Democracy Without Ideology?

Abstract

Ockham’s razor or the principle of parsimony has come down to us as the claim of the fourteenth century philosopher, William of Ockham, that theoretical entities must not be multiplied unnecessarily. Less famous but similarly parsimonious is the claim by Antonio Gramsci that ideological elements are usefully minimized in social scientific theory. In what follows I will apply Gramsci’s razor to democratic theory considered as a central tenet of educational theory. I will identify what might reasonably be meant by ideological elements in a social scientific theory and contrast them to nonideological elements. Then I will describe how democracy functions ideologically in educational theory and, following John Dewey, will offer a nonideological democratic theory of education. Finally, I will discuss in Gramscian terms an advantage that nonideological theory exercises over ideological theory.