Tgk1946's Blog

From Alien Powers (Kenneth Minogue, 1985) pp167-70

There are two entirely decisive reasons why ideology is incompatible with the activity of politics. The first is that, whereas the doctrine of ideology assumes that mankind is enslaved, politics is an activity of the free. The second is that politics presupposes the possibility of an equal contribution of wisdom from each citizen, while ideology argues that this is impossible, for the understanding of most people has been fatally clouded by the experience of domination. Let us consider each point in turn.

To be able to participate in political life has, since classical times, been the mark of freedom. It is precisely what eleutheria signified among the Greeks, and what the Athenian demos insisted upon against the oligarchs. The Roman plebeians did not count themselves free until they had magistracies of their own with a recognized place in the republic. Modern European politics over the last few centuries has been marked by a sequence of dramas in which, successively, middle and working classes, and subsequently women and other excluded groups, claimed a franchise which they regarded as a liberation from the silence of civil dependence. Ideologically, however, this identification of politics with freedom is declared an illusion, and supported by the argument that, since freedom (or democracy) means getting what one wants, and since we often fail to get what we want, the freedom we think we have must be illusory. A vision is then dangled before us in which freedom ceases to be an aspiration and turns into a reality. As usual, the fastest path into this tangled complex of arguments lies through the early Marx.

Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?
Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German state; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.l

In this remarkable passage, we may glimpse something unusual in the generally purposeful discourse of ideology: some hint of the appeal to magic which is an important element of the doctrine. The quest for emancipation, as in fairy stories, is riddled: it requires a kind of frog prince in the form of a class which is not a class, and an estate which is the dissolution of all estates. The theoretical impact of this particular argument lies in the claim that all previous history has been a failure to achieve the universality which would give each of us access to full participation in the human world. Thus philosophy has, most conspicuously among intellectual endeavours, attempted to create a truly universal understanding of our world, but it has produced (Marx argues) only distortions for an élite; in the practical world, the state merely represents the pretence that we can rise to a citizenly universality in our political lives while at the same time our social experience divides us into competing individuals, sexes, religions, families and occupations. Ideology thus discovers that what we generally consider to be theory liberated from its historical circumstances (such as science or philosophy) and what we generally take to be institutions of universal justice (such as law and the state) are in fact merely vehicles of special interests. Such a criticism of contemporary culture might plausibly lead on to an incitement to the educated and the authoritative to try harder in their task of establishing a genuine universality. Instead, a strange thing happens. We learn that it is the least free, and the least educated, who must lead humanity to freedom, for it turns out that it is the ignorant and the weak who are closest to the essence of humanity.

Again, the theme is familiar both from fairy tales and from religion. The youngest brother wins out against the opposition of his elders, and the meek inherit the earth; similarly, it is the newest and weakest of classes which will redeem us. For, the argument goes, it is those most enslaved who are least corrupted by the contemporary system. Just as the barbarians, bursting into the debilitated Roman empire, first destroyed it and then created a new and superior civilization, so it must be the proletariat who, bursting through the barriers of respectable society, will bring to an end a complex historical development, and awaken a sleeping mankind. The term ‘proletariat’ which Marx appropriated from Latin politics may thus be seen as a technical term in the elaboration of any ideology, and signifying pure ideological agency. As a Latin expression, the term signified the lowest class available for military service, those who had nothing to contribute but their offspring, or proles.2 In ideological terms, it signifies a class of people negatively specifiable purely in terms of their suffering. It is by virtue of their suffering and their impotence that such classes have ‘purely human significance’.

It is important to emphasize these echoes from religion and fairy tales in the redemptive element of the ideological doctrine, because this element, running directly counter to the traditional wisdom of politics, needs explanation. Freedom is, in political thought, recognized as a complex and difficult growth not to be had by a mere uprising of slaves. Slave rebellions, it is clear, merely produce new despotisms, a proposition to which everything in the history of twentieth-century ideological experience testifies. Marx himself does, indeed, recognize a point of this kind in emphasizing that a long process of revolutionary organization will be needed to school the proletariat in the character appropriate to the coming condition of things. It remains, however, eccentric that he and other ideologists should choose the least cultivated of classes as the vehicle of salvation, a choice notably at variance with that of the rationalists of the Enlightenment. The central argument is that the deprived are a creative negation of the corrupt world in which we live, the more excluded the less corrupted. The essence of humanity appears most abundantly in those least integrated with contemporary society and its evils. There are, of course, philosophical reasons why Marx should have been impressed by this otherwise curious doctrine, but what is most striking is that, politics being an activity of the articulate, Marx should have chosen the most inarticulate people he could conceive of, as political agents.

What is at issue in the ideological choice of the inarticulate as both historical and political agents of redemption is the question of whether it is better that human beings should live their lives as free choosing agents, or whether they should live in a perfect community. Ideology, as we have seen, erodes and destroys this issue not merely by its rejection of the value of individual self-determination but by its conviction that such determination is unreal and illusory. A perfect community therefore becomes not merely desirable, but also the only perfection possible. If we now consider this conclusion as one which must be argumentatively commended to the sophisticated electorates of the Western world, then the rhetorical problem becomes obvious. It requires a direct assault upon freedom. But as a simple matter of fact, it is difficult to get very far in modern politics by promising to extinguish everything which, in our imperfect human lives, we recognize as freedom, and replace it with a dictatorship of the enlightened promising us a distant perfection. Hence there has been an understandable temptation to present this new and superior situation as a new and superior form of freedom, with a corresponding denigration of something called ‘bourgeois freedom’. But the expression ‘bourgeois freedom’ (and its variants) is a solecism. There is no other kind. To be free is to be ‘bourgeois’. It produces evils as well as goods, no doubt, but that is another question.

In the ideological terminus, then, there will be no freedom because there will be no need for it: the only option will also be the right option, and will also correspond precisely to what everyone actually wants to do. Such a rationalism is familiar from its Platonic and Spinozistic versions, in which reason is identified with transcendence of the passions, and individuals are reduced to instances of the universal. In Hegel, the rationalism of this position had been significantly modified: particularity (including the passions) was not a defect but a necessary part of the articulation of the idea. The universal can only become actual by descending into the particular, and what Hegel called ‘Spirit’ must use the passions in its process of selfactualization. Indeed, reason and passion are recognized as having both legitimate and conflicting interests: ‘A mighty figure must trample many an innocent flower underfoot, and destroy much that lies in its path.’ It is Hegel’s insistence upon the necessity of the suffering found in history as freedom develops which prepares the way for Marx’s belief that mankind’s capacity to grasp the universal is imminent; a stage of human development which Marx took to be the end of the process.