Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (13 page)

As a tradition, liberalism entertains the idea of the open-ended development of human beings towards increasingly civilized states of existence, epitomized in John Stuart Mill’s writings. That development revolves around the liberty that people can practise unfettered, through not being dominated against their will, abetted by an increasing recognition and formalization of human rights. But throughout the 20th century, the idea of a fair deal to people
has grown within the family of liberalisms, consisting not only of equal legal protection and treatment, but the equalizing of economic and gender opportunities and respect for multiple and diverse cultures and faiths within and across nations. Human well-being, or welfare, have come to be principal ingredients of the package of benefits that a humanist political system pledges to its citizens.

Liberalism’s achievements have been quietly momentous. Its vision of free peoples bore fruit in the emancipation of colonies from imperial rule. It contributed directly to the liberation of politically marginalized groups from tyranny and discrimination; the very fact that defeated politicians in liberal democracies stand down from power rather than calling in the tanks attests to the assimilation of its norms of political accountability and responsibility. It has promoted social reform on a grand scale, climaxing with the welfare state – witness the legislation for old age pensions, unemployment and health insurance of the Liberal governments in the UK between 1906 and 1914, inspired by the programme of the new liberalism. In international relations the 14 points of American President Woodrow Wilson for the post-First World War settlement envisaged a new world order that initially failed to materialize but that was echoed in the establishing of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a generation later, and is now slowly spreading to states formerly under totalitarian domination. Every constitution with a bill of rights and a strict demarcation of governmental powers that is honoured by the authorities and the people alike, every system that defers to the rule of law, is a triumph of the liberal tradition. President Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal was one example of liberals acknowledging the need for governments to intervene in order to secure liberty and fairness for their citizens. Another strand of the liberal tradition, to the contrary, has found succour in the advancement of free markets and economic entrepreneurship – shielded from the suspected bureaucratic inefficiency of the state – as the engines of human welfare.

These are some of the more notable milestones of the liberal tradition that have changed the world more than the most dramatic of political revolutions, and have lasted far longer. The liberal tradition has also faltered notably in a number of instances: the weakness of the Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany failed to prevent the rise of Hitler to power; the masculinist biases of liberals have been slow to extend their objective of emancipation to women; and even liberalism’s much valued tolerance has found it difficult to grapple with methods of contemporary terror without descending to the moral level of its enemies, and generates perplexity among liberals when confronted with non-liberal cultures in their own societies. At any given point it is important to realize, contra Gramsci, that there exist more non-hegemonic than hegemonic ideologies.

Socialism is another of the major ideological families, and it would be premature to announce its demise quite yet. Its impact on the 20th century and on intersecting ideological families has been considerable. Its core conceptual configuration combines the following. First, it sees the
group
as the basic social unit, whether society as a whole or a smaller group such as a commune or a syndicate. For socialists, human beings are constituted by their relationships with their human and, at one remove, their non-human environments. A class, however, is an alienated group, isolated from the material and social goods required for full human development and expression. It therefore has negative connotations, although in several non-Marxist socialisms ‘class’ has become a
cultural
structure that confers a welcome identity on its members. Second, it has a passion for
equality
, for the removal of hierarchical distinctions, and for the redistribution of goods on the basis of human need. Third, it singles out
work
(also termed labour, creativity, productivity, or activity) as the fundamental constitutive feature of human nature, and accordingly the basic element around which social organization must be structured. Fourth, it cherishes
an ideal of human
welfare
or flourishing based in the short run on the elimination of poverty and in the longer run on the free participation of all in the material and intellectual inheritance of humanity. Fifth, it fosters a belief in the promise held out by the
historical process
and the ability of human beings to direct that process to beneficial ends. Socialism is importantly future-oriented and heavily critical of the past and the present. Sometimes in socialist discourse the march of history is unstoppable and the future erupts, erasing all that came before (that is the case with one of socialism’s mighty variants, Marxism); at other times it is gradual, erratic, and requires the helping hand of people of good will.

The socialist tradition took off in the late 19th century, prompting European nations in particular to take heed of the demands of the rising working class. Inasmuch as it is justified to refer to an ideological family in the plural, it is certainly justified to talk about socialisms rather than socialism. Several of its versions were messianic and utopian. Socialist anarchists dreamt of the abolition of political power and a spontaneous social order based on altruism and mutual interdependence. Some Marxist-inspired believers went off to found communes like the early kibbutzim over a century ago, in which the family, private property, and the division of labour were abolished in order to create a socially intimate society no longer fractured through barriers of any kind. French and British proto-socialists such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen designed communities based on radical principles of equality. Syndicalists wished to replace the state with what they saw as the natural political and economic unit: the workplace, following on from identifying work as the essence of being human.

11. The Re-Thinker
.

Other socialist versions accepted the institutions of liberal-democracy, but declared their intention to use the state to restructure society gradually, yet inexorably. Among those were members of the Fabian Society in Britain, led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, who, punching above
their numerical weight, developed methods of disseminating socialist ideology through cheap and populist publications. They requisitioned the mantle of science through the use of statistics and the breaking down of human beings into measurable categories of neediness: poverty, illness, or enforced idleness. The German socialist Eduard Bernstein was the intellectual leader of their continental equivalents, social democrats heavily committed to an evolutionary path of participatory democracy and increased individual freedom as well as equality.

The immediate political consequence of the socialist tradition was the upsurge of socialist (and in Britain, Labour) parties with a vigorous class agenda. As a consequence, they preferred to concentrate on augmenting the current power of exploited groups rather than investing their faith entirely in the future supersession of prevailing social arrangements. The more effective participation of workers in social and political life, and respect for their rights, became principal socialist ends, promoted by trade unions as well as theorists. Socialism served as a rallying cry of immense potency, as it fostered grand transformative expectations and compelled ruling groups to be on the defensive politically. Nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange became a genuine political objective that was partially realized in the programmes of moderate socialist parties when they came to power in the mid-20th century. More commonly, though, socialists merged with progressive liberal ideologies in developing and consolidating the practices of the welfare state. Here is an apposite example of the intricate relationship between party and ideology. Though socialist parties claimed to have brought the welfare state into the world, it was clearly a liberal construct, balancing public and private responsibility for individual well-being and blending consumer choice with state regulation. Socialist parties provided the muscle for what was originally a liberal ideological scheme, and most of the ideologists of the welfare state were hybrid social-liberals. As we shall see below, all these variants were very different from what became known in Eastern Europe as socialism or communism.

The third major Western ideological family is conservatism. Despite its frequent disclaimers that it isn’t an ideology, it too is a particular view of the political world and inevitably contains a series of concepts structured in a specific relationship. The reason why conservatives misread the nature of their belief system, and why adversaries of conservatism have seen it as opportunistic, lies in a peculiar conceptual profile that has disguised its internal consistency. How was it, asked the critics, that conservatives could be paternalist and interventionist in the 19th century, assuming the vocation of protectors and governors of social order, whereas in the late 20th century they aligned themselves with advocates of the free market and minimum state intervention? One historically oriented answer might be that the conservative tradition metamorphosed into something quite different; that it had no fixed substantive position, and merely reflected the policies of the institutions that acted in its name. Accordingly, in Britain the Conservative Party moved from a complacent to a proactive role in the face of industrial strife and the spiralling costs of welfare. On the continent, the Christian Democrats emerged from religiously partisan roots, predominantly Catholic. They then found it heavy going as denominational politics receded in importance, so that conservatives had to realign on the basis of nationalist agendas. That was especially problematic since the continental nationalist tradition had to a considerable extent been taken over by the extreme right, leaving ‘normal’ conservatives with little space for manœuvre.

But there is another solution to the ostensible elusiveness of conservative ideology. Its critics may have been looking in the wrong place for its core concepts and therefore failed to come up with a durable holding pattern. They have been searching for the conservative counterparts to liberal and socialist ideas concerning human nature, distributive justice, and the relationship between state and individual, and they have drawn a blank. In conservative
discourse those ideas do not display a stable continuity and cannot therefore be candidates for core concepts. Yet there
are
such candidates. One common thread running through all conservative argument is an anxiety about change and the urge to distinguish between unnatural and
natural change
. The latter is modelled on continuous organic growth, rather than on disjointed, planned mechanical leaps and bounds. Only change as growth is legitimate, safe, and steady. Another common thread is the conviction that the social order is founded on laws that are insulated from human control; it is therefore impervious to human will, a will that can only tamper with it harmfully. Over time, and as explanatory paradigms of order have altered, different
extra-human origins of a permanent social order
have been invoked: God, nature, history, biology, and economics are some of the more common anchors to which conservatives resort.

Many conservatisms employ religion as a mainstay of the moral and political beliefs they espouse, and use the sanction of religion to impose political order. Indeed, the relationship between the major religions and conservatism is problematic inasmuch as those who hold to their beliefs most strongly, particularly among some Christians, Muslims, and Jews, wish to apply a freeze frame in which the state would become the political instrument of faith. Nature, as already observed, is a favourite ideological artifice for condoning what already exists, or for cloaking the clumsy transparency of social arrangements. History arrives in the form of tradition – appealed to as the cumulative wisdom of the past which the present is fortunate to inherit. Biology and economics are two manifestations of science, whose fashions conservatives engage in their service in order to acquire the status of a secular truth. All these devices deflect criticism away from human beings, especially ruling groups. They can simply disown responsibility for the deficiencies of society, as the latter are apparently ordained by a meta-political framework.

Conservatism is a powerful political tradition because it appeals to
human inertia. It also condones the good fortunes of those already in positions of political, economic, and social power, who are understandably reluctant to part with their gains, whether earned, inherited, or acquired by force. Fear is thus a spur to conservatism. Conservative theorizing has also not unduly troubled its supporters. It has not required the great intellectual and imaginative effort that all progressive and reforming ideologies demand: to conjure up a world better than the existing one. Its technique has been largely reactive, and that in two ways. First, although its ideology is normally dormant, it awakens when confronted by the principles and policies of opposing ideologies. Confrontation is built into conservatism, whenever it is challenged by a project it regards both as humanly contrived and breaking with acceptable, organic change. Equality is then matched by natural hierarchy; a developmental individuality by the sobriety of existing cultural norms; a regulatory state by a retreat into civil associations. Revolution is criminalized, utopianism ridiculed.