“Thinking (and Teaching) Democratically”: A Defense of Ideologies

Abstract

Ideologies are important in modern politics. This is the standard reason political scientists give for studying them. In this article I provide another rationale for the study of ideologies: to promote democracy. This normative argument has been superceded by empirical ones, in part, because of the pejorative connotations of ideology. Those connotations are, however, based upon a selective history and hence an incomplete definition of the term. By reviewing that history, I recover a positive association between ideology and democracy. In the process, I hope to encourage political theorists to teach political ideologies.TheOxford English Dictionaryprovides two standard definitions of ideology. The first is descriptive or neutral: ideology is the “science of ideas.” This definition, indeed the word itself, originated with Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment philosopher. The second is critical or deprecatory: ideology is “ideal or abstract speculation” and “unpractical or visionary theorizing.” Napoleon Bonaparte, Tracy's contemporary, first used ideology in this pejorative sense. Both definitions are operative in contemporary political science.Political scientists who study ideologies as “belief-systems” follow the first definition. For example, standard texts define ideology as “a set of closely related beliefs, or ideas, or even attitudes, characteristic of a group or community” or “a value or belief system accepted as fact or truth by some group.” These texts focus upon the various functions of ideologies, e.g., communication, legitimation, socialization, and especially mobilization.