A Green Ideology? From Exclusive Models to an Inclusive Framework

Abstract

The theoretical stage for a new type of political ideology can now be set. At the outset, it was already demonstrated that the ‘end of ideology’ thesis left little room for newly emerging traditional ideologies to be established, dismissing the possibility that the extraparliamentary opposition and the New Left have anything new to offer on ideological grounds. The emergence of the Greens as a compound political actor, and their very reluctance to admit having to mould an ideology, suggest that the traditional understanding concerning the concept of ideology might be inadequately equipped, as it is, to encompass the political worldview of the Greens. This chapter tackles the problem of the ideology of the Greens from two further angles. First, the attempts of political theorists to account for a Green Ideology are classified and critically reviewed. The state of the art in terms of the dominant approaches to the ideology of the Greens explicates the spectrum of analytical attitudes, demonstrating — by the sheer incompatibility of the different models — the need for a synthetic framework for the analysis. Second, the analytical perspective is then complemented by a theoretical one, which re-examines the study of ideologies, introduces the modular ideology and places it within a different approach to the theory of ideologies.