History of Ideologies
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), a French Enlightenment philosopher, is usually credited with coining the word “ideology.” His four volume Elements of Ideology (1801-1815) was translated by Thomas Jefferson and published in English in 1817. He and his compatriots—who proudly called themselves Ideologues—used the term “ideology” to mean the science of ideas. De Tracy and the Ideologues sought to take ideas out of the realm of metaphysics and the supernatural. Ideas, they argued, originated from our senses and our ability to perceive and understand the world.
De Tracy’s understanding of ideology was revolutionary for its day, because it was a very democratic notion. Everyone has senses, and can therefore generate ideas from that sensory input. This conception of ideology was part of a larger Enlightenment movement toward empiricism, or the practice of relying on experimentation and observation to understand nature. Moreover, the ideas generated by all kinds of people are subject to being discussed and evaluated on their merits. So a “science of ideas” opened debate on the material conditions of society to a wide range of people, and promised to improve society. As you can imagine, monarchs, the aristocracy, the clergy, and autocrats such as Napoleon denounced the Ideologues.
The definition of ideology took on a more overtly political connotation with the writing of The German Ideology (written in 1846, although not published in full until 1932) by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). They argued that ideology was less a science of ideas and more of a tool of the ruling class to justify its privileged position. Just as the ruling class is materially, militarily, and politically dominant, it maintains a monopoly of ideas as well. The ruling ideology is pervasive and serves as a mutually reinforcing web of support to justify the status quo. Consider, a Marxist would say, the ways in which the ideas of the capitalist elite dominate all the important aspects of modern life: in parenting (rewards and punishments to control children); in schooling (the bell has rung, so do your work); in religion (look for your reward in heaven, not on earth); in the workplace (the clock says 9am, so do your work just like you were trained in school); in the economy (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps); in the media (our press is free, fair, and balanced); and in social rituals (land of the free, under God, patriotic pride to be an American with the best healthcare system in the world!).
From our point of view the system of ideas articulated by Marx and Engels was itself an ideology. The 19th Century and early part of the 20th Century seem to have been transformative in this respect. During that time we came to the consensus that while Marx and Engels were largely correct about the ways in which elites dominate the ideas of the societies they rule, any group wishing to rule a society will need to articulate a fairly coherent set of ideas, illusions, abstractions, programs, and myths that can mobilize people to support that group. A number of developments in that period contributed to the transformation of “ideology” into its modern connotation:
Development of Partisan Politics—The American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions mark the beginning point of modern political partisanship. American debates over the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain provided important practice in mobilizing a literate population. Parties emerged very quickly in the new American republic as Federalists squared off against Democratic Republicans (aka Jeffersonian Democrats). The Federalists faded quickly, leaving the American party system centered on contention between the Whigs and the Democrats, and between the Republicans and the Democrats since the 1860s. In the French revolutionary period, the division in the National Assembly affected the ways we talk about political ideologies today. Those advocating a radical departure from the ancien regime (the “old regime”) sat on the left, defenders of the monarchy sat on the right, and moderates sat in the middle. To this day, we usually describe an ideology advocating radical progressive change as leftist, those who defend the privileges of those empowered by the status quo as right-wing, and those in the middle as centrist. Today, however, the picture has been complicated by the past success of liberalism and the current ascendance of conservatism. Modern conservatives in the United States often advocate radical regressive change to undo social welfare policies (e.g. Social Security), civil rights (e.g. constitutional amendment banning gay marriage or civil union rights), or civil liberties (e.g. the right to privacy) that have already become a part of the social fabric.
As they developed along with the expansion of the right to vote, political parties were compelled to articulate broad-based, coherent political programs that would attract supporters. These programs are important component parts of larger ideologies.
Nationalism—The 19th Century also saw the rise of nationalism. In political science, we make distinctions between “states” and “nations.” A state is a political organization that is sovereign over a defined geographic region. Sovereignty refers to the fact that the governing institutions of the state constitute the highest legal authority recognized in that defined area. A nation is a group of people who share a common birth--natus is the Latin word for birth—by which we usually mean a group of people with a common language, history, and culture. When a nation possesses its own sovereign state, we refer to this as a nation-state. Japan is a classic example of a nation-state, with a sovereign state encompassing the Japanese nation. The fit between nations and states is usually not as neat as in the Japanese case. Most nation-states are like the United States, Russia, Iran and Nigeria: they encompass a diversity of peoples who recognize the sovereignty of the state to varying degrees.
Nationalism is the idea that nations should have their own distinct state. It became a powerful force in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, in the unification of Germany and Italy in the 1860s and 1870s, and in the world wars of the 20th Century. In America, nationalism was a motivating force behind the expansion of the United States across North America and the independence movements in Central and South America in the 19th Century. Later, after World War II, nationalism fueled independence movements in former European colonies in Africa and Asia, and was often behind the aspirations of Eurasian peoples to escape the Soviet Empire.
Ideologies have sought either to incorporate nationalist impulses or to negate them with calls for a movement that transcended national and state boundaries. Most famously, the Nazi Party in Germany—officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—emphasized German nationalism in direct opposition to the explicitly internationalist Marxist and Socialist parties of the day.
Advances in Communication—The 19th and 20th Centuries witnessed the development of national and international mass media systems. Earlier innovations paved the way for this to happen. Between 1041 and 1048 a Chinese printer named Bi Sheng invented movable type using clay type pieces; then in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg independently invented a movable type press with metal characters that revolutionized printing in Europe. Printing stimulated the expansion of literacy, which created more demand for printed Bibles, broadsides, pamphlets, and corantos, which were the first newspapers that were published in England, the Netherlands, and other European trading nations in the 1600’s. In 1709 the British Parliament passed the first national copyright law, which was used as a model by many other countries and helped to limit government control of printed matter by vesting ownership rights with the writer and/or publisher.
Several developments in the 1800’s and 1900’s created the kind of mass media system that has existed until the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. Specifically, you should be aware of the following:
Ideologies were affected by mass media in an even more direct way. The symbols and political programs put forth by ideologues were forced to compete with each other in an ever-growing critical environment. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” They were right, but their statement was as much a self-fulfilling prophecy as anything. Their relatively short pamphlet mobilized a great deal of fear of the communist spectre, just as it rallied workers to the cause. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party made the first extensive use of propaganda films such as Der Ewige Jude and Triumph des Willens (1) to spread their racist vision for the Third Reich. Franklin Roosevelt broadcast important “fireside chats” on the radio beginning in 1933 and running to 1944. The broadcasts helped him explain his policies and decisions directly to an audience of millions. For example, in the December 9, 1941 fireside chat he said, “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of the war.” (2)
Industrial Revolution—Beginning in Britain in the late 1700’s and spreading to Northern Europe and North America in the 1800’s, economic activity began to be characterized by mechanized manufacturing, regimented work schedules, sophisticated private financing, and organized factories. We’ll talk a bit more about the details of the Industrial Revolution in the next chapter, and focus here on the effect it had on the development of ideology.
(1) My understanding is that The Eternal Jew (1940) was considered so vulgar and over the top that it was not particularly effective, while Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), with its stirring footage from a Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, was quite influential. I saw these and other Nazi propaganda films while a student at the University of Bonn.
(2) Franklin Roosevelt’s papers and speeches are in the public domain. The fireside chats are available from the FDR Library and Museum at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/firesi90.html.
De Tracy’s understanding of ideology was revolutionary for its day, because it was a very democratic notion. Everyone has senses, and can therefore generate ideas from that sensory input. This conception of ideology was part of a larger Enlightenment movement toward empiricism, or the practice of relying on experimentation and observation to understand nature. Moreover, the ideas generated by all kinds of people are subject to being discussed and evaluated on their merits. So a “science of ideas” opened debate on the material conditions of society to a wide range of people, and promised to improve society. As you can imagine, monarchs, the aristocracy, the clergy, and autocrats such as Napoleon denounced the Ideologues.
The definition of ideology took on a more overtly political connotation with the writing of The German Ideology (written in 1846, although not published in full until 1932) by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). They argued that ideology was less a science of ideas and more of a tool of the ruling class to justify its privileged position. Just as the ruling class is materially, militarily, and politically dominant, it maintains a monopoly of ideas as well. The ruling ideology is pervasive and serves as a mutually reinforcing web of support to justify the status quo. Consider, a Marxist would say, the ways in which the ideas of the capitalist elite dominate all the important aspects of modern life: in parenting (rewards and punishments to control children); in schooling (the bell has rung, so do your work); in religion (look for your reward in heaven, not on earth); in the workplace (the clock says 9am, so do your work just like you were trained in school); in the economy (pull yourself up by your own bootstraps); in the media (our press is free, fair, and balanced); and in social rituals (land of the free, under God, patriotic pride to be an American with the best healthcare system in the world!).
From our point of view the system of ideas articulated by Marx and Engels was itself an ideology. The 19th Century and early part of the 20th Century seem to have been transformative in this respect. During that time we came to the consensus that while Marx and Engels were largely correct about the ways in which elites dominate the ideas of the societies they rule, any group wishing to rule a society will need to articulate a fairly coherent set of ideas, illusions, abstractions, programs, and myths that can mobilize people to support that group. A number of developments in that period contributed to the transformation of “ideology” into its modern connotation:
Development of Partisan Politics—The American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions mark the beginning point of modern political partisanship. American debates over the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain provided important practice in mobilizing a literate population. Parties emerged very quickly in the new American republic as Federalists squared off against Democratic Republicans (aka Jeffersonian Democrats). The Federalists faded quickly, leaving the American party system centered on contention between the Whigs and the Democrats, and between the Republicans and the Democrats since the 1860s. In the French revolutionary period, the division in the National Assembly affected the ways we talk about political ideologies today. Those advocating a radical departure from the ancien regime (the “old regime”) sat on the left, defenders of the monarchy sat on the right, and moderates sat in the middle. To this day, we usually describe an ideology advocating radical progressive change as leftist, those who defend the privileges of those empowered by the status quo as right-wing, and those in the middle as centrist. Today, however, the picture has been complicated by the past success of liberalism and the current ascendance of conservatism. Modern conservatives in the United States often advocate radical regressive change to undo social welfare policies (e.g. Social Security), civil rights (e.g. constitutional amendment banning gay marriage or civil union rights), or civil liberties (e.g. the right to privacy) that have already become a part of the social fabric.
As they developed along with the expansion of the right to vote, political parties were compelled to articulate broad-based, coherent political programs that would attract supporters. These programs are important component parts of larger ideologies.
Nationalism—The 19th Century also saw the rise of nationalism. In political science, we make distinctions between “states” and “nations.” A state is a political organization that is sovereign over a defined geographic region. Sovereignty refers to the fact that the governing institutions of the state constitute the highest legal authority recognized in that defined area. A nation is a group of people who share a common birth--natus is the Latin word for birth—by which we usually mean a group of people with a common language, history, and culture. When a nation possesses its own sovereign state, we refer to this as a nation-state. Japan is a classic example of a nation-state, with a sovereign state encompassing the Japanese nation. The fit between nations and states is usually not as neat as in the Japanese case. Most nation-states are like the United States, Russia, Iran and Nigeria: they encompass a diversity of peoples who recognize the sovereignty of the state to varying degrees.
Nationalism is the idea that nations should have their own distinct state. It became a powerful force in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, in the unification of Germany and Italy in the 1860s and 1870s, and in the world wars of the 20th Century. In America, nationalism was a motivating force behind the expansion of the United States across North America and the independence movements in Central and South America in the 19th Century. Later, after World War II, nationalism fueled independence movements in former European colonies in Africa and Asia, and was often behind the aspirations of Eurasian peoples to escape the Soviet Empire.
Ideologies have sought either to incorporate nationalist impulses or to negate them with calls for a movement that transcended national and state boundaries. Most famously, the Nazi Party in Germany—officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—emphasized German nationalism in direct opposition to the explicitly internationalist Marxist and Socialist parties of the day.
Advances in Communication—The 19th and 20th Centuries witnessed the development of national and international mass media systems. Earlier innovations paved the way for this to happen. Between 1041 and 1048 a Chinese printer named Bi Sheng invented movable type using clay type pieces; then in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg independently invented a movable type press with metal characters that revolutionized printing in Europe. Printing stimulated the expansion of literacy, which created more demand for printed Bibles, broadsides, pamphlets, and corantos, which were the first newspapers that were published in England, the Netherlands, and other European trading nations in the 1600’s. In 1709 the British Parliament passed the first national copyright law, which was used as a model by many other countries and helped to limit government control of printed matter by vesting ownership rights with the writer and/or publisher.
Several developments in the 1800’s and 1900’s created the kind of mass media system that has existed until the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. Specifically, you should be aware of the following:
- In 1811 Friedrich Koenig, a German printer, became the first person to harness the power of a steam engine to a printing press. This was instrumental in creating large production runs of newspapers and books. The Times of London became the first newspaper to use a steam-powered press in 1814.
- Samuel Morse patented the electric telegraph in 1840, and popularized the Morse Code series of dots and dashes to represent letters. Newspapers and news services like Reuters and the Associated Press quickly adopted the telegraph, as did businesses, banks, railroads, or anyone who could afford to use the service. While the telegraph did not become a mass person-to-person communication tool, it revolutionized the speed and manner in which people heard about political and economic news from across the world.
- In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, and by 1879 the National Bell Telephone Company consolidated all emerging local telephone networks into a nationwide system. In contrast to the telegraph, the telephone did become a widespread personal communication device, especially in the United States, which for many decades had a more developed phone network than any other place in the world.
- Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi are forever linked in historical imagination with the invention of the radio. Although there is some dispute, it appears as though Tesla first patented the idea and had gathered all the pieces needed for a working radio, while Marconi is credited with constructing the first working radio in 1895. Initially radios broadcast Morse Code, but by 1906 the first voice broadcasts were made.
- In 1889 Thomas Edison and W. K. Dickson invented the kinetoscope, a kind of personal movie theater where people paid money to watch a moving picture in the viewer. The French brothers August and Louis Lumiere invented the first movie projector in 1895, and staged the first commercial exhibitions of film to an audience. By 1909 there were over 9,000 movie theaters in the United States alone. The modern motion picture industry was on its way.
- Television was invented in the 1920s and 30s, with Russian-born émigré Vladimir Zworykin and American Philo Farnsworth garnering most of the credit. The Great Depression and World War II delayed the development of television into a mass media system. At the end of the war, there were only some 7,000 television sets and seven stations in all of the United States. Commercial broadcasting and the popularity of television exploded in the early 1950s.
Ideologies were affected by mass media in an even more direct way. The symbols and political programs put forth by ideologues were forced to compete with each other in an ever-growing critical environment. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” They were right, but their statement was as much a self-fulfilling prophecy as anything. Their relatively short pamphlet mobilized a great deal of fear of the communist spectre, just as it rallied workers to the cause. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party made the first extensive use of propaganda films such as Der Ewige Jude and Triumph des Willens (1) to spread their racist vision for the Third Reich. Franklin Roosevelt broadcast important “fireside chats” on the radio beginning in 1933 and running to 1944. The broadcasts helped him explain his policies and decisions directly to an audience of millions. For example, in the December 9, 1941 fireside chat he said, “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of the war.” (2)
Industrial Revolution—Beginning in Britain in the late 1700’s and spreading to Northern Europe and North America in the 1800’s, economic activity began to be characterized by mechanized manufacturing, regimented work schedules, sophisticated private financing, and organized factories. We’ll talk a bit more about the details of the Industrial Revolution in the next chapter, and focus here on the effect it had on the development of ideology.
- The Industrial Revolution was enormously disruptive of traditional ways of life. Explaining what was happening and responding to the attendant social disruption were key components of the ideologies that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The socialist condemnation of capitalist exploitation of the working class during the industrial revolution presented a critique that helped to split neo-classical liberalism into two of its main contemporary parts: social welfare liberalism, which attempts to mobilize the state to protect people from the adverse consequences of capitalism, and market conservatism, which defends the theory and practice of capitalism.
- The Industrial Revolution also made it easier to mobilize large numbers of people, because the process of industrialization drew people from the countryside to the urban centers.
- Industrialization hardened class lines by making capitalists enormously wealthy relative to the working class. Ultimately—and with the help of social welfare policies pushed by socialists and liberals—the Industrial Revolution created broad prosperity for most people. But in the 19th Century it was easy to see that workers’ lives were expendable and owners’ lifestyles were lavish. Those class distinctions also helped mobilized people in ideological causes.
- The Industrial Revolution produced enough material wealth to allow all people to live in comfort. However, as we all know, that material wealth was distributed unequally. It is difficult for complex ideologies to form when nearly everyone in a society is eking out a subsistence living. Once a society produces enough wealth to satisfy everyone’s needs, people begin to think in broader terms about social justice, wealth distribution, and the allocation of public resources.
- Social ills multiplied along with the advance of industrialization. Cities became showcases of crime, prostitution, pollution, child abuse, poor health, and graft. How were these problems to be solved? Could they be solved? Some people thought to found private relief societies; others turned to government intervention; still others simply turned away.
(1) My understanding is that The Eternal Jew (1940) was considered so vulgar and over the top that it was not particularly effective, while Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), with its stirring footage from a Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, was quite influential. I saw these and other Nazi propaganda films while a student at the University of Bonn.
(2) Franklin Roosevelt’s papers and speeches are in the public domain. The fireside chats are available from the FDR Library and Museum at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/firesi90.html.
History of Ideology Lecture
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