acceptability and taboo versus encouraged behaviour in (interpersonal) social interactions, especially where these bridge identity or group divides, and either perpetuates or counteracts power relationships between their participants.
Lastly, ideology analysis divides over whether ideology is principally an explicit or implicit social phenomenon. Here, the substantial issue is whether ideology takes the form of overt and conscious articulations of its constitutive ideas, which are openly and unambiguously ideological in nature, or whether it is (also/instead) to be found in forms that are not consciously ideological – or even specifically claim to be non-ideological – that nonetheless ‘deliver’ ideological content in a subtle, unwitting, even disguised way. The former approach treats ideology as primarily linguistic and textual, found above all in print, digital, online, and broadcast media, where ideas are directly rendered and where their content and delivery can be subjected to lexical, logical, subtextual–contextual–intertextual, or rhetorical analysis. On this account, ideology appears mainly as self-aware programmatic statements and (discursive) behaviour expressly designed to deliver, frame, and thematise specific ideas in a particular ‘telling’ (e.g., manifestos, statements of principle, op-eds, demonstrations, scholarly interventions). By inference, ideological analysis is empirical, measuring ideology’s social effects through observable, (usually) quantifiable data and involving historical and comparative assessments of social phenomena and events according to their frequency of incidence, scale, and popularity. By contrast, the latter approach highlights how ideology can also be symbolic and ‘applied’, non-linguistically embedded or summarised, with sensory (especially audiovisual) cues acting as a ‘shorthand’ for ideas and for the social behaviours and institutions that ‘instantiate’ them. This approach focuses on ‘what is left unsaid’, ‘everyday’ behaviour that reveals unstated, underlying ideological commitments, often presented as ‘natural’, ‘apolitical’, ‘neutral’, or ‘common sense’. Its ideological analysis is correlatively more interpretative, evaluating ideology’s effects using theoretical models that depict various ‘deep-structure’ social forces and generalised trends that are not always immediately discernible from surface-level empirics but require reasoned extrapolation.
Different traditions and approaches within the study of ideologies have different views on each of these six debates. Some of these views are well known within and even beyond social research: orthodox Marxism’s assessment of ideology as false (an illusion), temporary (a feature of the capitalist present), and singular (the total assemblage of pro-capitalist values and institutions); or the assumption that it is plural (divided into rival families), collective (held by groups of voters and legislators), and explicit (expressed in manifestos and opinion polls) in comparative-political party systems studies. Of course, these differences are a major part of what delineates such traditions from one another, partly because of and partly in parallel to deeper divergences in their methodological assumptions. Yet even where they happen to agree, they may do so for entirely unrelated reasons: for example, a view of ideology as individual may stem from an atomistic conception of the structure of society or a focus on the priority of subjective experience. What makes these questions central, however, is the fact that every tradition finds itself in the position of having to take a stance – whether one-sidedly ‘committed’ or equivocally ‘compatibilist’ – within each one of these debates. This means that these six ‘contrasting pairs’ are best conceived as binary poles at the extremes of six ‘ideologological’ spectrums, with ideology-theoretical approaches falling somewhere in between them on each one: for instance, seeing ideology as ‘more false than true’, ‘largely necessary’, ‘definitely plural’, ‘both explicit and implicit’, and so on. It is thus possible to ‘map out’ traditions of ideology analysis in terms of the constellation of points they occupy on all of these spectrums: for example, social psychology’s view of ideology as (roughly) true–(fairly) necessary–permanent–plural–(mainly) individual–explicit, or critical discourse analysis’s reading of it as false–(reluctantly) necessary–permanent–(more) plural–individual and collective–explicit and implicit, and so on. By the same token, as a heuristic exercise, we may find it useful to ‘map out’ our own views on each of these questions to see whether we find ourselves more sympathetic to some traditions than others, to a hybrid combination of their positions, or to a whole new ‘ideologological’ conception entirely.
§2 From the study of ideology to ideology studies
Aspects of these questions have formed part of the standard material of philosophy and social theory since at least the Renaissance. Epistemology and philosophy of mind, language, science, and religion, and branches of early ethnography and cultural studies have long considered the relationship of abstract ideas to reality as either ‘inner essences’ or mediated representations, whether we can acquire reliable knowledge about the world, whether morality is real or synthetic and absolute or relative, the nature and sources of popular opinions, and so on. But, since around 1800, these questions have been increasingly corralled together under the rubric of addressing a specific social phenomenon. The first to use the term ‘ideology’ for this phenomenon were a group of late Enlightenment philosophers in post-Revolutionary France, who saw in it the promise of a new science of ideas, mental perceptions, and thought processes. But its rise to prominence (and its metonymic shift) came with the Marxist transformation of social thought from post-Hegelian philosophical materialism into the embryonic outlines of sociology, which tied ‘ideology’ explicitly to the cultural manifestations of capitalist, classist society. At the turn of the 1900s, sociology’s crystallisation as a discipline with many parallel traditions (positivist, anti-positivist, conflict-theoretic, functionalist, etc.) introduced new focuses on the collective and individual dynamics of crowd psychology and the role of propaganda and the media, as well as non-classist explanations for ideological support. Meanwhile, the growing prominence of scientific and statistical research methods enabled new approaches to studying ideology via polling, quantitative survey research, and breakdowns of electoral results. By the mid-1900s, the ascendancy of social science pushed the study of ideology heavily towards comparative empirical assessments of voters’ and legislators’ policy preferences and the demographics of pro- and anti-system movements. At the same time, new challenges and modifications to classical social theory (especially the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism) found ‘ideology’ increasingly inflexible and outmoded as an analytic tool, spurring the development of new lexicons to explain the conditions and impulses for human thinking, expression, and other social actions.
Parallel to these developments, the same period saw the emergence and consolidation of a growing number of ‘schools of thought’ that fit the description of integrated bodies or ‘tellings’ of ideas – which are increasingly defined as (and accept the label of) ‘ideologies’. From the early 1800s, the amorphous strands of post-Enlightenment political, economic, religious, and legal thought coalesced into a ‘Big Four’ of increasingly distinct ‘families’ (conservatism, liberalism, socialism, anarchism), the inaugural forms of their respective ideological traditions. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, these ‘Big Four’ underwent major transformations in response to four new ideological arrivals (social democracy, communism, Christian democracy, fascism), the results of split-offs from the conservative and socialist traditions. The mid- to late 1900s saw further transformations and shifting fortunes among all eight of these ideological families and, thanks to seismic shifts in the economic, political, and cultural constellations of global power that have continued into the 2000s, the ascendancy of two more (libertarianism, green ideology). All the while, developments in these ten ideological traditions were accompanied by a cumulative succession of narrower ideological currents that coursed within and between the ‘Big Four’ and their rivals – from nationalism and republicanism in the 1800s to feminism, religious ideologies, and ideologies of race in the 1900s, and finally to queer ideologies, populism, and ideologies of (dis)ability at the turn of the 2000s. This proliferation of rival intellectual movements led to competing ‘canons’ of symbolic, literary, and media outputs tied to the rising importance of various (often cross-cutting) social groups – including groupings by geography, language, occupation, wealth and income, age and health, sex, gender,
