Ideology & Ideologies

Ours has been called the "age of ideology." It might more accurately be termed the age of ideologies – plural, not singular – because we live in a world of contrasting and competing ideologies. The high degree of ideological conflict, combined with the ever-increasing sophistication and destructive potential of technology, makes a potent and potentially explosive combination. This combination helps to explain the ferocity of political conflicts – wars, civil wars, wars of national liberation, and revolutions – in the 20^th century. If we are to understand this world and to survive in it, we need to appreciate not only the awesome power of technology but also the power of political ideas and ideologies.

As the word ideology implies, the term originally referred to the systematic study of the origins or sources of our ideas. This 18^th century notion of ideology did not survive into the nineteenth century. An ideology came to mean a set of ideas that was somehow suspect, and quite probably false. The term ideology still retains this meaning for many of us. As we will use the term in this course, however, ideology has no pejorative or unfavorable connotations.

By ideology we refer to a systematically interrelated set of ideas that fulfills four functions: explanatory, evaluative, orientative, and programmatic. An ideology, that is:

	Purports to explain political phenomena;
	Offers a basis for evaluating actions, practices, and policies;
	Orients its adherents to the sociopolitical world, giving them a sense of identity and purpose; and
	Provides a program of political action.

Virtually everyone has a political ideology of some sort … otherwise he would remain relatively disoriented, would be unable to account for puzzling political and social phenomena, lack a basis for moral and political evaluation, and be unsure of what he should be doing, and with (or to) whom he should be doing it.

Different ideologies, of course, fulfill the four functions in quite different ways. Each supplies its adherents with quite different explanations, standards of evaluation, social orientations, and programs of political action.

In addition to these four functions, modern ideologies have two further features. First, every ideology has at its core a view of human nature – a conception of what human beings are, what moves or motivates them, what they are capable of achieving, and how they are (or ought to be) related to others. Second, and perhaps more surprising, every ideology harbors a particular view of freedom (or liberty). Freedom for a fascist means something quite different than it does for a feminist, a liberal, or a Marxist. But how can this be?

The answer is that freedom, like democracy, is an essentially contested concept – that is, a concept whose meaning is forever in dispute. Just as we do not all agree on what counts as art or music or dance, so do we disagree about the definitions of democracy and freedom.

We still discuss the disputes that rage around democracy in the following lesson. Here we want to look more closely at liberty or freedom. We can understand the different ways in which different ideologies construct the concept of freedom by looking at the three features of any view of freedom.

Freedom is a three-sided or triadic relation. It involves:

	An agent – someone who is said to be free (or unfree, as the case may be);
	A goal – something at which the agent aims or hopes to achieve; and
	An obstacle – the actual or potential barriers that stand in an agent’s way.

To say that someone is free then means that an agent (that someone) is free from an obstacle or barrier and is therefore free to achieve his aims or goals.

Ideologies differ in the ways in which they identify the agent, the obstacle(s), and the aim(s) or goal(s) sought by the agent. For example, a liberal identifies the agent as an individual; the obstacle as other individuals with whom he is in economic or other competition; and the goal as success in his competitive endeavor.

By contrast, a Marxist conceives of the agent not as an individual but as a class – the working class – and the obstacle as another class – the capitalists and the economic system over which they preside (namely capitalism). Marxists view the aim as the emancipation of workers in a cooperative, classless communist society.

A Nazi views the agent as a racial or ethnic group (a Volk); the aim as racial purity; and the obstacle as the presence, the influence, and even the ideas of supposedly inferior races or ethnic groups.

Other ideologies, of course, conceive of freedom in still other ways. For the moment, all you need to remember is that freedom is an essentially contested concept to which different ideologies give different meanings. As the next lesson will explain, the same is true of democracy.

Before we consider the different ways in which competing ideologies construct the concept of democracy, we need to take note of a further feature of ideologies in the modern world. Despite their differences and their mutual antagonisms, modern ideologies are alike in being "revolutionary." Each seeks to remake the world in its own image. Each tries to turn the world upside down. And this is because each views the political world in a different way. Each ideology offers its own explanation and evaluation of otherwise puzzling political and economic events. Each orients its followers in a distinctive way. And each offers its own political agenda – its own vision of the good society.

Ideologies are predicated on the notion that ideas are important – that they do, or can, make a big political difference. People die, often quite willingly, in wars and revolutions, not merely because they expect to enjoy some material or economic advantage – far from it – but because they believe strongly and fervently in the transforming power of ideas.

Political ideas and ideals have had, and continue to have, a profound impact in reshaping the political landscape in which we live. It therefore is to our advantage – not only as students, but also as citizens – to understand the nature of the ideologies that have made a deep and lasting impression upon our world.

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The Democratic Ideal

Our word democracy comes from two Greek word – demos, meaning people or common people, and kratein, meaning to rule. Thus, demoskratia originally meant rule by, and in the interest of, the common people. And since the common people constituted a numerical majority, democracy came to be associated with the idea of majority rule. Early Greek democracy was thus a system of class rule, that is, of rule by one class, the demos, in its own interest and, as often as not, in opposition to the interests of other classes, including the aristoi (the best – the source of the word aristocracy, or rule by those few who are best qualified to govern).

Democracy in the golden age of Greece – the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC – seems by our modern standards to have been undemocratic in several respects. For one thing, the right to vote and hold public office was denied to women, resident aliens, and slaves. For another, there were no legally guaranteed rights of freedom to speech, press, and assembly. Any citizen who publicly expressed unpopular views could, by a majority vote in the Athenian Assembly, be banished from the city and forced into exile, or even executed. Such was the fate of Socrates, the philosophical critic executed in 399 BC for daring to question certain popularly held religious and political views – including views about the value of democracy. Questions about truth, he claimed, cannot be decided by majority vote.

Socrates’ pupil Plato agreed. His best-known work, The Republic, criticizes democracy and paints a memorable picture of an ideal state ruled by a wise "philosopher-king." Plato’s pupil Aristotle took a somewhat more favorable view of democracy, although he too believed it to be a factious, unstable, and short-lived system of government. The best system, he argues, would be a system of "rule by the many," or polity, which aims at promoting the public good, not the individual or class interests of one faction or another. This idea of a mixed constitution or republic (from the Latin res publica, meaning the public thing or the public business) was picked up and developed by later Greek and Roman thinkers, including Polybius. He attributed the longevity of the Roman Republic to its mixture of different classes and interests. Out of their competition and compromises came a closer approximation of the public good.

Two important events stifled the further development of the idea that the best system of government was one in which the people ruled. The first was the death of the Roman Republic. With the triumph of the Caesars, Rome ceased to be a popularly governed republic, becoming instead a despotic and militarily expansionist empire. The second was the rise of Christianity, with its contention that worldly matters – including political matters – are much less important than otherworldly ones, especially salvation.

Democratic and republican ideas went into a long eclipse that ceased only during the Italian Renaissance (from re-naissance, or rebirth – the rebirth of classical learning and political ideas and ideals). The Renaissance writer who did more than anyone else to revive and defend the idea of republican government was Niccolo Machiavelli. In his Discourses (1531) he criticizes princely rule, advocating instead a system of popular rule by a virtuous and vigilant citizenry bent on protecting their liberty, which Machiavelli equates with the idea of self-government. The greatest danger to republican or self-government comes from corruption – the tendency to turn away from attending to the public business and turn inward toward private or individual interest, especially economic self-interest. Liberty or self-government, Machiavelli insisted, was not for the lazy, the selfish or corrupt, but was fit only for citizens steeped in self-discipline, love of country, civic virtue, and respect for the law. Only under "a government of laws, not men" could citizens remain free.

These ideas proved to be particularly influential in 17^th century England. As developed by James Harrington and others, the idea that self-government could be both stable and just became central to "the Atlantic republican tradition" which was later to inspire the American revolutionaries and founding fathers.

But 17^th century England also saw the return of democracy, at least as an inspirational ideal. During the English civil war of the 1640s, some thinkers – Levellers like John Lilburne and Diggers such as Gerard Winstanley – called for the creation of democracy, that is rule by and for the benefit of the common people. At about the same time, in the new English colony of America, dissident puritans like Roger Williams were preaching that all people being equal in God’s eyes entailed their being equally entitled to govern themselves in a democratic way.

Still, democracy remained a dissident – and, to some, a dangerous – form of government, usually equated with mob rule. Only in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries did democracy finally become respectable. In the United States, the democratic ideal was altered by the republican tradition, with its emphasis on balanced government, the rule of law, and the protection of civil rights.

Yet there are other regimes and systems of government that claim to be democratic but which do not offer such safeguards for individual rights. The so-called (and now defunct) people’s democracies of Eastern Europe, for example, censored the press and sometimes imprisoned outspoken critics for expressing their views. And yet they claimed to be democratic – indeed, to be more genuinely democratic than the United States. Surely, one might think, this cannot be so. In order to see how this might be, we need to remember the earlier meaning of democracy. In its original Greek sense, democracy meant rule by and for the benefit of the numerically largest social class. In modern industrial society this class is the working class or, to use Marx’s term, the proletariat. Because the proletarian or people’s democracies rule in the interest of the working class, this, they claim, entitles them to be called democracies. This assertion continues to be heard from the communist regimes of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

Thus, in the modern world, the word democracy is an essentially contested concept – that is, a term whose meaning is in dispute. Different people, adhering to different ideologies, define democracy in quite different ways. For some, the concept is closely connected with a particular social class; for others it is not. For some, democracy means not only majority rule but, in addition, the protection of minority rights; for others, it means nothing of the sort.

And this, in turn, give rise to a concluding consideration: democracy is not itself an ideology but an ideal – an aim or aspiration – that different ideologies define in different and sometimes radically divergent ways.

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Liberalism

When you hear that someone is a liberal, or that a particular proposal or policy is liberal, what do you think this means? Chances are that your answer will include one or more of the following. A liberal is:

	inclined to be in favor of extending the role of government in our daily lives
	tolerant, perhaps even permissive, toward unusual or deviant persons or actions
	more concerned with protecting the rights of unpopular minorities than those of the majority

These principles are in turn translated into policies such as:

	higher taxes, with more money spent on social welfare programs than on defense
	opposition to laws restricting freedom of expression and action, including such actions as having an abortion or smoking marijuana
	protecting the rights of defendants in criminal cases and restricting the power of the police to gather evidence and extract confessions

But are these answers correct? Historically speaking, they are … and they aren’t. Each of the above is a feature of one or another part of the long liberal tradition. As we will see, classical liberals like John Stuart Mill and modern libertarians tend to oppose governmental intrusion into the private sphere, while modern welfare or welfare-state liberals are more inclined to favor state intervention. In order to see how the liberal tradition can contain such apparently contradictory views, we need to look at its long history.

Deriving from the Latin word liber, mean free, liberalism has from the beginning championed the freedom of the individual from unjustified or unnecessary restrictions or restraints. In the Middle Ages these included restraints on religious worship and economic activity. The rise of liberalism was thus associated with several important developments. The first was the waning of the Middle Ages and, with it, the death of feudalism. A second development was the increasing importance of trade and commerce, and the appearance of the merchant capitalist as a key figure who sought to break down older feudal and religiously based barriers to trade. A third was the Protestant Reformation, with its questioning of papal and priestly power. And the fourth was the emergence of individualism. Along with these developments emerged new ideas – that the individual is sovereign, and endowed with a set of natural rights, including the right to life and liberty, and that the state should serve the individual, and not the other way around. It was in the name of these and other liberal ideas and ideals that the great revolutions of the 17^th and 18^th centuries were fought in England, in the American colonies, and in France. From the beginning, then, liberalism has been embroiled in political conflict and ideological controversy.

One of the main worries expressed by critics of this emerging ideology was simply this: How can order possibly be maintained in a society whose members were freed from traditional religious and economic restraints? Would not such "masterless men" ride roughshod over each other? If the older restraints no longer sufficed, what was to be substituted in their place? These were among the questions that early liberal thinkers asked and attempted to answer. In the 17^th century Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) argued that a condition of perfect liberty – what he called the "state of nature" – would be one of grave danger and insecurity in which life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Some way must therefore be found, he said, to bring solitary individuals into civil relations of cooperation and harmony. And, in keeping with the practices of the new commercial society, Hobbes suggested that an agreement – compact or "social contract" – was needed to bring and bind people together.

Hobbes’ successor, John Locke, agreed that some sort of social contract was the only means by which individual liberty and social order could be reconciled. The contract would specify the rights of individuals and limit the government’s right to restrict the actions and activities of its citizens.

Despite their differences, Hobbes and Locke agreed that civil society rests on the consent of rational, self-interested individuals concerned with protecting their lives and their property. Hobbes and Locke are, in this sense, defenders of the doctrine that we now call individualism. Individualism – the idea that the individual is the sovereign ruler of his or her own person – is at the core of liberalism and the liberal idea of freedom. Liberals have historically viewed the idea of liberty or freedom through individualist lenses.

Thus, when Locke wrote that every person possesses a right to "life, liberty and property," liberty was placed second only to life itself. And when Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, asserted that everyone has a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," he too asserted the primacy of liberty. So, in order to understand liberalism, we need to look at its understanding of liberty or freedom.

Recall the previous discussion of freedom as a triadic relation involving an agent, a barrier or obstacle, and an aim or goal. To see just how liberals have historically conceived of liberty or freedom, we need to see how they identify the three elements of the triad.

The Agent. For the liberal, the agent is the individual – not the class, caste, rank, or order to which he belongs. Each individual is, so to speak, an isolated self-governing sovereign.

Barriers or Obstacles. Freedom, for the liberal, is the absence of restrictions. To be free is to be unencumbered by obstacles or barriers. Specifically, the obstacles standing in the way of individuals include restrictions or limitations such as laws, rules, regulations, and restrictive customs and traditions that arbitrarily inhibit, impede, limit, or otherwise hinder the actions, movements, and choices of individuals, particularly in the private or personal sphere of thought and conduct. Liberals have tended to draw a fairly sharp distinction between public and private spheres. In the sphere of private belief – especially religious belief – one’s liberty should be absolute, according to Locke and other advocates of liberal toleration. The state has neither the right nor the authority to tell its citizens what to believe or how to worship.

Goals or Aims. The goals at which individuals aim are, of course, many and varied. Some people seek religious freedom; other, the freedom to travel or emigrate; and others, the freedom to vote and run for public office. Liberals have at one time or another defended the rights of individuals to pursue these and many other goals. But, historically, liberals have placed a premium on pursuing and promoting one’s self-interest, as one understands it. Once free of feudal ties and other restrictions, most individuals, it was thought, would naturally try to promote their own well being. As Locke put it, human beings have a natural right to "life, liberty, and property."

Two social institutions were supposed to protect and promote these rights. First, the free market would allow individuals to pursue their own interests in competition with others pursuing their interests. Although earlier, pre-liberal moral codes had condemned such self-interested behavior as sinful or unjust, early liberals like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith believed such "selfish" behavior to be both rational and socially beneficial. "Private vices," said Mandeville, have a way of becoming "public benefits" in the long run. But perhaps the most famous case for self-interest was made by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Human beings, he says, have a natural "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange."

Like Mandeville, Smith argued that although each individual in seeking to make a profit intends to benefit only himself, the larger – and altogether unintended – result is that everyone benefits. It is, Smith says in a famous phrase, as though an "invisible hand" were turning individual vices into public benefits, and selfish individuals into public benefactors.

In addition to the invisible hand of the market was the second – and more visible – hand of the state. It is necessary that the scope and power of the state be minimal or severely limited because it restricts the freedom of its citizens. That accounts for the old liberal adage that "that state governs best which governs least." Thus, the state does have a role to lay, although its role is in most cases limited to making and enforcing the laws that are needed to promote public and private dealings (for example, laws for enforcing the terms of contracts between individuals). The state is supposed to intervene to protect individual rights and to act in those few instances in which the free market does not or cannot operate.

The history of liberalism in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries was the story of disagreements about how much the unassisted "free market" is able to achieve, and how well it can provide socially necessary services. The two sides of liberalism – the economic and the ethical – have long coexisted in uneasy tension.

In the early 19^th century the Utilitarian liberals led by Jeremy Bentham tried to reconcile this tension by devising a market-based moral theory. Utilitarianism holds that each of us shops around, seeking to maximize our pleasures and minimize our pains. Human beings are by nature hedonists; we are, that is, pleasure-seekers and pain-avoiders. Human nature impels us to search for pleasure or happiness and to avoid pain or unhappiness. Each person has a natural or innate interest in promoting his own pleasure or happiness. Hence, says Bentham, there is no overriding "public interest," apart from "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."

Bentham and his disciple James Mill were free-market liberals. But Mill’s more famous son, John Stuart Mill, extended this notion beyond the economic sphere John Stuart Mill maintained that the free market in goods and services was less important then the free market in ideas and opinions. The state, he said, may not legitimately interfere with the expression and dissemination of ideas – however unpopular or unorthodox they may be. Mill’s On Liberty (1859) is a sustained defense of individual freedom and an impassioned argument against "paternalism" – that is, the idea that the state or any other institution or person can legitimately censor or silence unpopular individuals or minorities for their own or someone else’s good. Too often, says Mill, the majority, or the state that speaks in its name, has been mistaken or misguided. Far too much of human history is a sad chronicle of the censoring and silencing of people with unorthodox or unpopular views. Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, and countless others have been silenced, to the detriment of human progress and happiness. To be sure, new truths and novel views are uncomfortable or unwelcome. But that, says Mill, is not sufficient reason for not listening to and considering such unorthodox views.

Mill maintains, then, that the state has no business restricting the expression of ideas and opinions. But what of actions? Surely the state has a legitimate role to play in restricting or regulating certain kinds of actions or behaviors. But which ones can it legitimately limit or restrict? Mill answers by drawing a distinction between purely private or "self-regarding" actions and public or "other-regarding" acts. An act is self-regarding, says Mill, if it affects only the person performing it. An act is other-regarding if it also affects someone else. The state, he concludes, has no right whatever to interfere with self-regarding acts and a legitimate, though severely limited, right to intervene in other-regarding acts. Only if an other-regarding act actually harms someone other than the person performing it, can the state step in to regulate, restrict, or outlaw it.

But what about economic actions and transactions? Are they purely self-regarding or are they other-regarding? If the latter, to what extent can the state legitimately restrict or regulate the economic actions and activities of its citizens? Consider, for example, the case of inheritance. Suppose my parents leave me a million dollars, and your leave you nothing but debts. Obviously, I am freer to pursue my aims than you are to pursue yours, especially if your aim is to be a millionaire. Liberal equality – so-called equality of opportunity – would hardly characterize our relationship. What, then, should be the proper role of the state? Should it maximize my parents’ freedom to dispose of their wealth as they see fit? Or should it seek to promote equality of opportunity by providing a "level playing field" that is not tipped toward my or anyone else’s advantage – by, for example, levying a stiff inheritance tax on large fortunes?

In attempting to answer such questions, liberals divided into two competing camps. On the one side were those who favored letting individuals decide how best to make and dispose of their wealth. They favored unrestricted economic competition and laissez-faire. These "Manchester liberals" believed that life was a struggle for survival and that the market was best suited to decide the outcome. This view was soon supplemented by the "social Darwinists," who claimed to apply Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection to the study of human society. Like the liberals of the Manchester school, they believed that the role of the state should be limited to seeing that contracts were kept and private property protected. For the Manchester Liberals and Social Darwinists, then, freedom was the freedom to compete and to keep the fruits of one’s victory over other, unsuccessful competitors.

Another school of liberalism, the "reform" or "welfare-state" liberals, held very different views. If liberal ideas such as equality of opportunity were to have any meaning, the playing field must be made more level than it has heretofore been. Some kinds of freedom – especially economic freedom – can be restricted in favor of other freedoms and in order to promote other important values and ideals. In short, T.H. Green and other reform-minded liberals believed that the Utilitarians, the Manchester Liberals, and the Social Darwinists had gotten it all wrong. For one thing, their view of human nature was mistaken. Human beings, said Green, are not selfish, pleasure-seeking animals but are rational and reflective creatures capable of being motivated by noble and generous ideas and ideals. Unlike mere animal pleasures, human pleasures and pains are mediated by ideas and ideals – such as justice and fairness. The prospect of anyone being treated unjustly is a source of pain to any morally sensitive and reflective human being. And, Green added, each of us – far from being a pleasure-seeking animal or automaton – harbors a vision of an ideal or better self. This higher self is, in short, a conception or picture of the kind of person we would like to be. With this more expansive notion of the self came a more expansive notion of self-interest – and a different view of freedom and of the role of the state in promoting and sustaining freedom.

For Green and later welfare or welfare-state liberals like Leonard Hobhouse in England and John Dewey in the United States, freedom is not simply the liberty to do anything one pleases, provided that it does not interfere with other people’s freedom to do as they please. Instead, they insisted, freedom is the opportunity for our ideal or higher self to be realized, that is, made real. Freedom, in other words, is the freedom of our ideal or higher self to promote its ideals and goals in a community consisting of other similarly situated higher selves. True liberty or freedom, then, requires that our ideal or higher self be free of the temptations to which our lower self too often succumbs – including the temptation to take advantage of, or care nothing about, those less fortunate than ourselves.

From this reform or welfare liberal perspective, then, the laws that smooth social relations and restrict all-out competition are aids to true liberty, not restrictions on our rights or our freedom. These laws restrict our lower selves even as they encourage our higher selves to realize our nobler, more just and generous ideas.

As we will see, a similar sentiment has been invoked by socialists in support of their schemes for social reform. But we need to clearly distinguish reform or welfare-state liberalism from socialism. Socialism seeks not to reform capitalism but to replace it with a system of publicly owned enterprises. Welfare-state liberalism, by contrast, presupposes and takes for granted the existence of a capitalist system. From the perspective of the welfare-state liberal, the role of the state includes that of regulating competition and alleviating the social ills and individual injuries wrought by a competitive capitalist society.

In fact, the grandfather of the modern welfare state was neither a socialist nor a liberal. Otto Von Bismark, the Prussian militarist and ardently antisocialist "Iron Chancellor" who united Germany in the latter part of the 19^th century, believed that the welfare state was the best way of opposing socialism. Through a state-sponsored system of taxing employers and employees to support ill, injured, and unemployed workers, the German state could increase its power and prestige while at the same time stealing the thunder from the socialists, who had made considerable gains by playing upon the workers’ fears of illness, injury, and unemployment. The welfare state supplied a social safety net in an unpredictable up-and-down cyclical capitalist economy.

In the United States, the rough-and-ready liberalism of the Manchester school was advocated by proponents of rugged individualism such as Herbert Hoover. (It was, in fact, Hoover who coined the phrase "rugged individualism.") But no matter how rugged they were, isolated individuals were hardly a match for the Great Depression of the 1930s. Workers lost their jobs, farmers lost their farms, and financiers lost their fortunes. No one seemed safe from the ravages of a competitive capitalist system gone haywire.

During the Great Depression, welfare-state liberalism came into its own. President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed through programs that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. Although some critics cried "socialism," FDR was no socialist. He was simply a reform-minded welfare-state liberal who had tried, as he thought, to save capitalism from its own excesses.

The Depression ended with the coming of World War II. But the welfare state and its supporting ideology, liberalism, continued to flourish well into the 1960s, during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In the 1970s – and even more in the 1980s, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan – the ideology of welfare-state capitalism was criticized by those who called themselves "conservatives."

But, as we’ll see, American conservatives like Reagan have borrowed heavily from the essentially economic liberalism of the older 19^th century variety – that is, from Manchester Liberalism.

There is one group, however, that criticizes Reagan and other contemporary conservatives for not being true to the economic principles of Manchester Liberalism and the ethical principles of John Stuart Mill. This is the loose alliance whose members sometimes call themselves "true" liberals but, most often, simply libertarians.

Modern libertarians like Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick want to get the government out of the boardroom and the bedroom – that is, out of the economy and out of the moral domain. The state, they say, has no business interfering in any economic transaction, including the selling of sex or drugs or any other commodity or service. Almost any decision – including the decision to take drugs or to sell sexual services or to buy them from others – is a private moral decision made on the basis of self-interest and therefore best left to individuals operating in the environment of the free market. The state, say the Libertarians, should be minimal in its scope and morally neutral in its operations. Therefore, it should not try to regulate the economy or to reform citizens.

If nothing else, libertarianism and the other varieties of liberalism suggest that the liberal tradition is complex and varied. No doubt it is this complexity, variety, and variability that accounts for much of the modern confusion over what liberalism is and what liberals believe. And yet, much the same can be said about what conservatism is and what conservatives believe and advocate.

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Conservatism

When you think of conservatives and conservatism, what comes immediately to mind? Do you think first of particular people – of former President Ronald Reagan, say, or former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, or President George W. Bush – or of policies and positions advocated by these or other contemporary conservatives? Examples, of the latter might include such policies as increased military spending, decreased expenditures for social-welfare measures, limited government interference in the economy, and the like. But when you try to focus not on particular persons or policies but on conservatism as an ideology, what then comes to mind?

If you find conservatism confusing, you are not alone. Not all who call themselves conservatives agree about what is central to the ideology of conservatism. Some conservatives claim that conservatism is not an ideology at all but an anti-ideological orientation or set of dispositions. But conservatism does fulfill the four functions of an ideology.

Historians of political ideas and ideologies sometimes draw a distinction between two kinds of conservatism – an older conservatism stemming from Edmund Burke, which we might call classical conservatism, and a newer variant, which we might call modern or contemporary conservatism. This week we will look at both kind of conservatism, classical and modern, and at other offshoots and variations as well.

Let’s begin by trying to understand some of the similarities and the differences between classical and modern conservatism. Their most obvious similarity is that they share the same label. And this shared label suggests that both are concerned with conserving something. But when we ask what they claim to conserve, how they propose to conserve it, and by whom they think it should be conserved, we see that the two kinds of conservatism give very different answers.

To see how and why they differ, we need to look at the history of classical conservatism. Although there have been many statesmen and political thinkers whom we might call conservatives, one in particular stands out as spokesperson, standard-bearer, and champion of the classical conservative tradition. Edmund Burke was an outspoken critic of liberalism for several reasons, including:

	its view of human nature and government, and
	its view of freedom.

As we saw last week, the classical liberal view of human nature is that humans are naturally rational, competitive, narrowly self-interested, calculating creatures devoted to maximizing their own advantage in relation to other people.

Civil society is therefore simply an aggregation of self-interested individuals who are kept in check by a system of law. And that system of law is in turn enforced by a minimal state. Moreover, that minimal state is created by its members, who make a social contract into which they enter freely for the purpose of protecting their life, liberty, and property.

This, at least, is the early liberal view of human nature. But it is assuredly not Burke’s view. Burke believed the liberal view of human nature and government to be not only mistaken in theory, but also politically dangerous when put into practice.

Why did Burke believe this? For one thing, human beings are not self-interested calculators but creatures of habit, custom, and tradition. And, for another, political society is not simply a heap of isolated individuals but a living and changing organism greater than the sum of its individual parts. Individuals may come and go, but the society of which they are members endures. In short, the argument by liberal social contract theorists that civil society is (or could conceivably be) brought into existence by consenting, contracting individuals is in Burke’s view a politically dangerous fiction.

If political or civil society rests on some sort of contract, Burke says, it is not the kind of contract that liberals like Locke had in mind. It is less like a legal contract than a sacred covenant that binds people and generations together.

Point for point, this Burkean or classical conservative view of human nature and government differs from the picture painted by early liberal thinkers. But nowhere is the difference between early liberalism and classical conservatism more evident than in their different views of freedom and democracy. To be free, for the classical liberal, is to be free from obstacles that stand in the way of realizing one’s own individual desires or interests. For the liberal, this kind of freedom is an unquestionable value – subject only to the constraint that one individual’s enjoyment of his freedom does not restrict another’s enjoyment of his.

But Burke’s view is very different. For him, freedom is not necessarily a good thing. It can be, but it does not have to be. To ask whether freedom is a good or a bad thing is like asking whether fire is a good or a bad thing. Clearly, fire is a valued good if and only if it is kept under control and put to good use. But once out of control, fire’s destructive powers are awesome and fearful, and to be avoided if at all possible. So, too, Burke says, whether freedom is a good or a bad thing depends on the uses to which it is put by an individual or a party or by an entire society. Kept under control and put to good use, freedom is without doubt a very valuable thing. But once out of control, the destructive power of people freed from all legal and traditional restraints is horrible to behold.

What then is Burke’s – and the classical conservative’s – conception of liberty? And what, by implication, becomes of democracy? To take the first question first, there is, Burke insists, against Locke and others, no abstract right to liberty possessed by all people. To claim otherwise would be as absurd as claiming that there is an abstract right to fire belonging to everyone, including arsonists. Rights – including one’s right to liberty – are always concrete, never abstract or universal. It makes no sense, in Burke’s view, to speak of the rights of man, although it makes perfectly good sense to speak of the rights of Englishmen or of some other people or nationality. And as with rights, so too with liberty. Instead of speaking of liberty (or freedom) as an abstract idea or ideal, Burke speaks of liberties, by which he means the particular freedoms that people enjoy in particular societies. These liberties will, moreover, differ from one society to another. The liberties enjoyed by the English, for example, need not be identical with those enjoyed by the Spanish or French or Italian people.

What then of democracy? Democracy, in Burke’s view, was a system ripe with the possibility of abuse. It gives too much power, he thought, to the least reflective and responsible members of society. A society is best governed, Burke believed, by those who have the greatest stake in its well being and are the most reflective and thoughtful of its members. If that society should be a democracy, it then behooves the people to elect the wisest and most prudent among them and then leave them free to govern as they think best. An elected representative should be neither a mirror of nor a messenger from his constituents. He is, instead, a trustee authorized to represent their interests as he sees them and as he sees fit.

For Burke and for classical conservatives more generally, direct or participatory democracy is both undesirable and impracticable. Any defense of direct democracy is tantamount to a defense of anarchy and mob rule. And to prove this point Burke had, he thought, only to turn his gaze across the English Channel, where the French Revolution was then raging. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Burke maintained that the French Revolution represented almost everything that was wrong with the modern world. Motivated by a mixture of envy and rage fueled by abstract liberal theories about liberty and the rights of man, mobs of masterless men and women embarked on a mad rampage. They had attacked King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and members of the hated aristocracy. And why? Simply because of who they were and what class they belonged to. The French revolutionaries had turned their France into a nation of spies and informers. As a result, few of the people of France were secure, and none was truly free.

To promote freedom by thus violently removing real or imagined obstacles in their way was, Burke believed, to hold a mistaken and wholly indefensible view of liberty. The only freedom worth having, Burke believed, is the ordered liberty to act in accordance with the laws and abide by the traditions of one’s own society. These laws and traditions are not obstacles or constraints but enablements – aids to help people to play a useful part in some larger, well ordered whole. Society is not merely a collection of individuals, each of whom is independent of the others. Rather, society is conceived by classical conservatives like Burke as a web of relationships and reciprocal dependencies. To use one of Burke’s favorite images, the individual members of a community or nation are woven together like threads in a larger social fabric. Taken individually, none of the threads is strong or beautiful; but once woven tightly together, the whole can be both strong and beautiful. In such a social fabric none of the individual threads determines the shape or pattern or color of the whole. Only in a frayed fabric – already coming apart at the seams – do individual threads stand out from the rest. That, thought Burke, is the dismal picture presented by a liberal individualist society. A society consisting of self-seeking individuals, each essentially independent of the others and thus free to pursue his own self-interest is, for Burke, a deranged, disordered, or sick society – a threadbare society scarcely deserving of the name.

What classical conservatives like Burke mean by freedom or liberty now comes into clearer view. Recalling the three elements of our triad for analyzing different conceptions of freedom, we can begin by looking at Burke’s view of who the agent is. Society, he says, does not consist of isolated individuals but of people involved in relationships of mutuality and interdependence. Each person therefore has his particular station or status and a stake in the larger society into which he is born, is educated, marries, works, lives, and dies. All these actions, activities, practices, and institutions are part of the social fabric into which we are woven and which we help to weave, reweave, and repair. The goal of free men is to maintain the integrity of the social fabric. To do so, however, requires that one surmount such obstacles as false beliefs about liberty, society, and human nature. Liberty, says Burke, is not absolute or without limits; societies are not simple machines to be tinkered with; and human nature is complex.

With this classical conservative view of the nature of human life comes a corresponding view of politics and the purpose of political life. The purpose of political activity is simply to preserve and conserve the social fabric within which these necessary human activities are carried on from day to day and from one generation to the next. As the British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) puts it, politics is nothing more than the activity of attending to the arrangements of one’s society. Politics is not, or should not be, part of any attempt to radically remake one’s society from the ground up. Still less should politics be or involve any collective attempt to make imperfect persons and institutions perfect. That task belongs only to God. And even He did not succeed in creating such creatures. Thus, conservative politics, as Anthony Quinton says, is necessarily and inescapably "the politics of imperfection" – and, by implication, the repudiation of what Oakeshott calls the rationalist politics of perfection.

By classical lights, the mistake made by political radicals and rationalists from Robespierre to Pol Pot is two-sided. First, they are mistaken in believing that human nature is malleable and even, one day, perfectible. From this first mistaken belief follows a second mistaken belief, namely that humans can and will one day live in a perfect society – an earthly paradise from which greed, envy, and injustice have been banished once and for all. But to bring this about they believe it both necessary and possible to pull an entire society up by its roots and to remake it from the ground up. The results of such large-scale attempts at social engineering are bound to be disastrous. And this, says the classical conservative, is because society is not perfect and can never be made so. Politics is not an exact science but an inexact and imperfect art – the art of "muddling through" one step at a time and without the aid of abstract theories or elaborate rationalist blueprints. There may well be truths in this art, but few, if any, are simple. One of the few simple truths is that there are no simply truths – no easy solutions to social problems – because social problems are always complex. So we had best be wary, Burke says, of anyone who claims that such simple solutions are readily available.

Having sketched several key features of classical conservatism, let’s move on to consider the similarities and contrasts between classical and modern conservatism. Both, as we have seen, share the name conservative. So both are presumably concerned with conserving something. But conserving what? And how? And by whom?

Burkean or classical conservatism is skeptical toward liberal individualism. The irony of modern conservatism is that it speaks the language not of Burke but of the very liberalism and individualism that Burke found so objectionable. What the modern conservative seeks to conserve is not Burke’s social fabric but the very principles of individualism, competition, and self-interest that Burke believed to be destructive of that very fabric. And this in turn gives a characteristic twist to the language, and therefore the thought, of the modern conservative. Let’s look a little more closely at this difference. Burke and his successors in the classical conservative tradition stress the delicacy and intricacy and complexity of the social fabric, and see individuals as inevitably situated in a web of interdependency and as connected across generations with their ancestors and with their unborn successors. It is therefore possible, within this classical conservative framework, to justify the welfare state as a way of smoothing the rough spots caused by a competitive capitalist society.

By contrast, modern conservatives, from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan, are much more inclined to talk about rugged individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. And they are apt to talk about freedom as the freedom of individuals to compete with others, especially in the economic arena of the free market. For the modern conservative, then, freedom is intimately tied to free enterprise, that is, to a competitive, capitalist economic system. This form of conservatism has been especially strong in the United States, where the founding principles of the country included a belief in individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because these essentially liberal rights were part of the American tradition, there was a clear sense in which those people who advocated rugged individualism in the U.S. were taking a conservative position.

Another difference between classical and modern conservatism is worth noting. Classical conservatives emphasize the intricacy of the social fabric and the complexity of its problems. With this comes their deep-seated skepticism regarding supposedly simple solutions. Modern conservatives, by contrast, are much more inclined to claim that our problems are really quite simple – stemming mostly from too much government interference in the operations of the free market – and to claim, correspondingly, that the solutions are therefore essentially simple: Reduce the size of government; reduce government spending, particularly for social welfare programs; and give the free market a free rein, in economic if not in moral matters. If these themes sound familiar, they should. These modern conservative prescriptions are precisely the ones ordered by earlier, economically minded liberals, and by 19^th century Manchester liberals in particular.

If nothing else, this brief and selective historical sketch helps explain how conservatism came to be a house divided. But the story is more complex yet. For besides the division between classical and modern conservatives, there are differences and divisions between these and other kind of conservatives as well.

For example, there are the so-called neoconservatives such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservatives might be described as disenchanted welfare-state liberals. For, while acknowledging the merits of capitalism as an economic system capable of generating great wealth, neoconservatives share the classical conservatives’ concern over the social disruption and dislocations brought about by a freewheeling market economy. These include labor unrest, unemployment, the social and familial disruption and violence wrought by ups and downs in the business cycle, and the adverse burdens that these impose upon those least able to deal with them, especially the very young and the very old. When those young people grow up, they prey on the old, and so the vicious cycle repeats itself. These and other ills of capitalism have led one neoconservative, Irving Kristol, to suggest that capitalism deserves only two out of a possible total of three cheers.

At the same time, however, neoconservatives insist that the welfare state, although good in inception and intent, has fared badly in practice. It has created an entrenched class of welfare bureaucrats with a vested interest in perpetuating the poverty and dependence of their clients, and has thus perpetuated the very problem that it initially sought to alleviate. The social welfare system needs not be discarded, but rethought in new and creative ways.

But neoconservatism consists not only of a critique of capitalism and of the welfare state alike, but also of cultural questions. Neoconservatives like Daniel Bell claim that capitalism harbors numerous cultural contradictions. And it is through these contradictions that capitalism undermines its own already-thin moral and intellectual foundations.

To take only one example, consider the following. On the one hand, capitalism rests upon people’s willingness to defer pleasures and gratifications – in other words, to save and invest in the present with the expectation of receiving a greater return in the future. On the other hand, however, capitalism creates such abundance that people tend to think that there are no limits – that almost anything is possible and that one can have it all, here and now, without waiting or undue effort. In short, capitalism spoils people, leading them to expect more and more while actually being able to deliver less and less. Far from being confined to economic matters, this attitude carries over to other areas as well. It carries over into attitudes toward government, for example.

Too many people now expect too much, too quickly, from all institutions, and from government in particular. Citizens want lower taxes and increased government spending for their pet projects. They want to deny welfare benefits for others while demanding them for themselves. For middle-and upper-middle-class citizens the terms are different – they don’t speak of welfare benefits but of tax reductions and a better business climate – but the result is the same. The result is an increasing inability of government to deliver and, with this, a decline in the legitimacy of governmental and other institutions. By and large, then neoconservatives tend to be skeptical welfare-state liberals in domestic matters and hard-line anticommunists in foreign affairs. They are apt to favor government aid to families with dependent children, and American assistance, both economic and military, to anticommunist regimes and rebel movements abroad.

But also – and in marked contrast with many modern conservatives – neoconservatives tend to take a lively interest in artistic, literary, educational, and other broadly cultural issues. And they do this because it is through our culture, broadly understood, that we define who we, as a nation and a people, are or aspire to be. And in far too many aspects of our culture – in our music, our literature, our theater, our art, and not least in our educational curricula – we are defining ourselves as ill-mannered, amoral drifters and degenerates undermining or discarding what little remains of a once great and vibrant Western culture. Neoconservatives complain that an adversary culture composed largely of left-leaning intellectuals, feminists, and assorted malcontents poses a greater threat to our values and way of life than do any real or imagined threats to the free market. Thus, the political struggle waged by real or true conservatives, say the neo conservatives, must include a cultural and intellectual struggle against this subversive adversary culture. This is important because while these adversaries might initially influence the values and attitudes of only a handful, their ideas must sooner or later trickle down to the masses, where their influence will be even more dangerous. This serves to explain why neoconservatives have a deep and abiding interest in cultural and educational matters.

To this point we’ve considered three kinds of conservatism – classical conservatives, modern conservatives, and neoconservatives. There has emerged of late, however, another kind of conservative, at least on the American political scene. The Religious Right conservative shares several affinities with other kinds of conservatives. The Religious Right agrees with Burke and other classical conservatives that religion is a conservative force and is therefore a cornerstone of a viable society. But they ignore or disagree with classical conservative warnings about the danger of unbridled religious zeal and the self-righteous single-mindedness and claims of absolute certainty that often accompany it. To put it bluntly, classical conservatism is profoundly skeptical in a way that Religious Right conservatism is not.

The Religious Right agrees with the modern conservative antipathy to communism – though less for economic than for theological reasons. The Religious Right also agrees with neoconservatives that the most dangerous threat to our traditions and way of life is not only economic and political but also cultural and moral. But religious conservatives, unlike most neoconservatives, tend to equate morality with Christian Fundamentalism and to adopt a more circumscribed view of Western culture and history.

The Christian Right claims to be democratic, believing that society should be ruled by a righteous or moral majority of born-again Christians. (Whether this moral majority is also a numerical majority is never made entirely clear. And so we cannot say whether its majority status is purely moral – that is, they make up in righteousness what they lack in numbers – or refers to some claim to numerical superiority as well. In listening closely to the sermons of Revered Jerry Falwell and others, it sometimes seems to be the one, and at other times the other.)

The Religious Right also tends to favor increased government intervention in areas and activities previously deemed private. They want the state to ban abortions, to make prayer mandatory in public schools, to restrict or outlaw certain sorts of sexual activities, and to purge schools and libraries of materials that they regard as morally offensive or un-Christian. Thus, in these and many other respects, the Christian Right would greatly increase and expand the powers of government. And certainly, in this and other respects, the views of this group stand in stark contrast to those espoused by other kinds of conservatives.

What then should we make of all this division and diversity within the conservative camp? Well, for one thing, we can see that ideologies and ideologists rarely speak with a single voice, and conservatism is certainly no exception. We have seen that there are several species or varieties of conservatism, each of them sharing certain family resemblances with the others, but each having features or characteristics that are incompatible with other rival traditions. Of course, the same can also be said of other rival ideological traditions … including the diverse and varied socialist tradition.

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Socialism & Communism

When you hear the word socialism, what comes to mind? What comes to mind when you hear the words communist and communism? Socialism and communism are related, though by no means identical, ideologies. And there are different varieties of socialism, just as there are different varieties of communism. The thinker whose name we most often associate with both is probably that of Karl Marx. Yet socialism and communism predate Marx by many centuries. Twenty-five centuries ago Plato envisioned an ideal republic whose guardian class was to own all things (including spouses and children) in common. Early Christians, and later monastic orders, pooled their worldly possessions. In the early 16^th century, St. Thomas More envisioned an ideal communist commonwealth from which private property, profit, and greed had been banished.

During the English Civil War of the 1640s several radical sects, such as the Diggers or True Levellers, tried to put communal or communist ideas into practice, calling for every able-bodied person to work and to contribute to the common store of goods, skills, and services. Fearing the spread of such radicalism, the English authorities destroyed their communes and arrested their leading spokesman.

With the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18^th century, these earlier agrarian visions of socialism and communism were replaced by a more urban-industrial vision. This more modern vision was in part a reaction against the profound social upheavals brought about by industrial capitalism. Uprooted from the farms on which they had worked for generations, families moved into the cities looking for work in factories. Working conditions were unsafe and living quarters were cramped, dirty, and squalid. The workers’ condition contrasted sharply with that of the newly emerging class of capitalists, whose wealth was growing apace as their workers’ health, wealth, and welfare were diminished.

Most observers were admittedly shocked by what they saw. Some thought such squalor natural, necessary, and inevitable, even tough regrettable. Others thought that some way must be found to improve the condition of the working class by, for example, passing laws requiring safer and cleaner working conditions. But some thought that the whole system was rotten and needed to be changed from the ground up. Many in this latter group called themselves socialists. They tended to belong to either of two camps. One, the moralistic or ethical socialists, believed that the system would change when people came to recognize industrial capitalism as a morally intolerable evil. A more humane socialist society of equals would come about as a result of people changing their minds about the old system of profit and exploitation. The other group, the so-called scientific socialists, agreed about the aim, but disagreed with the moralists about how it might be brought about. Some, such as Saint-Simon, believed that hidden historical processes were at work which would bring a socialist society into being. For example, industrial society requires the expertise of engineers and technicians; socialist society requires planning, and planning requires knowledge of social, economic, and industrial processes. Therefore industrial capitalism, with its need for technical expertise, lays the groundwork for an expertly planned socialist economy. Other socialists, such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, attempted to plan perfect socialist societies, and their disciples attempted to put these into effect in model communities.

These and other efforts by earlier socialists were all criticized by Karl Marx as utopian socialism. It is impractical, Marx maintained, to suppose that socialist society will come about as a result of people having a change of heart. And it is no less impractical to suppose that socialist society will come about automatically and inevitably, as a necessary consequence of capitalism. Capitalism, Marx argued, makes socialism (and eventually communism) possible, but by no means inevitable. Such a society can be created only if the old society is first destroyed. And such destruction will happen only under the right conditions. The working class – or proletariat, as Marx called them – must realize that their class interests are incompatible with, and opposed to, those of the dominant class of capitalists, or bourgeoisie. The workers must be enlightened as to their real condition and how it might conceivably be changed.

Marx offered his theory as an aid to such enlightenment. Drawing upon a number of diverse sources, including Hegel’s philosophy of history and the economic theories of Adam Smith and others, Marx formulated his own theory of how capitalism had come into being, how it was changing, and how it might be overthrown. The cornerstone of Marx’s theory of social change is the "materialist conception of history." Marx called himself a materialist and the cornerstone of this theory the materialist conception of history in order to emphasize a key difference between himself and earlier utopian socialists: far-reaching social change involves more than changing one’s ideas or ideals. It requires changing the material conditions – the social, economic, and institutional structures and processes – that underlie the dominant ideas. This, then is the main theme of the materialist conception of history.

Human history, says Marx, is the story of a twofold struggle: the struggle to master nature for human aims and ends and the struggle between different social classes. The two are related. In order to master nature, human beings must labor. For this labor to be effective, people must relate to and work with one another in ways that increase their capacity to put nature to human use. This requires two things. First, it requires what Marx calls the material forces of production – raw materials and tools for extracting, processing, transforming, and transporting these raw materials into humanly useful objects. Second, in order to create and make optimal use of these material forces, people must enter into what Marx calls the social relations of production – that is, the social division of labor that characterizes their particular society or social formation. In a primitive hunting society, for example, some do the hunting, others the skinning and tanning, and others the transforming of tanned hides into tents and sandals, the fur into coats and blankets, and so on.

Marx emphasizes material production because it is the precondition of life itself and therefore of all other human actions, activities, institutions, and practices. Before human beings can do anything else, they must first produce the means of their subsistence and reproduce the species. In these respects, human beings belong to the animal kingdom. But human beings – unlike other animals – are rational. That is, we are thinking beings. We are curious; we ask questions about life; we want to know the whys and wherefores of our existence. We want, that is, to know why things are the way they are why some people work hard and die early while others live lives of leisure and ease. And so every social formation is capped by an ideological superstructure – a system of ideas and ideals by means of which the social relations of a particular society are justified and legitimized in the eyes of its members.

People living in slave societies, for example, learn that some human beings are slaves by nature or it is God's will that they be slaves, while others are masters.

And in capitalist society, with its class division of labor between the ruling bourgeoisie and the subservient proletariat, people learn that the laws of economics dictate this as the only rational and workable arrangement. For those who remain unconvinced, says Marx, there is always religion – the "opiate of the people," which dulls their minds to the possibility that such a system is made by human beings and can be changed by human beings.

Because the "ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas," it follows that in capitalist society the dominant or ruling ideas of the bourgeoisie are widely viewed as the only ideas worth taking seriously. Alternative ideas – and especially socialist ideas – are either ignored or are portrayed in the classroom, the curriculum, and the mass media as self-evidently silly, unworkable, or absurd. Thus informed by educators, economists, and journalists, the members of the working class are kept from forming a true picture of their situation and the system under which they live and by which they are exploited. They suffer, in short, from false consciousness.

Marx meant for his theory to do two things. The first is to help workers overcome their false consciousness by supplying them with the means of cutting through the cant and misinformation to which they are exposed in capitalist society. That is why Marx's theory is cast as a critique not only of capitalism but also of political economy – that is, of the economic theory that justifies and legitimizes the capitalist system of production, exchange, and distribution. But second, and more constructively, Marx attempted to point to the possibility of another, more just and equitable society – which would, he believed, be a classless communist society.

Let's look briefly at the critical and the constructive aspects of Marx's theory. Marx did not believe that capitalism was an unalloyed evil. He thought it had been beneficial in that it had helped to break down feudal society and punctured the illusions that had governed the medieval mind-set. It had enormously increased humanity's powers over nature. It had greatly expanded the productive capacity of human beings; and it had, as a result, created enormous wealth.

But capitalism, like feudalism, had now outlived its usefulness and caused more problems that it had solved. For one thing, the capitalist system of production is alienating in four respects: it separates or alienates workers from the product of their labors; it kills the spirit of creativity by making the worker serve the machine, rather than the other way around; it dulls or destroys the workers' capacity to create and enjoy beauty; and it alienates workers from each other, by making them into competitors rather than comrades.

Marx argues that the capitalists, although affluent and comfortable, are also alienated. Just as capitalism makes the worker into an appendage of the machine so it makes the capitalist into an appendage of capital. That is, the capitalist must do what the market tells him or her to do, even if it means ignoring his or her conscience or casting morality aside. In capitalist society, Marx says, the only thing that is free is the market; all others – including the capitalists – are its servants or slaves.

But this, in Marx's judgment, is a perverted or topsy-turvy kind of society for human beings to inhabit. The only kind of society fit for human habitation is one in which human beings are free and in full control of their fate. To be truly free, the proletariat (and ultimately everyone) must be free of the constraints and restrictions imposed by class divisions, economic inequalities and the unequal life-chances that may result. And they must be free to recognize these inequalities – they must, that is, be free of the false consciousness that makes them mistake their own real interests. Only then can workers fulfill the basic human need to have rewarding work and the respect of their fellows.

But such is not – and cannot be – the case in capitalist society. There, the market is free and in control; human beings are its appendages and servants. Thus, Marx concludes, capitalist society is unfit for human habitation.

What, the, are the prospects for change? And what constructive alternative does Marx claim to offer?

Marx claimed that the capitalist system is self-subverting and, in the long run, self-destructive. It has created its own gravediggers – the proletariat. By bringing them together and teaching them to work cooperatively to produce complex and costly commodities, the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, has given the proletariat a sense of its own enormous collective power. The bourgeoisie has also given them a common enemy (the bourgeoisie), a common interest (namely, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie), and a common aim (the replacement of capitalism with a just and equitable system of production and distribution).

But capitalism is self-subverting in other ways as well – ways that lead, in the final analysis, to proletarian revolution. The steps in the revolutionary sequence are as follows: (1) Periodic and ever-worsening economic crises bring about (2) the immiseration of the proletariat, which in turn leads them to develop (3) revolutionary class consciousness, thereby giving them the will and motivation to (4) overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power for themselves in the form of (5) the dictatorship of the proletariat. When it is no longer needed, (6) this dictatorship or transitional state will wither away, thereby making possible the creation of (7) classless communist society.

About the last step, Marx had remarkably little to say. Unlike the utopian socialists – who had planned future societies down to the last detail – Marx was determined to resist the temptation to write recipes for the kitchens of the future. The shape of any future society should be decided by future people, not by Marx or anyone else. This explains why Marx made only a few vague and tentative suggestions regarding the possible shape and structure of communist society. It will almost certainly be democratic. The major means of production will be publicly owned and democratically controlled. There will be free public education for all. All able-bodied people will work. And the rule regarding production and distribution will be "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need." But where Marx was vague and tentative, many later Marxists were precise and dogmatic. What happened next to Marx's theory after Marx's death is among the several topics to be taken up next week.

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Socialism & Communism After Marx

After Marx's death in 1883 his friend Friedrich Engels emerged as chief spokesman for, and authoritative interpreter of, the theory that Marx had formulated. Engels' chief contribution to the reinterpretation of Marxian theory was to simplify it by recasting it in deterministic and materialistic terms. Where Marx had emphasized choices and options, Engels spoke of necessity and inevitability. Where Marx had stressed the social foundation for material production and social change (the "materialist conception of history"), Engels emphasized an older and (according to Marx) outmoded philosophical materialism that reduced social and economic phenomena to "matter in motion."

After Engels’ death in 1895 another influential interpretation of Marxian theory was taking shape. Revisionist Marxists – including preeminently, Eduard Bernstein – maintained that Marxian theory needed to be revised and brought up to date. Bernstein claimed that revolutionary Marxism was both politically unnecessary and morally undesirable. Contrary to Marx's predictions, the working class had not, by the end of the 19^th century, become poorer and more miserable (Marx's "immiseration thesis").

Due to the growing power of labor unions and of socialist parties like the SPD in Germany, workers were, on the whole, becoming better off economically and a more powerful political force as well. These developments, Bernstein maintained, made armed revolutionary struggle unnecessary. In addition, he argued, the peaceful political and economic evolution of capitalism into socialism was morally preferable to achieving that end by means of violent revolution.

Even as Bernstein’s evolutionary variant of Marxism became dominant in German socialist circles, a very different variant was emerging in Russia. An economically underdeveloped society, Russia had few proletarians in Marx's sense of the term. Its economic base was mainly agricultural, and its workers mainly peasants who had until very recently been poor serfs toiling on feudal states. Marx, who had made disparaging remarks about the idiocy of rural life, believed that the prospects of a progressive revolution were pretty dim in a predominantly agricultural society.

Even so, some Russians believed it both possible and desirable, perhaps even historically inevitable that revolution come to Russia. Not all would be revolutionaries were Marxists, but many were. The Russian philosopher Georgi Plekhanov, much influenced by Engels’ materialist recasting of Marxian theory, in his turn influenced the young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his revolutionary pseudonym, Lenin.

Lenin acknowledged that Russia seemed unripe for revolution in several respects. For one, its workers were mainly agricultural rather than industrial. They, like Russia's economy, were backward and they tended to be suspicious, superstitious and deeply religious. And so, Lenin argued, what was needed was a tutelary vanguard party to educate and enlighten the workers as to their real or true class interests. And because Russia was politically backward – ruled by an autocratic tsar and run largely by censors and police spies – this vanguard party had to be small and tightly knit in its organization and secretive and conspiratorial in its operations. It was democratic in the sense that it operated according to the doctrine of democratic centralism; that is, members were free to discuss and disagree over political and tactical questions. But once a decision had been made and agreed to, no one was free to dispute or disregard it. This party was to be made up mainly of bourgeois intellectuals because only they had the theoretical knowledge and acumen required to inform and educate the workers. Without such a party the workers were bound to make mistaken decisions and to act wrongly.

This, Lenin argued in Imperialism (1916) was precisely what had happened with the outbreak of World War I. Workers in England and Germany volunteered eagerly to fight each other, rather than joining together to fight the ruling bourgeoisie. They did so, Lenin explained, because the workers in the advanced capitalist countries had come to have a small share in the superprofits generated by their respective countries' imperialist ventures in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. These huge profits from abroad allowed capitalists at home to pay higher wages, thereby raising the living standard of workers. It was this – and not the evolution predicted by Bernstein – that explained why the immiseration of the proletariat had not occurred in the industrialized and affluent Western capitalist countries. And it was this, Lenin held, that explained the workers' willingness to fight and kill their fellow workers from other enemy countries. World War I was, in reality, a war among capitalist countries for a larger share of the superprofits to be made in the non-Western world.

To meet its treaty obligations, Russia entered the war against Germany. The war did not go well for Russia. Defeat followed defeat, the desertion rate was high, and back home the peasants were suffering from war-induced shortages of food and fuel. In March 1917 riots broke out in Petrograd and other Russian cities. When Tsar Nicholas ordered his troops to stop the revolt, they refused. Shortly thereafter the Tsar stepped down, to be replaced by a coalition government. Afraid he might miss the revolution, Lenin (with assistance from the German government) left his exile in Switzerland and traveled to the Russian border. Once in Russia he rallied Bolshevik forces to topple the provisional government headed by the non-Bolshevik socialist Alexander Kerensky in October 1917. Lenin was named premier. He proceeded to take Russia out of the war. Pursuing a policy of war communism, Lenin in the name of the people seized mines, mills, farms, and factories. The Bolshevik government gave land and bread to the peasants. Wealthy landowners and others who had much to lose started a "White" counterrevolution against the "Reds." The reds emerged scarred but victorious. The brief civil war had taken a heavy toll and some restive peasants and soldiers turned their anger against the government.

To assuage their anger and defuse the growing discontent, Lenin in 1921 instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP). Under the NEP, peasants were allowed to farm their own land to sell their produce for a profit. At this time also, the secret police or Cheka was formed to root out dissidents and potential counterrevolutionaries.

In 1924 Lenin died. Within 5 years his place had been taken by a man whom he distrusted deeply, Joseph Stalin. In 1929 Stalin began consolidating his hold over the party. In the mid-1930s he began laying the groundwork for the purge trials of the late 1930s, which resulted in the imprisonment and death of other leading Bolsheviks and untold millions of ordinary Soviet citizens.

In order to justify these and other policies and practices Stalin made several creative adjustments to the ideology that had by then come to be called Marxism-Leninism. Of these, three deserve special mention. First, Lenin had claimed that the working class is afflicted with false consciousness. Stalin went further still, claiming that the party itself is not immune from this malady and must therefore be led by and all-knowing, all-powerful and infallible genius – namely himself. The party was merely to be a rubber stamp, putting its seal of approval on any decision that Stalin made. Second, Stalin decreed a strategy of socialism in one country, the rationale being that socialism (as a precursor to full communism) must be consolidated in the Soviet Union before it can come to any other country. The communist parties of all other countries must therefore be subservient to the Soviet Communist Party, led by Stalin. In Stalin's hands the old Marxian vision of an international movement of equals was replaced by a vision of a national Soviet hegemony over unequals. And third, Stalin based his claim to infallibility upon his insight into and the mastery of the scientific socialist theory of dialectical materialism which owed more to Engles than to Marx.

Stalin died in 1953. Today, some four decades later, the Soviet Union no longer exists. But Russia and other republics are still trying to exorcise Stalin's ghost.

Communism still endures China. The larger-than-life figure whose legacy the Chinese are attempting to come to terms with is the late Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao made a number of alterations in Marxian theory – or rather, more precisely, to that theory as earlier amended by Lenin and later by Stalin.

That Mao should have been attracted to Lenin's Bolshevik variant of Marxism is not altogether surprising. The first great revolution of the 20^th century did, after all, occur in Russia. And Russia, like China, was economically underdeveloped and primarily agricultural. Both, moreover, had millions of peasants and relatively few industrial workers; that is, both lacked a sizable proletariat. While still a student at Beijing University in the early 1920s, Mao came to believe that Lenin had shown how and why a vanguard party could lead a successful revolution against the ruling class. Adapting Lenin's arguments to Chinese conditions, Mao made and offered an ideological justification for the Chinese Revolution that brought the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to power in 1949.

The ideology now known as Mao Zedong Thought includes several features. First, Mao proposed bypassing the small urban proletariat, opting instead to tap the vast reservoir of resentment among the Chinese peasantry. Second, Mao downplayed the importance of objective or material conditions, stressing instead the central importance of revolutionary consciousness or will. And third, Mao stretched the concept of class not only to cover economic and social strata within China, but also to include entire nations. The United States is a bourgeois nation, and China a proletarian nation. And just as CCP forces surrounded the cities, China and other proletarian nations are to surround the bourgeois nations of the world. Cut off from the resources, cheap labor, vast markets, and superprofits to be found in proletarian (that is, Third World) countries, the bourgeois nations must capitulate. In these and other ways, Mao, like most modern Marxists, altered Marx's original theory almost beyond recognition.

Not all modern socialists and/or communists claim to be Marxists, of course. Many are and have been critics of Marx and Marxists.

Many anarchists (or anarcho-communists) criticized Marx's scenario for revolutionary seizure of state power. The anarchists said that the state ought to be abolished, not taken over. That state is by its very nature oppressive. To put state power in the hands of the communists will only corrupt them, making them into new – and even more oppressive masters. Variations of this theme came from Bakunin and Kropotkin, among other anarchists.

Another group of socialists, the Fabian Society of Great Britain, has given up revolution altogether, favoring instead a peaceful parliamentary path to socialism. Essentially the same view has been taken by most American socialists, from Edward Bellamy to Michael Harrington.

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Fascism

Fascism is the name generally given to a generic group or class of ideologies, each of which shares several characteristics. In very general terms, we can begin by noting that the defining features of fascism are more negative than positive; that is, this particular ideology is characterized in large part by what it is against or opposed to. Fascism is, in this sense, a reactionary ideology in the sense of that term as defined in week four. In other words, fascism in its several varieties represents a reaction against other ideologies and intellectual currents. Specifically, fascism is rooted in the reactions against the 18^th century Enlightenment and the two major ideologies – liberalism and socialism – that spring from it.

Different as they are in other respects, these two ideologies are alike in sharing the two main premises of the Enlightenment. These include:

Despite their very real differences, liberalism and socialism share these fundamental characteristics. But fascism does not. Indeed, the origins of fascism can be traced back to the late 18^th and early 19^th century intellectual current that some scholars call the Counter-Enlightenment. This reactionary current included many thinkers, including the linguist Herder, the royalists de Maistre and Bonald, the libertine and pornographer the Marquis de Sade, and the racial theorist Arthur Gobineau. Quite clearly, then, the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment were a fairly diverse group. And it would be neither true nor false to call them fascists or even protofascists. But it is true that they were (in Keynes' famous phrase) the "intellectual scribblers" who supplied the themes, the ideas and the ideals – the intellectual ammunition – that 20^th century fascists carried and used with deadly effect.

Despite their differences, and, taken together, these thinkers were alike in rejecting one or more of the major premises of the 18^th century Enlightenment.

Now, taken singly, there is nothing necessarily fascist about any of these views. But, taken together, they form a large part of the backdrop for 20^th century fascism.

Nor is fascism a single ideology. It appears, rather, in a number of forms or variants. Let’s look briefly at several of these, beginning with the Italian variant. Italian fascism, especially as represented by Benito Mussolini, partakes of all five features of the Counter-Enlightenment noted above. To cite several examples of the kinds of differences it emphasizes: It is natural for the weak to dominate the strong, for men to dominate women, and for superior nations (like Italy) to dominate weak and inferior nations (like Ethiopia). Other differences – especially class differences – are to be subordinated to the nation, an idea whose concrete expression (or embodiment) is the state and whose symbolic or emotional embodiment is the all-powerful Duce, or leader. He alone is the focus of love, loyalty, and authority. From this it follows that democracy, as interpreted by liberals and by socialists, is unnatural and unworkable. Fascism replaces democracy’s cacophony of many voices with the unique and unmistakable voice of a single all-powerful leader.

Now, given fascism’s hostility to democracy, it might seem strange to say that fascists like Mussolini subscribe to a view of freedom … but they do. The agent which is (or needs to be) free is the nation. The goal at which the nation aims is national power and glory, both of which are to be found in the unquestioning loyalty of the citizens and in the Italian nation’s power over other nations. The obstacles that need to be removed include certain Enlightenment ideas – especially liberal notions about individuals having rights against the state and Marxian notions about divisive class struggles within the nation. These obstacles are to be overcome, and these goals achieved, not by means of rational debate and argumentation, and still less by parliamentary bickering, but by sheer force and by powerful propaganda calculated to appeal to people’s patriotism and love of country. The force was supplied by the Black Shirts and the propaganda by the state ministry of propaganda, which censored books and newspapers, determined editorial policies, and helped to shape the school curriculum for students of all ages.

Mussolini believed that Italians, like other people, had a deep-seated need to believe in and to follow an all-knowing and all-powerful leader. This innate will to believe (as the American psychologist William James – certainly no fascist – had called it) was once vested in God and religion. Now, thought Mussolini, it was more likely to be directed toward political leaders like himself. This, he held, is only natural, since history is the story of a few Great Men – Alexander the great, Caesar, Napoleon, and now Mussolini – who are able to mobilize the myths (in Sorel’s sense) and tap the sentiments (in Pareto’s sense) which inspire and motivate particular peoples in particular times and places.

These and other views were shared by Mussolini’s German counterpart and ally, Adolf Hitler. Hitler held that the Fuhrerprinzip (leadership principle) bound the masses to their all-knowing leader. They became the obedient body and he the head and heart. And just as the body follows the head and heeds the heart, so must the people or Volk follow their Fuhrer blindly, unquestioningly, and obediently. And from this it follows, of course, that democracy of any kind is a dangerous delusion to be avoided. The Fuhrer thinks and acts as the Volk would think and act, if they were racially pure, free of foreign ideas and ideals, and bent on realizing their innate racial destiny. But since they are not, they need the Fuhrer to represent and act on behalf of their racially higher selves.

Once again, it might seem strange to suggest that Hitler and the German fascists (Nazis) had a conception of freedom … and yet they did. The agent is to be the Volk, whose essence or spirit is represented by the Fuhrer. The aim or goal sought by the Fuhrer on behalf of the Volk is to realize its destiny. That destiny is to realize its racial purity and supremacy. The Aryan Volk – the predominately blond, blue-eyed Teutons of Germany and northern Europe are destined (if they have the will) to dominate other, lesser peoples or races – particularly Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other inferior races or nationalities. Before they can do this, however, they must confront and surmount certain obstacles or barriers. These include the very existence of Jews and other inferior peoples – and, no less importantly, Jewish ideas about equality. If Aryans are to be truly free, they must suppress and eliminate not only the Jewish people but also Jewish ideas, including liberalism and Marxism, and all the Enlightenment notions upon which both are predicated. Soft ideas about equality and humanity are obstacles for Aryans bent on destroying the enemies of racial purity.

Against these ideas and ideals Hitler and the Nazis pitted their propaganda and their practices, with deadly effect. From these ideas followed their justification for the burning of books, to being with; then for the burning of temples and synagogues; then for arrests and deportations; and, finally for the burning of people by the millions.

Hitler and Mussolini are dead, and their crimes distant if unforgettable memories. But their legacy lives on. It lives in various white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups in the United States – the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, gangs of Skinheads, and Neo-Nazi militia groups. Some are inspired by The Turner Diaries, a chilling fictional portrait of a white supremacist revolution that produces a racially pure America.

Clearly, then, fascism is hardly the relic of a bygone era. It is with us still.

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Liberation Ideologies & Green Ideologies

Liberation ideologies – black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation, liberation theology, native people’s liberation, and even animal liberation – share several common or core features:

Let us look briefly at each of the aforementioned liberation ideologies.

The ideology of black liberation is directed to a particular audience, namely blacks. Blacks have long been discriminated against by white people. But such external forms of oppression as racial jokes, jibes, stereotypes, job discrimination, and so forth, are even more insidious when they are attempts to expose and overcome the oftentimes subtle ways in which blacks have internalized white norms and values, and then go on to articulate and defend alternative black standards of beauty, appropriate behavior, and so on, as a way of instilling a sense of self-respect and black pride.

The ideology of black liberation includes two main variants – the civil rights variant (which tends to emphasize external barriers facing black people) and the black power variant (which stresses spiritual and cultural barriers and goals).

Turning next to the ideology of women’s liberation, we see similar features. This ideology is directed at women, who have long been oppressed by men, and who have themselves participated in their oppression – by, for example, objectifying themselves as sex objects, as child bearers, and so on, to the detriment of their full and free development as whole human beings.

The women’s liberation movement has several variants, of which two have been particularly important and influential. The liberal feminist variant tends to place more emphasis on such external barriers as discriminatory laws or hiring practices. The more militant radical feminist variant, by contrast, gives greater weight to the internalized beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes that make women less willing and able to empower themselves.

The ideology of the gay liberation movement is directed at homosexual men and women. Homosexuals often try to hide their sexual preference, either out of shame or fear of being discriminated against, or a combination of the two. The ideology of gay liberation attempts to help homosexuals come to terms with, and feel comfortable about, their homosexuality. It attempts to instill a sense of shared identity and pride – gay pride – as a way of overcoming homophobic fears, stereotypes, and attitudes held not only by many straights but also by many homosexuals themselves and which make them ashamed and powerless. The ideology of gay liberation seeks to empower homosexual men and women by helping them to overcome old fears and crippling attitudes about their "abnormal" sexual preference.

Native people’s liberation movements are concerned with the well-being of native or indigenous people – Native Americans in the United States, the Aborigines in Australia, First Nations in Canada, the Maori in New Zealand – whose lands have been conquered and cultures demeaned by white European settlers. European domination has undermined the pride and identity of these peoples. Their various liberation movements aim to recover the identity and restore the pride and dignity of these oppressed groups. More materially, they seek political power and, in some cases, the restoration of lands long ago taken from them and the enforcement of fishing and other rights guaranteed to them by treaties made with their ancestors.

Liberation theology, as the name implies, has a more distinctly religious or theological orientation than do the other liberation ideologies we have discussed. It offers an emancipatory interpretation of the gospels. It views Jesus, for example, as a teacher who helped people liberate themselves no only from sin but also from the evils of an exploitative money economy (look at Jesus’ encounter with the money changers) and who criticized the Pharisees and others who thought themselves morally and socially superior. Jesus, moreover showed us how to "exercise the option for the poor" by choosing to live among them, and taking ordinary workers as his disciples. Thus, the scriptures, properly interpreted, convey an emancipatory message: the dignity of labor, human equality, and the empowerment of the poor and powerless.

Liberation theologians attempt to address several audiences at once. The main audience is the poor or powerless peasant or worker (often, though not always, in Latin America, where liberation theology has been most influential). But they also address the wealthy and affluent, appealing to them to follow Jesus and take their side in the struggle for social justice. The poor are oppressed not only externally – by landlords and powerful corporations, for example, but also internally, by their defeatists (and self-fulfilling) beliefs and attitudes about their own inferiority and powerlessness. The theology of liberation attempts to expose and break through those self-imposed shackles to give the poor a sense of their own dignity, power, purpose, and potential.

The ideology of animal liberation is addressed to humans who hold unexamined assumptions abut the innate superiority of their own species. Along with this sense of superiority goes a certain set of attitudes toward animals: that we can, for our own profit or pleasure – and without worrying about their pain – eat their flesh, use their fur or skin for clothing, and perform painful experiments on them. Animal liberationists argue that these attitudes – usually termed speciesism – are harmful not only to animals, but also to human beings. Speciesism, they say, gives us a false picture of our species’ real and proper relationship to other species and of the environment that makes our mutual existence possible. Only when we overcome this deep-seated prejudice will our full humanity be realized. Thus the ideology of animal liberation hopes to liberate animals from human oppression by appealing to human beings to examine their own previously unexamined beliefs about and attitudes toward the animals with which we share the earth.

Historically, ideologies have emerged from major social, economic, and/or cultural crises. The emergence of the so-called Green movement is no exception. The crisis out of which this movement and its ideology have emerged is the environmental crisis of the late 20^th century. Because this ideology is so new, it has no fully formed structure, no settled orthodoxy, or even, for that matter, a name upon which all its adherents can agree. But because many call their movement "Green politics," I shall use Green as a convenient term of reference.

The Greens tend to be critical of several features of modern society. First, though not opposed to technology per se, they are critical of the unreflective use of human technological power to master nature for human ends – and especially the end or aim of economic growth. Second, and perhaps even more important, Greens tend to be critical of other modern ideologies, insofar as these ideologies either justify, or acquiesce in, the degradation and destruction of the natural environment.

The Greens have, accordingly, begun to mount a twofold assault on the arrogance of modern technological society. The first part consists of a critique of the assumptions and shortcomings of other modern ideologies; the second, the construction, articulation, and justification of an alternative Green ideology or ethic. Let’s briefly consider each of these in turn.

The Green critique of other ideologies is directed mainly against an assumption that all modern ideologies share. Sometimes called anthropocentrism or humanism, this assumption holds that human beings are the natural and rightful masters of nature. According to this view, nature is merely a resource base from which human beings draw to serve their own ends. Nature itself has no value apart from this function. All modern ideologies – right and left, liberal and conservative, Marxist and Non-Marxist – share this humanist assumption. This arrogant attitude, say the Greens, has given us a poisoned and polluted planet whose species – including the human species itself – are now in grave peril from man-made ills.

The arrogance of humanism lies in its assumption that we are not only superior to nature and her species, but also somehow separable or apart from them. But this is factually false, say the Greens. We, like all species, are deeply dependent upon each other and upon the conditions that nurture and nourish us. Far from being discrete and disconnected creatures, we rely on other species, and they on us. This, after all, is what ecology is: the study, recognition, and appreciation of the myriad connections and interconnections of supposedly different things. The tree and the fish, the giant polar bear and the tiny plankton that swim in the sea, the human infant and the tropical rain forest – these and others are all part of an intricate web of life. This web, tough in some ways but fragile in others, has been torn and disrupted by humans in their headlong rush to master nature and to acquire wealth and other worldly goods.

Against this studied indifference to nature, the Greens counterpoise their own alternative ideology or environmental ethic. This ethic has several key features. The first and most central feature is the fact that all things are connected. All actions, however small or apparently insignificant, produce consequences of some sort. We can no more act inconsequentially than we can touch one part of a Jell-O mold without shaking the whole. This sense of intimate interconnectedness – almost lost to modern men and women – forms an essential part of the folk wisdom of supposedly primitive peoples. From such people, say the Greens, we modern and supposedly sophisticated people have much to learn.

From the fact that all things are connected, several other features follow. One is that all life, human or otherwise, is, if not sacred, then certainly deserving of respect and preservation. Our fate is connected inextricably with the fate of other creatures, from the smallest to the greatest. And since life can be created and sustained only under certain conditions, those conditions need to be maintained and preserved. These include clean air and water, appropriate habitats, and other life-sustaining conditions.

These conditions, and the myriad life forms that they sustain, are threatened in two ways: first by nuclear war (or omnicide, that is, the destruction of everything) and second by the slower but no less certain route of ecocide, that is, the destruction of the ecosystems that sustain life on earth. Each of these sets a central part of the Green agenda.

From the first threat comes a duty to be pacifists and work for peace. To be peaceful or to be a pacifist, Greens hasten to add, does not mean that one ought to avoid all conflict. Some conflicts – especially between those bent on destroying the environment and those dedicated to protecting and preserving it – are probably inevitable, at least for the foreseeable future. Greens should not refrain from participating in these confrontations but should take part in peaceful, life-respecting ways.

From the second threat – the threat of slow ecocide – comes a duty to do whatever one can, individually and collectively, to slow and ultimately to stop or even reverse these destructive processes and practices. These range from such individual actions as not buying or using products wrapped in non-biodegradable plastic or Styrofoam, and recycling cans, bottles, and newspapers, to more public collective actions such as boycotting packagers that produce and stores that sell such products. It is not necessary that everyone, or even a majority of consumers, refuse to buy such products or join in protesting their manufacture and sale. All that is necessary is that enough people participate to make a dent in the producers’ profit margins. At that point the producers and distributors will begin to look for, and possible talk with their critics about, better alternatives. In these and many other ways, say the Greens, individuals can and do make a difference.

Of late there have emerged a number of differences and disagreements within Green ranks. In the main, these differences center upon means – that is, appropriate strategies and tactics – rather than upon ends. The end, they agree, is the preservation of the planet, its natural environment and ecosystems, and the species that it nourishes, including the human species.

Some Greens, especially those favorably disposed to pluralistic interest group politics, contend that Greens should form and support coalitions of environmental interest groups and send lobbyists to Washington and to the various state capitals and other political centers to press for legislation favorable to the environment. Other Greens, by contrast, look down on such special interest tactics because, they say, the earth and its inhabitants do not comprise a special interest but a universal one with pressing needs. Now is not the time for politics as usual but for more urgent discussions and actions regarding the future of our planet.

Some green groups, such as Greenpeace, favor dramatic, direct-action strategies for confronting whalers, polluters, developers, and other despoilers of the environment face-to-face and head-on. By these means, they say, the consciousness of the public can be raised and people can become concerned, reflective and aware. Less militant and more conservative groups, such as the Sierra Club, favor a quieter, more low-keyed approach. They prefer not to raise people’s consciousness but to educate and inform them. Still other groups, such as the Nature Conservancy, favor a low-profile strategy of quietly buying up private land to turn into nature preserves and wilderness areas. But, despite these differences of accent and approach, all agree about the importance of public or political action as a strategy in the campaign for a clean environment.

Some Greens are less inclined to political tactics than to religious rituals and observances to raise people’s consciousness, to heighten their awareness of the peril faced by humans and other species. We should, they say, look upon the earth as our common mother, the goddess Gaia, from whom we all draw nurture and sustenance. Only in this way can we overcome our anthropocentric pride and humanistic arrogance. Only in this way can we come to think in earth-centered, not human-centered, terms. Some though by no means all, who call themselves deep ecologists speak in these essentially religious terms.

Other deep ecologists, especially those affiliated with Earth First! speak in less religious and more Malthusian terms. The earth, they say, can get along very well without humans, who have a propensity to plunder and despoil their planet. If human beings cannot learn to live with other species and walk lightly upon the earth, then their demise is not to be regretted but welcomed.

Still other Greens, particularly those who call themselves social ecologists are suspicious of both religious language, on the one hand, and militant anti-humanism on the other. If humanism has been an arrogant creed in the past, it need not be so in the present and future. Humans have the capacity to reflect upon and learn from their mistakes. We human beings are, they admit, responsible for the mess we have made. We owe nothing to any real or imagined goddess. But we do owe it to ourselves, to other species, and to our children and their children to take responsibility for cleaning up and reversing the mess that we have made.

Despite their differences regarding means, however, it appears that most Greens agree about a common end – the preservation of the earth and all its species.

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The Future of Ideologies

This course has dealt with a fairly wide variety of ideologies, past and present. But what of the future of ideology? Will ideologies, as some now claim, cease to play a major part in modern politics? Are we witnessing what sociologist Daniel Bell has called the end of ideology? Or are we merely seeing the decline and demise of some ideologies, such as Marxism-Leninism, and the emergence of new ideologies in response to the new crises of our time?

Although it is too early to offer a definitive answer, it appears that the second is the more likely. After all, people will doubtless continue to need something that fulfills the four functions of ideology outlined in this course. They will also, in all likelihood continue to talk about, and to value, freedom and democracy – ideals that different ideologies interpret in different ways. If the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist notions of people’s democracy be dead or dying, other conceptions – such as liberal democracy – are very much alive and continue to attract adherents around the world.

Add to this the fact that the new political movements are emerging and gaining adherent. The green, gay liberation, and animal rights movements – to mention only three new arrivals on the scene – apparently are growing in numbers and influence. Other movements thought to be long dormant or even dead are coming back to life. For example, neo-Nazi groups – the Aryan Nation, skinheads, and other white-supremacist organizations – are attracting increasing numbers of members.

Add to these the continuing and arguable growing influence of nationalism and religion, and you have a receipt for the revitalization – not the end – of ideology. It appears that ideology will be with us for some time to come.

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Political Ideology Review

As a summary of the some of the concepts from this course, I'm including the following chart (This is adapted from another source ... not original to me!) followed by a list of relevant links

Copyright © 1996 Amy S. Glenn
Last updated: 03 February 2012