable we find that the within and between effects point in the same direction, though the between effects are mostly not significant. However, this is still interesting, as we see the within effects as better tests for causal relationships. The between effects, however, indicate that the relationships suggested by the within-estimates may also shape the patterns we observe between countries.

After establishing that immigration and discourses are significant predictors of anti-immigrant attitudes, our goal is to test whether they increase polarisation. To this end, we estimate cross-level interactions between the country-level variables and the respondents’ political orientations and education levels. We estimated a large number of models, using different estimation strategies (random and fixed effects (RE/FE) as well as two-stage models) and a variety of model specifications. Here we present only the central results from a selection of models. We discuss our additional tests in the section on robustness below and in much more detail in the online appendix (Sections B and C).

Figure 28.1 summarises the results with regard to political orientation as measured by the left–right dimension (the complete models are in Table 28.4). All models presented here include random slopes of political orientation at the country and country –year levels and decompose the interaction effects into their within and between components. Figure 28.1 shows the predicted anti-immigrant sentiment for the left and the right, depending on the three country-level variables of interest; more precisely, conditioned on within-country variation in these variables: The graphs show how polarisation between left and right changes when the country-level variables vary within countries over time. As we partial out the between effect of political orientation, these effects are genuine within-country effects.

A series of six line graphs comparing predicted anti-immigrant sentiment across different variables, with separate lines for left and right respondents. Each graph includes shaded confidence intervals and an Interaction coefficient value. The top row shows results for Inflow of foreigners, Exclusionary political discourse, and Inclusionary political discourse, all with significant or marginally significant coefficients. The bottom row repeats the same variables with smaller or nonsignificant coefficients. In general, the right respondents’ dashed line shows higher predicted anti-immigrant sentiment than the left respondents’ solid line, particularly under conditions of stronger exclusionary political discourse.

Figure 28.1 Predicted anti-immigrant sentiment from cross-level interaction effects with left–right, conditioned on within-country variation.

Notes: * p<.05, ** p<.01, *** p<.001, one-sided tests (significance stars after coefficients relate to the estimated within effect of the cross-level interaction itself, while the 95%-confidence intervals of predictions are based on additional uncertainty from the complete regression function). All estimates use multiple imputation (m=5). The upper panel shows three separate models, each including only the shown cross-level interaction (models M12, M13 and M14 from Table 28.4). The lower panel shows the three cross-level interactions estimated from a combined model, which includes them all simultaneously (model M15 in Table 28.4).

Table 28.4 Cross-level interaction effects with left–right

	M11	M12	M13	M14	M15
Year	0.005		0.005		0.005		0.005		0.005
Individual-level variables
Sex (Ref. = male)
Female	0.037	***	0.037	***	0.037	***	0.037	***	0.037	***
Age	0.069	***	0.069	***	0.069	***	0.069	***	0.069	***
Age2	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***	-0.020	***
Migration background (Ref. = no)
Yes	-0.302	***	-0.302	***	-0.302	***	-0.302	***	-0.302	***
Education (Ref. = ISCED 5–6)
ISCED 4–5	0.378	***	0.378	***	0.378	***	0.378	***	0.378	***
ISCED 0–2	0.564	***	0.564	***	0.564	***	0.564	***	0.564	***
Left–right	0.091	***	0.088	***	0.090	***	0.090	***	0.087	***
Context-level variables
Inflow foreigners [BE]	-0.117		-0.322	***	-0.254	***	-0.255	***	-0.327	***
Inflow foreigners [WE]	-0.059	***	-0.061	***	-0.059	***	-0.059	***	-0.059	***
Exclusionary Discourse [BE]	0.086		0.284	***	0.281	***	0.283	***	0.242	***
Exclusionary Discourse [WE]	0.061	***	0.061	***	0.051	***	0.061	***	0.051	***
Inclusionary Discourse [BE]	-0.001		-0.096		-0.094		-0.079		-0.067
Inclusionary Discourse [WE]	-0.039	***	-0.039	***	-0.039	***	-0.042	***	-0.040	***
GDP/c [BE]	-0.050		0.221	**	0.220	**	0.221	**	0.219	**
GDP/c [WE]	-0.073	**	-0.075	**	-0.074	**	-0.075	**	-0.075	**
Left–right [BE]			-1.581	***	-1.577	***	-1.582	***	-1.574	***
Cross-level interactions
Left–right X Inflow foreigners [BE]			0.051	*					0.056	**
Left–right X Inflow foreigners [WE]			0.013	*					0.002
Left–right X Exclusionary Discourse [BE]					0.001				0.031
Left–right X Exclusionary Discourse [WE]					0.037	***			0.036	***
Left–right X Inclusionary Discourse [BE]							-0.012		-0.021
Left–right X Inclusionary Discourse [WE]							0.012	*	0.004
Constant	-0.320	***	-0.306	***	-0.309	***	-0.309	***	-0.305	***
Variance components	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)	Var	(se)
Country level (between country)
Var (Constant)	0.052	(0.016)	0.052	(0.021)	0.056	(0.024)	0.056	(0.024)	0.051	(0.020)
Var (Left–right)	0.014	(0.004)	0.011	(0.004)	0.014	(0.004)	0.014	(0.004)	0.011	(0.003)
Cov (Constant, left–right)	0.001	(0.008)	-0.016	(0.008)	-0.020	(0.010)	-0.019	(0.010)	-0.015	(0.008)
Country–year level (within country)
Var (Constant)	0.015	(0.001)	0.015	(0.001)	0.015	(0.001)	0.015	(0.001)	0.015	(0.001)
Var (Left–right)	0.003	(0.000)	0.003	(0.000)	0.002	(0.000)	0.003	(0.000)	0.002	(0.000)
Cov (Constant, left–right)	-0.001	(0.001)	-0.001	(0.001)	-0.001	(0.000)	-0.001	(0.001)	-0.001	(0.000)
Var (Residual)	0.815	(0.002)	0.815	(0.002)	0.815	(0.002)	0.815	(0.002)	0.815	(0.002)

Notes: * p<.05, ** p<.01, *** p<.001 (one-sided tests). Estimates are based on multiple imputations (m=5). For variance estimates, we report standard errors (se) instead of significance-levels. N(country)=22, N(country-year)=290, N(individual)=322,044. The within-country effects of left–right is labelled as ‘Left–right’, while the between-country effect is labelled ‘Left–right [BE]’. The latter effect is not of any substantial interest but necessary to make the former a strict within-country estimate.

When tested separately, the interactions between political orientation on one hand and actual inflow, inclusionary discourse and exclusionary discourse on the other are all significantly positive (one-sided tests), but the interaction with exclusionary discourse is about three times the SS of the other two interaction effects. The conditional effects from three separate models, each including only one cross-level interaction, are shown in the upper panel of Figure 28.1 (models M12, M13 and M14 in Table 28.4). These models suggest that polarisation between the political left and right increases when the actual inflow of foreigners increases, as suggested in Hypothesis 3. More importantly, polarisation between the political poles increases with political elite discourses – independent of whether these discourses are positive or negative, as suggested in Hypothesis 5. This is particularly interesting because the main effects of exclusionary and inclusionary discourse are in the opposite direction. Put differently, exclusionary political elites, on average, lead to more hostile attitudes and this effect is stronger for those on the political right, leading to a polarisation between left and right. Inclusionary political elites, on the other hand, generally reduce anti-immigrant attitudes, but primarily on the political left. This also results in polarisation between the left and the right. In other words, inclusionary discourses may be able to counteract exclusionary discourses on the aggregate level, but they resonate with different parts of society. Consequently, both kinds of discourse may increase polarisation between left and right.

When all three interactions are tested simultaneously, only the interaction with exclusionary discourse remains significant (at the .1 per cent level, one-sided test), while the other two interactions are no longer significant. This, however, may also be due to the high collinearity in the model, which simultaneously includes three cross-level interactions with and a random slope of the same individual-level variable. The interaction effects from this complete model are depicted in the lower panel of Figure 28.1. Exclusionary discourse is clearly the strongest driver of polarisation between left and right. The conditional effect of left–right self-placement varies between 0.016, when exclusionary discourse is at its minimum, and 0.2455 when it is at its maximum. The interactions with actual inflow and inclusionary discourse are much smaller. In the separate models (upper panel of Figure 28.1), this is also reflected in the variance reductions in the random slope of the left–right self-placement. While the interaction effects with actual immigration and inclusionary discourse explain less than 3 per cent of within-country variation in the effect of political ideology, the interaction with exclusionary discourse explains 23 per cent of the variation in the slope. Again, exclusionary discourse seems to be the main driver of polarisation between left and right.

Immigration and immigration-related discourses may polarise people not only along ideological lines, but also regarding educational levels. In the next step, we test the cross-level interactions with education. Figure 28.2 summarises these results. Again, the upper panel shows results from three separate models, in which education interacts with only one of the macro-level variables, while the lower panel presents results from a combined model, in which all three macro-level variables are interacted simultaneously. All models include random slopes for the educational levels at the country- and country-year level. The full models are in the online appendix (Section A, Table OA1). Although we find one significant interaction in the separate models, the overall pattern of the estimated conditional effects clearly speaks against the hypotheses of increasing polarisation based on education levels (H4 and H6). In the separate models (upper panel in Figure 28.2), exclusionary discourse has a significant negative effect on lower-educated individuals, reducing the polarisation between those with high and low educations. This relationship is the opposite of what hypothesis H6 suggests, but we do not view this model as an indicator of decreasing polarisation either. In fact, there is no consistent effect across the educational groups, as the model also suggests that polarisation between those of high and mid-level education increases at the same time. In the combined model, we do not find any significant interaction between the three country-level variables of interest and educational levels of the respondents.

A series of six line graphs illustrating predicted anti-immigrant sentiment in relation to different factors, with lines representing three education levels I S C E D 0–2, 3–4, and 5–6. Each graph includes shaded confidence intervals. The top row and bottom row display results for the inflow of foreigners, exclusionary political discourse, and inclusionary political discourse. Across most graphs, individuals with higher education ISCED 5–6 show lower predicted anti-immigrant sentiment than those with lower education ISCED 0–2, particularly under conditions of stronger exclusionary political discourse.

Figure 28.2 Cross-level interaction effects with education, conditioned on within-country variation in three country-level variables.

Notes: * p<.05, ** p<.01, *** p<.001, one-sided tests (significance stars in boxes relate to the estimated within effect of the cross-level interaction itself, while the 95%-confidence intervals of the conditional effect are based on additional uncertainty from the complete regression function). All estimates use multiple imputation (m=5). The upper panel shows three separate models, each including only the shown cross-level interaction (models M17, M18 and M19 in Table OA1 in the online appendix https://www.tandfonline.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1080%2F1369183X.2022.2132222&file=cjms_a_2132222_sm3268.pdf). The lower panel shows the three cross-level interactions estimated from a combined model (model M20), which includes them all simultaneously. Full mo.dels are shown in section A, Table OA1, in the online appendix.

Robustness checks

Multi-level models with countries are characterised by a low number of higher-level clusters and therefore are at risk of highly influential cases (van der Meer, te Grotenhuis and Pelzer 2010; Schmidt-Catran et al 2019). We therefore tested model M10 (compare Table 28.1), which led us to conclude that actual inflow as well as inclusionary and exclusionary discourses have significant effects on anti-immigrant attitudes, with a delete-one approach. One at a time, we excluded each of the 22 countries from the estimation sample and re-estimated the model.[92] The results are presented in Figure 28.3, which shows the within-country effects of the three country-level variables of interest. Overall, we see these results as a confirmation of our conclusion from the full sample, as results are quite stable.

A series of three separate plots showing the coefficient estimates and confidence intervals for the effect of Inflow foreigners coefficients range from minus 0.1 to minus 0.02, Exclusionary discourse coefficients range from 0 to 0.1, and Inclusionary discourse coefficients range from minus 0.08 to 0 across 24 European countries. Each country, identified by a two-letter code on the vertical axis, has a point estimate marked by a dot and an associated horizontal line representing its confidence interval.

Figure 28.3 Country-level within effects from delete-one estimation (M10).

Notes: Compare Table 28.1 for explanation of country codes. We re-estimated model M10, excluding each of the countries one at a time. The presented coefficients are the within-country effects from the three country-level variables of interest. The dots represent the point estimates and the lines represent 90% confidence intervals, which, if they do not overlap with the vertical line at values 0, indicate significance at the 5% level with a one-sided test. Estimates are based on multiple imputations (m=3).

We also tested the cross-level interaction models (M15 and M20) with a delete-one approach. Figure 28.4 shows the results for model M15. With the full sample, the within-country interaction between exclusionary discourse and political orientation was significantly positive. This result was confirmed in all models of the delete-one approach. In fact, two outliers (Hungary and Spain) drag the interaction effect between negative political discourse and left–right-self-placement towards zero, indicating that the effect may be even stronger. In other words: our conclusion of a positive significant effect is conservative. Overall, we conclude that our results are sufficiently robust with regard to outliers at the country level. The delete-one results for model M20 are presented in the online appendix (section B, Figure OA1) and confirm that there are no consistent interaction effects between education levels and the country-level variables. In sum, the delete-one robustness checks support the effects identified in models M10 and M15. Therefore, we tested these two models with a variety of additional checks to ensure that these effects are robust.

Three separate plots showing the country-specific coefficient estimates and confidence intervals for the interaction effects of Left-right political orientation with Inflow coefficients range from minus 0.02 to 0.02, Exclusion coefficients range from 0.02 to 0.07, and Inclusion coefficients range from minus 0.01 to 0.015 across 24 European countries. Each country is identified by a two-letter code on the vertical axis, with a dot marking the point estimate and an associated horizontal line representing its confidence interval.

Figure 28.4 Cross-level interactions with left–right (within effects) from delete-one estimation (M15).

Notes: Compare Table 28.1 for explanation of country codes. We re-estimated model M15, excluding each of the countries one at a time. The presented coefficients are the within-country cross-level interactions between inflow of foreigners (in % of population), exclusionary political discourse and inclusionary political discourse. The dots represent the point estimates and the lines represent 90% confidence intervals, which, if they do not overlap with the vertical line at values 0, indicate significance at the 5% level with a one-sided test. Estimates are based on multiple imputations (m=3).

The models M10 and M15 have been re-estimated with an alternative operationalisation of the discourse variables, in which we used not linear interpolation but forward interpolation. 480.This results in a step function rather than the continuous function we obtained from linear interpolation. We thereby follow Bohman (2011) and Mitchell (2021), who have worked with the same data and opted for this alternative (for more information, see section F in the online appendix). With this alternative operationalisation, the main effects decrease in size – by 35 per cent for exclusionary and 24 per cent for inclusionary discourse – but they remain significant. The interaction with the ideological position is unaffected by the operationalisation. Please see Section B and Table OA2 in the online appendix for details. Finally, we have re-estimated models M10 and M15 without a time trend to make sure that its inclusion does not produce methodological artefacts. Apart from small changes in the coefficients, the results are substantially identical. We also estimated models which allowed 481.the time trend to vary across countries. This was done in a fixed-effects framework, as these models did not converge with a random effects specification. The results are presented in section C of the online appendix and show that our conclusions remain robust.

Multi-level models impose distributional assumptions about the random effects and shrink estimates towards the normal distribution. An alternative is a two-stage approach (Gelman 2005), which does not shrink towards the normal distribution and generally imposes fewer restrictions. This is because any individual-level variable’s effect is freely estimated for each country, while the multi-level models restrict all individual-level effects without a random slope to being equal across countries. We therefore estimated two-stage models to test the main effects and the cross-level interactions for robustness. These models confirm our results, as they replicate the effects from the multi-level models. Please see Section B and Table OA3 in the online appendix for details.

Finally, we tested our models with a fixed effects approach, as suggested by Giesselmann and Schmidt-Catran (2019). We do so because the decomposition of multiple cross-level interactions and main effects into within and between components is very complex, as it requires multiple components in the fixed part and in the random part of the regression equation. To ensure that the models yield correct results, we identified the within effects also with a fixed effects approach, which is more straightforward. These models confirmed our estimation results from the RE models (see Section C in the online appendix).

Overall, we conclude from the robustness checks that the main effects of our country-level variables are robust, yet the size of the discourse effects decreases with an alternative operationalisation. The cross-level interaction of exclusionary political discourse and political orientation, in contrast, is very robust against different specifications.

Conclusion

In contemporary Europe, few social phenomena are discussed as vigorously as immigration. However, the relationship between immigration and public opinion is still subject to scholarly debate. In this study, we examined how both actual immigration and political discourses on this issue shape anti-immigration attitudes. Our results reveal that, in contrast to the argument of the group threat theory, rising immigration numbers are associated with less negative attitudes. At the same time, political elite discourses play an important role: when political elites in a country become more positive on immigration-related issues, Europeans – on average – tend to be more open as well. On the other hand, the public becomes more hostile toward foreigners in times where political elites are more exclusionary.

Crucially, our results show that all these developments can lead to attitude polarisation along ideological lines. We found strong evidence that the gap in attitudes between the political left and right increases when political elites become more exclusionary. Some models also suggested that increasing immigration inflows and inclusionary discourse could increase polarisation. This implies that even positive and inclusionary rhetoric can have the unintended consequence of dividing the public. Modelling all interactions simultaneously, however, suggests that exclusionary discourses trump inclusionary ones in terms of attitude polarisation. We find no evidence for a polarisation based on educational levels.

In sum, our findings clearly rule out realistic group conflict as a driver of inter-group hostility. If anything, more immigration was associated with attitudes that are more positive. Yet, the results are in line with the broader argument that perceiving newcomers as threatening triggers exclusionary attitudes. As we show, however, the cause of these threat perceptions is not the actual conditions (i.e. immigration itself), but rather how national political elites frame immigration. This implies that the national context does matter, but not so much in a demographic sense (mirroring the findings of the meta-analysis of Pottie-Sherman and Wilkes 2017). Rather, political discourses often concern, for example, the national way of life in a given country. Thus, it is likely that these discourses have nation-wide outreach (or at least are less limited to certain sub-national areas). In other words, from a country perspective, discursive aspects are more important than objective conditions.

Our findings extend the group threat paradigm in a second relevant way: In addition to the focus on negative attitudes that dominates the group threat literature, our findings suggest an “anti-threat” effect, with positive discourses being associated with more welcoming attitudes. Since decreasing out-group hostility is an important goal, focusing on such positive effects could be a promising approach for future research and a fruitful political strategy to enhance inter-group relations.

The positive association between immigration and attitudes might be seen as somewhat puzzling. The most popular explanation for this is inter-group contact. Pettigrew (1998) most prominently presents the argument that interaction between ethnic groups can have the power to reduce ethnic and racial prejudice. However, we are cautious to apply this explanation to our study, as the national level is a very broad one. It is unlikely that people have contact with immigrants nationwide. Prior research has instead shown that contact is more likely on local levels (Weber 2015). Another explanation for our finding is that immigrants may self-select into more friendly countries. This should be particularly true for the years 2015/16, when refugees fled primarily to more welcoming countries such as Germany and Sweden. The dynamics between a “welcoming culture” and selective immigration could be subject to further research. Similarly, our proxy for the political elite climate is somewhat crude, as it is based on party manifestos and thereby limited to election years. To solve this, we imputed values for the years between elections. Future research might want to use a more fine-grained measure of political rhetoric, perhaps by drawing upon parliamentary debates, politicians’ posts on social media or press releases (Gessler and Hunger 2021). One should keep in mind, though, that collecting such data systematically across a large number of countries and over a long time span would be a very demanding project. Finally, we deliberately abstracted from the actual content of elite discourses to enable our cross-national and longitudinal comparisons. However, future research might want to look at the effects of specific arguments in more detail.

References

Abou-Chadi, T., Cohen, D. and Wagner, M. (2021) “The centre-right versus the radical right: The role of migration issues and economic grievances”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, no. 1, 1–19. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1853903.

Alba, R., Rumbaut, R. G. and Marotz, K. (2005) “A distorted nation: Perceptions of racial/ethnic group sizes and attitudes toward immigrants and other minorities”, Social Forces, vol. 84, no. 2, 901–919. doi: 10.1353/sof.2006.0002.

Alonso, S. and da Fonseca, S. C. (2012) “Immigration, left and right”, Party Politics, vol. 18, no. 6, 865–884. doi: 10.1177/1354068810393265.

Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P. Brown, T. W. Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Fallin Hunzaker, M. B., Lee, J., Mann, M., Merhout, F. and Volfovsky, A. (2018) “Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 37, 9216–9221. doi: 10.1177/1474022214539267.

Billiet, J., Meuleman, B. and De Witte, H. (2014) “The relationship between ethnic threat and economic insecurity in times of economic crisis: Analysis of European social survey data”, Migration Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 135–161.

Blalock, H. M. (1967) Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations, New York NY: Wiley.

Blumer, H. (1958) “Race prejudice as a sense of group position”, The Pacific Sociological Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 3–7.

Bohman, A. (2011) “Articulated antipathies: Political influence on anti-immigrant attitudes”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 52, no. 6, 457–477. doi: 10.1177/0020715211428182.

Bohman, A. and Hjerm, M. (2016) “In the wake of radical right electoral success: A cross-country comparative study of anti-immigration attitudes over time”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 42, no. 11, 1729–1747. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2015.1131607.

Card, D., Christian Dustmann, D. and Preston, I. (2012) “Immigration, wages and compositional amenities”, Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 10, no. 1, 78–119. doi: 10.1111/j.1542–4774.2011.01051.x.

Careja, R. (2015) “Party discourse and prejudiced attitudes toward migrants in Western Europe at the beginning of 2000s”, International Migration Review, vol. 50, no. 3, 599–627. doi: 10.1111/imre.12174.

Cavaille, C. and Marshall, J. (2019) “Education and anti-immigration attitudes: Evidence from compulsory schooling reforms across Western Europe”, American Political Science Review, vol. 113, no. 1, 254–263. doi: 10.1017/S0003055418000588.

Ceobanu, A. M. and Escandell, X. (2010) “Comparative analyses of public attitudes toward immigrants and immigration using multinational survey data: A review of theories and research”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 36, no. 1, 309–328.

Chong, D. and Druckman, J. N. (2007) “A theory of framing and opinion formation in competitive elite environments”, Journal of Communication, vol. 57, no. 1, 99–118. doi: 10.1111/j.1460–2466.2006.00331.x.

Czymara, C. S. (2020) “Propagated preferences? Political elite discourses and Europeans’ openness toward Muslim immigrants”, International Migration Review, vol. 54, no. 4, 1212–1237. doi: 10.1177/0197918319890270.

Czymara, C. S. (2021) “Attitudes toward refugees in contemporary Europe: A longitudinal perspective on cross-national differences”, Social Forces, vol. 99, no. 3, 1306–1333. doi: 10.1093/sf/soaa055.

Czymara, C. S. and Dochow, S. (2018) “Mass media and concerns about immigration in Germany in the 21^st century: Individual-level evidence over 15 years”, European Sociological Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 381–401. doi: 10.1093/esr/jcy019.

Czymara, C. S. and Gorodzeisky, A. (2024) “Hostility on Twitter in the aftermath of terror attacks”, Journal of Computational Social Science, vol. 7, 1305–1325, doi: 10.1007/s42001-024-00272-9.

de Vries, C. E., Hakhverdian, A. and Lancee, B. (2013) “The dynamics of voters’ left/right identification: The role of economic and cultural attitudes”, Political Science Research and Methods, vol. 1, no. 2, 223–238. doi: 10.1017/psrm.2013.4.

Fairbrother, M. (2014) “Two multilevel modeling techniques for analyzing comparative longitudinal survey datasets”, Political Science Research and Methods, vol. 2, no. 1, 119–140. doi: 10.1017/psrm.2013.24.

Flores, R. D. (2018) “Can elites shape public attitudes toward immigrants? Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Election”, Social Forces, vol. 96, no. 4, 1649–1690. doi: 10.1093/sf/soy001.

Geese, L. (2024) “Tough positions, trustful voters? How mainstream party position-taking on immigration shapes political trust and its impact on far-right voting”, Government and Opposition, 1–27. doi: 10.1017/gov.2024.6.

Gelman, A. (2005) “Two-stage regression and multilevel modeling: A commentary”, Political Analysis, vol. 13, no. 4, 459–461.

Gessler, T. and Hunger, S. (2021) “How the refugee crisis and radical right parties shape party competition on immigration”, Political Science Research and Methods, 1–21. doi: 10.1017/psrm.2021.64.

Giesselmann, M. and Schmidt-Catran, A. W. (2019) “Getting the within estimator of cross-level interactions in multilevel models with pooled cross-sections: Why country dummies (sometimes) do not do the job”, Sociological Methodology, vol. 49, no. 1, 190–219. doi: 10.1177/0081175018809150.

Gorodzeisky, A. and Semyonov, M. (2019) “Perceptions and misperceptions: Actual size, perceived size and opposition to immigration in European societies”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 612–630. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2018.1550158.

Green-Pedersen, C. and Otjes, S. (2019) “A hot topic? Immigration on the agenda in Western Europe”, Party Politics, vol. 25, no. 3, 424–434. doi: 10.1177/1354068817728211.

Hainmueller, J. and Hiscox, M. J. (2007) “Educated preferences: Explaining attitudes toward immigration in Europe”, International Organization, vol. 61, 399–442.

Hainmueller, J. and Hopkins, D. J. (2014) “Public attitudes toward immigration’. Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 17, no. 1, 225–249. doi: 10.1146/annurev-polisci-102512-194818.

Heisig, J. P. and Schaeffer, M. (2019) “Why you should always include a random slope for the lower-level variable involved in a cross-level interaction”, European Sociological Review, vol. 52, no. 2, 258–279. doi: 10.1093/esr/jcy053.

Heizmann, B. and Huth, N. (2021) “Economic conditions and perceptions of immigrants as an economic threat in Europe: Temporal dynamics and mediating processes”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 62, no. 1, 56–82. doi: 10.1177/0020715221993529.

Heizmann, B. and Ziller, C. (2020) “Who is willing to share the burden? Attitudes towards the allocation of asylum seekers in comparative perspective”, Social Forces, vol. 98, no. 2, 1026–1051. doi: 10.1093/sf/soz030.

Herda, D. (2010) “How many immigrants? Foreign-born population innumeracy in Europe”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 4, 674–95. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfq013.

Highton, B. (2009) “Revisiting the relationship between educational attainment and political sophistication”, Journal of Politics, vol. 71, no. 4, 1564–1576. doi: 10.1017/S0022381609990077.

Hjerm, M. (2007) “Do numbers really count? Group threat theory revisited”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 33, no. 8, 1253–1275.

Hopkins, D. J. (2010) “Politicized places: Explaining where and when immigrants provoke local opposition”, American Political Science Review, vol. 104, no. 1, 40–60.

Hutter, S. and Kriesi, H. (2021) “Politicising immigration in times of crisis”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 341–365 doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1853902

Kalogeropoulos, A. and Hopmann, D. N. (2018) “Interpersonal discussions and immigration attitudes”, Communications, vol. 44, no. 2, 185–203 doi: 10.1515/commun-2018-2007.

Kaminski, M. (2015) “All the terrorists are migrants”, Politico.Eu. [Online], Available: www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-interview-terrorists-migrants-eu-russia-putin-borders-schengen/ [25 Aug 2021].

Klingemann, H.-D., Volkens, A., Bara, J., Budge, I. and McDonald, M. D. (2006) Mapping Policy Preferences II: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments in Central and Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990–2003, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Kuntz, A., Davidov, E. and Semyonov, M. (2017) “The dynamic relations between economic conditions and anti-immigrant sentiment: A natural experiment in times of the European economic crisis”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 58, no. 5, 392–415. doi: 10.1177/0020715217690434.

Lancee, B. and Sarrasin, O. (2015) “Educated preferences or selection effects? A longitudinal analysis of the impact of educational attainment on attitudes towards immigrants”, European Sociological Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 490–501. doi: 10.1093/esr/jcv008.

May, A. C. and Czymara, C. S. (2024) “Careless whisper: Political elite discourses activate national identities for far-right voting preferences”, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 30, no. 1, 90–109. doi: 10.1111/nana.12985.

Meltzer, C. E., Eberl, J. M., Theorin, N., Heidenreich, T., Strömbäck, J., Boomgaarden, H. G. and Schemer, C. (2020) “Media effects on policy preferences toward free movement: Evidence from five EU member states”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–19. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1778454.

Meuleman, B., Eldad Davidov, E. and Billiet, J. (2009) “Changing attitudes toward immigration in Europe, 2002–2007: A dynamic group conflict theory approach”, Social Science Research, vol. 38, no. 2, 52–65.

Mitchell, J. (2021) “Social trust and anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe: A longitudinal multi-level analysis”, Frontiers in Sociology, vol. 6, 604884. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.604884.

Müller, K., Blommaert, L., Savelkoul, M., Lubbers, M. and Scheepers, P. (2023) “Political elite discourses and majority members’ beliefs about the prevalence of ethnic discrimination in Europe”, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, vol. 35, no. 2, doi: 10.1093/ijpor/edad003.

Newman, B. J. and Velez, Y. (2014) “Group size versus change? Assessing Americans’ perception of local immigration”, Political Research Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, 93–103. doi: 10.1177/1065912913517303.

Pettigrew, T. F. (1998) “Intergroup contact theory”, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 65–85.

Pottie-Sherman, Y. and Wilkes, R. (2017) “Does size really matter? On the relationship between immigrant group size and anti-immigrant prejudice”, International Migration Review, vol. 51, no. 1, 218–50. doi: 10.1111/imre.12191.

Quillian, L. (1995) “Prejudice as a response to perceived group threat: Population composition and anti-immigrant and racial prejudice in Europe”, American Sociological Review, vol. 60, no. 4, 586.

Rubin, D. B. (2004) Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys, vol. 81. New York NY: Wiley.

Schafer, J. L. (1999) “Multiple imputation: A primer”, Statistical Methods in Medical Research, vol. 8, no. 1, 3–15.

Schemer, C. (2012) “The influence of news media on stereotypic attitudes toward immigrants in a political campaign’”, Journal of Communication, vol. 62, no. 5, 39–57. doi: 10.1111/j.1460–2466.2012.01672.x.

Scheve, K. F. and Slaughter, M. J. (2001) “Labor market competition and individual preferences over immigration policy”, Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 83, no. 1, 133–145. doi: 10.1162/003465301750160108.

Schmidt, A. W. and Spies, D. C. (2014) “Do parties ‘playing the race card’ undermine natives’ support for redistribution? Evidence from Europe”, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 47, no. 4, 519–549. doi: 10.1177/0010414013488542.

Schmidt-Catran, A. W. and Fairbrother, M. (2016) “The random effects in multilevel models: Getting them wrong and getting them right”, European Sociological Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 23–38. doi: 10.1093/esr/jcv090.

Schmidt-Catran, A. W., Fairbrother, M. and Andreß, H. J. (2019) “Multilevel models for the analysis of comparative survey data: Common problems and some solutions”, Kölner Zeitschrift Fur Soziologie Und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 71, 99–128. doi: 10.1007/s11577-019-00607-9.

Schmidt-Catran, A. W. and Czymara, C. S. (2023) “Political elite discourses polarize attitudes toward immigration along ideological lines. A comparative longitudinal analysis of Europe in the 21^st century”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 85–109, doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2022.2132222

Semyonov, M., Raijman, R. and Gorodzeisky, A. (2006) “The rise of anti-foreigner sentiment in European societies, 1988–2000”, American Sociological Review, vol. 71, no. 3, 1988–2000.

Semyonov, M., Raijman, R. and Gorodzeisky, A. (2008) “Foreigners’ impact on European societies: Public views and perceptions in a cross-national comparative perspective”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 49, no. 1, 5–29. doi: 10.1177/0020715207088585.

Semyonov, M., Raijman, R., Tov, A. Y. and Schmidt, P. (2004) “Population size, perceived threat and exclusion: A multiple-indicators analysis of attitudes toward foreigners in Germany”, Social Science Research, vol. 33, no. 4, 681–701.

Sides, J. and Citrin, J. (2007) “European opinion about immigration: The role of identities, interests and information”, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 37, no. 3, 477–502.

Sniderman, P. M., Hagendoorn, L. and Prior, M. (2004) “Predisposing factors and situational triggers: Exclusionary reactions to immigrant minorities”, American Political Science Review, vol. 98, no. 1, 35–49.

Taber, C. S. and Lodge, M. (2006) “Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 50, no. 3, 755–769. doi: 10.1111/j.1540–5907.2006.00214.x.

Thorisdottir, H., Jost, J. T., Liviatan, I. and Shrout, P. E. (2007) “Psychological needs and values underlying left-right political orientation: Cross-national evidence from Eastern and Western Europe”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 175–203. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfm008.

van der Brug, W. and Harteveld, E. (2021) “The conditional effects of the refugee crisis on immigration attitudes and nationalism”, European Union Politics, vol. 22, no. 2, 227–247. doi: 10.1177/1465116520988905.

van der Meer, T., te Grotenhuis, M. and Pelzer, B. (2010) “Influential cases in multilevel modeling: A methodological comment”, American Sociological Review, vol. 75, no. 1, 173–178.

van der Waal, J. and de Koster, W. (2015) “Why do the less educated oppose trade openness? A test of three explanations in the Netherlands”, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, vol. 2, no. 3–4, 313–344.

van Spanje, J. (2010) “Contagious parties: Anti-immigration parties and their impact on other parties’ immigration stances in contemporary Western Europe”, Party Politics, vol. 16, no. 5, 563–586. doi: 10.1177/1354068809346002.

Weber, H. (2015) “National and regional proportion of immigrants and perceived threat of immigration: A three-level analysis in Western Europe”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 56, no. 2, 116–140. doi: 10.1177/0020715215571950.

Weber, H. (2022) “The educational divide over feelings about ethnic minorities: Does more education really lead to less prejudice?”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 228–247

Werner, A., Lacewell, O. and Volkens, A. (2015) Manifesto Coding Instructions, 5^th revised edition, Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.

Wong, C. J. (2007) ‘“Little” and “Big” pictures in our heads. Race, local context and innumeracy about racial groups in the United States”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 3, 393–412.

Zaller, J. R. (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

29. Countering the myth of Russia’s “ideological vacuum”

Three alternative ways of doing ideology in post-Soviet times

Juliette Faure and Guillaume Sauvé

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-37

Introduction

Starting from the 1960s, American sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell and Alex Inkeles argued that the modernisation of the Soviet Union would lead to its convergence with the West, thereby marking the “end of ideology” (Bell 1962). They identified some of the aspects of the Soviet system such as the professionalisation of its economy, the developing intellectual autonomy of academics and the growth of techno-scientific expertise as evidence of the ongoing “secularisation” of Soviet social sciences and its progressive separation from ideology (Engerman 2009: 197). “End-of-ideology” theories particularly gained momentum after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Michael Freeden has stressed, because these theories of ideology were “modelled on our experiences of totalitarianism”, they equated the passing of totalitarianism with “the passing of ideology” in general and the beginning of a “post-ideological age” ( Freeden 2005: 250).

This is especially true in studies of Russia. In contrast to Soviet Russia, which was considered the archetypal example of an ideocratic regime, the first decade of post-Soviet Russia has been widely regarded as devoid of ideology. The term “ideological vacuum”, which had been used to describe the effects of ideological erosion in the late Soviet period (Reddaway 1982), became a common characterisation of the state of “moral disorientation” in Russia in the 1990s. Through regular repetition in journalistic and academic discourses, the idea gained a character of self-evidence, leading scholars to routinely mention it as an objective assessment. Thus, for example, political scientist Mark Kramer casually mentions that “the basic problem [of the Yeltsin era] was that an ideological vacuum had been left by the collapse of Soviet Marxist–Leninist ideology” (Kramer 2019: 105).

How accurate is the notion of an “ideological vacuum” as a depiction of the Russian ideational landscape of the 1990s? It depends on the interpretation given to the notion. In many cases the notion is framed in relative terms, expressing the idea that post-Soviet Russian society is less ideologised than in the Soviet era. Such a statement is hard to disagree with, although the idea that there are “levels” of ideologisation deserves further reflection. Crucially, the notion of an “ideological vacuum” is also often used in a much more forceful sense, to describe a situation considered exceptional in history and pathological in its consequences for Russian society and the post-Soviet regime. Implicit in this normative assessment is the assumption that the “vacuum” must be filled for a given society to thrive, as articulated in typical fashion by a Russian sociologist at the time:

the greatest chaos reigns today ... in people’s heads, in the sphere of social consciousness. Moral reference points have been lost. … Russia’s citizens have little sense of where the country is going, what kind of society we are building and so forth. [Yet] Russians must have an adequate notion of themselves, of their country’s mission and role in the world and so forth.

(Batalov 1997: 7, 18)

This chapter aims to challenge this second, normative version of the “ideological vacuum” thesis, of which Russia in the 1990s is reputed to be a paradigmatic example.

In academic literature, this thesis exists in two main variations: an “ideological vacuum” experienced within society and a vacuum of ideological supply in the political field. The idea of a vacuum in society is often formulated as an explanation for the rise of reactionary movements – communists or nationalists – in the Russia of the 1990s (Scherrer 2013; Shlapentokh 2014; Inglehart 2020). Its most elaborated and influential formulation can be found in anthropologist Serguei Oushakine’s landmark article In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia ( Oushakine 2000). The article argues that Russian society of the late 1990s is in a state of extreme disorientation and identity crisis, as it lacks symbolic structures that would allow people to provide meaning to their present life and future. Although situations of “aphasia” have occurred elsewhere – Oushakine draws the concept from structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson – the degree of “symbolic impotence” in contemporary Russian society is said to be “a historically unique phenomenon” (Oushakine 2000: 1001). It is also deemed highly problematic because “the missed chance to offer a new (ideological) horizon … ‘locked’ the major part of the population within the old frame of symbolic (e.g., Soviet) references” (Oushakine 2000: 1003), thus explaining the wave of nostalgia for the previous regime. According to Oushakine, this disorientation has its cause in the lack of mediatory institutions that would offer Russians a coherent and positive vision of their present and future; in other words, a lack of political ideologies supply. This leads to the second variation of the “ideological vacuum” thesis.

The most influential formulation of the “ideological vacuum” thesis in the Russian political field has been made by political scientist Stephen Hanson in his book Post-Imperial democracies (2010). The book highlights “the near absence of any coherent ideological basis for politics after communism’s collapse”, and more specifically the Russian political parties’ inability or reluctance to articulate political ideologies, which the author defines as “clear and consistent definitions of the principles of membership in a desired political order” (Hanson 2010: xviii, xiv). Once again, the Russia of the 1990s is deemed exceptional, at least when compared with two other cases of democratic regimes emerging on the ruins of an empire, that of the Third French Republic and Weimar Germany. In these two cases, political parties played a crucial role, rallying strong constituencies around the great ideological banners of the time.

Interestingly, Hanson explains the Russian specificity by the lack of social demand for ideology, thus unwillingly closing the argumentative loop with Oushakine’s position. Following Hanson, Russian politicians’ reluctance to engage in ideology-building reflects widespread disdain for ideology in reaction to the exhausting experience of decades of Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. As he argues, the absence of successful party ideologies is problematic because it prevents effective party organisation and mobilisation. The lack of ideology on the supply side, in this sense, is seen as the main cause of the failure of Russia’s entire party system and, consequently, its inability to challenge the executive power, thus facilitating the establishment of a new form of authoritarianism. Hanson’s argument has been influential; it is explicitly referenced in the field of Russian studies (Gelman 2015) and beyond (Chen 2016) as an authoritative description of the absence of ideological offerings in Russia of the 1990s and a persuasive indication of the political problems it entails. His book greatly contributed to consecrating as established knowledge the idea that Russia ushered in the 1990s in a “post-ideological era”, as he would later put it (Hanson 2011). This idea, in turn, constitutes the background of many analyses of later developments in Russian politics of the 2010s that are said, by contrast, to be marked by the return of ideology (Lipman 2013; Rodkiewicz and Rogoża 2015).

In contrast with the “ideological vacuum” thesis, in this chapter we follow in the footsteps of authors who have demonstrated that “end-of-ideology” theories rely on a misconception of ideology. As Jonathan Leader Maynard has pointed out, these theories are based on a “true believer model of ideology”, which narrowly defines ideologies as rigid, explicit and consistent belief systems that provide comprehensive prescriptions for action (Leader Maynard 2022: 28). Instead, we use a broader conceptualisation of ideology as a form of symbolic language constitutive of social life. More specifically, we use Karl Mannheim’s definition of ideology as a collection of shared meanings and interpretations that contains a “crystallization of the experiences of a certain group” and defines membership in this group (Mannheim 2015: 19). Ideology, Mannheim insists, is a collective practice that is dependent on group existence and is rooted in action. Following Mannheim, Freeden describes ideologies as “those systems of political thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended, through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit and then act on that understanding” ( Freeden 1996: 3). Ideology, in this broad sense, is understood as a multi-faceted ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon. This theorisation of ideology accounts for the morphological evolution of ideologies from all-encompassing macro phenomena exemplified by 19^th-century ideologies and 20^th-century totalitarian ideologies (cf. Freeden’s chapter in this volume) to less developed micro ideologies with limited scope and ambition, which Freeden has termed “thin ideologies” ( Freeden 2003: 94). While earlier macro ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism were also not necessarily fully consistent,[93] thin ideologies are specifically characterised by their lack of comprehensiveness and by their greater slipperiness, eclecticism and malleability.

Our broader conception of ideology implies a wider consideration of the forms and sources of ideological supply in the political field. This chapter is based on extensive empirical studies of political and intellectual networks in early post-Soviet Russia (Faure 2025; Sauvé 2025),[94] in which we examined ideological discourse not only among political parties but also in a variety of other “mediatory institutions” – to use Oushakine’s expression – ranging from informal organisations and discussion clubs to newspapers, scientific institutions and state bodies. By following the interactions of key protagonists in the political field of the time, we considered multiple genres of public discourse, some of them less prone to doctrinal consistency than party documents; from editorial diatribes to low-key expert advice, from petitions and round-table discussions on day-to-day issues to speculative philosophical meditations on Russia’s civilizational fate. We believe that our inductive empirical approach, uncovering ideological supply in places and formats less frequently studied, allows for a better understanding of its transformation and concrete effects in the post-Soviet era.

In contestation of the established viewpoint, best formulated by Hanson, our argument is that the 1990s in Russia represents a period of ideological rearrangements instead of ideological vacuum, in which the fragmentation of the formerly predominant macro-ideological paradigm of Marxism-Leninism led the way to various types of thin ideologies. In this respect, our analysis concurs with research carried out in other cases such as China. As different scholars have shown, the waning of Maoism as a comprehensive ideological system in the 1980s did not lead to a decline in the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological work; rather, it has led to its evolution toward what they have depicted as an “eclectic mix of values” (Brady 2012: 68), “a highly fluid framing process, where Marxist–Leninist and other traditional tenets of socialist ideology are constantly recombined with new political concepts” (Holbig 2013: 64) or a “more concealed, more nuanced and in some spaces more flexible” ideology (Brown and Bērziņa-Čerenkova 2018: 325).

To support our argument, we identify three types of ideological languages that developed throughout the 1990s in Russia, which we broadly define as “Westernism”, “national–patriotism” and “managerial centrism”. While they have been disqualified as ideologies by “ideological vacuum” theses, we wish to demonstrate, on the contrary, that they still count as ideologies. Indeed, despite their complex relationships with the concept of ideology, which we characterised as rejecting ideology, merging ideologies and transcending ideologies, they continue to operate with what Freeden has identified as the constitutive dynamic of ideology, i.e. to define and decontest the meanings of concepts and fix them into distinctive systems of ideas that can be studied independently (Freeden 1996: 76). However, unlike fully developed ideologies, these ideological languages are “thin” due to their high degree of eclecticism and malleability. We further demonstrate that, by losing sight of these renewed forms of ideological production, “ideological vacuum” theses are blind to the important effects that thin ideologies continue to exert on the formation of social groups and the structuration of the political field.

Westernism: Rejecting ideology

Actors

In the late 1980s, with the launching of ambitious liberalising reforms dubbed perestroika (“reconstruction”) and the opening of the late Soviet public sphere, a coalition emerged in support of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies, comprising two distinct groups. The first consisted of elite intellectual figures – artists, journalists and scholars from humanities and natural sciences – primarily centred in Moscow and Leningrad. They were joined by a broader intelligentsia, including teachers, engineers and other middle-class professionals from all over the country, even from remote industrial cities (Kotkin 1991). Notable members included key advisers to Gorbachev, such as sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaia,[95] IR analyst Anatolii Cherniaev and literary scholar Dmitrii Likhachev, along with influential figures like physicist Andrei Sakharov, economist Gavriil Popov and historians Iurii Afanasiev and Leonid Batkin, who became the opinion-makers (vlastiteli dum, literally “masters of minds”) of the glasnost era.

The second group, largely unseen in public life until the early 1990s, suddenly emerged as advisers to the new post-Soviet ruling class. Comprising technocrats predominantly trained in economics like Egor Gaidar, Anatolii Chubais and Grigorii Iavlinskii and self-styled expert advisers like Andranik Migranian and Vitalii Naishul, they prided themselves on their technical knowledge of economic reform and state-building.

During perestroika, reformist intellectuals and technocrats formed a coalition, initially in support of Gorbachev’s reforms and later backing Boris Yeltsin, a more radical reformer who proposed a swift transition to liberal democracy and a market economy akin to Polish “shock therapy”. This coalition found organisational backing in the Democratic Russia movement, founded in 1990 in opposition to the Communist Party and in support of Yeltsin.

With the ousting of the Communist Party from power in 1991, democratic Russia found itself in search of a new purpose. It quickly declined and split, giving way to two main rival branches within the emerging party system by late 1993. One branch, led by Iavlinskii and key figures from the perestroika era, including Iurii Boldyrev, Viktor Sheinis and Viacheslav Igrunov, formed the party Iabloko, opposing Yeltsin’s policies and garnering support from the intelligentsia disenfranchised by severe budget cuts in the fields of science, education and culture. The other branch comprised a series of “pocket parties” such as Choice of Russia, Democratic Choice of Russia and the Union of Right Forces, created in support of Yeltsin’s policies in each election. These parties, led by technocrats like Egor Gaidar, Sergei Kirienko and Aleksei Uliukaev, aimed to represent the interests of the emerging entrepreneurial class. Taken together, all these parties in favour of liberalising reforms – and an array of other ones of even smaller scale – never gained more than 15 per cent of public support, as their project came to be associated with the extreme hardships endured by the Russian population. Elite figures from this coalition managed nonetheless to retain prominent positions throughout the 1990s, serving as appointed members of the government and playing vocal roles in the media, NGOs and academia.

Concepts

Members of this political camp typically referred to themselves as “democrats”, “liberals” or both. However, these labels can be quite misleading, as they imply a similarity with the concepts as understood in established liberal democracies, thus suggesting that Russians – and their counterparts in Eastern Europe – were merely “catching up” with the West (Habermas 1990). This presumption was widely embraced at the time among Russian “democrats” and “liberals” themselves, as well as their supportive Western observers (Fish 1995; McFaul 2001). However, in retrospect, it has been found to lead to significant misunderstandings (Lukin 2000; Krastev and Holmes 2019; Sauvé 2025). Following Freeden’s morphological approach to ideology (Freeden 1996), the ideational production of this coalition can be fruitfully characterised in a concentric arrangement, identifying one core concept – Westernism – whose meaning varies according to the adjacent concepts with which it is associated: democracy and freedom.

Westernism, known in Russian as zapadnichestvo, has been a prominent strand of Russian thought since at least the mid-19^th century ( Tolz 2010). It advocates for a “civilizational choice” in favour of the West ( Malinova 2017) as a model to be emulated across various domains – political, social, cultural, scientific – often implicitly dismissing the East as inferior and barbaric. During the late 1980s and 1990s, proponents of Westernisation debated whether Russia should rapidly “become Europe” in alignment with its inherent identity (Batkin 1988) or if it should proceed gradually on the “long road to the European home” (Migranian 1989). However, they generally did not question the ultimate destination, if only to the nuance that some argued Russia should emulate the American model rather than Europe as the epitome of Western modernity. As faithful heirs of the Enlightenment, Russian Westernisers espoused a linear and deterministic view of history as progress in knowledge, morality and wealth. In this view, Russia was deemed to be somewhat “backward” and “lagging behind” the West, leading to the frequent euphemistic labelling of Westernisation as “modernisation”. Additionally, in a Hegelian vein, Russia’s historical patterns were seen by Westernisers as accidental particularities destined to be absorbed into the generality of the Western universal, often referred to as “world civilisation” and “universal values”. As Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Kozyrev put it in 1992: “Our first goal in foreign policy is to join the ranks of the civilized world” (Lévesque 2013: 185).

Westernism serves as the core concept of the “liberal–democratic” coalition that emerged in Russia in the late 1980s. It is a fundamental tenet for all its members, while being anathema to the rival coalition of national patriots and a matter of indifference for the rival coalition of managerial “centrists”. However, within the Westerniser camp, there are divergent views on which aspect of the West should be prioritised for emulation. For some, the crucial dimension of the Western model is “democracy”. This is particularly evident among Soviet intellectuals of the “sixtiers” (shestidesiatniki) generation, who had been raised in the humanist ideals of the 1960s and believed that socialism could be perfected – or its flaws mitigated – by importing the best aspects of capitalism, such as representative democracy (Gelman 2020). Reflecting this priority among humanist intellectuals, during perestroika, members of the Westerniser coalition were usually identified as “democrats”.

The label “democrat” was challenged within the Westerniser camp in the early 1990s with the belated appearance – late compared to Poland, for example ( Szacki 1995) – of positive references to “liberalism” as the quintessential progressive Western ideology. Russian self-professed liberals tended to prioritise the adjacent concept of “freedom”, understood as individual negative freedom from state intervention, particularly economic freedom. As a result, it has been convincingly argued that Russian liberalism of the 1990s primarily consisted essentially of economic liberalism ( Malinova 1998). While most Westernisers advocated for both “democracy” and “freedom”, the relative priority given to each concept directly influenced the distribution of forces within the camp in the 1990s: the opposition party Iabloko staunchly advocated for individual rights, yet its strongest stance was the defence of democracy against the authoritarian tendencies of the liberal reformer Yeltsin. Meanwhile, various pro-Kremlin parties championed liberalism in unwavering support of Yeltsin, even at the expense of democratic procedures, believing it was the only means to safeguard freedom against the revanchist tendencies associated with the national patriots.

An anti-ideological activist ideology

The two strands of Russian post-Soviet Westernism held distinct perspectives on the role of ideology, yet they shared a crucial commonality. The viewpoint of the “democrats” was fiercely anti-ideological. In a notable departure from the Bolshevik Promethean endeavour of organising society through scientific knowledge, “democrats” envisaged democracy – and the market – as the natural state of society once freed from the artificial constraints of ideology (Furman 1995). Russian democrats condemned the entire Soviet era as a “Great Experimentation”, not solely for its perceived failure, but precisely for its experimental character – a conscious effort to shape human behaviour rather than allowing the free expression of individual potentialities, as they believed capitalism did (Burtin 1989). Thus, the capital sin of communism was seen to reside precisely in its ideological nature, which implied doctrinal abstractedness and disconnection from reality. Ironically, this position was reminiscent of the criticism of ideology typical of Western conservative thought since the time of Edmund Burke ( Magun 2010; Atnashev 2018). President Yeltsin echoed this perspective in early 1992 when he proclaimed at the United Nations that there would be no further ideology in Russia, but rather the primacy of “democracy, human rights and freedoms, legal and moral standards and political and civil rights” (Breslauer and Dale 1997: 316). Although Yeltsin shifted towards managerial “centrism” in subsequent years, as elaborated below, the anti-ideological stance persisted within the Westerniser camp. Iabloko consistently rejected any ideological affiliation – despite acknowledging liberal influences in its economic agenda – and insisted on identifying itself as the party of “democrats”, in line with the tradition of perestroika intellectuals. Technocratic Westernisers, who occupied government positions and led various short-lived pro-Kremlin parties in the 1990s, for their part readily embraced liberalism as their ideological framework for Russia’s “modernisation” ( Uliukaev 1995).

As seen in an examination of parallel developments in Czechoslovakia, the coalition of Westerniser humanists and technocrats – exemplified there by the alliance of the two Vaclavs: the dissident intellectual Havel and the monetarist economist Klaus – was made possible in Russia as well by a shared “elective affinity” for an “anti-transcendental” perspective on politics (Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley 1998). This perspective eschewed the exercise of power as the precise implementation of an ideological blueprint, instead favouring a social order governed “from afar”, whether through the moral authority of intellectuals or through macro-economic regulations. In this regard and despite occasional self-identification with liberalism, the Westerniser coalition laid the groundwork for the pervasive anti-ideological ethos of post-Soviet Russia – an institutionally fed aversion to explicit and coherent doctrines aimed at shaping the country’s present and future. Nevertheless, it is crucial not to overlook that this ethos originated from a deeply entrenched militant ideological agenda.

National–patriots: Merging ideologies

Actors

This group historically formed towards the end of the 1980s when nationalist and conservative intellectuals aggregated with pro-status quo members of the Soviet political and military establishment in reaction to Mikhail Gorbachev’s programme of reforms ( Brudny 1998; Mitrokhin 2003). Bound by their common experience of political struggle against Westernisers, they continued as a group across the 1991 regime change. The unity of the coalition was strengthened by their resentment at the collapse of the Soviet Union, their rejection of the post-Soviet elites and their organisation of mass protest actions against Boris Yeltsin’s regime ( Laqueur 1993; Dunlop 1993; Allensworth 1998). Institutionally, this group was represented by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation led by Gennadii Ziuganov’s (1944–) and various other political movements and organisations such as the National Salvation Committee created in the autumn of 1992. The first post-Soviet public statement of this large anti-liberal opposition, entitled Statement by the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Opposition and signed by around 40 major political and intellectual figures, was published in reaction to the regime’s repression of the protests of 23 February 1992. Two newspapers, successively founded by the journalist and writer Aleksandr Prokhanov (1938–), Den (1990–93) and then Zavtra (1993–), provided the media platform in which the diverse beliefs of the group could rally together under the same flag.

The ideological diversity of this coalition can be illustrated by the list of these newspapers’ contributors, which included monarchist Orthodox Slavophiles like Vladimir Osipov; Father Dmitrii Dudko and Metropolitan Ioann; national–communists like Gennadii Ziuganov and Sergei Kurginian; national–conservatives writers like Valentin Rasputin, Vladimir Soloukhin and Vadim Kozhinov; Islamic traditionalists like Geidar Dzhemal and Samil Sultanov; Eurasianists (advocating Russia’s civilizational distinctiveness from Europe) like Aleksandr Dugin and Lev Gumilev; neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists like Aleksandr Barkashov; Soviet-style constructivist technocrats like Konstantin Pchelnikov; and former Soviet dissidents who had become disillusioned with liberalism like Aleksandr Zinoviev and Eduard Limonov.

Concepts

By including scattered elements of Soviet Marxist-Leninism and pre-revolutionary Russian conservatism, the national–patriotic coalition formed a platform connecting elements of ideological paradigms formerly hailed as opposite. In particular, analysis of Den’s and Zavtra’s publications shows that their authors sought to deconflict the relationship between three pairs of concepts.

First, national–patriots merged monarchism with Soviet patriotism by advocating a conciliatory vision of Russian history, according to which both the tsarist and the Soviet periods contributed to the same collective ideals of “Russian statehood” (russkaia gosudarstvennost) and the “Russian idea” (russkaia ideia). Relatedly, they combined technological modernisation and religious conservatism within a unique vision of Russia’s developmental path. Den’s various special features illustrate this syncretism. The paper’s sections such as “Symbol of Faith”, “Technocrats” and “Rock and the Russian Resistance” mixed elements of pre-revolutionary Orthodox Slavophile conservatism promoting the traditional and religious values of the Slavic people and the rejection of Western influences, Soviet technocratism and industrialism and post-Soviet nationalist counter-culture. This synthesis was clearly asserted by the leaders of various organisations included in the national–patriotic coalition (Faure 2021). Aleksandr Rutskoi, the leader of the “social–patriotic” movement Derzhava (Power), for instance, stated his commitment to the “revival of Russia as a great power within the borders of the USSR”, which, in his view, required the restoration “of our primordially Orthodox way of life ... based on morality and spirituality” ( Rutskoi and Prokhanov 1994). Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia called for the revival of the “remnant of the Russian Empire and the communist USSR – a powerful military industry, a powerful army, the heroic spirit of the Russian people” and the preservation of the “spiritual world of the Orthodox Slavs” in opposition to the “disintegrated” West ( Zhirinovskii and Prokhanov 1994).

Finally, the national–patriotic coalition also included a wide array of attitudes towards the definition of the Russian state. Zavtra’s section The Third Rome or the Republic of Rus (Tretii Rim ili Respublika Rus), for instance, published articles on the definition of the “Russian idea” raging from ethnic nationalist programs to Eurasian imperialism.

Militant ideological eclecticism

The main conceptualisers of the national–patriotic ideological identity praised the coalition’s syncretism as its defining characteristic. According to Prokhanov, the task of the coalition was “to connect what seems to be incompatible” (Rutskoi and Prokhanov 1994). While this synthesis was often disqualified as an ideology by external commentators such as Russian Westernisers or Western analysts calling it a “paradoxical pluralism” (Griffiths 2016) and “strange alliance” (Simonsen 1996), Prokhanov described this eclecticism as a “necessary symbiosis” (quoted in Simonsen 1996: 97). Because they shared the same rejection of Yeltsin’s Presidency and of the post-Soviet liberal order, theorisers of the national–patriotic coalition assembled the variety of their positions under broader rallying political categories, such as the “patriots” (“patrioty”) and the “partisans of the state” (“gosudarstvenniki”). As Aleksandr Dugin views it, their coalition was not based on “doctrines that are finally formulated and that have received clear intellectual expression”. Rather, he argues, patriots are bound by a common group identity that sets them in a bipolar political confrontation against Westernisers, as “two global archetypal models dividing society into ‘ours’ (nashi) and ‘not ours’ (nenashi)” (Dugin 1991).

Zavtra’s slogan, “The newspaper of the Russian state”, illustrates the national–patriots’ dismissal of the incumbent regime and their claim to represent the “real” essence of the Russian state in a separate space. The all-encompassing dimension of the national–patriots’ ideological syncretism, therefore, was meant as a form of political opposition to counter what they perceived as the society’s pluralisation, division and moral vacuum following the fall of the Soviet Union and the setting up of the post-Soviet liberal order. In the first official issue of the paper Den, published in January 1991, Prokhanov’s editorial introduced the newspaper as the centre of the alternative to the “collapse of the liberal utopia”. In contrast to civil war, economic criminality and political dictatorship, which he associated with liberal policies, Prokhanov called on all forces of society to unite as a “new collective entity”, a “single creative whole” ( Prokhanov 1991). This claim for a fundamental normative unity and permanence of values across varied anti-liberal ideological paradigms is reflected in the broad ideological frameworks used to designate the coalition, such as “the ideology of resistance”, the “ideology of national salvation” or “the ideology of reconciliation”.

Managerial “centrism”: Transcending ideologies

Actors

From the era of perestroika and well into the following decade, different factions of Westernisers clashed with diverse national–patriotic forces. Each camp, entrenched in its beliefs, engaged in a zero-sum game both in public discourse and legislative arenas. The national–patriotic opposition portrayed itself – “We, the Russian patriots” – as the righteous protectors of “Russian civilization”, engaged in resistance against the Westernisers, who were demonised as “murderers”, “butchers” or traitors in the pay of the CIA or entwined in Judeo-Masonic conspiracies ( Prokhanov 1996a, 1996b). In response, Westernisers, invoking Voltaire’s “écraser l’infâme” (razdavit gadinu, to crush the infamous), openly advocated for quashing the “red-brown plague” of communist and nationalist opposition ( Pisateli trebuiut 1993). This ideological battle escalated into violent confrontations on the streets of Moscow in October 1993, when parliamentarians and their supporters protested against Yeltsin’s illegal dissolution of the Congress, attempting to seize power and resulting in hundreds of casualties.

Amidst this heightened polarisation, a new ideology emerged among post-Soviet leaders: that of the strong-handed khoziaistvennik (manager) who transcends ideological conflicts through “can-do pragmatism and no-nonsense professionalism” (Hale 2006: 214). Most notably embodied by the colourful Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov, this approach was adopted by numerous Russian governors, many of whom, like Luzhkov, were former Party apparatchiks. This pragmatic posture served as a means to cultivate personal patronage networks and electoral alliances without committing to specific policy agendas. Reflecting this trend, in 1996 the Westerniser champion Anatolii Sobchak failed to secure re-election as mayor of Saint Petersburg, losing to the self-professed “efficient manager” Vladimir Iakovlev.

Even President Boris Yeltsin increasingly embraced this managerial profile in the latter half of the 1990s. By the decade’s end, all serious contenders for Yeltsin’s succession, including Luzhkov, former Prime Minister Evgenii Primakov, General Aleksandr Lebed and a then-obscure newcomer named Vladimir Putin, embodied the new managerial persona. The last competitive legislative elections, held in December 1999, witnessed the clash of two rival coalitions – “Fatherland – All Russia” and “Unity” – both seeking to unite regional elites under the banner of conspicuous pragmatism, commonly referred to as “centrism”. This label was one of the four party orientations officially recognised by the Central Electoral Commission, alongside “democrats”, “communists” and “national–patriots” ( Raviot 2008: 37). Putin’s victory and the subsequent merger of the two coalitions into the hegemonic party “United Russia” symbolised the triumph of “centrism” as the prevailing ideology among post-Soviet ruling elites in the aftermath of the roaring 1990s.

Concepts

Beyond the leader’s professed competencies, the fundamental concept of managerial “centrism” revolves around the promotion of social unity as a prerequisite for stability and prosperity. At its immediate level, this concept aimed to counter the prevailing ideologies clashing in the public arena. However, more fundamentally, the managerial approach advocated for a pacified vision of politics, wherein activism is equated with extremism and political conflict is seen as a harbinger of impending civil war.

This shift in approach was evident in Boris Yeltsin’s stance by late 1993. Recognising the strong popular support garnered by the national–patriotic opposition, which he had just quelled thanks to the intervention of the army, Yeltsin attempted to distance himself from his past image of radical reformer and position himself as a champion of “reconciliation and accord” (primirenie and soglasie). With the exception of the 1996 presidential campaign, during which he reverted to fervent Westernism in an effort to vilify his communist rival, Yeltsin consistently presented himself post-1993 as a unifying figure in a fractured nation. In this vein, he renamed the October Revolution Day as “National Reconciliation Day”. Moreover, he famously declared, “Those who do not lament the disintegration of the union do not have a heart. But those who are dreaming about its restoration do not have a brain” (Breslauer and Dale 1997: 327). This quote, essentially borrowed from Lebed and later adopted by Putin, often gets attributed to the latter, highlighting the continuum of “centrism” between late Yeltsin and early Putin.

In his programmatic article Russia at the Turn of the Millennium, published in December 1999, Putin emphasised the importance of “constructing a social consensus” as one of his primary objectives. Criticizing all ideological factions equally, he warned against calls for revolution, emphasising the need for stability and pragmatic governance. Putin aimed to “consolidate” Russian society and bridge its “deep ideological and political schism” by rallying “responsible social–political forces” behind a strategy of prudent management and preservation of the gains made during market and democratic reforms (Putin 1999).

In practice, the consolidation of capitalist norms by the emerging post-Soviet ruling class of self-styled “managers” often went along the promotion of aestheticised elements of imperial grandeur from Russia’s past, particularly the Tsarist era (Khazanov 2023). Moscow Mayor Luzhkov was at the forefront of this trend, overseeing the transformation of the city into a hub of capitalism while also making gestures to appeal to nationalist sentiments, such as the costly reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and advocating for the return of Crimea to Russia.

President Yeltsin similarly indulged in flirtations with Tsarist symbolism as part of his “centrist” rebranding, exemplified by the restoration of the Tsarist imperial eagle as the state coat of arms in November 1993 and the pompous reburial of the royal family in Saint Petersburg in 1998. This symbolic policy, characterised by a collage of disparate historical elements, continued into Putin’s early mandates, with the decree in 2000 confirming the use of the imperial coat of arms alongside the republican tricolour flag and the restoration of the Soviet anthem – albeit stripped of references to communism ( Malinova 2015).

Conspicuous pragmatism

Reminiscent of the anti-ideological stance often embraced by Westernisers, the centrist parties of the 1990s openly rejected ideologies as sources of dangerous radicalism or, at best, as abstract distractions from real-world issues. Reflecting on this position, a governor supporting the “Unity” coalition in 1999 asserted that “The ideology of Unity is the lack of any kind of ideology” (Hale 2006: 227). This sentiment was faithfully embraced by its successor, “United Russia”, which positioned itself as the “party of practical matters” (partiia konkretnykh del). The party’s anti-ideological stance was succinctly articulated by its president, Boris Gryzlov, in 2003: “Centrism is pragmatism. The ability to solve real problems of real people” ( Predvybornaia programma 2003).

While many scholars have interpreted this typical posture of post-Soviet elites as indicative of a lack of ideological coherence in 1990s Russia, in reality “centrism” was not simply a negative concept. Its anti-ideological stance should not be taken at face value, as it also served as an ideological instrument aimed at building up legitimacy and garnering constituencies around defining elements of the political community, however elusive and disparate those elements may be. Arguably, the primary distinguishing feature of post-Soviet managerialism, in contrast to more fully articulated ideological frameworks, lies not in its anti-ideological ethos – which was widespread at the time – but in its top-down dynamics. Unlike Westernism or national–patriotism, post-Soviet “centrism” was never a platform for mass mobilisation in Russia. Its platform did not emerge from discussions and debates; rather, it was a consensus imposed from above to serve as a unifying symbol for elites, who in turn secured popular support in their respective spheres through patronage networks.

Interestingly, post-Soviet elites themselves appeared ambivalent about the ideological nature of this approach. One notable example is the curious initiative launched by Yeltsin in 1996 to unite society around a shared “Russian idea”. In stark contrast to his earlier anti-ideological stance, he declared “In Russia’s history in the 20^th century, there have been various periods – monarchism, totalitarianism, perestroika and, finally, the democratic path of development. Each epoch had its own ideology. [But] now we don’t have one. And that’s bad.” (Urban 1998: 969) This project was quietly abandoned shortly after, as it became evident that no consensus could be reached among rival political forces at the time.

This ambiguity is reflected in scholarly literature, where post-Soviet “centrism” has been labelled with various terms highlighting its different aspects: “situational conservatism” ( Prozorov 2005) or “Bonapartism” ( Budraitskis 2022) in its role of consolidating order by former revolutionary elites to safeguard their hard-won privileges; “liberal conservatism” (Poliakov 2000; Sakwa 2008) for its attempt to synthesise market reforms with the preservation of natural order; “Stolypinism” (Khazanov 2023) for its advocacy of enlightened despotism and Tsarist nostalgia. These designations serve as a reminder not to mistake the “centrist” anti-ideological stance for the symptom of an “ideological vacuum”.

Conclusion

This brief overview of the ideological landscape of Russia in the 1990s aims to demonstrate that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, Russia experienced a rich array of political ideologies during that period. Admittedly, the various coalitions clashing in the public sphere and legislative arenas did not coalesce around anything resembling the clarity and consistency associated with the macro ideologies of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Indeed, the stark contrast between the ossified Marxism-Leninism and the ensuing conflictual plurality engendered a subjective sense of acute disorientation, as argued by anthropologists like Oushakine and vividly reflected in literature ( Aleksievich 2018). However, we argue that the experience of identity crisis, ideational eclecticism and the conspicuous pragmatism of emerging political elites should not be mistaken for an “ideological vacuum”, at least not in the normative sense often conveyed in academic literature.

Our analysis has significant implications for political science accounts of the Russian political system by shedding new light on the role that ideology continued to play in structuring post-Soviet intellectual and political fields immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the instability, eclecticism and fluidity of the thin ideologies we have identified should not be equated with their operational weakness. In fact, thin ideologies retained important tangible effects on the social and political order.

First, thin ideologies have consolidated and stabilised the identity and contours of elite groups across the regime change of 1991. The various ideological languages we have highlighted served as symbolic rallying structures that substantiated different groups’ boundaries, collective representations and speech norms. Although they were not designed as fully coherent political ideologies, they acquired consistency as stylised discourses that forged the group’s shared identity and sense of belonging. For instance, national–patriots discursively built their unity by fostering a defining divide between them and “the others”. Moreover, this interactional definition of elite groups through ideological labels has had significant political effects by organising the bipolarisation of the post-Soviet political field. In a context where the post-Soviet partisan system was poorly institutionalised, with political parties using designations that were out of step with their actual position within the political spectrum (such as Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, which was, in fact, one of the leading national–patriotic parties), the structuring of political cleavages relied on the interactional dimension of their identity construction, distinguishing between two groups: “one of us” / “not one of us” (nashi / nenashi). While both the Westernisers and the national–patriots fuelled this ideological bipolarisation of the post-Soviet political field, their ideological co-construction led to the rise of a “centrist” reaction supervised by the party in power. Vladimir Putin successfully represented this “liberal–conservative” agenda in the 1999 Presidential elections and subsequently used it to authoritatively manage ideological pluralism.

The notion of an “ideological vacuum” proves to be empirically unfounded as far as Russia in the 1990s is concerned. We would like to conclude by highlighting our methodological contribution to the study of ideologies, specifically by pointing out the heuristic weaknesses of the notion, beyond the specific Russian case, as it is misleading in two ways.

First, the “ideological vacuum” assumes that the Russian experience of the 1990s was exceptional. This idea is advanced, as we have seen, by academic proponents of the “ideological vacuum” and was also a shared sentiment among those who experienced the 1990s, as testified by Yeltsin’s earlier quoted reflection on the post-Soviet era being the only period in Russian history without a well-defined ideology. Instead of supporting this presumption of exceptionality (iskliuchitelnost) widely shared in Russian political discourse and in studies on Russia (see Frye 2021 for a criticism), our analysis suggests the value of comparative research. For example, the Russian case could be contrasted with post-Maoist China, where the fragmentation of a comprehensive ideological system similarly resulted in the emergence of new, eclectic ideological configurations. More thin ideologies can be better understood by linking Michael Freeden’s theoretical concept with an empirically grounded study of the various actors, organisations and institutions involved in ideological production.

Second, labelling the situation as an “ideological vacuum” implies a pathology, whereas progress is believed to require a clear and coherent vision of the future. We argue that this view is highly problematic in that it looks at late 20^th-century politics from the perspective of “lack”, condemning reality for not corresponding to a certain array of expectations based on historical experience rather than considering it for what it is. By looking for – and failing to find – grand ideologies in the form they typically took in the late 19^th and most of the 20^th century, we hinder ourselves from seeing the configuration of the emerging ideological landscape. Abandoning the language of pathology and therefore discarding inherited analytical categories that inevitably lead to a diagnosis of insufficiency allows us to appreciate the diversity of contemporary transformations of ideological production through different actors, formats and fields.

References

Aleksievich, S. (2018) Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, New York NY: Random House.

Allensworth, W. (1998) The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization and Post-Communist Russia, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Atnashev, T. (2018) “Utopicheskii konservatizm v epokhu pozdnei perestroiki: otpuskaia vozhzhi istorii”, Sotsiologiia vlasti, vol. 29, no 2, 12–53.

Batalov, E. (1997) “How shall we fill the ideological vacuum?”, Sociological Research, vol. 36, no. 4, 6–18.

Batkin, L. (1988) “Stat Evropoi”, Vek XX i mir, no. 7, 29–33.

Bell, D. (1962) The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, New York NY: Collier Books.

Brady, A.-M. (ed.) (2012) China’s Thought Management, Abingdon UK; New York NY: Routledge.

Breslauer, G. W. and Dale, C. (1997) “Boris Yeltsin and the invention of a Russian nation-state”, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 13, no. 4, 303–332.

Brown, K. and Bērziņa-Čerenkova, U. A. (2018) “Ideology in the era of Xi Jinping”, Journal of Chinese Political Science, vol. 23, no. 3, 323–339.

Brudny, Y. M. (1998) Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet state, 1953–1991, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Budraitskis, I. (2022) Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in post-Soviet Russia, London: Verso.

Burtin, I. (1989) “Akhillesova piata istoricheskoi teorii Marksa”, Oktiabr, no. 11, 3–25.

Cheng, C. (2016) The Return of Ideology: The Search for Regime Identities in Postcommunist Russia and China, East Lansing MI: University of Michigan Press.

David-Fox, M. (2015) Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Dugin, A. (1991) “Erotizm i imperiia”, Den, no. 21, 16.

Dunlop, J. B. (1993) The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Engerman, D. C. (2009) Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts, New York NY: Oxford University Press USA – OSO.

Eyal, G., Szelenyi, I. and Townsley, E. R. (1998) Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe, New York NY: Verso.

Faure, J. (2021) “A Russian version of reactionary modernism: Aleksandr Prokhanov’s spiritualization of technology”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 26, no. 3, 356–379.

Faure, J. (2025) The Rise of the Russian Hawks: Ideology and Politics from the Late Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fish, S. (1995) Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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

Freeden, M. (2005) “Confronting the Chimera of a ‘post-ideological’ age”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 2, 247–262.

Frye, T. (2021) Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Furman, D. (1995) “‘Perevernutyi istmat?’ Ot ideologii perestroiki k ideologii ‘stroitelstva kapitalizma’ v Rossii’”, Svobodnaia Mysl, no. 3, 12–25.

Gelman, V. (2015) Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing post-Soviet Regime Changes, Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gelman, V. (2020) “‘Liberaly’ versus ‘demokraty’: ideinye traektorii postsovetskoi transformatsii v Rossii”, Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no. 1, 53–79.

Griffiths, E. (2016) Aleksandr Prokhanov and post-Soviet Esotericism, Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag Haunschild.

Habermas, J. (1990) “What does Socialism mean today? The rectifying revolution and the need for new thinking on the left”, New Left Review, vol. 183, no. 1, 3–22.

Hale, H. E. (2006) Why not Parties in Russia? Democracy, Federalism and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanson, S. (2010) Post-imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanson, S. (2011) “Plebiscitarian patrimonialism in Putin’s Russia: Legitimating authoritarianism in a Postideological era”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 636, no. 1, 32–48.

Holbig, H. (2013) “Ideology after the end of ideology. China and the quest for autocratic legitimation”, Democratization, vol. 20, no. 1, 61–81.

Inglehart, R. F. (2020) “Giving up on God: The global decline of religion”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 99, no. 5, 110–118.

Khazanov, P. (2023) The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse, Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Kotkin, S. (1991) Steeltown, USSR. Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era, Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Kramer, M. (2019) “Autocratic ideology as an obstacle to liberal democratic thought in post-Soviet Russia”, in Cucciola, R. M. (ed.) Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism: Historical Drama and New Prospects, Cham Switzerland: Springer: 89–106.

Krastev, I. and Holmes, S. (2019) The Light that Failed: why the West is Losing the Fight for Democracy, New York NY: Pegasus Books.

Laqueur, W. (1993) Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, New York NY: Harper Collins Publishers.

Leader Maynard, J. (2022) Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities, Oxford, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Lévesque, J. (2013) “Moscow’s evolving partnership with Beijing. Countering Washington’s hegemony”, in Black, J. L. and Johns, M. (eds) Russia After 2012: From Putin to Medvedev to Putin – Continuity, Change or Revolution? Abingdon UK: Routledge: 184–201.

Lipman, M. (2013) “The Kremlin turns ideological. Where this new direction could lead”, in Lipman, M. and Petrov, N. (eds) Russia 2025. Scenarios for the Russian Future, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan: 220–239.

Lukin, A. (2000) The Political Culture of Russian “Democrats”, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Magun, А. (2010) “Perestroika kak konservativnaia revoliutsiia?” Neprikosnovennyi Zapas, vol. 74, no. 6, 231–249.

Malinova, O. (1998) Liberalizm v politicheskom spektre Rossii (na primere partii “Demokraticheskii vybor Rossii” i obshchestvennogo obedineniia “Iabloko”. Yabloko.ru, [Online], Available: www.yabloko.ru/Publ/Liber/olga.html

Malinova, O. (2015) Aktualnoe proshloe: Simvolicheskaia politika vlastvuiushchei elity i dilemmy rossiiskoi identichnosti, Moscow: Politicheskaia entsiklopediia.

Malinova, O. (2017) “Konstruirovanie ‘liberalizma’ v postsovetskoi Rossii. Nasledie 1990-kh v ideologicheskikh bitvakh 2000-x”, Politiia, no. 1, 6–28.

Mannheim, K. (2015) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, Mansfield Centre CT: Martino Publishing.

McFaul, M. (2001) Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Migranian, A. (1989) “Dolgii put k evropeiskomu domu”, Novyi Mir, no. 7, 166–184.

Mitrokhin, N. (2003) Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR 1953–1985 gody, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

Oushakine, S. (2000) “In the state of post-Soviet aphasia: Symbolic development in contemporary Russia”, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 6, 991–1016.

“Pisateli trebuiut ot pravitelstva reshitel’nykh deistvii”, Izvestiia, 5 October, 1993, 3.

Poliakov, L. (2000) “Liberalnyi konservator”, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2 February, [Online], Available: www.ng.ru/ideas/2000-02-02/8_conserve.html

“Predvybornaia programma Politicheskoi partii ‘Edinaia Rossiia’” (2003) “Gosudarstvo i vlast”, 20 September 2003, [Online], Available: https://state.rin.ru/cgi-bin/main.pl?r=245

Prokhanov, A. (1991) “Krakh liberalnoi utopii”, Den, no. 1.

Prokhanov, A. (1996a) “My – iz russkoi tsivilizatsii”, Zavtra, no. 31.

Prokhanov, A. (1996b) “Zagnannykh prezidentov pristrelivaiut, ne pravda li?”, Zavtra, no. 42.

Prozorov, S. (2005) “Russian conservatism in the Putin presidency: The dispersion of a hegemonic discourse”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 10, no. 2, 121–143.

Putin, V. (1999) “Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii”, Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 30 December 1999, [Online], Available: www.ng.ru/politics/1999-12-30/4_millenium.html

Raviot, J-R. (2008) Démocratie à la russe: Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir en Russie, Paris: Ellipses.

Reddaway, P. (1982) “The development of dissent and opposition”, in Brown, A. and Kaser, M. (eds) The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khruschev, London: The MacMillan Press: 121–156.

Rodkiewicz, W. and Rogoża, J. (2015) “Potemkin Conservatism. An ideological tool of the Kremlin”, OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. [Online], Available: www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/point-view/2015-02-03/potemkin-conservatism-ideological-tool-kremlin

Rutskoi, A. and Prokhanov, A. (1994) “Razgovor s otkrytym zabrolom”, Zavtra, no. 36.

Sakwa, R. (2008) Putin: Russia’s Choice, London: Routledge.

Sauvé, G. (2025) Suffering Victory: Soviet Liberals and the Failure of Democracy in Russia (1987–1993), Ithaca NY: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press.

Scherrer, J. (2013) “The ‘cultural/civilizational turn’ in post-Soviet identity building”, in Bodin, P., Hedlund, S. and Namli, E. (eds) Power and Legitimacy: Challenges from Russia, London: Routledge: 152–168.

Shlapentokh, D. V. (2014) “Implementation of an ideological paradigm: Early Duginian eurasianism and Russia’s post-Crimean discourse”, Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 35, no. 3, 380–399.

Simonsen, S. G. (1996) Politics and Personalities: Key Actors in the Russian Opposition, Stockholm: International Peace Research Institute.

Szacki, J. (1995) Liberalism after Communism, Budapest: Central European University Press.

Tolz, V. (2010) “The West”, in Leatherbarrow, W. J. and Offord D. C. (eds) A History of Russian Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 197–216.

Uliukaev, A. (1995) Liberalizm i politika perekhodnogo perioda v sovremennoi Rossii, Moscow: Izdatelstvo Evraziia.

Urban, M. (1998) “Remythologising the Russian State”, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 50, no. 6, 969–992.

Zhirinovskii, V. and Prokhanov, A. (1994) “Ia vvedu v Kreml”, Zavtra, no. 6.

30. The Christian Right in the United States

Mobilisation and ideology

Leonard Williams and Clyde Wilcox

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-38

Introduction

For more than 100 years, religious and political actors in the United States in the United States have sought to mobilise conservative Christians for political action. By “conservative Christians” we mean white evangelicals who come from one of three doctrinal communities – fundamentalists, Pentecostals or charismatic Christians. Although these communities differ on some important matters, they share a common worldview born of a similar theology. All three groups preach that the Bible contains no errors, while fundamentalists and most Pentecostals hold that it is literally true. Evangelical Christians believe in a living Satan who walks the earth and tempts people, and hence find it especially important to protect vulnerable children from his temptations. They also believe that sometime soon an Antichrist will emerge to take over the world’s governments and that afterward Christ will appear again to summon Christians to heaven. All people who have been engaged in sinful behaviour will be left behind to face tribulations before the final battle between God and the Antichrist.

This shared theological perspective has been constructed in conservative evangelical churches to imply that life in this world is an ongoing war between the forces of good and evil. This conflict has been interpreted in various ways. For example, early in the 20^th century it told Christians to eschew politics, remain pure for the rapture and focus on preaching the gospel. Over time, though, the theology was adapted to mobilise Christians for political action to defend the nation, their local communities and especially their children from threats deemed Satanic (Wilcox et al 1991). Evangelical religious beliefs thus became linked to a conservative populism that pits Christians against secular elites, challenges cultural forces that turn Americans away from God and demands that the US remain strong enough to combat communism and lead the world.

In recent years, the idea of a singular “Christian Right” has become rather fuzzy. Its most visible leaders from its heyday have retired or died and prominent organisations like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition are essentially defunct, while Focus on the Family now attends more to family issues than to political ones. Some Christian Right groups from half a century ago still exist but none of them are widely known. Without recognisable national leaders or large national organisations, the term is less common in public discourse. Scholarly interest in the Christian Right per se has declined somewhat, particularly among those employing survey research methods to study specific candidates and groups involved with electoral politics. Even so, field research and journalistic studies of conservative Christians have been conducted (Alberta 2023; Bork-James 2021; Wilson 2025) and recent studies have explored the rising belief system of Christian Nationalism (Whitehead and Perry 2000; Gorski and Perry 2022; McDaniel, Nooruddin and Shortle 2022; Djupe et al 2023). Today’s Christian conservatives embrace a range of ideologies and causes, from white nationalism to QAnon, and some voice support for political violence and other anti-democratic ideas – even as the Supreme Court and Republican Party politicians have provided them with notable policy victories.

In what follows, we explore the ideology of what we loosely call the “Christian Right”. We start by highlighting waves of Christian Right mobilisation in the US and trace the evolution of the movement’s political agenda. We then turn our attention to the ideologisation of religious belief by outlining key features of the worldview adopted by conservative Christians. Our approach to understanding Christian Right ideology draws on several research traditions active within contemporary ideology studies. After placing the Christian Right in the general context of American conservatism, we then offer some suggestions for further research.

Continuity and change in the Christian Right: Waves of mobilisation

Throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries, white evangelicals have founded religious and political groups that mobilised to support various issues, parties and candidates. Although these waves of mobilisation differ in important ways, the high point of each was a period in which certain packages of ideas were promoted and sets of political agendas pursued. Each era of mobilisation was followed by a period when national religious organisations weakened, political activity lessened and evangelical Christians returned to a privatised faith and adopted an apolitical orientation.

The first wave of political mobilisation in the early 20^th century was rooted in fundamentalist organisations and churches whose theology of biblical literalism and premillennial dispensationalism limited their interest in political action. The organisations formed during this wave opposed evolution because it contradicted a literal reading of Genesis. They objected to high-school textbooks and mounted populist attacks on college professors and presidents, forcing many resignations (Lienesch 1993). The narrow range of their social concerns left fundamentalists with no coherent theory of political action, however (Marsden 2006). Fundamentalist groups declined after the Scopes trial[96] and some of their members became attracted to conspiracy theories and extremist politics. Without a solid anchor in fundamentalist churches, some of their leaders even adopted racist, antisemitic and fascist rhetoric and sentiments ( Ribuffo 1983).

During the Great Depression, fundamentalists and other evangelicals focused on privatised spiritual renewal rather than political action, on holding revival meetings rather than secular rallies. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, a series of groups were formed to combat “Godless atheistic communism”. They spread their message through radio and television programmes, as well as travelling schools teaching a gospel of anti-communism. Like Senator McCarthy and the John Birch Society, conservative religious groups made efforts to thwart a vast, subversive conspiracy that they believed operated within colleges and universities, the entertainment industry, the American government and even liberal religious institutions. Unsurprisingly, religious and secular anti-communist groups coalesced to challenge disturbing social changes – fluoridation, juvenile delinquency, abolition of school prayer, Medicare and sex education – each of which appeared to be part of the Communist plot to undermine America.

Evangelical Christians and their leaders embraced the presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater’s loss to President Lyndon Johnson was a huge blow to these organisations, and soon the movement again had no strong organisations to continue its faith-based political activity. The decade that followed saw evangelicals returning to a privatised approach to religion. Fundamentalist churches worked at building schools and establishing internal communication networks and Pentecostal and charismatic televangelists built large audiences for their televised sermons and talk shows.

By 1976, a third wave of political mobilisation occurred when evangelical Christians again entered political life during the campaigns of Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian who became president, and Ronald Reagan, who lost his first bid for the presidency. Conservative political elites sought adherents among the viewers of Falwell and Robertson, as well as the activists in grassroots campaigns against school textbooks and gay rights initiatives. Republican operatives recruited Falwell and others to form groups whose message would target fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians. Republican activists helped these groups build contact lists, conduct fundraising and mobilise Christians to support Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan’s victory gave the Moral Majority enough political credibility for it to take credit for putting Reagan into the White House – bragging that it had registered three to four million new voters, although this claim was probably exaggerated.

In tandem, religious and political activists learned to employ biblical arguments in support of conservative candidates and policies. The range of issues addressed was broad. In the foreign policy realm, Christians added to their longstanding anti-communist stances support for increased defence spending, for Israel and for apartheid South Africa. Domestically, the Moral Majority adopted conservative positions on tax relief, deregulation, the gold standard and a sub-minimum wage for teenagers.

Christian Right organisations involved in politics nevertheless kept their focus on two main areas. First, such groups embraced a pro-family agenda that aimed to buttress traditional patriarchal families – often depicted as being undermined by egalitarian social movements as well as by public policies providing for abortion, gay rights and no-fault divorce. Second, they continued a century-long emphasis on education issues by questioning the content of school curricula, opposing sex education and attacking a culturally pervasive “secular humanism”. Beyond these concerns, the Christian Right engaged in a symbolic politics or “culture wars” bent on weakening a constellation of organisations and movements more or less aligned with the Democratic Party – e.g., feminists, “homosexuals”, environmentalists, liberals and socialists. During the Reagan era, Christian conservatives provided a key constituency for Republican candidates at the state and national levels. But as the direct mail revenues of the groups centred in fundamentalist churches declined, new politically oriented groups appeared. Focus on the Family founded the Family Research Council (FRC) and the Christian Coalition emerged from the ashes of Pat Robertson’s 1992 presidential campaign. Both the FRC and the Christian Coalition built state chapters headed by political activists, not clergy, and maintained strict control over the actions and personnel of these chapters. Funded by big donors to the Republican Party, the Christian Coalition sought to register and contact conservative evangelical voters during national elections, most famously by distributing voter guides in conservative churches on the Sunday before Election Day. The source of ideological constraint thus moved from being centred on the Bible in the 1920s to being focused on the needs of conservative Republican politicians in the 1980s.

Christian Right mobilisation aimed at electing Republican politicians who supported its preferred policies, but it also adopted the agenda dictated by the conservative wing of the GOP. Using fear and anger to turn believers into voters, they stressed that the family, Christianity and America itself were threatened by elitist, liberal and secular forces. In one letter, for example, Pat Robertson warned that the feminism was “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” (Wilcox and Larson 2006). Christian Right activists nevertheless claimed to be supportive of democratic norms of tolerance, compromise and deliberation. The Christian Coalition’s director, Ralph Reed, asserted that the Christian Right wanted not a theocracy but merely a “seat at the table” (Reed 1996). For a time, the Coalition sponsored training schools to teach activists how to work with those of other faiths, how to reach out to racially diverse communities and how to frame political arguments in secular terms (Shields 2007).

By the millennial year of 2000, the Republican Party had fashioned a skilled cadre of religiously minded political activists and secured a substantial base of loyal evangelical voters. Though contributions to Christian Right groups began to dry up, religious voters did not return to a privatised faith and individualised politics. Instead, evangelicals were subsumed into Republican-affiliated movements whose messages were no longer constrained by biblical language. Both the Tea Party and Donald Trump rallied evangelical voters using populist and anti-immigrant appeals, often mixed with outlandish conspiracy theories. Conservative Christian leaders supported Trump by arguing either that he was at bottom a true Christian or that God had chosen Trump to lead and protect America – much as he used King Cyrus of Persia, a non-believer, to achieve his ends (Coster 2024). Former general Michael Flynn’s Reawaken America tour took such sentiments a step further by mixing Christian nationalism with revivalism, election denialism, QAnon conspiracies, anti-vaccine messages and apocalyptic pronouncements that America would fall should Trump lose. Overall, the Republican Party seems to have transformed evangelical religion at least as much as Christian Right religious values influenced the GOP (Wilcox 2009).

Today’s religious and political landscape is quite different from what it was when the third wave of Christian Right mobilisation began. Since the formation of the Moral Majority in 1978, the percentage of Americans who are Protestant has declined from 60 per cent to 33 per cent and the percentage identifying with no religious tradition increased from 7 per cent to 23 per cent (Gallup n.d.). Similarly, fundamentalist churches have lost membership and there are far fewer people who believe that the Bible is literally true. Not only has religious belief faded and American culture become more secular, but the political scene has become more partisan and polarised (Mason 2018; Klein 2020; Kalmoe and Mason 2022). Indeed, a significant segment of the public believes numerous conspiracy theories, regards members of the opposing party as morally evil, thinks that political violence may be necessary and generally holds anti-democratic views. Conservative Christians themselves have become more flexible in their political ideology and more likely to regard any political encounter as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. In short, where the US once saw the emergence of a Christian Right whose political ideology was constrained by religious doctrine, we now see a White Christian Nationalism, unconstrained by doctrine and fervently believing that Trump has been chosen by God to lead America.

Religion and ideology

In and around waves of political mobilisation, religious orientations and argumentation have played a significant role in American political culture, not just recently but from the colonial era to the present (Abbott 2010; Kersch 2021). Throughout US history, its political values (e.g., limited government and civil religion) and social practices (e.g., chattel slavery and free enterprise) have been affected, supported and challenged by people of faith. Though religion’s influence cannot be questioned, it remains a matter of contestation – not least because Christians, like other groups of people, take a variety of positions on the issues of the day (Lambert 2008; Williams 2021). Fully comprehending the role of the Christian Right in American politics, then, requires that we explore the relationship of religion to ideology.

As comprehensive worldviews – perspectives that constitute identities, give life meaning and shape how we act in the world – religion and ideology share important features. Indeed, for some scholars, political ideologies are little more than secular religions. One common feature of religion and ideology is the hold they have on people, the “ethical magnetism” that attracts and binds people to them (Blakely 2024). Because religious beliefs and ideological commitments are central to our identities and practices, we frequently adhere to them in dogmatic ways. We sometimes embrace them with intense fervour, disavow them with great reluctance and adopt new ones through a kind of conversion experience (Williams 2007; Bork-James 2021).

While similarities between religion and ideology exist, we must not neglect the ways in which they differ ( Claval 2015). One such distinction is that while ideological orientations are a relatively recent development whose origins date to the French Revolution, religious worldviews can be found in most all societies throughout human history. Another key distinction is linked to the fact that religious beliefs focus on a supernatural or heavenly reality that offers believers enlightenment or salvation. By contrast, ideologies are directed toward the concerns of this world; they promise to show adherents the path toward a better life for themselves, their compatriots and their descendants.

Such abstract distinctions, however, neglect the very phenomenon we face in coming to terms with the Christian Right – namely how religion turns into ideology. Hassan Rachik ( Rachik 2009) described this process of ideologisation as one in which religious leaders spend less time musing about theological matters and more time addressing social and political topics. Rachik concludes that religion is likely to become ideological in two circumstances: first, when the proponents of faith feel threatened by the actions of those with political power; and second, when a faith becomes so attached to social identity that its believers employ the tools of political action. As we will see later, both circumstances have applied to the Christian Right; but in the meantime, let us discuss some approaches to studying ideology and show how they reveal key features of Christian Right thinking.

Approaches to ideology studies

There are few sustained analyses of the Christian Right as an ideology per se and most textbook treatments of ideology have ignored the topic altogether. If religious beliefs are addressed at all, they are subsumed into discussions of mainstream ideologies such as conservatism, populism or nationalism. When surveys of modern ideologies address religion and politics, they tend to discuss fundamentalisms or political Islam rather Christian democracy (Love 2006; Ball and Dagger 2011; Freeden, Sergent and Stears 2013; Geoghegan and_ Wilford 2014). Though a comprehensive treatment of Christian Right ideology is not possible here, we outline its worldview by drawing on several orientations in the field of ideology studies – e.g., interpretive approaches, morphological analysis, political discourse theory and survey research.

Interpretation

Any enquiry into ideology rests upon interpretation, the construction of meaning. Ideology studies thus have affinities with the disciplinary traditions dedicated either to the interpretation of texts and discourses or to the humanistic study of societies, cultures and human action (Geertz 1973; Ricoeur 1981; Walsh and Fatovic 2017). In these contexts, ideologies are understood to provide us with the cognitive maps by which we understand social and political life, the symbolic relations that bind us to social organisations and the motivations that impel and justify political activity. Understanding ideology as “an ordered system of cultural symbols” (Geertz 1964), our interpretations of ideology necessarily involve “creative synthesis” (Thompson 1990). For instance, upon observing that religious conservatives have played an important role in American history, Michael Lienesch interprets the writings of key thinkers associated with the New Christian Right ( Lienesch 1993). Theologically, the movement dedicated itself not only to converting souls but also to transforming society. Putting their faith into practice, its adherents also sought to restore the prominence of patriarchal families, build alternative institutions premised upon Christian values and counter the cultural force of secularism.

The political impact of the Christian Right thus grew as religious leaders such as Falwell and Robertson made common cause with Republican Party activists such as Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie. The resulting blend of religion and politics fostered a worldview and a set of practices that combined resistance and reform, piety and patriotism. Mounting a cultural war against an immoral minority, Christian Right activists sought to return the US to its spiritual roots, thereby restoring biblical principles to their rightful place in American life. Only then could the US fulfil its destined role as a “redeemer nation” that would defend the world against godless Communism. Drawing additional strength from populist appeals, the political religion of the New Christian Right emerged like “a comet that appears and retreats along a more-or-less regular path, attracting our attention periodically and then seeming to disappear, retreating but always returning” (Lienesch 1993).

Morphological analysis

The morphological approach developed by Michael Freeden ( Freeden 1996; Freeden 2013) posits that ideologies consist of an arrangement of key concepts and values, some more central than others. Structurally, an ideology consists of three types of concept: core concepts are the fundamental ones that characterise an ideology as a distinct frame of reference; adjacent concepts offer additional nuance and anchoring; while peripheral ones give an ideology the flexibility it needs to adapt to a changing environment. The morphological approach thus examines ideologies by mapping their conceptual structures, unearthing their meanings and tracing the evolution of patterned relationships. In other words, it “studies the nature, structure and variability of political thought-practices and how they offer competing maps of the political world” ( Freeden 2021).

A morphological analysis of Christian Right ideology would not only involve locating its relationships to other traditions but also identifying its core concepts and values. For example, in his sketch of the history of ideologies, Marius Ostrowski (Ostrowski 2022) highlights the role of religiously inflected traditionalism in both conservative and fascist ideologies from 1870 to 1940. Another set of ideologies from the same era had more direct roots in religious belief; hence, the ideology of Christian democracy emerged as a “religiously inspired alternative to both liberalism and socialism”, and nationalistic “political religions” (e.g., Islamism, Hindutva[97] and Zionism) could be seen as relatively narrow perspectives called micro ideologies. More recently, “secular and fundamentalist religious trends” have produced religious ideologies whose morphologies have been drawn from the main ideological families.

Although Ostrowski does not explicitly address Christian Right ideology, we might elucidate its core concepts by starting with the tendency labelled “political religion”. Its morphological core stresses not only the value of religious perspectives (access to basic truths) and practices (participation in meaningful rituals) but also a belief in the superiority of one’s own faith (religious exceptionalism). No matter its faith tradition, political religion focuses on defending the faith from persecution and on expanding the cadre of believers. In the case of the Christian Right, we find its core beliefs rooted in the claim that the US had been blessed “because in its early days she sought to honor God and the Bible, the inerrant Word of the living God” and because the American founders built a nation predicated on Holy Writ. Such a nation could return to greatness only if it were purged of its sins (e.g., abortion, homosexuality, pornography and liberalism) through a political renewal and a moral revival premised upon a “sacred commitment to God Almighty” (Falwell, 1980).

Political discourse theory

The discourse theory associated with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe ( Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Laclau 2014) focuses less on micro-level concepts and more on macro-level signifiers that shape subject identities and political struggles. Blending Gramscian and post-structuralist thought into a post-Marxist orientation, Laclau’s discourse theory holds that ideologies appear as discursive systems that engage with other ideological positions and with the political system’s own contradictions. Amid pervasive struggles for political power and cultural hegemony, then, ideologies employ linguistic signifiers as tools for legitimising an established social and political order or for challenging that regime and its orthodoxies. Understanding hegemony “as both a state of affairs and as a political process” ( Filc 2021), we come to see social and political struggles as ones in which movements advance ideas, compete for adherents, build coalitions, contest for power and seek to dominate discourse in economic, political and cultural realms (Adkin 2022). The partisans in such conflicts employ discursive mechanisms not only to impose order upon a field of meaning but also to reconfigure political allegiances. Discourse theory thus “aims to describe, understand and explain how and why particular discursive formations were constructed, stabilised and transformed” (Torfing 2005).

In responding to social forces that threatened faith, family and tradition, the Christian Right certainly embarked on a “war of discourse” (Durham 1998). Among the weapons employed were signifiers that helped believers identify the enemy – invoking what Laclau calls a “logic of difference” that establishes a cleavage between the dominant worldview and its antagonists. One signifier of note is the concept of “secular humanism”, a term used to link disparate cultural forces such as public education, mass media, government policy, feminism and gay liberation – forces that reduced church attendance, disapproved of public displays of religious faith and caused moral decay. As a result, organisations like the Moral Majority challenged the cultural power of the “vocal minority of ungodly men and women” whose efforts had brought “America to the brink of death” (Falwell 1980). Similarly, political activists such as Viguerie sought to unite blue-collar Americans, pro-life Catholics and Jews and born-again Christians into a movement that would battle with liberals and communists, vanquish them and remake American society for the better (Viguerie 1981). These early efforts to promote morality through political action led to the creation of the Christian Coalition, which aimed to overcome the “intellectual and political hegemony” of New Deal liberalism and enact a pro-family agenda (Reed 1996).

Identifying the secular and the ungodly as enemies of God-fearing people was not enough, however. In any war of discourse, it is also important to build a coalition of forces opposed to the hegemonic order. A discursive “logic of equivalence” permits a challenger ideology to reach out to new audiences and attract new members to its oppositional coalition. In this context, advocates of Christian Right ideology faced two problems: first, how to find common ground among people with diverse religious beliefs; and second, how to expand their cultural and political influence in the broader, increasingly secular society. Finding common ground among the faithful was a significant challenge, given the moral absolutism and religious exceptionalism taken for granted by many faith leaders. Solving this problem required using “empty” or “floating” signifiers, discursive elements that are vague enough to be used without necessarily being subjected to scrutiny or criticism. The most useful of these was the invocation of the concept of “Judeo–Christian” values. Though the concept had been used previously as a counterweight to antisemitism, it was appropriated by the Christian Right to overcome its own intolerance by promoting an inter-faith commitment to traditionalism, morality and support for Israel (Green 1996). Other key signifiers appeared in frequent references to God, faith and morality, as well as in broadly nationalistic references addressed to “the people in this country who still believe in decency, the home, the family, morality, the free-enterprise system and all the great ideals that are the cornerstone of this nation” (Falwell 1980). Later, it was common for Christian Coalition activists to use such terms as “pro-family” and “pro-life” to unify conservatives across the boundaries of denomination or religious tradition. These discursive manoeuvres helped “transform the religious conservative community from a political pressure group to a broad social reform movement based in local communities” (Reed 1996).

Commonly, Christian Right discourse has employed a two-tiered rhetorical strategy (Klemp 2012). When leaders and organisations speak inside their religious communities, they make appeals based upon scripture and religious conviction. When they talk about political matters, they use vocabularies and rationales appropriate for a cross-section of citizens. Recognising that social change required not only political involvement in elections and issue campaigns but also efforts to persuade government to cultivate virtue, Christian Right activists have become adept at using this two-tiered rhetoric to bridge the worlds of religion and ideology. Convinced that the principles of faith touched on every aspect of life, they could unify social and economic conservatives by advancing agendas that were simultaneously pro-family (religious freedom, traditional marriage, opposition to abortion) and libertarian (school choice, welfare reform, tax cuts). In his pursuit of “traditionalist ends through libertarian means”, Reed initially rejected a reconstructionist approach that would impose biblical law by fiat. Where he once favoured spiritual renewal rather than political revolution, Reed later supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns on pragmatic grounds (Reed 1996; Reed 2020).

Survey research

Though no survey data exists for supporters or members of the anti-evolution crusades, we do have some on support for the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and similar groups. While most Americans were largely unaware of these organisations, supporters were likely to be Republicans, attend fundamentalist churches, believe the Bible to be literally true, favour prayer in public schools and dislike communists (Wolfinger et al 1964; Wilcox 1987a; Wilcox 1988). By contrast, countless surveys assessed the beliefs of Christian Right supporters during the third wave of mobilisation (Wilcox 1986; Green and Guth 1988; Rozell and Wilcox 1996; Wilcox 1987b; Wilcox, Jelen and Linzey 1995; Wilcox, Debell and Sigelman 1999; Bendyna et al 2000). The movement’s supporters tended to be disproportionately Republican and more likely to hold fundamentalist doctrines, oppose abortion, dislike feminist groups, support increased defence spending and have negative attitudes toward government.

Though previous mobilisations of Christian conservatism have receded, White Christian Nationalism has recently become a significant focus of enquiry. For example, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry developed a “Christian Nationalism Scale” and sought out its correlates. People who scored high on the scale favoured a libertarian conception of freedom, a paternalistic and hierarchical sense of social order and a sense that violence should be used to defend the freedom and social standing of “white Christian men” (Gorski and Perry 2022). With a populist orientation that arrays “real Americans” against “un-American” forces, the latest incarnation of Christian Right ideology asserts that American society should return to biblical principles. Contemporary Christian nationalism embraces an “ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious and national identity” and yearns for a restoration of the cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have threatened (Gorski and Perry 2022). As religious exceptionalism and Christian nationalism tends to animate the Republican Party’s base, about one-fifth of Americans see the nation as divinely constituted, inspired and hence, blessed (McDaniel, Nooruddin and Shortle 2022). Unsurprisingly, those who do so also exhibit an “embattled group identity” and an affinity for elements of authoritarian populism. As with any ideology, ethnocentric Christian nationalism gives its adherents a framework for understanding public affairs as well as a sense of position and purpose.

Assessment

Regardless of how one studies its ideology, the “Christian right has been intertwined with American conservatism for decades” (Dias and Graham 2022). To understand this relationship fully requires coming to terms with the nature of American conservatism (Nash 1996). Given that most accounts of conservative ideology begin with Edmund Burke’s political thought, the nature of conservatism in the prototypically liberal US has been contested, if not problematic (Kirk 1993; Hartz 1955; Deneen 2016). Contrary to those who regard conservatism as either a timeless creed or the views of aristocrats hostile to the French Revolution, proponents of a “situational definition” instead regard conservative ideas as responses to a fundamental challenge to society (Huntington 1957). Because conservatism is less a creed and more a disposition (Oakeshott 1962), those who identify as conservatives in a secular society would proclaim the value of religious faith, seek to establish faith-based institutions and work to restore morality to public life.

Whatever particular issue stands they may take, conservatives tend to employ paradigmatic styles of argumentation centred around themes of perversity, futility and jeopardy (Hirschman 1991). One can find these themes in the arguments American conservatives, whether religious or secular, make to show that liberal divorce laws, generous social welfare programmes and women working outside the home have undermined the stability and sanctity of the nuclear family. No matter the cultural and political context, a spirit of reactionary politics underlies and pervades the history of conservative political thought (Robin 2018). Conservatism routinely appears as a counterweight to political movements and social change efforts from below. Its primary animus is to assert, defend and if necessary, re-establish society’s traditional hierarchies and inequalities. Clearly, the moral absolutism, patriarchal attitudes and ethnocentric patriotism of the Christian Right place its ideology within the conservative tradition.

Through the years, though, American conservatism has had one consistent feature – multi-vocality. Since the 1960s, the conservative movement has been described in terms of a “fusionism” that blended libertarianism, traditionalism and anti-Communism (Meyer 1964). While fusionism enabled conservatism to address the post-war political situation, a cultural and political reaction to the social movements of the 1960s created opportunities for new combinations as dissatisfied liberals turned to neoconservatism, evangelicals abandoned their reluctance to engage in political activity and Republican party activists sought to expand their constituencies (Kristol 1976; Falwell 1980; Viguerie 1981). Further hybridisation continued into the next decade as Christian moralism, cultural traditionalism and libertarian economic thought merged into the ideology of a New Right that found expression in party platforms and issue campaigns favouring pro-family, school choice, anti-tax, anti-regulatory and law-and-order policies (Viguerie 1982; Dolbeare and Medcalf 1988). Thereafter, the New Right further morphed into the Tea Party and the MAGA movement whose brands of conservatism have been held together by the glue of populism (Müller 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2019). Though present in the writings of early Christian Right leaders, populist themes have enabled conservatives to merge religious perspectives with policy proposals to improve the plight of “real Americans” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013; Gibson 2020) and with the cultural resentments of “Middle American radicals” (Warren 1976; Francis 1982).

Directions for further research

What options for further research into Christian Right ideology exist? One path forward would examine the links between party and ideology that the Christian Right has forged. As fluid forms of political thought, ideological constructions reveal themselves not only in manifestos and creeds, but also in parties, movements and policies. Like other ideologies, the beliefs and values of the Christian Right have produced several organisational forms and political tendencies. Analogously, where social democratic practices had been shaped by a “dialectical interplay between doctrinal commitments to a socialist vision of society and the implications of pursuing those goals through parliamentary democracy” (Goes 2024), the Christian Right has exhibited a similar tension between its purists and pragmatists. Its religious commitments to a vision of a moral society have often been adjusted to reach people in contemporary America, even as its practical aims have come into conflict with the political needs of the conservative movement. Indeed, the religious and political work of the New Right seems to have hollowed out the Republican Party and undermined the American party system (Schlozman and Rosenfeld 2024).

Another line of enquiry to pursue might focus on how ideology recruits or transforms individuals into subjects. Louis Althusser called this process interpellation, a process that occurs “along the lines of the most common everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (Althusser 1971). Put another way, ideologies help shape our social and political identities. Because social groups are distinguished by who they are, what they believe and what they do, students of ideology must understand “the dynamics that relate social members to ideologies and to the collectivities that are constituted by shared experiences, beliefs and ideologies” (van Dijk 1998).

In this context, we note that the ideologisation of conservative Christianity is linked to narratives of personal victimisation, the sense that faithful Christians are besieged by the government, “woke” businesses, an influx of immigrants and a secular culture (McDaniel, Nooruddin and Shortle 2022; Posner 2022). Insofar as conservative Christians speak of interference with their rights of conscience and highlight intrusions into their way of life, they propagate collective narratives in which the US – a Christian nation – has lost its favoured status because its people have turned away from God and its practices have strayed from foundational biblical principles. Combining these narratives lets the Christian Right fashion a religiously inflected politics built around a dispositional populism rooted in which the true people (Christians) have been betrayed by entrenched elites. To be a Christian today is to claim a cultural identity more than a faith perspective; a believer’s worldview now appears less as a coherent theology or ideology and “more a matter of how one thinks of oneself and the stories one draws on” (Onishi 2023). In this context, scholars could study how religious symbolism and rhetoric have been employed for identitarian purposes among the Christian Right in the US and within similar movements elsewhere (Cremer 2023).

A final set of inquiries could explore the iterative, hybridised nature of Christian Right ideology. We have already pointed to moves made in the transition from Christian moralism to New Right politics to Christian Nationalism. However, we were not able to address fully the internal debates, intellectual dilemmas and practical problems that supported those moves. A thorough treatment of this tradition would show not only how its cognitive maps evolved over time or how the Christian Right employed a two-tiered rhetorical strategy, but also how its ideology blended concepts, ideas, beliefs and values from multiple discourses and traditions. Because wholesale reconstructions of our ideologies are rare, a comprehensive account of Christian Right ideology would likely reveal that both its hybridisation and its pursuit of ideological change are contingent, complex and multi-dimensional affairs (Williams 1997; Williams and Franks 2025)

Conclusion

In this chapter we aimed to trace the development of the Christian Right, mainly over the last half-century or so. Like the movement itself, its organisational, political and ideological forms reflect not only a multiplicity of voices but also a hybridised set of beliefs and values. Beginning with calls for moral and spiritual revival to prevent a people’s further slide into sin, evangelical Christians and others turned to political activity (voter registration, information campaigns and mobilisation) as the primary means of effecting social and cultural change. Occasional electoral and legislative successes whetted the Christian Right’s appetite for broadening its public appeal and joining forces with secular organisations and movements. As political reform efforts stalled and big prizes remained elusive, purity gave way to pragmatism, religion turned into ideology and resistance transformed into reconstruction. Though the Christian Right once sought mere protection from the left’s values and agenda, today its thinkers and activists seek dominion and regime change (Clarkson 2019; Deneen 2023).

Though appraisals of the ideological movement profiled here initially saw it as a passing fad, some studies of its religious (Christian Right) and political (New Right) aspects foretold a more lasting impact. Lienesch, for one, offers the bold observation that “whether we like it or not, the Christian right has not disappeared; in some form or another, it will most certainly appear again” (Lienesch 1993). Kevin Phillips, a political strategist, also suggests that under the proper circumstances, both wings of the movement would produce a national awakening (Phillips 1982). Given that Christian Right ideology has indeed persisted to this day and that its supporters figured prominently in Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency, the question remains whether it will result in spiritual renewal, political revolution, or something else entirely.

References

Abbott, P. (2010) Political Thought in America: Conversations and Debates, Long Grove IL: Waveland Press.

Adkin, L. (2022) “Hegemony & counter-hegemony”, in Ballmingie, P. and Szanto, D. (eds) Showing Theory to Know Theory: Understanding Social Science Concepts through Illustrative Vignettes, Ottawa: Showing Theory Press.

Alberta, T. (2023) The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, New York NY: HarperCollins.

Althusser, L. (1971) “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)”, in Althusser, L. (ed.) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York NY: Monthly Review Press.

Ball, T. and Dagger, R. (2011) Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal, New York NY: Pearson Longman.

Bendyna, M., Green, J. C., Rozell, M. J. and Wilcox, C. (2000) “Catholics and the Christian right: A view from four states.”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 39, 321–332.

Blakely, J. (2024) Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life, Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK: Agenda.

Bork-James, S. (2021) The Divine Institution: White Evangelicism’s Politics of the Family, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Clarkson, F. (2019) “The rise of dominionism: Remaking America as a Christian Nation”, in Berlet, C. (ed.) Trumping Democracy: From Reagan to the Alt-Right, New York NY: Routledge.

Claval, P. (2015) “Religions and ideologies”, in Brunn, S. D. and Gilbreath, D. A. (eds) The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics, New York NY: Springer.

Coster, H. (2024) “Christian TV Evangelicals Fire up Trump Support with Messianic Message”, Reuters, [Online], Available: www.reuters.com/world/us/god-gave-us-trump-christian-media-evangelicals-preach-messianic-message-2024-03-22/ [26 Apr 2024].

Cremer, T. (2023) The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deneen, P. J. (2016) Conserving America? Essays on the Present Discontents, South Bend IN: St. Augustine’s Press.

Deneen, P. J. (2023) Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, New York NY: Sentinel.

Dias, E. and Graham, R. (2022) “The growing religious fervor in the American right: ‘This is a Jesus movement’”, The New York Times, 6 April.

Djupe, P. A., Lewis, A. R. and Sokhey, A. E. (2023) The Full Armor of God: The Mobilization of Christian Nationalism in American Politics, New York NY: Cambridge University Press.

Dolbeare, K. M. and Medcalf, L. J. (1988) American Ideologies Today: From Neopolitics to New Ideas, New York NY: Random House.

Durham, M. (1998) “The Christian Right”, in Lent, A. (ed.) New Political Thought: An Introduction, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Falwell, J. (1980) Listen, America!, New York NY: Bantam Books. Filc, D. (2021) Is Populism Counter-Hegemonic? [Online], Available: www.ideology-theory-practice.org/blog/is-populism-counter-hegemonic[27 Apr 2023].

Francis, S. (1982) “Message from Mars: The social politics of the new right”, in Whitaker, R. (ed.) The New Right Papers, New York NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2013) “The morphological analysis of ideology”, in Freeden, M., Sargent, L. T. and Stears, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, M. (2021) “Discourse, concepts, ideologies: Pausing for thought”, Journal of Language and Politics, vol. 20, 47–61.

Freeden, M., Sargent, L. T. and Stears, M. (eds) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallup, I. (n.d.) Religion, [Online], Available: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx[2 Sept 2024].

Geertz, C. (1964) “Ideology as a cultural system”, in Apter, D. E. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, New York NY: The Free Press.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York NY: Basic Books.

Geoghegan, V. and Wilford, R. (eds.) (2014) Political Ideologies: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Gibson, L. (2020) “The authoritarian reflex: Pippa Norris puts America’s flagging democracy in global context”, Harvard Magazine, [Online], Available: www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/03/feature-the-authoritarian-reflex

Goes, E. (2024) Social Democracy, Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK: Agenda.

Gorski, P. S. and Perry, S. L. (2022) The Flag + the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Green, J. C. (1996) Understanding the Christian Right, New York NY: The American Jewish Committee.

Green, J. C. and Guth, J. L. (1988) “The Christian Right in the Republican Party: The case of Pat Robertson’s supporters”, The Journal of Politics, vol. 50, no. 1, 150–165.

Hartz, L. (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, New York NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Hirschman, A. O. (1991) The Rhetoric of Reaction, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Huntington, S. (1957) “Conservatism as an ideology”, American Political Science Review, vol. 51, no. 2, 454–473.

Kalmoe, N. P. and Mason, L. (2022) Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, its Causes and the Consequences for Democracy, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Kersch, K. I. (2021) American Political Thought: An Invitation, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kirk, R. (1993) Ten Conservative Principles, [Online], Available: https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/[17 Jul 2022].

Klein, E. (2020) Why we’re Polarized, New York NY: Simon and Schuster.

Klemp, N. J. (2012) The Morality of Spin: Virtue and Vice in Political Rhetoric and the Christian Right, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefied.

Kristol, I. (1976) “What is a ‘neo-conservative’?”, Newsweek, vol. 87, 17.

Laclau, E. (2014) The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, London: Verso.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso.

Lambert, F. (2008) Religion in American politics: A Short History, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lienesch, M. (1993) Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right, Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Love, N. (2006) Understanding Dogmas and Dreams: A Text, Washington DC: CQ Press.

Marsden, G. M. (2006) Fundamentalism and American Culture, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Mason, L. (2018) Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Mcdaniel, E. L., Nooruddin, I. and Shortle, A. F. (2022) The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meyer, F. S. (ed.) (1964) What is Conservatism?, New York NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2013) “Populism”, Freeden, M., Sargent, L. T. and Stears, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017) Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Müller, J.-W. (2016) What is Populism?, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Nash, G. H. (1996) The Conservative Intellectual Movement in the United States since 1945, Wilmington DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019) Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oakeshott, M. (1962) Rationalism in Politics and other essays, New York NY: Basic Books.

Onishi, B. (2023) Preparing for war: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism –and What Comes Next, Minneapolis MN: Broadleaf Books.

Ostrowski, M. S. (2022) Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Phillips, K. P. (1982) Post-conservative America: People, Politics and Ideology in a Time of Crisis, New York NY: Random House.

Posner, S. (2022) The Key Ingredients of Christian Nationalism, Talking Points Memo, [Online], Available: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-key-ingredients-of-christian-nationalism[26 Aug 2024].

Rachik, H. (2009) “How religion turns into ideology”, The Journal of North African Studies, vol. 14, 347–358.

Reed, R. (1996) Active Faith: How Christians are Changing the Soul of American Politics, New York NY: The Free Press.

Reed, R. (2020) For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump, Washington DC: Regnery.

Ribuffo, L. P. (1983) The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War, Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robin, C. (2018) The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rozell, M. J. and Wilcox, C. (1996) Second Coming: The New Christian Right in Virginia Politics, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Schlozman, D. and Rosenfeld, S. (2024) The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts And Disordered Present of American Party Politics, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Shields, J. A. (2007) “Between passion and deliberation: The Christian Right and democratic ideals”, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 89–113.

Thompson, J. B. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the era of Mass Communication, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Torfing, J. (2005) “Discourse theory: Achievements, arguments and challenges”, in Howarth, D. and Torfing, J. (eds) Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

van Dijk, T. A. (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage.

Viguerie, R. (1981) The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead, Falls Church VA: The Viguerie Company.

Viguerie, R. (1982) “Ends and means”, in Whitaker, R. (ed.) The New Right Papers, New York NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Walsh, S. N. and Fatovic, C. (eds) (2017) Interpretation in Political Theory, New York NY: Routledge.

Warren, D. (1976) The Radical Center, Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Whitehead, A. L. and Perry, S. L. (2000) Taking America back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, New York NY: Oxford University Press.

Wilcox, C. (1986) “Evangelicals and fundamentalists in the New Christian Right: Religious differences in the Ohio moral majority”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 25, 355–363.

Wilcox, C. (1987a) “America’s radical right revisited. A comparison of the activists in Christian Right organizations from the 1960s and the 1980s”, Sociological Analysis, vol. 48, no. 1, 46–57.

Wilcox, C. (1987b) “Popular support for the moral majority in 1980: A second look”, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 1, 157–167.

Wilcox, C. (1988) “Sources of support for the old right: A comparison of the John Birch society and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade”, Social Science History, vol. 12, 429–449.

Wilcox, C. (2009) “Of movements and metaphors: The co-evolution of the Christian Right and the Republican Party”, in Brint, S. and Schroedel, J. R. (eds) Evangelicals and American Politics, New York NY: Russell Sage Press.

Wilcox, C. and Larson, C. (2006) Onward Christian Soldiers: The Christian Right in American Politics (3^rd edition), Boulder CO: Westview.

Wilcox, C., Debell, M. and Sigelman, L. (1999) “The second coming of the New Christian Right: Patterns of popular support in 1984 and 1996”, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 181–192.

Wilcox, C., Jelen, T. G. and Linzey, S. (1995) “Rethinking the reasonableness of the religious right”, Review of Religious Research, vol. 36, 263–276.

Wilcox, C., Linzey, S. and Jelen, T. G. (1991) “Reluctant warriors: Premillennialism and politics in the moral majority”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 30, no. 2, 245–258.

Williams, D. K. (2021) The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship, Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Williams, L. (1997) American Liberalism and Ideological Change, DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press.

Williams, L. (2007) “Abundance, lack and identity”, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 12, no. 1, 109–126.

Williams, L. and Franks, B. (2025) Hybridity and Ideology, New York NY: Routledge.

Wilson, A. R. (2025) The Politics of Hate: How the Christian Right Darkened America’s Political Soul, Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press.

Wolfinger, R., Wolfinger, B. K., Prewitt, K. and Rosenhack, S. (1964) “America’s radical right: Politics and ideology”, in Apter, D. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, New York NY: Free Press.

31. Rethinking political corruption and ideology within African communalism

Beatrice Okyere-Manu and Kow Kwegya Amissah Abraham

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412007-39

Introduction

Corruption is conceptualised in various forms within the African political space. It is identified as a phenomenon predominantly involving political elites and the managers of bureaucratic systems established in the civil and public service sectors. In a recent Afrobarometer report by Good Authority, out of 34 counties sampled, 31 countries saw an increased report of respondents having paid bribes in the public service to get things done between the years 2016/2018 and 2021/2023 (Visser 2024). While many views have been assembled to elicit and explain the push and pull factors of corruption and its attendant effects, little attention has been given to interrogating corruption in Africa through an ideological perspective. Thus, the very entailment and conceptualisation of corruption in Africa have been variously assumed and attention has been given to the drivers of corruption and its attendant effects. The corollary is that a deeper theoretical understanding of corruption and interrogation of how it is conceptualised within the African context has been given less attention. The reason is partly because corruption is seen as a global concept with uni-vocal and converging descriptiveness. As much as corruption’s effects and facilitating conditions are demographically and geographically diverse, the enabling conditions and conceptualisation of corruption require detailed attention within different political spaces.

The chapter posits that interrogating and assessing political ideology in Africa is vital to understanding corruption in the contemporary era. This is because corruption in Africa is predominantly politically driven and its conceptualisation and understanding can legitimately be canvassed from the perspective of ideology. Within the African context, corruption is not only an act pursued by an individual in isolation; the very institutional structures to ensure smooth bureaucratic processes for public service sometimes become enablers due to the weakness of such institutions (Justesen and Bjørnskov 2014; Brierley 2020; Wimpy 2021; Boateng et al 2024; Malipula 2024). In general terms, problems associated with leadership, policies, implementation of laws, monitoring and evaluation, among others, have converged to enable corruption in Africa. A better understanding of the phenomenon then requires that the ideological positions that inform the operation and organisation of the state and determine the mode of governance be given particular attention.

To adequately investigate corruption in Africa through ideology, this chapter adopts a philosophical posture by using ethical tools to analyse it within the communalist ideology. The chapter is organised as follows: first, it looks at it within African political thought and the periodisation that has been externally imposed as epochs of African ideological change. Second, the chapter looks deeper at communalism as an ideology, as the focal ideology to interrogate corruption. The section discusses the various attacks and defences of communalism and the relationship between communalism and ethics. Third, the chapter assesses political corruption in Africa. Fourth, it interrogates political corruption within the communalism space and uses ethical tools to analyse the place of corruption within communalist ideology. The conclusion summarises findings from our interrogations and points to areas of potentially promising research.

Ideology in African thought

Ideology, precisely political ideology, is deemed to be shaped by factors such as culture, political antecedents in general and indigenous political organisations. In Africa, factors such as colonialism, the slave trade, imperialism, neocolonialism and Pan-Africanism have been central and pivotal to the development of political ideology as well the adoption of those ideologies deemed as appropriate for the socio-political organisation of African states.

The various conceptualisations of ideology converge on the view that ideology is best conceptualised as a belief system containing ideational and emotional elements that allow people to understand the conditions of their existence, enable the use of political power in specific ways and is transmitted to citizens through complex socialisation processes (Clapham 1970; Hall 1985; Conroy-Krutz and Lewis 2011; Smith 2011; Bamikole 2012; Saife 2022).

The views on ideological posture and practice have been on whether African ideologies existed even during pre-historic times or only emerged during colonialism and afterward. According to Bamikole (2012: 70), the quest for African states to rediscover themselves after enslavement and colonisation has affected their ideological posture. As a result, African states employ ideologies that have fundamental drivers such as economic, political and social freedom. Further, the development deficits faced by African countries have contributed to the ideological dispositions of these countries right from the post-colonial era. An assessment of the politics of Sub-Saharan Africa aptly reveals that the ideologies of first-generation African leaders were mainly a reaction to colonialism. African leadership immediately after independence focused mainly on development, socio-political integration and the abolition of the ills of colonialism. As a result, they adopted and developed political ideologies that spoke to these realities and were specific about breaking away from capitalism, which dominated the colonialist agenda.

According to Conroy-Krutz and Lewis (2011: 1), there is a difference in the ideological influences of political followers in Africa and the Western world. In current times and especially since 2000, African politicians rarely make their election appeals based on ideology. This was not the case in the post-independence era, in which political parties articulated ideological positions often intended to win domestic and foreign support. However, African parties offer eclectic and boilerplate promises and party organisation (Conroy-Krutz and Lewis 2011; Osei 2013). And most African citizens’ political attitudes and dispositions are not structured coherently by identifiable political ideologies (Bratton 2013; Adida et al 2017; Harris 2020; Dulani et al 2021; Ferree 2022; Agomor, Banini and Langnel 2023; Taden, Banini and Kingsley 2023).

Post-independence leaders have presented their ideologies as instruments of the socio-economic development that was so much needed in Africa. Most African leaders adopted versions of socialism that were distinctive to their African state and social structures. Thus, for instance, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (Okon 2014; Osei-Opare 2023), Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia (Kanu 2014; Mbewe, Hinfelaar and Money 2023), Modibo Keita of Mali (Yacouba and Wologueme 2018; Wurzer, 2020) and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (Nyerere 1987; Eckert 2011), adopted and innovatively adapted socialist ideology to their specific post-colonial projects. On the other hand, notable among those advocating pro-Western capitalism as the ideal ideological path for the African states were Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire ( Aboussou 2019), Kofi Abrefa Busia of Ghana (Gerits 2022; Boaheng 2022) and Amadou Ahidjo of Cameroun (Sneyd 2014). While socialist-oriented countries, such as Ghana, pursued development through state control, several capitalist-oriented African countries favoured a free market economy with individual competitiveness. Moreover, crucially for our argument here, regimes’ ideological leanings also affected their conceptualisations of certain abhorrent practices such as clientelism, nepotism and corruption.

African states that gained self-rule between 1957 and 1976, such as Ghana and Nigeria, began to seek alignments and affirmations from foreign partners and foreign powers from the East and West were divided among ideological lines. Thus, the ideology professed by these latter states had a significant impact on African states’ international alliances and alignments. This explains why governments in this era developed strong ideological rhetorical and communication strategies that pushed for these ideologies’ agendas (Mazrui 1972; Ochs 1986: 16–26; van der Veur 2002).

Conroy-Krutz and Lewis (2011: 3) contend that the “third wave” of politics in Africa, from late 1990 to the present, is characterised by a drastic decrease in the use of and emphasis on ideology. Many parties abandoned explicit ideology as the core basis of convincing electorates. Election campaigns shifted to focus on the personal traits and characteristics of the party leaders and the ruling elites (Schatzberg 2001). Others employed alternative methods, which included ethnicity, demography and affiliations, to convince electorates (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 17). Carbone (2008: 149) has also pointed to instances of emphasis on populist ideas and proposals which tended to whip up the emotions of the electorate. This phenomenon informs van de Walle’s judgment (2003: 304–306) that as far as African politics is concerned during this period, ideology actually plays an insignificant role. This seems to be the case because the underlying factors that propel development, as indicated in the various manifestoes of political parties, do not seem achievable within the restrictive path of only one political ideology.

As a result, there has been an eclectic approach to addressing the developmental needs of African states, which means an amalgamation of the various drivers seen in the different ideologies. Thus, in Ghana, for instance, a political party that professed pure capitalist ideology formed the ruling government and then went on to implement social programmes and provide safety nets as a means of bridging the inequality gap. Scholars have thus argued that in Ghana today, political cleavages are not about ideology so much as ethnicity, demography and party affiliation through heritage, among others (Nugent 1999; Frempong 2001; Gyimah-Boadi 2003; Gyimah-Boadi and Asante 2006; Fridy 2007; Arthur 2009).

Boxing the African ideological posture with extrinsic periodisation

Influential Western scholars’ periodisation of African political history has led them to identify a pre-ideological period when Africans pursued no ideology in the socio-political organisation of their people. This extrinsic determination of historical epochs before colonialism, involving an almost static socio-political organisation based on tribes and ethnic groups, is simplistic and misleading (Silveira 1969: 5).

We reject this extrinsic periodisation. Well before colonialism, powerful kingdoms and city-states in the Congo, Mali and Ghana had advanced political organisations and distinctive socio-political ideologies. Insofar as ideology entails ideas, concepts and systems employed to shape political organisation and behaviour within a state, it makes little sense to conceive of pre-colonial Africa as pre-ideological. The development of ideology, as portrayed in the political history of African states, is determined by the exigencies of the prevailing circumstances. For instance, before colonialism, Africa was predominantly organised along ethnic and tribal lines and among the main objectives was territorial aggrandisement by the tribes and the creation of alliances for peaceful co-existence. As a result, some tribes pursued an ideology that justified and facilitated territorial aggrandisement and an increase in vassal tribes, while this same phenomenon and the quest for peaceful co-existence also promoted the non-competitive communalistic approach to socio-political organisation (Wittman 1973; Conroy-Krutz and Lewis 2011).

African communalism as an ideology

This chapter contests the view that communalism is not an ideology but rather a form of social organisation and that every society, from its primitive stage, is communalistic, then evolves into a more complex entity whereby ideologies are developed to shape the lives of the members of that society. We submit that such a narrative entails a narrow understanding of an ideology. It ignores how ideology animates the systems and structures employed to rule, regulate and ensure socio-political harmony in a society. We support Ejeh’s (2020) rejection of the idea that Africa has no particular ideology.

According to Onebunne (2019: 143), communalism is used as a backdrop to the ideologies posited by African leaders who were predominantly independent leaders and professed to speak for community identity. Such identity was based on a cultural value emphasising the ideals of mutual participation and sharing for everyone in the community. Communalism was practised at the level of communities before post-colonial statehood. It is premised on the view that every individual is first a member of one human family and as a result, the fundamental pathway to creating relationships among ourselves as humans is to understand and organise ourselves as one big family. For Iroegbu (1995), African communalism has one distinctive principle: belongingness. This means that every community member is first seen as part of a family within the community before individual self-aggrandisement. Ikuenobe (2018) asserts that African communalism, in practice, does not result in any conflict between the individual and the community, especially when members of the community see that contributing to the welfare of the community also means promoting the welfare of the individual. In this setting, mutuality is predominant and very potent in socio-political organisations.

Some have argued that since communalism is practised at the community level, the same norms and ideals cannot be applied at the state level, where the population becomes more extensive and has varying interests (Kumar 1992; Etta, Esowe and Asukwo 2016; Ihejirika 2021; Kapur 2023). The argument here is that it becomes difficult for the interest of the community or the solidarity of the members to be prioritised over the interest of each individual (Nagengast 2015). We argue that the community of interest is better expressed at the community level regarding demography, but it can also be effectively practised at the state level. Thus, such practice starts with egalitarian policies, with attendant solidarity and patriotism. Contrary to Bisong (2018), the communalist ideology can be seen as comprehensive rather than narrow.

Communalism emphasises deep community spirit and inter-relationships among people bounded by language, culture, socio-economic life, etc. On this basis, Onebunne (2019: 144) asserts that it symptomises the expressions made by people through nationalism as a result of one identity, course or goal they share. Communalism, then, is regarded as a way of life that comprehensively shapes the social organisation of a society that seeks to practise it. For Ekennia (1998), communalism professes fellowship in social relationships and organisation. According to Senghor (2004), Africans live in a collective society or, more precisely, a communal society. For Julius Nyerere (1962), the founding leader of Tanzania, communalism was more of an African brotherhood. Communalism became a pivotal ideology adopted by African post-independence leaders to forge the togetherness and inter-relatedness of communities previously dominated by colonialism. Apart from creating artificial borders, colonialism also led to the creation of weak institutions and pushing a predominantly capitalist agenda, not ideally suited to political organisation in Africa. This explains why African leaders professed versions of communalism as a socio-political ideology for mass organisation and participation.

Onebunne (2019: 148) asserts that communalism has been instrumental in ensuring just distribution, where everyone is treated as a member of one big family that shares personality and interests. According to Osha (2023: 44), like Marxism, communalism employs a collective ethos in organising citizens’ everyday lives, political practices and the distribution of resources. The socio-political ideology adopted by independence movement leaders during the last phase of formal colonialism was geared towards achieving independence and claiming power ( Mogenthau 1964), while the ideological posture of African leaders immediately after independence was determined by new opportunities and challenges presented by formal political autonomy.

For Ikuenobe (2006: 53), communalism can also be seen as a normative theory about the connection between the African and her community within African thought systems. In his defence of communitarianism and communalism, Menkiti (2017: 468) asserts that capitalism and Soviet communism were both antithetical to the idea of the community. The fact that African societies before colonialism were organised along the lines of communalism cannot be overemphasised. Asouzu (2007: 350), in clarifying the thought of Mbiti (1970: 141), asserted that in African societies, the idea of the community’s primacy oriented every human activity. This falls in line with Nyerere’s account of communalism in African society (see also Olatunji 2006 and Gyekye 1996). As Ephraim (2003: 31) puts it, the common good is the familiar spirit that lives together in cooperation.

Other African scholars have added to this account of communalism as an African indigenous socio-political ideology. Olufemi (2016) emphasises that African communalism is a long-standing traditional ideology suited to rural African societies. Ihejirika (2021: 423) portrays African communalism as a socialist ideology that stresses the importance of sharing, thus reducing unhealthy competition and rivalry among people. Ejeh and Arum (2021: 244) posit that in African communalism, societies are structured to emphasise how everyone is inter-related and to condemn any action that inclines members to be insensitive to the misfortune and suffering of others. Similarly, Abakare and Okeke (2018) assert that under African communalism, individuals enjoy freedom within the community and protect such freedom of others when considering the community’s wellbeing. For Oluwagbemi-Jacob_ (2014: 246), communalism is a moral and socio-economic framework emphasising principles such as friendship, caring and sharing.

African communalism and ethics

African communalism is not only a socio-political ideology but a distinctive moral system as well. Thus, it deals with the total behaviour of individuals and makes normative prescriptions about how members of a society or community ought to behave. In Africa, acceptable behaviour ensures social harmony, peaceful co-existence and solidarity. Ikuenobe (2018) states that African communalism values and prioritises human rights and responsibilities. Additionally, Gyekye (2010) believes that, at its core, African communalism plays a significant role in imparting ethical values to worthy members of society. Thus, the moral aspect of communalism enables and encourages community members to cooperate and pool resources for the common benefit and good of all in the community. According to Ominde, K’Odhiambo and Gunga (2020: 280), in African traditional societies, ethical values stem from an understanding that the individual always lives in an inter-related society to whose welfare all members must contribute. In the view of Ikuenobe (2006), the African moral prescription is basically against individualism and prioritises the collective good; individuals must see themselves as part of the whole community and, in doing so, acquire an identity shaped by the community.

Among the pivotal principles of African communalism is social responsibility, which is collectively shared by community members. Ominde, K’Odhiambo and Gunga (2020: 281) contend that social responsibility entails correlative and communal rights under community membership (Ikuenobe 2006). Such rights entail duties and obligations; according to Wiredu (2008), the African communalist society emphasises respect for human rights, taking care of the elderly and offering protection for women and children in instances of violence and conflict. Here, moral obligation and duty can be conceived in two related ways. First, the community has specific duties and obligations towards the individual, which are especially important concerning raising children. Thus, second, in African communalist societies one person does not bring up a child because any community member is responsible for ensuring the child develops a good character.

Individuals also have substantial duties to the community. The community fosters collective sharing, solidarity and togetherness and the individual is responsible for upholding these ideals, not exalting her personal interest over that of the community. African communalism also proposes an ethics of transparency. Taylor (2011) argues that a lack of transparency leads to distrust and destruction of relationships and social cohesion. Since African communalism emphasises social cohesion, the central role of political officeholders is that of a trustee, fully accountable to the citizens. African communalism thrived in the pre-colonial period because transparency and accountability worked well in this context, increasing collective participation and heightening interest in community affairs (Hesse 1986; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2013; Osafo-Kwaako and Robinson 2013; Etta, Esowe and Asukwo 2016).

Attacks on African communalism

Scholars have variously attacked African communalism with diverse positions on its practicality and propensity to allow for better socio-political organisation of a society ( Táíwò, 2016; Negedu and Ojomah 2018; Abakare and Okeke, 2021; Nnaemeka 2023). According to Bisong (2018: 1), communalism is a curse for contemporary African societies. He paints a very gloomy picture of the African adoption of communalism, which may have formed the basis of African traditional societies but cannot work in modern African states. He cites the failure of Nyerere’s Ujamaa programme as a case in point and asserts that any attempt to make communalism fit into current African states will fail. His major problem with communalism is what he conceives as the diminished individual interest in the community, arguing that when an individual supports the interest of one community, she must be pushed away from other communities. Clinging to one community then breeds ethno-centricism and tribalism, which leads to corruption.

Bisong (2018: 4) argues that communalism is at the base of Africa’s problems and progress must involve exorcising the communalist spirit. He also contends that the leadership problem and its attendant development deficit result from communalism because elected officials will focus on developing their tribesmen and policies that favour their community. This distributes positions of power and influence along ethnic and tribal lines and, as a result, makes meritocracy a non-starter in Africa. Bisong (2018: 4) insists that endemic African corruption results from leaders being pressured by expectations of enrichment from their communities. Leaders who gain power amass wealth to secure themselves and their communities. Because communalism does not adequately respond to the contemporary socio-political organisation of African states, it is practically impossible to practise at the level of a national state (Bisong 2018).

In defence of communalism

As noted above, African communalism has suffered many attacks from scholars from both Africa and beyond. It has also been defended and justified for ensuring a more humane socio-political system for African societies ( Mabovula 2011; Onah, Ezebuilo and Ojiakor 2016; Arum 2021; El Nabolsy 2023; Omoregie 2023). Communalism presented a more viable and appropriate ideology for the socio-political organisation in African states. But for colonialism, which altered the practice of communalism and further thwarted its organic development, the ideology would have been crucial in quickening growth in Africa.

To contend that communalism does not qualify as ideology is inadequate. To the extent that communalism was adopted to shape behaviour, create the path to social relationships, determine wealth distribution and prescribe political organisation and participation, it counts as an ideology. Further, the fact that it was practised in the pre-colonial era does not make it less of an ideology. Not all ideology is designed and formulated based on Western whims.

Further, it is erroneous to claim that since communalism is a community-based theory, any expansion of the same as a nation–state ideology will fail. It is not the ideological posture that makes for successful implementation, but the creation and implementation of policies to ensure its practice. For instance, capitalism will not thrive anywhere if strong institutions are not created to act as regulators of individual self-aggrandisement. It is not the ideology that makes things problematic; the policies set out to ensure that the ideology is implemented.

Some claim that vices such as nepotism, clientelism, favouritism and ethnicity are fuelled by communalism. However, pre-colonial practices of communalism worked rather well without these vices featuring prominently in the socio-political organisation of the state. The problem is not so much the ideology but the mentality of the citizens currently and the violent altering of the practice of this ideology. Here, communalism ensures equality, eliminates vices such as nepotism, fascism and clientelism, among others and emphasises meritocracy. This is because a person first sees the other as a human being and a member of the community and not an isolated stranger who requires no attention. Thus, every individual starts on an equal footing as a community member. This then shapes how one performs one’s duties to and in the community. In such a setting, leaders see themselves as trustees and, as a result, are committed to faithfulness, sincerity, transparency and accountability. This reduces corruption, especially when the focus is on the community’s interest.

Political corruption in Africa

Political and bureaucratic corruption have cost Africa greatly and continue to affect the continent and increase poverty among citizens. According to a 2021 African Union Report on illicit financial inflows, Africa has lost over $1 trillion to corruption in the past 50 years. It continues to lose about $50 billion annually to such illicit flows. Cases where governments award contracts for development projects without open tender constitute one of the predominant areas exploited by political corruption. Currently, Africa is deemed stagnant in its fight against corruption (Transparency International 2022). As of 2020, over 43 per cent of Africans live in poverty while the continent is still rich in natural resources (Ngumbi 2020: 100). Again, across 39 countries recently surveyed on issues of bribery and corruption, 58 per cent of respondents said that the level of corruption had increased between 2021 and 2023 in their country (Visser 2024).

According to Inge Amundsen (2006: 3), political corruption occurs when persons in high political offices abuse public power, be it through the accumulation of personal wealth or misuse of public funds for political gain. The objective is often about maintaining political power. Thus, in political corruption, the first thing to look for is the people involved and the second thing is the purpose of the corrupt practice. On this basis, government officials use their power to take from the private sector and even the government coffers for their private gain. Further, many scholars have replaced political corruption with corruption simpliciter and conceived it as constituting unethical behaviour that violates the political order. According to Heidenheimer (2002), corruption is simply using public power for private gain. Among the motives for corrupt acts are wealth, power and status (Amundsen 2006: 5; see also Iyanda 2012; Aktan 2015; Muntai and Ashukem 2023; Amundsen 1999; and Heywood 2015). Many have argued that in Africa, political corruption is influenced by the quest to seek and maintain power to promote the ruling elites’ selfish interest ( Otusanya 2011; Owoye and Bissessar 2014; Wilson 2014; Uddoh 2016; Aidt 2010 Amundsen 2019).

Political corruption is different from bureaucratic corruption, in which lower-level public officials use their tasks and duties in public administration for private gain, usually at the stage of implementing policy (Amundsen 1999). The effects of political corruption are more devastating since it takes place at the higher echelon of the state’s political system (Rose-Ackerman 2015). In is worth noting that in the 2024 Afrobarometer report, a significant proportion of respondents said that most or all the officials in the presidency in their various countries are corrupt and this response saw an increase from 25 per cent in 2011/2013 to 38 per cent in 2021/2023 (Visser 2024).

Reconsidering political corruption within communalism

During the period before colonialism, Africans were organised on tribal and ethnic lines and the main socio-political ideology was communalism, which fitted well with the African experience. The practice of communalism cuts across Africa, even though there were no homogenous countries or groups connected by trade and other activities. This fostered inter-ethnic groups and inter-tribal communal relationships among the citizens. Operating together, indigenous ideals of communalism such as humanness, sharing, solidarity, collectivism and togetherness led to less unhealthy competition and rivalry and people assumed local office as trustees and custodians. Conscious efforts were made to recognise that one was only a trustee, accountable to the trust’s beneficiaries – the citizens.

Again, it is indisputable that the community’s interest was also upheld under communalism (Negedu 2018; Ominde et al 2020; Abakare 2021; Oladipupo 2021). This does not mean that the individual had no interest in freedom of her own; it instead meant that when the general good pursued by the community is taken care of, it invariably satisfies the individual since the interest of the community is not exclusive and distinct from the interest of the individual. Under such circumstances, individual freedom or interests can be pursued while recognising the common good. Individual self-aggrandisement is minimised, community interest and togetherness are prioritised and individuals have neither the incentive nor the opportunity to amass wealth through exploitation and abuse. The resonating issue in interrogating the community’s interest and the extent to which such interests assume objective recognition is how this communal interest develops. Ideologically decoding the community interest may lead us to the individual interest, which is deemed subsumed under community interest. The lacuna of how a subjective individual interest becomes a community interest may be filled with what we call universal assent. This is where the community generally recognises and agrees to a particular act as satisfying the community’s interest.

Our discussion of political corruption above assumed that its most important practitioners are ruling elites and that their corruption affects the very governance of the state and the structures of the institutions that are supposed to serve as checks (Nelken and Levi 1996; Ebbe 2005; Atuobi 2007; Ojo 2018; Lodge 2019). We noted the consensus in the literature that political corruption is essentially about using public office for private gain (Amundsen 1999; Offe 2004; Aktan 2015; Cerqueti and Coppier 2017). The link between African political elites’ rejection of pre-colonial communalism and their extensive political corruption can now be made. A society that fosters strict individual self-aggrandisement and glorifies a strict consequentialist posture of the end justifying the means will also witness increased corruption. In the communalist system, the individual interest is subsumed under the community’s interest (Iroegbu 1995). As a result, corrupt acts will not thrive in a communalist system. In a communalist socio-political setting, individuals’ interests, goals and freedom are not antithetical to the community’s interest. As a result, when an individual seeks an interest that is at variance with the general community interest, such private interest must be jettisoned for the sake of the community. In a communalist system, affluence and wealth are recognised as legitimate personal goals. Individuals have the right to work hard to improve their economic status. However, when an individual acts to achieve his or her interest through corruption, it conflicts with the interest of the community and must be disallowed (Theron 2013; Khan 2018).

An ethical analysis of corruption within the African communalism ideology

Communalism can pass both consequentialist and deontological ethical tests. While consequentialism proposes moral determination based on the end results, deontologists look at the reason why a person is performing her duty for the action to be moral (Moyar 2012; Thomas 2015). In applying this to communalism, one realises that the communalist looks at the effect that pursuing an individual’s interest would have on the community. If the interest harms the community’s progress, such interest will be deemed unacceptable. The communalist ideology emphasises social harmony, community progress and togetherness; everyone succeeds when one person is successful. On this basis, the consequentialist position in communalism is that the common good ought to be pursued and individuals’ personal interests must be consistent with the common good.

On the other hand, communalism can also be justified deontologically, emphasising the performance of duty by the individual and the community (Morey 2005). Thus, in our exposition of communalism, we contended that the community has specific duties to the individual, such as protection. At the same time, the individual also has a duty to the community to always pursue the common good. This deontological posture in performing one’s duties means that pursuing an interest that will harm the community is inconsistent with the duty that an individual has to the community. On this basis, communalism also employs the deontological posture (Tomaselli 2009; Ikuenobe 2018).

Generally, therefore, we conceive that communalism is an eclectic ideology that can employ both the consequentialist and deontological ethical perspectives. This posture affects the survival of corruption as a phenomenon within a communalist system, since such a canker has a strong and negative effect on society and is inconsistent with the ideals of communalism. Thus, from a consequentialist perspective, corruption is not worth pursuing. The adoption of a deontological posture in communalism is the emphasis on duty to the community.

Conclusion

This chapter has interrogated Africa’s corruption from the perspective of political ideology. In doing this, it focused on communalism as an ideology by employing philosophical tools to analyse the place of corruption in African communalism. Communalism has been less explored using ethical tools to interrogate corruption within political ideology, specifically. To the extent that communalism has been jettisoned and is not dominant in most discussions of political ideology, this chapter has argued that communalism is indeed a political ideology and was mainly dominant in Africa during the pre-colonial era. The fundamental values of communalism, such as togetherness, solidarity and humanness, were paramount in the pre-colonial socio-political organisation of African society. These values are antithetical to the enabling factors for corruption, especially political corruption.

Communalism is an eclectic political ideology that accommodates consequentialist and deontological justifications, which helps us to appreciate why pervasive political corruption is not enabled within a society organised along the communalist ideology. For future research, it is crucial to broaden the scope of interrogation of corruption using other Afro-centric ideologies such as communitarianism and the concept of Ubuntu. Further, such interrogation can be approached with methodological lenses, such as ethnography to understand the in-depth cultural foundation of acts deemed as corruption and ethno-philosophy and philosophic sagacity to enquire into the extent to which wise sayings, proverbs, etc. reflect on the conceptualisation of corruption. This can contribute to understanding corruption and its prevalence in the current African ideological dispensation of capitalism.

References

Abakare, C. O. and Okeke, V. C. (2018) “Communalism in contemporary African society: A phenomenological study”, Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 2, 67–83.

Aboussou, D. (2019) Kwame Nkrumah and Félix Houphouët-Boigny: Divergent Perspectives on African Independence and Unity. Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK: Cambridge Scholars.

Adida, C., Gottlieb, J., Kramon, E. and Mcclendon, G. (2017) “Reducing or reinforcing In-Group preferences? An experiment on information and ethnic voting”, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, vol. 12, no. 4, 437–477.

African Union. (2023) “African Union convention on preventing and combating corruption status list”. Addis Ababa: African Union.

Agomor, K. S., Banini, D. K. and Langnel, Z. (2023) “Legislative electoral incumbent defeats: Cues from Ghana.” The Journal of Legislative Studies, 1–20.

Aidt, T. S. (2010) “Corruption and sustainable development”, International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption, vol. 2, 1–52.

Aktan, C. C. (2015) “Political corruption: An introductory study on terminology and typology. International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanity Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 47–65.

Amundsen, I. (1999) Political Corruption: An Introduction to the Issues. Bergen, Norway: Chr. Michelsen Institute.

Amundsen, I. (2006) Political Corruption. U4 Issue.

Amundsen, I. (2019) “Extractive and power-preserving political corruption”, in Amundsen, I. (ed.) Political Corruption in Africa, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 1–28.

Apter, D. E. (1964) “Ideology and discontent”, in Apter, D. E. (ed.) Ideology and Discontent, London: Free Press of Glencoe: 15–46.

Arthur, P. (2009) “Ethnicity and electoral politics in Ghana’s Fourth Republic”, Africa Today, vol. 56, no. 2 (Winter), 44–73.

Arum, B. M. O. (2021) “Towards a defense of African Communalism”, Sapientia Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Development Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 242–252.

Asomah, J. Y. (2019) “What are the key drivers of persistent Ghanaian political corruption?” Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 54, no. 5, 638–655.

Asouzu, I. I. (2007) New Complementary Ontology beyond World Immanentism, Ethnocentric Reduction and Impositions, Zweigniederlassung Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Wien.

Atuobi, S. M. (2007) “Corruption and state instability in West Africa: An examination of policy options”, KAIPTC Occasional Paper, vol. 21, 1–24.

Bamikole, L. O. (2012) “Nkrumah and the triple heritage thesis and development in Africana societies”, International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology, vol. 2, no. 2, 68–76.

Bell, D. (1960) The End of Ideology, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Bisong, P. (2018) “Between communalism and individualism: Which way Africa?”, RAIS Journal for Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 2, 1–10.

Boaheng, I. (2022) “Exploring the contextual implications of Kofi Abrefa Busia’s socio-political ethics for contemporary Ghana”, Social Sciences Humanities and Education (SHE) Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 40–51.

Boateng, A., Wang, Y., Ntim, C. G. and Elmagrhi, M. (2024) “Institutions and corruption relationship: Evidence from African countries”, Journal of International Management, vol. 30, no. 3, 101–136.

Bratton, M. (ed.) (2013) Voting and Democratic Citizenship in Africa, Boulder CO: Lynne Reiner.

Brierley, S. (2020) “Unprincipled principals: Co-opted bureaucrats and corruption in Ghana”, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 64, no. 2, 209–222.

Burgess-Jackson, K. (2013) “Taking egoism seriously”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 16, 529–542.

Carbone, G. (2008) No-party Democracy? Ugandan politics in Comparative Perspective, Boulder CO: Lynne Riener.

Cerqueti, R. and Coppier, R. (2017) “Political corruption”, in Marciano, A. and Battista, G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, New York NY: Springer.

Chabal, P. and Daloz, J. (1999) Africa works: Disorder as Political Instrument, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

Chowdhury, M. (2018) “Emphasizing morals, values, ethics and character education in science education and science teaching”, MOJES: Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, 1–16.

Clapham, C. (1970) “The context of African political thought”, Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1–13.

Conroy-Krutz, J. and Lewis, D. (2011) Mapping Ideologies in African Landscapes, Pretoria South Africa: Institute for Democracy in South Africa.

Downs, A. (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York NY: Harper.

Dulani, B., Harris, A., Lust, E., Ferree, K., Kao, K., Jansson, C. and Metheney, E. (2021) “Elections in the time of Covid-19: The triple crises around Malawi’s 2020 Presidential elections”, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, vol. 31, no. sup1, 56–68.

Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.

Ebbe, O. N. (2005) “Political corruption in Africa”, ch. 9 in Sarre, R., Das, D. and Albrecht, H. (eds.) Policing Corruption: International Perspectives, Lanham MD: Lexington Books.

Eckert, A. (2011) “Julius Nyerere, Tanzanian elites and the project of African socialism”, in Dülffer, J. and Frey, M. (eds) Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ejeh, C. P. and Arum, B. M. O. (2021) “Towards a defense of African communalism”, Sapientia Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Development Studies (SGOJAHDS), vol. 4, no. 2, June, 242–252.

Ejeh, P. C. (2020) “Appraisal of Justin N. Ekennia’s critique on African communalism and political rationality”, Oracle of Wisdom Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs (OWIJOPPA), vol. 4, no. 4, 11–20.

Ekennia, J. (1998) African Communalism and Political Rationality: A Critique in African Philosophy and Public Affairs, Enugu Nigeria: Delta: 348–349.

El Nabolsy, Z. (2023) “The African novel and the question of communalism in African philosophy”, Safundi, vol. 25, no. 1–2, 12–17.

Ephraim, I. (2003) “African communalism”, in Ozumba, G. O. (ed.) A Colloquium of African Philosophy, Calabar Nigeria: Pyramid.

Erikson, R. S. and Kent, L. T. (2003) American Public Opinion, 6^th edition, New York NY: Longman.

Etta, E. E., Esowe, D. D. and Asukwo, O. O. (2016) “African communalism and globalization”, African Research Review, vol. 10, no. 3, 302–316.

Ferree, K. E. (2022) “Choice and choice set in African elections”, The Journal of Politics, vol. 84, no. 4, 2261–2265.

Fleming, S. (2019) “Corruption costs developing countries $1.26 trillion every year – yet half of EMEA thinks it’s acceptable”, World Economic Forum, vol. 9, December.

Frempong, A. K. (2001) “Ghana’s election 2000: The ethnic undercurrent”, in Ayee, J. (ed.) Deepening Democracy in Ghana: Politics of the 2000 Elections, Accra: Freedom.

Fridy, K. S. (2007) “The elephant, umbrella and quarrelling cocks: Disaggregating partisanship in Ghana’s Fourth Republic”, African Affairs, vol. 106, no. 423 (April), 281–305.

Gerits, F. (2022) “Anticolonial capitalism: How Ghana came to embrace market-led development theory (the 1970s–1990s)”, Southern Journal for Contemporary History, vol. 47, no. 1, 4–26.

Gerring, J. (1997) “Ideology: A definitional analysis”, Political Research Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4 (December), 957–94.

Gyekye, K. (1996) African Cultural Values: An Introduction, Accra: Sankofa.

Gyekye, K. (2010) “African ethics”, in Zalta. E. N. and Nodelman, U. (eds) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford CT: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University.

Gyimah-Boadi, E. (2003) “Ghana: The political economy of ‘successful’ ethno-regional conflict management”, in Bastian, S. and Luckham, R. (eds) Can Democracy Be Designed? The Politics of Institutional Choice in Conflict-Torn Societies, London: Zed: 120–144.

Gyimah-Boadi, E. and Asante, R. (2006) “Ethnic structure, inequality and public sector governance in Ghana”, in Bangura, Y. (ed.) Ethnic Inequalities and Public Sector Governance, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, S. (1985) “Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and the post-structuralist debates”, Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 2, no. 2, 91–114.

Harris, A. S. (2020) “Toward performance-based politics: Swing voters in South Africa’s 2016 local elections”, Politikon, vol. 47, no. 2, 196–214.

Heidenheimer, A. J. (2002) “Introduction to Part I”, in Heidenheimer, A. J. and Johnston, M. (eds.) Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction: 3–14.

Hesse, P. (1986) “Communism and communalism in the 1920s. Notes on a neglected nexus”, Engineer, vol. 18.

Heywood, P. (ed.) (2015) Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, Abingdon UK: Routledge.

Hills, A. (2010) The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ihejirika, C. (2021) “The ideology of African communalism as a socialist pathway to Nigeria’s national integration”, Sapientia Foundation Journal of Education, Science & Gender Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 323–432.

Ikuenobe, P. (2006) Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions, Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Ikuenobe, P. (2018) “Human rights, personhood, dignity and African communalism”, Journal of Human Rights, vol. 17, no. 5, 589–604.

Iroegbu, P. (1995) Metaphysics: The Kpim of Philosophy, Owerri Nigeria: International University Press.

Iyanda (2012) “Corruption: Definitions, theories and concepts”, Oman Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, vol. 2, 37–45.

Justesen, M. K. and Bjørnskov, C. (2014) “Exploiting the poor: Bureaucratic corruption and poverty in Africa”, World Development, vol. 58, 106–115.

Kanu, I. (2014) “Kenneth Kaunda and the quest for an African humanist philosophy”, International Journal of Scientific Research, vol. 3, no. 8, 375–78.

Kapur, R. (2023) “Understanding communalism, secularism and regionalism”, Indian Journal of Social Science and Literature (IJSSL), vol. 2, no. 4, 11–16.

Khan, F. (2018) “Neopatrimonialism and corruption: Towards a new common sense”, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, 553–562.

Kumar, P. (ed.) (1992) Towards Understanding Communalism, Chandigarh India: Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development.

Lodge, T. (2019) “Corruption in African politics”, in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Politics. [Online], Available: https://oxfordre.com/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-848 [retrieved 13 November 2025]

Lumumba, P. (2014) “Corruption: The bane of Africa”, in* Corruption in Africa. A Threat to Justice and Sustainable Peace*, Geneva: Global Ethics.net Focus 14.

Mabovula, N. N. (2011) “The erosion of African communal values: A reappraisal of the African Ubuntu philosophy”, Inkanyiso: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1, 38–47.

Mafukata, M. A. (2015) “Evolution of corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa – from Nkrumah to Mutharika the 2^nd: Case study of South Africa”, International Journal of Research in Business and Social Science, vol. 4, no. 1, 87–112.

Malipula, M. M. (2024) “Understanding and addressing political-bureaucratic corruption in Africa: Reflections from Tanzania”, African Journal of Empirical Research, vol. 5, no. 2, 42–54.

Mannheim, K. (1960) Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. ([1848] 1972) “Manifesto of the communist party”, in Tucker, R. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2^nd edition, New York NY: W. W. Norton: 473–500.

Mazrui, A. (1972) “The press, intellectuals and the printed word”, in Moyo, E. and Rayner, S. (eds) Mass Thoughts, Kampala: Makerere University Press.

Mbewe, M., Hinfelaar, M. and Money, D. (2023) “Introduction: The life and legacies of Kenneth Kaunda in Southern Africa”, Zambia Social Science Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2.

Mbiti, J. (1970) Africa Religion and Philosophies, New York NY: Anchor Books.

McClosky, H. (1964) “Consensus and ideology in American Politics”, American Political Science Review, vol. 58, no. 2, June, 361–382.

Menkiti, I. (2017) “Community, communism, communitarianism: An African intervention”, in Afolayan, A. and Toyin Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Michalopoulos, S. and Papaioannou, E. (2013) “Pre-colonial ethnic institutions and contemporary African development”, Econometrica, vol. 81, no. 1, 113–152.

Morey, P. (2005) “Communalism, corruption and duty in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters”, in Morey, P. and Tiekell, A. (eds) Alternative Indias, Berlin: Brill, 141–160.

Morgenthau, R. S. (1964) Political Parties in French-speaking West Africa, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Moyar, D. (2012) “Consequentialism and deontology in the philosophy of right”, in Brooks, T. (ed.) Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford: Blackwell: 7–42.

Munyai, A. and Ashukem, J. C. N. (2023) “The political economy of political corruption in 21^st-century Africa: Perspectives from Cameroon and South Africa”, Law, Democracy and Development, vol. 27, 330–359.

Nagengast, E. (2015) “Communalism and liberalism in the struggle for human rights in Africa”, Juniata Voices, vol. 15, 80–86.

Negedu, I. A. and Ojomah, S. O. (2018) “The question of African Communalism and the antithesis of democracy”, Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions, vol. 7, no. 3, 53–71.

Nelken, D. and Levi, M. (1996) “The corruption of politics and the politics of corruption: An overview”, Journal of Law and Society, vol. 23, 1.

Ngumbi, E. (2020) “Reconstructing the elusive fight against corruption in Africa: The quest to re-characterize political corruption as an international crime”, International Journal of Business and Management, vol. 8, no. 2, 98–106.

Njangang, H., Asongu, S. and Mouchili, E. (2022) “Does corruption starve? An African perspective”, AGDI Working Paper, No. WP/22/022, Yaoundé Cameroon: African Governance and Development Institute.

Nnaemeka, J. (2023) “A critical discourse on African communalism vis-a-vis Western individualism: The existential realities”, Available at SSRN 4424478.

Nugent, P. (1999) “Living in the past: Urban, Rural and Ethnic Themes in the 1992 and 1996 elections in Ghana”, Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 37, no. 2 (June), 287–319.

Nyerere, J. K. (1962) ‘Ujamaa’: The basis of African Socialism, Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Standard.

Nyerere, J. K. (1987) Ujamaa: The basis of African socialism. Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 4–11.

Ochs, M. (1986) The African Press, Cairo: The American University of Cairo.

Offe, C. (2004) “Political corruption: Conceptual and practical issues”, in Kornai, J. and Rose-Ackerman, S. (eds) Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition, New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 77–99.

Ojo, J. S. (2018) “Politics of corruption in Africa”, in Farazmad, A. (ed.) Global Encyclopaedia of Public Administration, Public Policy and Governance, New York NY: Springer International. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3556-1

Okon, E. E. (2014) “Kwame Nkrumah: The fallen and forgotten hero of African nationalism”, European Scientific Journal, vol. 10, no. 17.

Oladipupo, S. L. (2021) “A Popperian interrogation of African communalism in the context of Nigerian democratic culture”, International Journal of Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 3, 236–245.

Olatunji, O. (2006) “The individual-community relationship as an issue in social and political philosophy”, in Oladipo, O. (ed.) Issues in African Philosophy. Ibadan: Hope.

Olufemi, T. (2016) “Against African communalism”, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 24, no. 1, 81–100.

Oluwagbemi-Jacob, D. (2014) “Communalism as a theory of justice and the human person in African culture”, Philosophy Study, vol. 4, no. 4, 245–258.

Ominde, E. S., K’Odhiambo, A. K. and Gunga, S. O. (2020) “Analysis of praxis of African Communalism: A model of ethical values in primary school curriculum in Kenya”, Journal of Educational Research in Developing Areas (JEREDA), vol. 1, no. 3, 278–288.

Omoregie, C. O. (2023) “The defence of African humanistic communalism for African pedagogy”, UNESWA Journal of Education, vol. 6, no. 1, 86–94.

Onah, O., Ezebuilo, H. and Ojiakor, T. (2016) “The place of the individual in the traditional African society: A philosophical appraisal”, International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review, vol. 6, no. 3, 225–229.

Onebunne, J. I. (2019) “Igwebuike: An African metaphysics of communal strength” IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities, vol. 5, no. 6, 143–155.

Osafo-Kwaako, P. and Robinson, J. A. (2013) “Political centralization in pre-colonial Africa”, Journal of Comparative Economics, vol. 41, no. 1, 6–21.

Osei, A. (2013) “Political parties in Ghana: Agents of democracy?”, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 543–563.

Osei-Opare, N. (2023) “Ghana and Nkrumah revisited: Lenin, state capitalism and black Marxist orbits”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 65, no. 2, 399–421.

Osha, S. (2023) “Marxism, communitarianism and communalism in Africa”, in Fleschenberg, A., Kresse, K. and Castillo, R. C. (eds) Thinking with the South: Reframing Research Collaboration amid Decolonial Imperatives and Challenges, Berlin: De Gruyter. [Online], Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110780567

Otusanya, O. J. (2011) “Corruption as an obstacle to development in developing countries: A review of literature”, Journal of Money Laundering Control, vol. 14, no. 4, 387–422.

Owoye, O. and Bissessar, N. (2014) “Bad governance and corruption in Africa”, in Maducumura, G. M. and Macol, G. (eds) Challenges to Democratic Governance in Developing Countries, Cham Switzerland: Springer: 227–245.

Rose-Ackerman, S. and Lagunes, P. (eds) (2015) Greed, Corruption and the Modern State: Essays in Political Economy, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar.

Schatzberg, M. (2001) Political Legitimacy In Middle Africa: Family, Father, Food, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

Seife, T. K. (2022) “The debate between conventional ideology and ethnic politics in Africa”, African Journal of Political Science, vol. 10, no. 1, 26–40.

Senghor, L. S. (2004) “Negritude: A humanism of the twentieth century”, in Cain, P. S. and Harrison, M. (eds) Imperialism: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Volume III, Abingdon UK: Routledge: 220–229.

Silveira, O. (1969) African Ideologies and Party Structure, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

Smith, K. B., Oxley, D. R., Hibbing, M. V., Alford, J. R. and Hibbing, J. R. (2011) “Linking genetics and political attitudes: Reconceptualising political ideology”, Political Psychology, vol. 32, no. 3, 369–397.

Sneyd, A. (2014) “Neopatrimonial African capitalism? Conceptual adventures via John Kenneth Galbraith”, Air & Space Power Journal-Africa and Francophonie, vol. 5, no. 2, 21–48.

Taden, J., Banini, D. K. and Kingsley, A. (2023) “Determinants of swing voting in Africa: Evidence from Ghana’s elections”, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 1–24.

Táíwò, O. (2016) “Against African communalism”, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 24, no. 1, 81–100.

Taylor, D. F. P. (2011) Can Ubuntu provide the Ethical Basis for King III? Unpublished Master’s dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand.

Theron, P. M. (2013) “Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa: A practical-theological response”, In die Skriflig, vol. 47, no. 1, 1–8.

Thomas, A. J. (2015) “Deontology, consequentialism and moral realism”, Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy, vol. 19.

Tomaselli, K. G. (2009) “(Afri) ethics, communitarianism and libertarianism”, International Communication Gazette, vol. 71, no. 7, 577–594.

Transparency International. (2022) Corruption Perceptions Index, Berlin: Transparency International.

Uddoh, J. (2016) Corruption and Nigerian Foreign Policy (1999–2007), Bloomington IN: Author House.

van de Walle, N. (2003) “Presidentialism and clientelism in Africa’s emerging party systems”, Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (June), 297–321.

van der Veur, P. R. (2002) “Broadcasting and political reform”, in Hydén, G., Leslie, M. and Ogundimu, F. F. (eds) Media and Democracy in Africa, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction: 81–105.

Visser, R. (2024) “Africans see rising corruption, even in daily life: Afrobarometer surveys track perceptions of graft and experience of bribery”, [Online], Available: https://goodauthority.org/news/africa-corruption-bribery-afrobarometer-survey/

Wilson, G. (2014) “The Nigerian state and oil theft in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria”, Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa, vol. 16, no. 1, 69–81.

Wimpy, C. (2021) “Political failure and bureaucratic potential in Africa”, Journal of Policy Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, 15–25.

Wiredu, K. (2008) “Social philosophy in post-colonial Africa: Some preliminaries concerning communalism and communitarianism”, South African Journal of Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 4, 332–339.

Wittman, D. A. (1973) “Parties as utility maximizers”, American Political Science Review, vol. 67, no. 2, June, 490–498.

Wrong, M. (2009) It is Our Turn to Eat: A Story of a Kenya Whistle Blower, New York NY: Harper Perennial.

Wurzer, K. (2020) “The Mali Federation: A Pan-African endeavour? Reflections on Pan-Africanism and nationalism in times of decolonization”, Stichproben (19928610), vol. 20, no. 38, 55–72.

Yacouba, C. and Wologueme, B. (2018) “From the failure of African socialism, how to set a new trend for a new generation?”, Open Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 2, 27–36.

Index

Note: Figures are indicated by italics. Tables are indicated by bold. Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the endnote number e.g., 20n1 refers to endnote 1 on page 20.

absurdity, in workplaces 295–7

academic research, think tanks in 204–6

ACF (Advocacy Coalition Framework) 270, 271

activism 44, 64, 177, 190, 242, 251, 253, 381, 497;

anti-ideological 493–4;

Christian Right 507, 509, 511;

environmental 50, 59, 60, 62, 120, 129;

political 28, 261, 506, 507, 511;

Republican Party 509, 513

adjacent realm, of an ideological field 5, 11

ADL (Anti-Defamation League) 174, 180n9

advertising 48, 235, 237, 241–3

Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) 270, 271

advocacy think tanks 203–15, 211, 212

affordance theory 303–6, 310

affordances 284, 303, 304, 308, 310, 349, 361, 383, 446, 453–5

African communalism: attacks on 524–5;

in defence of 525–6;

and ethics 524, 527–8;

as ideology 522–4, 527–8;

political corruption within 526–7

African ideological posture 521–2

African socialism 521

African thought, ideology in 520–1

Against the corporations of death 61

agency 25, 31, 85, 110, 114, 179, 188, 195, 234, 306, 307;

non-human animal 333, 337, 340, 342;

normative (of China) 416, 418, 424, 425

AI (Artificial Intelligence) 80, 310, 311, 349, 353, 357, 365, 371, 385, 387, 388

algorithms 73–4, 244, 302, 384;

hate speech detection 78–82;

Louvain clustering 78

alternative macros 41–2

Althusser, Louis 29, 239, 355, 402–3, 514

American conservatism 395, 505, 512, 513

American hegemony 384, 418, 420

American Voter, The 316

amour des places 98

anarchisation: dis- 125;

of ecologism 119–25, 131–2

anarchism: as best hosting ideology 123–4;

classical 122, 125–6, 130–1;

green 59, 61, 66;

greening of 119, 125;

ideological hybridisation with ecologism 119–21;

ideology of 119–32;

intuitive 121–2;

morphological iconoclasm of 121;

(over)greening of 125–31;

pluralising 130

anarcho-capitalism 368

Ancien Régime 98–100

Anderson, Benedict 8, 187, 345

Anderson, Perry 108–10

animal studies 284, 330–5, 342

anonymity 7, 56, 60, 62, 63, 66, 71, 372

anthropocentrism 122–3, 333–4

anthropogenic climate change 358, 360

anti-Black racism 163

anti-colonialism 152, 176–8

anti-communism 252, 255, 439, 505–6, 512, 513

Anti-Defamation League (ADL) 174, 180n9

anti-Enlightenment 186–7

anti-fascism 381

anti-ideological activist ideology 493–4

anti-ideology 46, 48, 179, 184, 493–4, 498, 499

anti-immigration attitudes 395, 461–4, 466, 470–2, 482

anti-Jewish pogroms 169, 170, 172–3, 176, 178, 179

anti-Jewish racism 169, 173

anti-neoliberalism 405

anti-pluralism 115

anti-racism 13, 135–6, 152, 154–60, 165, 166

anti-racist discourse 152, 155, 157, 158, 164–7

anti-racist ideology 135–6, 152–6;

discourse analysis of 158–65;

review of literature on 156–8

anti-racist resistance, against discrimination 161–4

antisemitic imagination, genealogies of 169–71

antisemitic libels 169, 172

antisemitism: and anti-Zionism 174–9;

critical analysis of 164–5;

defining 171–4;

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of 171, 175;

Nazi 172, 178;

performative violence in 169–81;

racial 169–70, 172

anti-slavery attitude 159, 161

anti-slavery discourse 159–60

anti-sociologism 402

anti-technology radicalism 56, 57, 65

anti-utopianism 386

anti-Zionism, and antisemitism 174–9

applied ideology studies 5

Archeofuturism 192–3

archives, of radicals 56, 60, 64–6

aristocratic ideology 335, 336

articulatory equivalences 52

Artificial Intelligence (AI) 80, 310, 311, 349, 353, 357, 365, 371, 385, 387, 388

associational ecologies 3

Atomwaffen Division 57

Ausgewahlte Schriften zur Judischen Frage 164–5

authenticity 46, 63–4, 127, 138, 175, 176, 451, 454

authoritarianism: populist 10, 13, 512;

right-wing 28, 321, 322, 322

automatic detection 78, 79

autonomisation, of ecologism 125

back-to-nature socialism 126

Bacon, Francis 256, 349–52

Bauman, Zygmunt 188

BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) 178, 180n11

Becker, Johann Philipp 114, 115

Benoist, Alain de 189–94

Bentham, Jeremy 90, 96, 108, 332–3

Benton, Ted 130

Bert 79–80

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 394, 444, 445, 447–9, 457

Bible 257, 260, 504, 507, 510, 512

biological metaphors 3

biological socialism 368

Birnbaum, Nathan 164–5

BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 394, 444, 445, 447–9, 457

Black Lives Matter 152, 156, 158, 163–4

Black resistance against slavery 160–1

blogs 62, 63, 71, 366, 452

Blood Libel 169–72

Bondage and My Freedom 160–1

Bookchin, Murray 121–4

Boswell, James 330–2, 336, 338, 340, 341

Bourdieu, Pierre 29, 187, 204, 260–1, 431, 432, 434, 437, 440

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) 178, 180n11

British Labour Party 57, 58

British liberalism 86, 89–90, 93, 94, 98, 100–1;

and capitalist development 94–7

Broken Earth trilogy 379, 382–3

Brown vs Board of Education 162

Burnham, James 188–9

Californian ideology 357–9

Cambridge School 3–4, 11, 34, 85, 91–3, 104–6, 128, 260–1, 368

canon, in ideology studies 2, 5;

beyond the 86

Canovan, Margaret 138–3, 145–9, 151n1

capitalism 94, 402, 493, 494, 520, 523, 525, 528;

anarcho- 368;

climate 241;

consumer 241;

free-market 292;

French 100, 101;

global 111;

large-scale 189;

neoliberal 188, 288, 293;

peripheral (of Latin America) 398;

platform 244;

print 8, 345;

pro-Western 521;

racial 378

capitalist development 90, 92, 98, 99, 238, 399;

and British liberalism 94–7

carbon realism 241–3

Carmichael, Stokely 163

cartographic method 20, 71, 74–6, 82

catch-all party 220

CCCM (climate change-counter-movement) 236–40, 244

CCP (Chinese Communist Party) 394, 413, 415, 419–22, 423, 424, 492

CDA see Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

CDM (community of destiny for mankind) 413, 416–18, 420–3

Centre for European Renewal (CER) 254–6, 258–9

centrism 206, 207;

anthropo- 122–3, 333–4;

eco- 122, 124, 126, 130–1;

ethno- 380;

managerial 395, 491, 493, 494, 496–9;

in Russia 497–500;

state- 188

CER (Centre for European Renewal) 254–6, 258–9

Champetier, Charles 189–92

change: climate ( see climate change);

ideological ( see historiography);

paradigmatic 229;

policy 199, 229, 267, 268, 270, 271;

social 320–1;

and upheaval 49–51

Chaouat, Bruno 175

Chapel Hill Expert Survey 221–2

Charbonnier, Pierre 127, 131

charismatic Christians 504

Chávez, Hugo 137, 144, 404, 405, 408

China, People’s Republic of (PRC) 14, 207, 433

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 394, 413, 415, 419–22, 423, 424, 492

Christian Bible 257, 260, 504, 507, 510, 512

Christian Coalition 504, 506–7, 511

Christian conservatives 504–7, 514

Christian democracy 50, 252, 508–10

Christian moralism 513, 514

Christian Nationalism 505, 507, 512, 514

Christian Right, in United States 504–15;

activism 507, 509, 511;

discourse 511–12;

ideology 505, 509–15

Christianity 110, 172, 395, 439, 440, 448, 507, 514

circulation: of ideology online 70–83;

of political ideas 254, 255, 257, 260, 261

Civil Rights Movement 152, 156, 162, 163

civilizationism 194–5

class conflict 111, 124, 336

classical anarchism 122;

(over)greening of 125–6, 129–31

classical social interpretation, of liberalism 92

climate capitalism 241

climate change 200, 234–40, 244;

anthropogenic 358, 360;

counter-movement (CCCM) 235–40, 244;

social organisation of 240–3

cognitive biases 272

Cold War 13, 188, 190, 192, 193, 254, 255, 355, 379–80, 421

collective habitus 458

collective identities 40, 111, 141, 147, 429

Collegium Intermarium 258

Collins, Randall 85, 430, 432–3

colonial libel 178

colonialism: anti- 152, 176–8;

settler 178, 378

Comintern 109

common values of all mankind (CVAM) 413–16, 422–5;

canonisation of (2022) 414–15, 421–2;

Chinese Communist Party historical mission (2021) 418–21;

first mentions (2015) 415–16;

systematic external propaganda (2019–2020) 417–18;

vs. universal values (2016–2018) 416–17

communalism, African see African communalism

communism: anti- 252, 255, 439, 505–6, 512, 513;

Soviet 257, 523; see also Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

Communist Manifesto 46, 113

community of destiny for mankind (CDM) 413, 416–18, 420–22, 423

Community Security Trust (CST) 178–9, 180n12

comparative intellectual history, of liberalism and capitalist development 89–101

complexity, confronting 42–5

comprehensibility, of ideas 229

computational sociology 73–4

computational studies, of online circulation of ideology 70–83

conceptual convergence 120–5;

minimal 121–2

conceptual ideological analysis 35n1; see also interpretive ideological analysis

conceptual interpretation, of liberalism 90–2

conceptual morphology, ideology as 3–5, 131

confronting complexity 42–5

Confucianism: modern 429–41;

New 434–5, 441n1, 441n3

conservatism: American 395, 505, 512, 513;

contemporary 184, 251, 259–60;

cultural 193;

radical 184, 185–7, 190–2

conservative Christians 504–7, 514

conservative intellectuals see International of Conservative Intellectuals (ICI)

conservative populism 237–40, 504

conspicuous pragmatism 497–9; see also centrism

Constant, Benjamin 91, 93, 98, 99

constituent ideas, of ideology 25, 26

constrained network of beliefs, ideology as 316–17

Consultative Commission on Human Rights 80

consumer capitalism 241

consumerism 49, 234, 240–4;

radical anti- 127

contemporary conservatism 184, 251, 259–60

contemporary political ideology, in India 444–58

content analysis 73, 206, 302, 451, 458

convergence 49;

conceptual 121–5;

ideological 221;

industrial 367;

between mode of science fiction futurism and wider culture 387;

of Soviet Union with the West 488

converging green concepts 130–1

Converse, Philip 27, 284, 316–17

core realm, of an ideological field 5, 11

Cornucopianism 350, 357–9

corruption, within African communalism ideology 527–8

cosmopolitanism 108, 109, 193, 372

cosmos-politanism 371

creation metaphor 307, 309

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 29–31, 51, 226, 227, 394;

of Hindutva 444, 451–6, 458

critical discourse theory 1

critical ideological analysis 20, 23, 28–31, 33–5, 35n1

Critical Techno-cultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) 454–5

CST (Community Security Trust) 178–9, 180n12

CTDA (Critical Techno-cultural Discourse Analysis) 454–5

cultural conservatism 193

cultural context 25, 393

cultural hegemony 256, 395, 456, 510

cultural traditionalism 513

CVAM see common values of all mankind (CVAM)

Danube Institute 256, 258, 258

decentralised structures, of radical groups 57–60, 58

decoding, of ideology 41, 53, 176, 284, 306, 307, 308, 527

Decoding report on anti-Semitism 80

decolonisation 175, 178

decontestation, ideological 11, 33, 43, 52, 169, 174–5;

in China 414–15, 421, 424–6;

morphological act of 227

Deicide 169, 171

de-ideologisation 220–1

democracy: ideology of 138, 139, 146, 151n1;

liberal 50, 138, 141, 187, 190, 195, 214, 257, 302, 365, 492;

and populism 138–42

democratic nationalism 106

Democratic Party 214, 317, 506

Derrida, Jacques 29, 332, 340

design metaphor 307, 308–9

despotism 98–100, 190, 341, 499

detection, of statements with antisemitic connotations 80–1, 81

digital data 72, 73

digital discourses, transmission of Hindutva through 444, 446–51

digital mapping 77–8, 77

digital methods 71–3, 78, 79, 82

digital scenes 72, 73, 82

digital spaces 71, 76, 79, 81–2

dignity at work 288, 296–7

Dire et mal dire 70

direct action 58, 62, 121–3, 125, 130

disanarchisation 125

discourse: anti-racist 152, 155, 157, 158, 164–7;

anti-slavery 159–60;

Christian Right 511–12;

digital 444, 446–51;

elite ( see immigration, political elite discourses on);

expert 203, 209, 212–14;

ideological ( see ideological discourse);

mankind (see community of destiny for mankind (CDM));

media 73, 360, 453–5;

political ( see political discourse);

war of 510, 511

discourse analysis 135, 153, 155, 160, 226, 359, 408;

ideological 155, 166; see also Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

Discourse Education Polarisation Hypothesis (H6) 465, 478

Discourse of Illusion (DoI) 394–5, 456–8

discourse theory 51, 52, 403, 408;

critical 1;

political 139, 509–12

Discourses Ideology Polarisation Hypothesis (Hypothesis 5) 465, 475

discrimination, anti-racist resistance against 161–4

discursive analysis, in Latin America 405–7

discursive hegemony 452, 458

discursive ideological analysis 35n1; see also critical ideological analysis

discursive institutionalism 200, 226–9, 268, 277

discursive turn 223–4

disinterested exploration 41

diversities, internal 45–6

Doctrinaire tradition 98–9

documentary analysis 253–4, 270

DoI (Discourse of Illusion) 394–5, 456–8

domestic legitimacy, grounding in globalised historical mission of 422–4, 423

Douglass, Frederick 160–1

Dubois, W. E. B. 161–2

Dugin, Alexander 191–5, 496

Earth First! 57, 59–61, 65, 67n3

Earth Liberation Front (ELF) 58–60, 63–5

Earth Overshoot Day 204, 211–13, 212

ecocentrism 122, 124, 126, 130–1

ecofascism 62, 66

ecological crisis 240, 241, 244

ecological metaphor 3, 4

ecological modernisation 241

ecological thought 13, 85

ecologism: anarchisation of 119–25, 131–2;

autonomisation of 125;

ideological hybridisation with anarchism 119–21

Ecology and Revolutionary Thought 121

economic development 89, 90, 94, 95, 98, 99, 110, 241, 520–1

economic federalism 131

economic liberalism 124, 260, 493

education: as moderator of anti-immigration attitudes 464–5;

as predictor of anti-immigration attitudes 464

ELF (Earth Liberation Front) 58–60, 63–5

539.elite discourse see immigration, political elite discourses on

elite networks, managerial 189–90

embeddedness: of ideology 9–10, 12, 64;

in nature (of man) 123;

of think tanks 206

emerging technologies 353–5

emotional governance 446

end of ideology 27, 46, 49, 317, 395, 488, 490

energy humanities 240, 244

Engels, David 256, 258, 259, 261n3

Engels, Friedrich 29, 41, 46, 109, 153, 289, 402–3

England 89, 91, 92, 94–7, 101, 170, 251–2

enhancement 365, 367, 369, 371

Enlightenment 26, 94, 106, 122, 251, 330, 342, 365, 367, 369, 429, 493;

anti- 186–7

environmental activism 50, 59, 60, 62, 120, 129

environmental contexts 122, 128–9, 131, 132

environmental heroes 125–31

environmental reflexivities 86, 121, 128–32

Environmentalism 122–3

environmentalism 42, 43, 46, 50, 56, 57, 61, 66, 124, 236

epistemic standards, selective adjustment of 360

epistemology 20, 47, 60, 90, 178, 179, 267, 378

Essex School of Language and Ideology 2, 7, 30, 223–4, 226

ethical magnetism 508

ethical naturalism 123

ethics: and African communalism 524, 527–8;

Derrida on 332;

individualist 367;

utilitarian 333, 369

ethnic nationalism 194

ethnocentrism 380

ethno-traditionalism 512

eugenics 166, 172, 365, 368

European Conservative, The *255–6, 258, **258***

Exclusionary Discourse Hypothesis (H2a) 463, 472

exclusionary political discourse 481

expert authority 214

expert discourse 203, 209, 212–14

Extinction Rebellion 57

extremism 63, 171, 174, 379, 497, 505

extrinsic periodisation 521–2

extropianism 364–5, 368–9, 371, 387

Facebook 58, 67n5, 71

faces of politics 139, 142

FAI (Informal Anarchist Federation) 58–61, 64;

Olga Cell 61

failed speech in Geneva, of Feng Youlan 438–40

fair-market ideology 292–5

false consciousness 153, 219, 289, 291, 304, 334, 335

Falwell, Jerry 506, 509–11, 513

familles spirituelles 221

fantasies: of freedom 294;

of meritocracy 283, 294;

of normality 295–7;

of social Darwinism 294; see also Žižek, Slavoj, theory of ideology

Farge, Arlette 70

fascism 24–5, 42, 46, 50–1, 101, 119, 179, 187–8, 525;

anti- 381;

Italian 24, 50

fast ideologies 7

Faye, Guillaume 192–3

feminism 43–4, 166, 507;

radical 370;

right-wing 252;

socialist 113, 115

Feng Youlan 434, 438–40

feudalism 91, 94, 97, 99, 100, 386; see also refeudalisation

Fields, Factories and Workshops 126, 127

Fifth Estate 60–1, 67n4

Focus on the Family 504, 506

folk ideologies 27

For All Mankind 380

fossil fuels 120, 234–6, 238–43, 358

framing 304–5, 359–60

Frankfurt School 29, 290, 382

free market 49, 173, 236, 292, 293, 358, 359, 521

Freeden, Michael 1–2, 173, 186, 225, 297;

conceptual morphology of 3–5, 130, 131;

on constitutive dynamic of ideology 491;

on green ideology 120;

ideological decontestation of 169, 174;

ideologies as macro phenomena 20;

ideologies as political thinking 224, 430–1, 490;

ideologies fulfilling political need 32;

on individual concepts 425;

morphological theory of 12, 140, 173, 226–7, 408, 509–10;

on political ideology 414;

on thin ideologies 7, 403–4;

on totalitarianism 488

freedom, fantasy of 294

French capitalism 100, 101

French liberalism 86, 89–92, 97–100

French radical right 70–83, 76, 77, 81

French Revolution 40, 70, 92, 97–9, 107, 110, 187–8, 193, 251, 429, 508, 512

French socialism 113

Fukuyama, Francis 49

fundamentalism 193, 380, 387, 394, 504–7, 510, 512, 515n1

futurism 385;

Archeo- 192–3;

science fiction 387;

Silicon Valley 383, 388;

techno- 136

futurity 345, 346, 384, 388

fuzzy memberships, of radical groups 59–60

Gaza 178, 179

Geertz, Clifford 32, 44

genealogical paternity 120, 126, 131

genealogy 125, 170, 171, 358, 369;

of antisemitic imagination 169–71

general theory of ideology 153

genetic engineering 346, 369, 370

genetic ideology analysis 65, 135

genetics 62, 333–4, 365–7

German Ideology, The 402–3

German Nazism 24, 50, 187–8

Germani, Gino 398–400

Germantown Petition 160

GFN (Global Footprint Network) 211

Gibson, James 304

Gleichschaltung 51

global capitalism 111

Global Footprint Network (GFN) 211

global governance 190, 417–18

global liberal managerialism 185, 187–91, 194

Global Rise of Populism, The 144

Global South 190, 424

global warming 119, 128, 240

globalisation 49–50, 187, 188, 192, 193, 195, 444

globalised neoliberalism 241

globalism 50, 193;

managerial 190

Golden Rule 160

governance: emotional 446;

global 190, 417–18;

ideological 412–13;

political 455, 457

GPT (Green Political Theory) 119, 121, 122, 123–5, 353

Gramsci, Antonio 226, 235, 243, 317, 402, 510

grand ideologies 47, 49, 51, 500

Great Depression 301, 505–6

Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition 364

green anarchism 59, 61, 66

Green Anarchist 60–62

green ideology 120

green modernisation 244

green paternity 125, 131–2

Green Political Theory (GPT) 119, 121–5, 353

green proxies 131

green radiation effect 130

greening, of anarchism 119, 125;

(over) 125–6, 129–31

Greening of Marxism, The 130

grievances 62, 147–8, 165, 180

group ideologies 24–5, 28, 33

group interest 316, 316

Group Size Hypothesis (H1) 463, 472

growthism 240–4

Habermas, Jürgen 29, 70, 235, 350–2, 492

habitus 187, 431;

collective 458;

national 444–7

Hall, Peter A. 227, 229, 269–70

Hall, Stuart 235, 239, 303–4, 335, 402, 403, 450

halo of legitimacy 140, 143, 149–50

Hamas 171, 178–9

Hanson, Stephen 395, 489–91

Haraway, Donna 333–4

hate speech 21;

detection of 78–82;

online 80–1, 81

hegemonic internationalism 108

hegemony 51, 52, 99, 139, 226, 235, 302, 335;

American 384, 418, 420;

cultural 256, 395, 456, 510;

discursive 452, 458;

of Hindu religion 455;

ideological 394;

intellectual 276, 511;

of liberalism in Western politics 368;

political 511;

Western 419

Hindi 447, 457

Hindu ideology 444, 446, 455–8; see also Hindutva

Hindu nationalism 14, 448–50, 455

Hindu nationalist ideology see Hindutva

Hindutva 444–58;

neo- 445;

transmission through digital discourses of 444, 446–51

historical institutionalism 226, 227, 229

historical materialism 29, 334

historiography: of anarchism 119–32;

of ideological change 85–6;

of liberalism 89–101;

of republicanism 104–15

History of Antisemitism 165

Hitler, Adolf 24, 50, 171, 172, 177, 178

Hodge (Samuel Johnson’s cat) 330, 339–41

Holocaust 172, 176, 178, 430

hosting ideology 120, 121, 123–4

Hu Jintao 422, 434

human being, the 338–42

human condition 186, 331, 346

human rights 160, 190, 524;

in China 416–18, 422, 424, 425

humanism 45, 166, 345, 432, 439, 493, 494, 509;

post- 359, 364, 365, 367–9, 372;

secular 369, 506, 510–11;

trans- ( see transhumanism)

hunting 331, 333, 336–8, 340–2

Husserl, Edmund 187

hybrid ideologies 7

hybridisation, of ideology 119–21, 367, 406, 513, 514

hyper-normalisation, of neoliberal beliefs 287–98

ICI (International of Conservative Intellectuals) 251, 254–61, 258

ideas: instrumental use of 275–6;

as motivators 272–3;

as preference shapers 272–3

ideational analysis 155, 166, 267, 271

ideational approach: to policy studies 200, 266–7;

to populism antagonism in Latin America 403–5, 408;

to public policy analysis 267–71

ideational environment 3–4

ideational power 275–7, 346

ideational transmission, between levels and domains 273–5

ideational turn: in policy studies 200;

in social sciences 2

ideological activity 3–5;

macro levels of 2, 3, 5, 6, 10;

meso levels of 2, 3, 6, 10;

micro levels of 2, 3, 6–7, 10, 20–1

ideological allegiances 173, 180

ideological analysis: conceptual ( see conceptual ideological analysis);

critical 20, 23, 28–31, 33–5, 35n1;

discursive ( see discursive ideological analysis);

interpretive 20, 23, 28, 30–4, 35n1;

macro level 2, 3, 5, 6, 10;

meso level 2, 3, 6, 10;

micro level 2, 3, 6–7, 10, 20–1;

positivist 20, 23, 26–30, 32–5, 35n1;

Post-Structuralist 30;

quantitative ( see quantitative ideological analysis);

three traditions of 23–35, 26

ideological beliefs 27, 239, 283, 316

ideological change, historiography of see historiography, of ideological change

ideological clusters 154–5, 157, 174, 179, 221

ideological contestation 14, 199–200, 346, 420

ideological convergence 221

ideological decontestation see decontestation, ideological

ideological discourse 19, 20, 30, 35, 71, 82, 204, 214, 243, 304, 453, 490

ideological ecologies 9–13, 199;

and levels-of-analysis 2–5

ideological effect 10, 52, 389

ideological engineering, in China 394, 413–15, 422, 424–6

ideological environment 25, 26, 28

ideological families 34–5, 42–4, 47, 49–51, 119, 368, 510

ideological fantasies 291, 297; see also Žižek, Slavoj, theory of ideology

ideological governance 412–13

ideological hegemony 394

ideological hybridisation, between anarchism and ecologism 119–21

ideological inference 20, 71, 74–6, 82

ideological mobilisation 173–4

ideological mutation 47–8

ideological orientation 25, 27–8, 395

ideological pluralism 500

ideological polarisation 73, 159, 239

ideological rearrangements, in Russia 395, 491

ideological reinforcement 359–60

ideological thinking/thought 4, 6, 43, 47, 227, 283, 315, 444, 458

ideological transformation 101, 189

ideological transmission, of Hindutva through digital discourses 446–51

ideological turn 413

ideological vacuum myth, of Russia 488–500

ideological vehicles, political parties as 219–30

Ideologies and Political Theory 1, 5, 85

Ideologies in Action 180

Ideologies in Everyday Life 173

ideologisation 393, 489, 505, 508, 514;

de- 220–1;

re- 394, 412

ideologues 41, 44, 176, 189, 225, 316, 316, 385, 421, 422, 446

ideology: African communalism as 522–4;

in African thought 520–1;

anarchist 119–32;

anti- 46, 48, 179, 184, 493–4, 498, 499;

anti-ideological activist 493–4;

anti-racist 135–6, 152–67;

aristocratic 335, 336;

Californian 357–9;

Christian right 505, 509–15;

circulation of 70–83, 76, 77, 81;

as conceptual morphology 3–5, 131;

constituent ideas of 25;

as constrained network of beliefs 316–17, 316;

as critique 290;

decoding of 41, 53, 176, 284, 306, 307, 308, 527;

definitions of 23–4, 204, 234, 239, 335, 490;

of democracy 138, 139, 146, 151n1;

as domination 289;

early uses of 40–1;

end of 27, 46, 49, 317, 395, 488, 490;

fair-market 292–5;

as fantasy construction 290, 293;

folk 27;

grand 47, 49, 51, 500;

green 120;

group 24–5, 28, 33;

Hindu 444, 446, 455–8;

Hindutva 444–58;

hosting 120, 121, 123–4;

institutional 25, 26;

as integration 289;

as interpretation 289;

intrinsic 77–8, 77;

as legitimisation 289, 290;

in literary study 334–6;

macro 43–5, 47–51, 53, 490, 491, 499;

modern Confucian 440–1;

nature of 19–20;

neoliberal 283, 288, 292–5, 297;

and news media 234–5;

non-human 330–42;

as normative logic 289–90;

online circulation of 70–83, 76, 77, 81;

palliative effects of 319, 320, 324;

party ( see party ideologies);

personal 24, 26;

political 519–28;

and political parties 219–30;

political psychology of 315–24, 316, 322;

as political worldviews 23, 24, 32, 251;

of post-postmodern conservatism 184–96;

in post-Soviet times 488–500;

and radical conservatism 185–7;

of radical groups 56–67, 58;

and science fiction 378–90;

shared 8, 25, 26, 154–6, 395;

and social change 320–1;

as social cognition 153–4;

society and history 155–6;

study of 225–9;

symbiosis with political parties 224–5;

symbolic 319–20, 322, 322, 323;

as symbolic identity 317–19;

technologies as locus of 349–61;

and think tanks 206–9;

transhumanism as 364–73;

unmasking of 20, 29, 30, 53, 283, 297;

vehicles of 219–30;

in visual messages 301–11, 307, 307;

workplace 287–98

Ideology and Utopia 32, 41

ideology critique 29, 235;

new 30, 31;

paradigms of 51–3

ideology studies 1–2, 14, 51, 53, 224;

applied 5;

beyond the canon 86;

canon in 2, 5;

and Christian Right 508–9;

emotion in 180;

and ideological mutation 47;

Latin American contributions to 394;

turn toward the individual in 59

IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) 171, 175

illiberal democracy 256

illiberal turn 250

illiberalism 250–3, 259

images 301–3;

and ideology 303–6

Imagined Communities 8, 187

immigration: political elite discourses on 461–83, 466, 467, 471, 473–4, 475, 476–7, 479, 480, 481;

public opinion on 462–4, 468, 482

Immigration Education Polarisation Hypothesis (H4) 464, 478

Immigration Ideology Polarisation Hypothesis (Hypothesis 3) 464, 475

imperialism 98, 175, 177, 190, 193, 389, 495, 520

Inclusionary Discourse Hypothesis (H2b) 464, 472

inclusionary political discourse 481

independent motivation, behind policy actor actions 272–3

India, contemporary political ideology in 444–58

indigenous peoples 159–60, 164, 166, 177, 236, 337

indigenous sovereignty 192

individual psychology 14, 25, 26, 34

individualist ethics 367

individualism 45, 49, 91–4, 120, 130, 157, 189, 293, 294, 297, 368, 369, 524

inductive reasoning 78, 395, 491

industrial convergence 367

Industrial Revolution 98, 110, 429

Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) 58–61, 64;

Olga Cell 61

in-groups 153–5, 160–3, 166, 237, 318, 319

institutional ideology 25, 26

institutionalism: discursive 200, 226–9, 268, 277;

historical 226, 227, 229

institution-building 111, 114

intellectual hegemony 276, 511

intellectual networks 2–3, 14, 85, 199, 490

intentionality 4, 142

internal diversities 45–6

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) 171, 175

International of Conservative Intellectuals (ICI) 251, 254–61, 258

international politics 24, 194, 195

international relations (IR) 2, 24, 28, 195, 259, 370, 419, 420

International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) 106–7, 111–14

internationalism: hegemonic 108;

liberal 108;

plebeian 86, 104–15;

proletarian 108–9;

revolutionary 108

internet users 70–4, 77, 78, 80–2

interpellation 514;

of populism in Latin America 397–401, 403, 405–8

interpretive ideological analysis 20, 23, 28, 30–4, 35n1

interviews with radicals 56, 60, 63–4, 66

intrinsic ideology 77–8, 77

intuitive anarchism 121–2

invasion from within 275

in-work benefits (IWBs) 273, 274, 276

IR (international relations) 2, 24, 28, 195, 259, 370, 419, 420

Italian fascism 24, 50

IWBs (in-work benefits) 273, 274, 276

IWMA (International Workingmen’s Association) 106–7, 111–14

Jemisin, N. K. 379, 382–3

Jewish culture 79

Jewish diaspora 170, 175

Jewish state 170, 176–8

Johnson, Samuel 284, 330–2, 336–9;

and Hodge (his cat) 339–41

journalistic sources 235–40

Judeophobia 169, 172–3, 178

Kaczynski, Ted 62, 65–6; see also Unabomber

Kafka, Franz 331

Kennedy, President John F. 162

keyword methods 78–80

Kropotkin, Peter 86, 125–7, 129, 130

Labour Party 57, 58

labour republicanism 106

Laclau, Ernesto 144, 145, 147–9, 398, 401, 403;

articulatory equivalences 52;

claim that populism, hegemony and democracy are one and the same 138–9;

discourse analysis of ideologies 226;

discourse theory 51, 510;

discursive turn 223–4;

ideological effect 52;

logic of difference 510–11;

populism 405, 407;

power of discourse 227;

radical democracy 140–2;

two faces of democracy 142

laissez-faire 90, 96, 100

language models 79–80

large-scale capitalism 189

Latin America 397–8, 407–8;

discursive analysis 405–8;

ideational approach to populism antagonism 403–5, 408;

Marx and Engels 543.turn around 402–3;

new field of ideology 401–2;

populism 398–401, 403–7

Latour, Bruno 333, 354

Lazare, Bernard 165

leader, the 143, 144, 145, 149

legitimacy: domestic 422–4, 423;

halo of 140, 143, 149–50;

political 91, 123, 209

levels-of-analysis 20, 23–35, 26;

and ideological ecologies 2–5;

macro 2, 3, 5, 6, 10;

meso 2, 3, 6, 10;

micro 2, 3, 6–7, 10, 20–1;

in study of ideologies 5–11

libels, antisemitic: Blood 169–2;

colonial 178;

loyalty 171

liberal consensus 250

liberal democracy 50, 138, 141, 187, 190, 195, 214, 257, 302, 365, 492

liberal internationalism 108

liberal languages 370;

techno- 370–2

liberal modernity 186

liberalism: British ( see British liberalism);

classical social interpretation of 92;

conceptual interpretation of 90–2;

economic 124, 260, 493;

French 86, 89–2, 97–100;

liberty before 104;

managerial 190, 191, 193;

neo- ( see neoliberalism);

post- 194, 257;

revisionist–discursive interpretation of 92–3;

and social property relations 94–100

libertarianism 29, 137, 252, 346, 370–1, 513;

transhumanist 371

liberty 32, 45, 51, 100, 105, 173, 365;

before liberalism 104;

negative 91;

popular 104–5

Life of Johnson, The 331

lifeworld 187, 351, 352, 358–9

Lincoln, President Abraham 139–40, 162, 301

liquid modernity 188, 193

literary study 334–6

Living in Denial 240

Locke, John 11, 43, 45, 91, 94

logic of difference 510–11

losers 289, 292, 294

Lost History of Liberalism 93

Louvain clustering algorithm 78

loyalty libel 171

Ma Yifu 435–7, 436, 438, 440

Machiavellian moment 104, 106, 109

McKeon, Michael 335–6

macro ideologies 43–5, 47–51, 53, 490, 491, 499

macro levels, of ideological activity 2, 3, 5, 6, 10

MAGA (Make America Great Again) 10, 513

Major, Philippe 433

majority cultures, empowerment of 194

majority rule 139, 140, 147

Make America Great Again (MAGA) 10, 513

make work pay (MWP) 273–5

managerial centrism 395, 491, 493, 494, 496–9

managerial elite networks 189–90

managerial globalism 190

managerial liberalism 190, 191, 193

Manifesto of the French Nouvelle Droite 189–90

Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) 221–2

mankind discourse see community of destiny for mankind (CDM)

Mannheim, Karl 32, 41, 154, 186, 490

mapping, digital 77–8, 77

maps of problematic social reality 32, 44

Marcuse, Herbert 65, 349, 351–2

MARPOR (Manifesto Research on Political Representation) 221–2

Marshall, Thurgood 162

Marx, Karl 26, 29, 106, 289

Marxian socialism 6

Marxism 46–7

mass publics 26, 27, 33, 283

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) 173

Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) 256–8, 258

media discourse 73, 360, 453–5

Mein Kampf 171, 172, 177

mental models 154, 155, 161, 452

meritocracy 89, 319, 525;

fantasy of 283, 294

meso levels, of ideological activity 2, 3, 6, 10

methodological pluralism 1, 57, 135, 200

Michel, John 381

micro levels, of ideological activity 2, 3, 6–7, 10, 20–1

migration and travel 112–13

militant ideological eclecticism 496

militarism 153, 156, 193, 380, 381, 384, 453, 457

minimal conceptual convergence 121–2

MNU (Movimento Negro Unificado) 164, 166

modern Confucian ideology 440–1

modern Confucianism 429–41, 436

modernisation 188–9, 251, 398, 433;

ecological 241;

green 244;

political 407;

progressive 188;

of Russia 494, 485;

of Soviet Union 488;

technological 495;

Western models of 430;

Westernisation as 493

modernity: liberal 186;

liquid 188, 193;

post- 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 195;

reflexive 119;

technological 14;

Western 191, 382, 430, 493

Modi, Narendra 14, 394, 445, 446, 448, 450

Moffitt, Benjamin 144–5, 148, 149

monstrous thinking devices 331–2

MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) 173

Moral Majority 504, 506, 507, 511

Morning Show, The 233–4, 238, 240

morphological act of decontestation 227

morphological analysis 2–3, 9, 19, 65;

and Christian Right 394, 509–10;

of liberalism 173;

and political parties 226;

and transhumanism 368, 370, 372

morphological compatibility 120–5

morphological iconoclasm, of anarchism 121

morphological model, adaptation of 11–12

Motadel, David 177

Mouffe, Chantal 51, 52, 140, 141, 149, 226, 398, 403, 405, 510

Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) 164, 166

MSA (Multi-Streams Analysis) 270, 276, 277

multi-culturalism 45–6, 468

multi-ethnicity 45–6

Multi-Streams Analysis (MSA) 270, 276, 277

Muslim Brotherhood 177

Mussolini, Benito 50, 82

Mutation or Death 381

MWP (make work pay) 273–5

myth, of Russia’s ideological vacuum 488–500

nanotechnology 353, 355–7, 360, 364, 365, 370

Napoleon Bonaparte 26, 29, 40, 41, 96, 98, 100

NatCon (National Conservatism) 254, 257–60, 258

National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles 259

national habitus 444, 455–7

national republicanism 106

national social imaginaries 187–91, 193

National Socialism 169–70

national sovereignty 191, 259

nationalism: Christian 505, 507, 512, 514;

democratic 106;

ethnic 194;

Hindu 14, 448–50, 455;

right-wing 444, 455

national-patriotism 395, 491, 494–6, 498

nature of the times 316, 316, 317

Naturiens controversy 128–30

Nazi antisemitism 172, 178

Nazism 24, 50, 171, 187–8

near ideologues 316, 316

negative liberty 91

neoconservative militarised internationalism 193

neoHindutva 445

neoliberal beliefs, hyper-normalisation of 287–8

neoliberal capitalism 188, 288, 293

neoliberal ideology 283, 288, 292–5, 297

neoliberal market fundamentalism 193, 380

neoliberalism 49, 260, 274, 283, 292–5, 404;

anti- 405;

globalised 241;

ideological alternatives to 297–8;

post- 404

neopopulisms 404

neotraditionalism 193

networks: of beliefs 316–17, 316;

intellectual 2–3, 14, 85, 199, 490;

managerial elite 189–90;

transnational 113, 205, 251, 364–5

New Atlantis 349, 350, 352

New Confucianism 434–5, 441n1, 441n3

New Direction 255, 258, 258, 259

New Ideology Critique 30, 31

New India 445, 446, 448, 457

New Right 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196n5, 260, 513–15

New Science 351–2

new technologies 345–6, 354, 359–60, 368, 446

news media 234;

and ideology 234–5

19^th-century social movements, Universal Republic in 104–15

no issue content 316–17, 316

non-human animal agency 333, 337, 340, 342

non-human ideology 330–42

non-ideological factors 9–10, 12, 33, 34

Norgaard, Kari Marie 240, 244

normality, fantasy of 295–7

normative agency, of China 416, 418, 424, 425

novelty, politics of 350–5

Novum Organum 350

Nuremberg race laws 172

Olga Cell, of Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) 61

O’Meara, Michael 192

online behaviours, low interpretability of 72

online circulation of ideology 70–83, 76, 77, 81

online hate speech 80–1, 81

online racism 79

online (radical) content 20, 56, 60, 62–63

ontogeny 333

ontological anxiety 31

ontological (in)security 446

ontology 24, 51, 90, 267, 268, 371;

of the planet 349–50, 358

organic differentiation 122–3

O’Riordan, Timothy 122–4

Oushakine, Serguei 489, 490, 499

out-groups 153, 155, 161–3, 166, 462–4, 483

(over)greening biases, of classical anarchism 125–31

Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, The 1, 85

Palestine 170, 171, 175, 176

palingenetic ultranationalism 179

palliative effects, of ideology 319, 320, 324

paradigmatic change 229

paradigms, of ideology critique 51–3

paradoxical pluralism 496

Paris Statement 259, 260

participant observation 56, 64, 253

party ideologies 220–2, 225, 230, 412, 413, 414, 422, 425, 490

party ideologues 421, 422

party politics 220, 221

party/ideology interface 199–200, 219–30

Pentecostals 504, 506

people, the 146–8

People’s Republic of China (PRC) 14, 207, 417, 419, 433, 437

performative violence, in antisemitism 169–81

perimeter realm, of an ideological field 5, 11

peripheral capitalism (of Latin America) 398

Peronism 398, 399

persecution 19, 20, 171, 172, 510

personal ideology 24, 26

personality traits 27, 315, 318, 319, 324

persuasiveness, of ideas 229

petroculture 234, 238–9

phylogeny 333–4

physiocrats 94, 97, 101

platform capitalism 244

plebeian internationalism 86, 104–15

plebs: as counter-power 111–12;

as event 110–11;

as social class 109–10

pluralising anarchisms 130

pluralism 9, 27, 43, 49, 50, 53, 86, 130, 141, 190, 204, 207, 288, 351, 368, 371, 384;

anti- 115;

ideological 500;

methodological 1, 57, 135, 200;

paradoxical 496

pogroms, anti-Jewish 169, 170, 172–3, 176, 178, 179

polarisation, of attitudes towards immigration 461–83, 466, 467, 471, 473–4, 475, 476–7, 479–81

policy advice 203, 204, 207

policy change 199, 229, 267, 268, 270, 271

policy elites 200, 204, 266, 275, 276;

and ideational analysis 271;

and ideational transmission 273–5

policy learning 272

policy stability 266, 270

policy studies, ideational turn in 200

policy transfer 272, 274

political action, and populism 142–6

political activism 28, 261, 506, 507, 511

political corruption, in Africa 520, 526

political discourse: exclusionary 481;

inclusionary 481;

in India 444, 447, 451, 453, 455–6;

socio- 394, 447, 452, 453, 455–6;

theory of 139, 509–12

political elite discourses, and immigration see immigration, political elite discourses on

political elites 393, 395, 462–5, 468, 475, 482, 483

political governance 455, 457

political hegemony 511

political ideas, circulation of 254, 255, 257, 260, 261

political ideology, within African communalism 519–28

political language 20, 33, 34, 40, 44, 48, 52, 369, 394, 412, 414, 415

political legitimacy 91, 123, 209

political mobilisation 395, 399, 400, 505, 506, 508

political modernisation 407

political movements 11, 20, 73, 149, 176, 243, 494, 507, 513

political orientation: as moderator of anti-immigration attitudes 464–5;

as predictor of anti-immigration attitudes 464

political parties: catch-all 220;

symbiosis with ideologies 224–5;

as users of ideologies 219–23;

as vehicles for ideologies 219–30

political possibility 243–4, 368

political power 223–4

political psychology, of ideology 315–24, 316, 322

political right 3, 184, 444, 464, 465, 475

political science 26, 34, 153, 185, 223, 267

political style 144–5, 148, 149

political worldviews, ideologies as 23, 24, 32, 251

politics: faces of 139, 142;

international 24, 194, 195;

of novelty 350–5;

party 220, 221;

pragmatic face of 139–2, 147;

redemptive face of 139–42;

techno- 366, 368–70;

transhumanist 368–70

Politics of Attack, The 61

politics–philosophy field nexus 435–8, 436, 440

Polska Wielki Projekt 256, 258, 258, 259

popular democratic field 400–2

popular liberty 104–5

popular republicanism 105, 106

popular sovereignty 106, 147, 401, 405

populism 137–50;

and advocacy tanks 212–14;

authoritarian 10, 13, 512;

and concept of the people 146–8;

conservative 237–40, 504;

and democracy 138–42;

in Latin America 398–401;

mood of 143, 149;

and political action 142–6;

political style of 145;

post-modern 191–5;

right-wing 12, 44, 45, 136, 237, 393–4, 408, 445;

sentiment of 144, 149;

as thin ideology 403–8

positivist ideological analysis 20, 23, 26–30, 32–5, 35n1

post-humanism 359, 364, 365, 367–9, 372

Post-Imperial Democracies 489

post-liberalism 194, 257

post-modern populism 191–5

post-modern possibilities 191–5

post-modernity 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 195

post-neoliberalism 404

post-postmodern conservatism 184–96

post-Soviet times, ideology in 488–500

post-structuralism 30–1, 191, 342, 510

Post-Structuralist Ideological Analysis 30

power in ideas 275

power of discourse 227, 369

power of ideas 227, 229

power over ideas 275

power through ideas 275

powerful actor endorsement, of ideas 229

pragmatic face, of politics 139–42, 147

PRC (People’s Republic of China) 14, 207, 417, 419, 433, 437

print capitalism 8, 345

print media and translation 112, 113

problematic inevitability 352

progressive modernisation 188

proletarian internationalism 108–9

propaganda: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 412, 415, 417–18, 425, 426n2;

model of 235;

Nazi 171, 172, 177, 180

prosopography 253

Protocols of the Elders of Zion 171, 177

pro-Western capitalism 521

pseudonymity 56, 58, 60–3, 66

pseudo-scientific racism 172

psychoanalytic theory 2, 31, 288, 290, 293, 297;

of ideology (Žižekian) 291–2, 295, 298

public intellectuals 7, 9, 209, 210, 222, 256, 257, 259, 365

public opinion 70, 199, 200, 205, 209, 223, 227, 236, 316, 412, 416, 418, 462, 463, 468, 482

public philosophies 268, 269, 273–4, 276–7

public policy 266–77;

ideational approach to analysis of 267–71

public political discourse analysis 226

puzzle metaphor 307–8, 307

Quakers 160, 166

qualitative methods 82, 230, 270, 273, 277, 305, 426

quantitative ideological analysis 35n1; see also positivist ideological analysis

quantitative methods 26, 33, 253, 270, 277, 426

racial antisemitism 169–70, 172

racial capitalism 378

racism 76, 155, 156, 158–9, 164, 165, 173;

anti- 13, 135–6, 152, 154–60, 165, 166;

anti-Black 163;

anti-Jewish 169, 173;

online 79;

pseudo-scientific 172;

structural 384;

systemic 165, 166

racist ideology 157, 166;

anti- 135–6, 152–67

radical anti-consumerism 127

radical conservatism 184–7, 190–2, 195

radical democracy 140–2

radical environmentalism 56, 57, 59–62, 65, 66

radical feminism 370

radical flank effect 57

radical fringe 57

radical groups: decentralised structures of 57–60, 58;

fuzzy memberships of 59–60;

ideologies of 56–67, 58

radical publications 56, 60–2, 64, 66

radical right: French 70–83, 76, 77, 81;

and post-modern conservatism ideologies 184–96

radicalism 65, 106, 498;

anti-technology 56, 57, 66

radicals: archives of 56, 60, 64–6;

interviews with 56, 60, 63–4, 66

Rambler, The 330, 331, 337–9, 341

reactionary politics 128, 175, 186–7, 191, 195, 321, 370–1, 389–90, 489, 513

Reagan, Ronald 378, 506

Reclus, Élisée 86, 125–7, 129, 130

recontextualising original intentions 127–8

redemptive face, of politics 139–42

refeudalisation 235

reflexive modernity 119

Regis, Ed 364

re-ideologisation, of Chinese politics 394, 412

religious imagination 172–3

relocalisation 123, 127, 128

Republican Party 210, 214, 316, 317, 505–9, 512–14

republican revival 104, 107

republicanism: labour 106;

national 106;

popular 105, 106;

socialist 106

république universelle see universal republic

Restoration France 98–9

retweeting 72, 76, 77, 453

revelation 127–8

revisionist–discursive interpretation, of liberalism 92–3

revolution: French ( see French Revolution);

Industrial 98, 110, 429

revolutionary internationalism 108

right: Christian ( see Christian Right, in United States);

French radical 70–83, 76, 77, 81;

New 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196n5, 260, 513, 514, 515;

political 3, 184, 444, 464, 465, 475;

radical ( see radical right)

right ideology 35;

Christian 505, 509–15;

radical 80–1, 81

right-wing authoritarianism 28, 321, 322, 322

right-wing feminism 252

right-wing nationalism 444, 455

right-wing populism 12, 44, 45, 136, 237, 393–4, 408, 445

Robertson, Pat 506, 507, 509

Robinson, Kim Stanley 379

Rosenberg, Alfred 176–7

Rosenblatt, Helena 93

ruling class 29, 40, 95, 106, 112, 176, 189, 492, 498

rural sovereignty 338

Russia, ideological vacuum myth of 488–500

Saint-Simonian Bonapartism 90, 100, 107, 11

science and technology studies (STS) 349, 353, 354, 387

science fiction (SF) 378–90;

futurism of 387;

ideological parameters of 379–82;

ideologies of 383–8

Scruton, Roger 255, 256, 258

Second Treatise of Government 11

Second World War 26, 29, 50–1, 289, 295, 330

secular humanism 369, 506, 510–11

self-interest 45, 49, 91, 267, 272, 338, 385, 413, 417, 418

self-sufficient commune 131

settler colonialism 178, 378

sexism 79, 163, 166, 318, 319

SF see science fiction (SF)

shared ideologies 8, 25, 26, 154–6, 395

Silicon Valley 346, 371, 379, 382, 384, 386, 389, 389;

futurism of 383, 388

Skinner, Quentin 32, 91, 104, 185–6, 431

Skornicki, Arnault 373, 431, 432

slavery, Black resistance against 160–1

SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) 163

social change 320–1

social cognition, ideology as 153–4

social Darwinism, fantasy of 294

social dominance orientation 28, 321, 322, 322

social environment 24, 25, 26, 31, 40, 53, 187, 334

Social History of Western Political Thought 93

social imaginaries 187, 193, 389;

national 187–91, 193

social media 7, 8, 10, 12, 48, 52, 67n5, 227, 244, 463, 483;

and Hindutva 444, 446, 447, 449–55

social movements, 19^th-century 104–15

social practices 9, 30, 152, 153, 155, 157, 370, 387, 402, 451–53, 457, 508

social property relations 86, 89–90, 92–4, 101;

and liberalism 94–100

social reality 30, 243, 268, 272, 335, 388, 390, 463;

maps of problematic 32, 44

social sciences, ideational turn in 2

social semiotics 302

social theory 3, 10–11, 29, 30, 226

socialism 42, 43, 45, 50, 106, 108;

African 521;

and anti-racism 157;

back-to-nature 126;

biological 368;

and capitalism 493;

and Christian democracy 510;

French 113;

Marxian 6;

National 169–70;

and populism 137, 399, 404, 405;

and radical conservatism 187;

and science fiction 380;

and transhumanism 366, 368, 369

socialist feminism 113, 115

socialist republicanism 106

social–property relations perspective, on liberalism 93–4

Sociology of Philosophies 85, 432

sociology of philosophy: as ideology analysis 430–3;

and modern Confucianism 430, 434–40, 436

socio-political discourse 394, 447, 452, 453, 455–6

socio-technical imaginaries 349, 353–5, 357, 387

solutions journalism 244

solutions media 244

SOS Racisme 152, 156, 158, 166

Souls of Black Folk 161–2

sovereignty 45, 50, 52, 95, 97, 139, 140, 365;

indigenous 192;

national 191, 259;

popular 106, 147, 401, 405;

rural 338;

state 190, 368;

territorial 192

Soviet communism 257, 523

Soviet Russia 488;

post- 488–90, 494

Soviet Union 50, 109, 437, 438, 488, 494, 496, 499

speech acts 4, 226, 415

Staël, Germaine de 91, 93

Stalin, Josef 47, 310

Star Trek 380

state sovereignty 190, 368

state-centrism 188

status homophily 209

Steger, Manfred B. 187–8

structural racism 384

structuralism 226, 267, 489;

post- 30–1, 191, 342, 510

STS (science and technology studies) 349, 353, 354, 387

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 163

Sublime Object of Ideology, The 291

superimposition 49, 310

symbolic ideology 319–20, 322, 322, 323

symbolic identity, ideology as 317–19

systemic racism 165, 166

Tax Freedom Day 204, 209–10, 211, 213

Taylor, Charles 187

Tea Party 507, 513

techno-liberal languages, of transhumanism 370–2

technological determinism 352, 359, 360

technological modernisation 495

technological modernity 14

technology 349–61;

emerging 353–5;

new 345–6, 354, 359–60, 368, 446

techno-optimism 127, 385, 386, 390

techno-politics 366, 368–70

Telegram 62

territorial sovereignty 192

terrorism 25, 28, 56, 63, 318–19, 456, 461

Thatcherism 239, 255

thin ideologies 7, 398, 490, 491, 499, 500;

populism as 403–8

think tanks 203–15, 211, 212

Third International 109

Thompson, E. P. 110

three traditions, of ideological analysis 23–35, 26

top-down model, of ideology analysis 180

totalitarianism 47, 50–51, 379, 488, 499

Tracy, Antoine Destutt de 26, 29, 40, 98, 99

traditional working class 193, 194

traditionalism 186–7, 194, 251, 441, 465, 495, 510–13;

cultural 513;

ethno- 512;

neo- 193

transhumanism: definition of 366;

delimitation of 366–8;

as ideology 364–73;

morphological analysis of 368, 370, 372;

techno-liberal languages of 370–2

transhumanist libertarianism 371

transhumanist politics 368–70

translation and print media 112, 113

transnational networks 113, 205, 251, 364–5

travel and migration 112–13

tribunician power 105, 112–14

triumphalism 49

Trump, Donald J.: Christian Right 511, 515;

first presidential victory 135, 255;

mugshot 306, 307, 308, 309;

populism 137, 507;

second presidential administration 136, 214, 346, 395, 515;

2024 presidential election 12

Trumpism 257

truth 223–4, 226

tweeting 72, 75, 76, 82, 452–5

Twitter 71–5, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 170

two faces of democracy 142, 146–7

Unabomber 57, 59, 65–6; see also Kaczynski, Ted

underground, the 20, 57–60, 58, 63

unemployment 193, 273, 274, 295, 467, 469, 472, 474

United States, Christian right in 504–15

universal republic 104, 106–7, 111–15

universalism 45–6, 53, 108, 189, 191, 367, 371, 429, 455–6

unmasking, of ideology 20, 29, 30, 53, 283, 297

upheaval, and change 49–53

utilitarian ethics 333, 369

utopianism 179, 373, 380;

anti- 386

value homophily 209

vehicles of ideologies, political parties as 219–30

Verstehen 32, 41

visual artefacts 301–2, 306, 310, 311

visual communication 48, 301, 302, 304

visual frames 306, 307, 307

visual ideology 301–3, 305, 310

visual messages 301–11, 307, 307

visual mischief 310

vox populi 43, 139–40, 148

wandering Jew 171, 177

war of discourse 510, 511

Weber, Max 31–2, 41, 220, 289, 431, 432

websites 62–4, 66, 163, 310, 384, 385, 386, 390n2, 419, 448

WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) nations 323, 324

Weltanschauung 41, 43, 46–7, 175, 194

Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) nations 323, 324

Western hegemony 419

Western modernity 191, 382, 430, 493

Westernisation 433, 493

Westernism 395, 491–4, 497

white evangelicals 504, 505

white working class 115, 157

winners 289, 292, 294

Wood, Ellen Meiksins 93–4

Woodcock, George 121, 125–6

working class 13, 86, 108, 110, 112–13, 170, 239, 399, 402;

traditional 193, 194;

white 115, 157

workplaces: absurdity in 295–7;

ideology of 287–8

world Jewish conspiracy 176

World Transhumanist Association (WTA) 366, 368

World War II 26, 29, 50–1, 289, 295, 330

world-building as critique 382–3

worldmaking 108

WTA (World Transhumanist Association) 366, 368

Wuthnow, Robert 32–4

X 71–5, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 170

Xi Jinping 394, 412, 415, 418–21, 424, 425

YouTube 71–2, 76, 77, 77, 78, 80, 81, 233

zeitgeist 260, 268, 276–7, 317

Zionism 164, 510;

anti- 174–9

Zionism: Enemy of the State 176–7

Žižek, Slavoj 29, 30, 223, 283, 288, 290, 293, 294, 297, 403;

theory of ideology 291–2, 295, 298

[1] I offered a triadic map of ideological analysis in Leader Maynard (2013), where I described the three approaches as “conceptual”, “discursive” and “quantitative”. I now see these approaches as rooted in broader methodological paradigms within the humanities and social sciences, hence the change in terminology. The positivist, critical and interpretive traditions largely map onto my original quantitative, discursive and conceptual approaches, with some modifications. A few paragraphs of this chapter are reproduced (with significant editing) from my 2013 article.

[2] For similar prominent definitions, see Seliger (1976: 11), Hamilton (1987: 38), Hall (1996: 29), Freeden (1996: 3), Oliver and Johnston (2000: 43), Jost, Federico and Napier (2009: 309–10).

[3] For discussion of the history of ideological analysis, see Leader Maynard (2017), Ostrowski (2022, Ch. 2).

[4] For explanation and critique of this methodology, see Levine (2022).

[5] See also Brick (2013).

[6] E.g. Berman (2019), Norris and Inglehart (2019), Urbinati (2019).

[7] This means-based definition of “radical” excludes many political parties on the “radical right”, which question liberal–democratic principles but do not resort to illegal tactics. On the terminology of “radical right”, “extreme right” and “far right”, see Pirro (2023).

[8] On the Earth Liberation Front, see also Brown (2020), Joosse (2012) and Loadenthal (2014).

[9] On Earth First!, see Lee (1995), Woodhouse (2018) and Taylor (2008).

[10] On the ideas of Fifth Estate, see Millett (2012).

[11] It is difficult to come up with a “pure” example of a group that communicates in a decentralised way but acts in a centralised way, but social media platforms are fairly good examples. Although Facebook facilitates decentralised communication among its billions of users, it is owned and operated by corporation that is as centralised as any other.

[12] This is the author’s own translation from French to English.

[13] Website: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api.

[14] Website: https://perspectiveapi.com/

[15] Website: https://github.com/unitaryai/detoxify

[16] Website: https://decoding-antisemitism.eu/publications/fifth-discourse-report/

[17] Definition that can be found on the association’s website:

[18] Website: www.cncdh.fr/publications/enquete-sur-lempreinte-antisemite-sur-youtube-rapport-2020-sur-la-lutte-contre-le

[19] This term is taken from Brenner (1976) and describes the basic form of a society’s class structure or social relations of production: the dominant modes of surplus extraction (vertical relation) and relationships among producers and non-producers (horizontal relations).

[20] The phrase “plebeian internationalism” is borrowed from an interview by Angela Zimmerman (2017).

[21] My use of the term “co-production” is indebted to Sinha’s (2024) insightful discussion.

[22] This mention of “Internationalismus” by Swiss workers predates timelines given by Friedemann and Hölscher (1982: 393), who indicate 1875 for its first us, and Bensimon (2014: 54), who dates “internationalisme” to 1876.

[23] For a full explanation of this theory of ideology, see Freeden’s 1996 text Ideology and Political Theory, or Freeden’s 2013 Ideology: A Very Short Introduction for a simplified version. Importantly, Canovan is not alone in using Freeden’s theory to explain populism as an ideology: Cas Mudde (2004), and in collaboration with Kristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2011; 2013; 2017) has used the same morphological approach to ideology, as has Ben Stanley (2011). However, importantly for our interests, Canovan is the only writer who has actively described populism as the ideology of democracy, rather than simply an ideology within democracy.

[24] See Introduction to this volume, p.1.

[25] Website: https://twitter.com/jxllyfish, accessed 11/2/2024.

[26] Website: www.algemeiner.com/2020/03/26/italian-artist-giovanni-gasparro-revives-antisemitic-blood-libel-with-graphic-painting-of-medieval-child-martyr/ accessed 10/2/2024.

[27] Website: www.vatican.va/jubilee_2000/magazine/documents/ju_mag_01111997_p-31_en.html accessed 15/2/2024.

[28] Website: www.breaknlinks.com/news/55445 accessed 15/2/2024.

[29] Website: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism, accessed 10/2/2024.

[30] Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_definition_of_antisemitism, accessed 10/2/2024.

[31] Website: www.nottingham.ac.uk/policyengagementblog/what-can-we-learn-from-the-holocaust, accessed 10/2/2024.

[32] Website: https://global100.adl.org/map accessed 17/2/2024.

[33] Website: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism, accessed 10/2/2024.

[34] Website: https://bdsmovement.net/colonialism-and-apartheid/settler-colonialism accessed 16/2/2024.

[35] Website: https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2024/02/15/antisemitic-incidents-report-2023 accessed 16/2/2024.

[36] Website: https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2024/02/15/antisemitic-incidents-report-2023 accessed 16/2/2024.181.

[37] Website: www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-08/sydney-motorist-oct7th-personalised-number-plates/103443696 accessed 17/2/2014.

[38] Website: https://fathomjournal.org/universities-in-crisis-the-professors-and-the-pogrom-how-the-theory-of-zionist-settler-colonialism-reframed-the-7-october-massacre-as-liberation/ accessed 17/2/2024.

[39] U.S. Colleges Teaching Hate: American Miseducation (Documentary) – YouTube at 7:23”, accessed 17/2/2024.

[40] Website: https://fathomjournal.org/universities-in-crisis-the-professors-and-the-pogrom-how-the-theory-of-zionist-settler-colonialism-reframed-the-7-october-massacre-as-liberation/ accessed 17/2/2024.

[41] For more detailed analyses see Drolet and Williams 2020; 2022; Abrahamsen et al. 2020; 2024.

[42] For a recent example see Dyal 2017.

[43] As he continues: “The art of historical survival … consequently dictates that a people jealously, intolerantly if need be, defend its myths, beliefs, lifestyles, language, institutions and, above all, its genetic heritage, for these alone enable it to be what it is and what it might be. There is in truth, no other raison d’etre for it.”

[44] A number of authors have noted this fusion of environmentalism and various nationalist and post-nationalist strains of conservatism. See, for instance, Forchtner 2020; Hamilton 2002; Olsen 1999.

[45] For a good discussion of these neo-imperial visions within the French New Right see Bar-On 2008.

[46] For an insightful analysis see Brubaker 2017.

[47] United States Patent and Trademark office, serial number: 7463534.

[48] All authors contributed equally to the creation of this work and are listed here in alphabetical order.

[49] On think tanks, see chapter by Landry and Lamy in this volume.

[50] Biographical information has been gathered from double-checked online sources (Wikipedia, official websites and media material) and, in some cases, from interviews conducted by the authors.

[51] See David Engels, “’Don’t just criticise, create! #1’ – Interview with Alvino-Mario Fantini, delibeRatio, 23 February 2023: https://deliberatio.eu/en/opinions/dont-just-criticise-create-1-interview-with-alvino-mario-fantini.

[52] Interview with Frank Füredi conducted by Anemona Constantin, Brussels, 11 January 2024.

[53] Website: https://thetrueeurope.eu/a-europe-we-can-believe-in/; Summer 2017.

[54] Website: https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/.

[55] Website: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/an-open-letter-to-natcon/

[56] These terms are similar to Schmidt’s (2008) ideational typology, with the term “paradigms” used here instead of “programs”. The term “policy paradigms” was popularised by Hall (1993).

[57] For a fuller discussion of policy-oriented theoretical frameworks where ideas play a central role, see Cairney (2020), chapters 9, chapters 10, chapters 11 and chapters 12.

[58] For a detailed study of the ideological foundations of this movement, see Gelfert (2012).

[59] A similar dynamic can also be found in the pursuit of synthetic biology as a target of science policy (see Gelfert 2013b).

[60] I am grateful to Kareem Esteban, Katarzyna Jaszczolt and Amira Moeding for comments.

[61] On the relationship between effective altruism, existential risk and transhumanism, see Davidson 2022 and Taillandier, Stephens and Vanderslott 2025.

[62] This is adapted from Duncan Bell’s (2014) comprehensive definition of liberalism.

[63] For distinct uses of the term, see Atanasoski and Vora 2018; Terranova 2024.

[64] There is a substantial literature on techno-libertarian projects. See for instance Coleman 2012 on programming and Slobodian 2023 on seasteading.

[65] Website: www.storylivingbydisney.com

[66] This project operated in secrecy until journalists broke the story about the investors in 2024 (see for example Bandlamudi 2024). The project then created a public-facing website called California Forever, which was frequently changed in response to journalistic critiques of the project’s aims. The website is at https://californiaforever.com.

[67] The text of the keynote address is available at www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html

[68] This verbatim translation is preferred to the concept’s official English translations as “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind” or “Global Community of Shared Future”.

[69] While in official English translations the concept mostly goes as “common values of mankind” or “common human values”, a more verbatim translation is preferred here, which loses neither the frequent gender bias of the CCP’s external propaganda nor the rhetorical emphasis on “all (of) mankind” as discussed below.

[70] The 12 SCV propagated since 2012 are “prosperity”, “democracy”, “civility”, “harmony”, “freedom”, “equality”, “justice”, “rule of law”, “patriotism”, “dedication”, “integrity” and “friendliness”.

[71] To visualise verbatim changes, the 2022 amendments have been collated with the 2017 version of the party constitution, available at www.gov.cn/zhuanti/2017-10/28/content_5235102.htm

[72] To translate “modern Confucianism” into Chinese so literally is unusual, but has the advantage of being maximally capacious and relatively unburdened compared to expressions more dominantly used in the literature such as xin rujia 新儒家 (New Confucianism), dangdai xin rujia 当代新儒家 (Contemporary New Confucianism) or xiandai xin rujia 现代新儒家 (Modern New Confucianism), which all come with their own political connotations and problematics of inclusion and exclusion.

[73] The May Fourth Movement (wusi yundong 五四运动) refers to the reaction to the Treaty of Versailles, particularly its article 156, which transferred the previous German concessions in Shandong not to China, but to Japan. In Beijing students took to the streets protesting against the perceived betrayal by the Allied powers and the weakness of the Chinese government, leading to nation-wide anti-imperialist protests. As a consequence, China did not sign the Treaty of Versailles, the Chinese cabinet had to step down and nationalism surged, even facilitating the later emergence of the CCP. The successful movement (a Sino-Japanese bilateral treaty returning Shandong to China was signed in 1921) is often seen as the beginning of China as an independent and modern state and a turning point for the broader New Culture Movement (xin wenhua yundong 新文化运动, 1915–1921) that blamed “traditional” Confucian values for the sorry state of affairs in China.

[74] See the Swiss National Science Foundation project The Exterior of Philosophy: On the Practice of New Confucianism and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange project Mapping New Confucian Networks (1911–2021).

[75] Feng’s most ingenious point turns on how Marx, Engels and Lenin had also used “the method of abstract inheritance” when turning Hegel on his head, which cannot but mean that “there were abstract concepts and methods in Hegel which could be inherited” (Louie 1986: 43).

[76] Feng was no minor figure. He had studied with John Dewey for his PhD at Columbia University and thereafter taught at several Chinese universities. Notably, he was chair of the Philosophy Department at Tsinghua University and the author of the influential History of Chinese Philosophy. At certain times, he would be wooed by the Kuomintang and the CCP alike.

[77] pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1998560

[78] Website: www.youtube.com/@RanveerAllahbadia/featured

[79] Website: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIRbxoUlV1k

[80] Website: www.ipf.org.in/Seminars.html

[81] indiafoundation.in/if_events/13^th-young-thinkers-meet/

[82] Website: www.ipf.org.in/p/scholarships-and-fellowships/

[83] Website: www.vhpsa.org.au/images/events/WHC_2023.pdf

[84] Website: www.vhpsa.org.au/hya_Website/pages-hya/about_us.html

[85] Website: www.instagram.com/p/B_mzG5TA9R6/?hl=en

[86] Website: www.youtube.com/channel/UC5lRKBgDMpPas8-VP3wsh0A

[87] theamericanhindu.com

[88] This chapter is an updated, slightly modified version of Schmidt-Catran & Czymara (2023).

[89] Two sub-items directly relate to immigration and diversity/assimilation. These would fit the theoretical argument perfectly. However, we opted for the more general items because the more fine-grained ones are unfortunately not available for most of the countries in the analysis. We assume that the broader items proxy the immigration discourse.

[90] Website: www.tandfonline.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1080%2F1369183X.2022.2132222&file=cjms_a_2132222_sm3268.pdf This URL provides access to all elements in the online appendix referred to later in the chapter.

[91] Our complete analysis can be replicated using a replication package we provide. Please see section E in the online appendix for more information.

[92] In the delete-one models, we reduced the number of imputed data sets to 3 instead of 5 to reduce the computation time.

[93] See, for instance, Michael David-Fox’s description of the defining principles of Leninism as “shrewd flexibility, hardheaded and tough practicality and a commitment to develop ideology dialectically in light of praxis” (David-Fox 2015: 76).

[94] Short verbatim from Juliette Faure’s book, The Rise of the Russian Hawks. Ideology and Politics from the Late Soviet Union to Putin’s (2025) published by Cambridge University Press, are reproduced in this chapter with permission.

[95] The chapter uses a simplified version of the LOC system to transliterate Russian words, except for surnames conventionally transcribed otherwise (e.g. Boris Yeltsin).

[96] The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, commonly known as the Scopes trial, took place in July 1925. Scopes was accused of teaching the theory of evolution in violation of state law. The high-profile trial involved prominent attorney Clarence Darrow for the defence and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but the sentence was stayed on appeal. Bryan’s death shortly after the trial left fundamentalists without a national leader and marked the end of anti-evolution crusades of that era.

[97] See Chapter 27 by Aditi Bhatia in this volume.

<www.routledge.com>

Taylor & Francis Group