theArtist

ON IDEOLOGY

People have interests and worries about their private life, from the activities they need to engage in, to the friendships and love relationships they need to entertain and the ideals they want to strive for. But there are also public interests that derive from living within a community, where one’s own aspirations can be cultivated, where security and justice can be found. Precisely because there are public interests, that is values according to which society must be articulated, and because therefore there are also conflict and difference of opinion, there is politics. Problems in politics are not exclusively technical problems, or problems inherent to power per se. And because we have ideals pertaining to what we want our public life to be like that there is politics. However, these ideals have meaning because they can be found within the vaster context of the life of individuals, and they must respond to the recondite movements and transformations that all individuals are privy to.

Thus political ideas rapidly become ideologies whenever they are removed from this broader context. Revolutionary Marxist movements played out this very parable, they channeled ferment and expectations that were extraneous to politics of the period into the public arena; but then they immunized these ideals from transformation and critique alike. Liberal democracies have shown a greater propensity to welcome change and to pass this on for political deliberation. But will these same democracies be able to comply with the transformations of the meaning of individual lives? Or don’t they also risk fixing an image of society to the detriment of the plurality of visions and models of life and living? We often talk of common ideals and interests. However, ideals vary from person to person. Each individual has his or her own. Common interest is therefore that of the collectivity, where all the private lives are recognized and in the name of which all ideals must be sacrificed. In this sense, politics, by attempting to conciliate all individual ideals, would be limiting and limited, in that it would limit personal liberties.

On the other hand, even common interest might be an idea, albeit a commonly-agreed-upon ideal. There might be situations – however rare in collective life – where a common interest, for example where everyone should respect specific rules even though they do not necessarily agree with them, is a shared ideal. Vice versa, there might well be conflict between ideals and interests. This is one of the reasons why it is necessary, even within diversity of opinion and evaluation, that a few behavioral norms should be respected so as to make sure that dissent does not degenerate into conflict. One of the greatest conquests of modern and contemporary democracy is that once conflict has been registered there is an attempt to convert it into competition, that is into dissent, the articulation of opinions, while respecting specific rules of the game. Hence derives a situation in which the multiplicity of ideals corresponds to the common interest of the free expression of ideals themselves.

Nowadays much is being said about the eclipsing of ideologies, but the history of European thought is full of the theme of the eclipsing of ideologies. Firstly, where can the term “ideology” be collocated historically? The French philosopher Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy coined the term at the close of the 18th century to indicate the science of the formation of ideas, to which concept the group of late-Enlightenment philosophers known as the Ideologues referred. The 19th century, apart from being the century of ideologies par excellence, was also the century that saw the emergence of theories on the demise of ideologies. The “social positivism” of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, originally his disciple, addressed the theoretical issue of the end of ideology by positing the primacy of scientific “laws”. Naturally, the theory of the end of ideology can in itself also become an ideology, and more precisely the reason for the end of ideologies, or rather it could become the ideology that justifies and legitimates a technocratic type of power. Attaining some form of power consequently leads to an attitude according to which we are no longer interested in the ideals as they were originally thought. It is obvious that we are living in a society that is predominantly permeated by an economicistic attitude. And it is equally obvious that an economicist logic implies the decline of certain types of values. On the other hand it would be wrong to believe that ideals correspond to ideologies. The ideologies that were most successful in the 20th century were all based on the assumption that it was possible to radically alter the world, both within history and through history. Once ideologies had died, the ideal, mostly regarding the absolute “form”in which an intellectual or moral instance is presented, is also able to subsist in our time. And this might even be a positive point. Ideals and values surely have greater value than any ideology. Ideology, in fact, could easily end up being an artificial and contrived covering that is forcibly placed over reality in order to radically transform it beyond the needs of transformation, while waiting for a captious model of the “new society”. All the great political forces in the 20th century have operated on ideological assumptions, where “ideology” implied the notion of “radically changing” the world, and not “comprehending” it. The “change” in a word corresponds to a hypothesis of forced will aiming to unhinge a specific reality. Here the purpose would be to construct a completely new building which, among other things, imposes the massification of society and the systematic violence exerted by power over its own citizens. In the "terrifying" totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, power essentially unleashed a war against its own people, transforming so-called “ideologies”into systems of ideas whose aims were “totalitarianism” itself. There was no respect for that hierarchy of values on which a civilized and advanced society should be based.

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