©Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL


Chapter 1 of Bourgeois Revaluation:
Ideology is Rhetoric
Vol. 2 of Bourgeois Virtues

by Deirdre McCloskey, October 2007 draft
Filed under academic interests [bourgeois virtues]

We seem therefore to be studying ideology here, I repeat, the change from a supposedly anti-bourgeois ideology in England around 1600 to a supposedly pro-bourgeois ideology around 1848. A good first step would seem to be to get the word "ideology" under control. But it keeps leaping up and growling and changing its spots. There is a reason for this: it is the wrong word.

Presumably "ideology" can be used for a scientific study, because presumably a society always has some ideologies knocking about, and the balance of one or the other can be the subject of an historical inquiry. Thus the Elizabethan world picture, and the Great Chain of Being, is an "ideology," a system of ideas supporting those in power. It does not disappear in England---a point that David Canandine makes---but becomes less prominent. In the United States nowadays, for example, it is believed chiefly by certain members of the country club.

The word "ideology" itself is strangely modern. Maybe not so strange, come to think if it, considering that looking on society as something other than God's own creation through God's own anointed kings is something discovered in the Christian West only in the 18th century. "Ideology" was first used roughly in its hostile modern sense by, of all people, Napoleon, who attacked the academics and other airy---and freedom-favoring---theoreticians opposing his schemes as mere "ideologists," ivory-tower thinkers. And then some decades later the Marxists gave it a fully modern sense of "prejudices in aid of power."

The word idéologie was first current in the 1790s to describe a science of ideas as derived from the senses alone, especially the system of NNN Condillac, and until late in the 19th century was used in a wider sense of the study of systems of ideas. In 1881, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Proceedings of the Philological Society declared that "valuable evidence could be derived from comparative ideology, a branch of the science of language . . . hitherto much neglected." What the Proceedingsseem to mean, by the way, is that linguistics was at the time focused on its amazing discoveries of laws of sound changes and was not yet concerned with the figures of thought that language conveyed (a language "conveying" a thought is an example of such a figure, known in the department of communication as the misleading "conduit metaphor"). To put it in linguistic jargon, the science of language was obsessed with phonology and etymology, and was later to become obsessed with syntax. Busy with such matters, the linguists for a long time left aside semantics---the study in language of meaning.

The original OED of 1928 does not mention the Marxist meaning of the word, nor does the Supplement of 1933. The fact is itself a trace of the ideology of bourgeois Britain from 1900 [check], when the letter "I" was completed, to 1933. Today the dictionary gives a fourth and as it were ideological sense 4: "A systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics or society, or to the conduct of a class or group, and regarded as justifying actions, especially [a scheme of ideas] that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events," with the first English instance in 1909. But in English the Marxist version of the word really got going in the 1930s, with the translation in 1936 by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils of Karl Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie (1929)---and more importantly with the crumbling political health of liberal capitalism. Analysts of the notion seem to agree that an ideology gets expressed more sharply in an era of political tension, and few decades in modern history have been more tense than that low, dishonest decade of the 1930s.

Ideology "gets expressed" because people need words and other figures of thought just when the politics is most in dispute, the better to push politics this way or that. They need for example a system of thought about fasci, Italian "bunch," to justify the ending of Italian liberalism in 1922. Or they need a racial rhetoric, complete with a vocabulary of Jews as "vermin" (Ungezeifer) and non-Jewish Germans as Volk, to justify the ending of German liberalism in 1933. Or, to take a recent example, they need a metaphor of a "war on terror" and a corresponding ideology of Republican imperialism to justify schemes to attack American liberalism.

Ideology moves dialectally. You do not need to be a Hegelian to think so. Obviously, in 5th century Athens an aristocratic ideology of guardians and philosopher-kings was a reaction to the alleged excesses of a democratic ideology. The same aristocrat ideologue, Plato, invented, too, an intellectual ideology he and we call "philosophy," in dialectical opposition to the democratic ideologies of the sophists and rhetoricians. And the science of rhetoric itself arose dialectically out of the fall of tyrants in Sicily.

Equally obviously, the ideologies of Baptism, Calvinism, Puritanism, Quakerism, and the endless other Protestant splittings---rubber tire Amish vs. steel-tire Amish---reacted dialectally to Papist plots, and to each other. [of Other examples.] An ideology of Muslim fundamentalism reacts to the ideology, and to the concrete politics on the ground, of Western orientalism, imperialism, feminism, republicanism, liberalism, and above all oil-ism.

Of course the dialectic is not independent of people and circumstances, and so ideologies are not an autonomous system of ideas in the style of Hegel or St. Augustine. Without Greek systems of law courts, there would have been no call for a science of rhetoric in 5th-century Sicily. Without Plato, there would have been no anti-rhetorical "philosophy." Without George Fox, no Society of Friends. Without Russian backwardness, no Russian nihilism.

When politics is not much in dispute, as in France before 1789---at any rate by comparison with France after 1789---one does not need such a word as ideology. "The function of ideology," wrote Clifford Geertz in 1964, "is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped" [Geertz 1964 (1973), p. 218].

I would quarrel with leaving it as Geertz wanted to do at the conscious level. Geertz wanted to leave "unreflective" or "received" tradition aside, but I don't think that's wise. The "traditional politics of piety and proverb" (p. 221) is best seen as an ideology, too. Unreflective Weltanschauung is "ideology," since otherwise ideology is something only for the clerisy and the more thoughtful politicians, a system of reflective belief. Geertz would have disagreed, arguing that only when it is explicit and not taken-for-granted is a political thought an ideology. Though he did not argue the point, he wanted ideology to be a matter of "strain, taking an intellectualist form, the search for a new symbolic framework in terms of which to formulate . . . political problems" [221].

Mannheim defined two sorts of ideologies, one "particular" and the other "total." The particular ideologies are "more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of a situation, the true recognition of which would not be in accord with [ones] interests. . . . [ranging] from calculated attempts to dupe others to self-deception." [Mannheim 1929 (1936, 1954), p. 49. It "never departs from the psychological level" (p. 51). The total ideologies are "the characteristics and composition of the total structure of the mind of this epoch or of this group" (pp. 49-50). It is a matter of social function. But both are viewed as objectionable compared with a realm of Science free from ideology. That is, ideology is still in Mannheim a cuss word, a sneer by practical people at mere theorists, as it was with Napoleon. I have political ideas. You, on the other hand, have ideologies.

My friend the economist Mark Blaug once said to me, in effect, "Isn't it remarkable that much of moral conduct doesn't need explicit ideology, because much of the socialization of people is tacit. Isn't it the tacit socialization at your mother's knees---and perhaps even the biological imperative in your father's genes---that must be explained? Do we need to drone on and on about theories of ethics and their historical change?"

And I answer: I understand your scientific impatience, and agree that some of the socialization is hardwired in humans. It seems to be hardwired at any rate in the broad method of, say, social shaming, if not in the detailed rules about what exactly is shameful. We are hardwired, for example, as another economist friend of mine, Alexander Field, argues in a recent book, not to kill each other on meeting. But of course even in this case we can be socialized even at our mothers' knees rather easily to kill Enemies on meeting, or at a convenient distance. The particular Enemies are highly specific to a culture and time, demonized in an ideology, often explicit. An ideology of German superiority socialized Germans to kill Poles. An ideology of British imperialism socialized Englishmen to kill Zulus. An ideology of American manifest destiny socialized Americans to kill Navahos. I repeat: of course. Humans are both hard-wired and soft-wared. We can read at least part of the software's code, because it is expressed in the lines and especially between the lines in Molière's plays and Jane Austen's novels, in Common Sense and in Johnson's colloquies, in Candide and in Goethe.

Articulated ideology and subliminal ideology, too, as Blaug implies, rides perhaps as a little wave of talk upon deeper currents of biology or interest or the means of production. But the little wave, too, has its own logic and its own consequences. I think---this is no astonishing discovery---that in northwestern Europe and especially in England the ruling ideology changed a great deal from 1600 to 1710 and then from 1710 to 1848, from Shakespeare's time to Addison's time, and then further to Macaulay's. Its characteristic site changed from an French aristocrat's estate to an English bourgeois' town.

Mannheim would have said that to use "ideology" before the great ideological factories of the 19th century in Europe is anachronistic. He argues that no conception of a "total" ideology, as he calls it, existed before then. True, he also argued that the notion of false consciousness is ancient---for example, is the man presenting himself as Hebrew prophet a true or false one? [p. 62] His case for a wholly modern sensibility of "ideology" goes as follows. "In the place of the medieval-Christian objective and ontological unity of the world, there emerged the subjective unity of the absolute subject of the Enlightenment--'consciousness in itself'" (Mannheim, p. 58), which seems right. The pulling out of the Godly rug is of course central to the shift of ideology from religion to politics. Mannheim regards the sequence from God to consciousness-in-itself to historical world spirit to ideology as Kant-Hegel-Marx in the realm of ideas, but "discovered not so much by philosophy as by the penetration of political insight into . . . everyday life" (Mannheim, p. 59). He emphasizes the French Revolution as such a penetrating time, which again seems right.

As Clifford Geertz noted, "in Sutton, Harris, Kaysen, and Tobin's in many ways excellent The American Business Creed. . . an assurance that 'one has no more cause to feel dismayed or aggrieved by having his own views described as "ideology" than had Molière's famous character by the discovery that all his life he had been talking prose,' is followed immediately by the listing of the main characteristics of ideology as bias, oversimplification, emotive language, and adaption to public prejudice." Ideology is peculiarly subject to what the rhetoricians call the "circumstantial ad hominem," that is, an attack on the grounds that you have an idea because of your circumstances, and that it is shameful to be so influenced, tending to undermine the very idea you have.

The analysis of ideology is therefore a piece with the Shame of Rhetoric, so prominent in Western thought since the 17th century. Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza among other hard men of the early scientific revolution declared eloquently against eloquence. Since then to be caught arguing a case has been thought shameful. D. D. Raphael (one of the chief editors of the great Glasgow edition of the works of Adam Smith, from whom he could have learned the importance of rhetoric) Probl. Pol. Philos. i. 17 "Ideology. . . is usually taken to mean, a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by rational argument."

Geertz points out that embarrassment with ideology resembles embarrassment with religion. The "militant atheist" attacks religion the same way even sophisticated social critics like Raymond Aron and Edward Shils attacked communism, as "mere" ideology. (Geertz 1964 (1973), p. 199). I would add that both are similar to the embarrassment with human argument in all its crazy richness, that is, with "mere" rhetoric. Purging our thinking of idols of the tribe or idols of the marketplace, said the anti-rhetorical rhetoricians of the 17th century, leads to Reality. Well, no, it doesn't.

Geertz distinguishes two theories of ideology, the interest theory---thus an ideology of the bourgeois virtues emerges from the interests of the bourgeoisie---and the other the strain theory---thus an ideology of the bourgeois virtues emerge to make people under strain feel good. "In the interest theory, ideological pronouncements are seen against the background of a universal struggle for advantage; in the strain theory, against the background of a chronic effort to correct socio-psychological disequilibrium. In the one, men pursue power; in the other, they flee anxiety." (Geertz 1973 p. 201).

Interest theory, he says, is fine so far as it goes, but "lacking a developed analysis of motivation, it has been constantly forced to oscillate between a narrow and superficial utilitarianism that sees men as impelled by rational calculation of their consciously recognized personal advantage and a broader, but no less superficial, historicism that speaks with a studied vagueness of men's ideas as somehow 'reflecting,' 'expressing,' 'corresponding to,' 'emerging from,"' or 'conditioned by' their social commitments." [Geertz 1973, p. 202]. What he is complaining about is the absence of any but a simpleton's theory of language, as "expressing" a base of material interests.

"Ideology is a patterned reaction to the patterned strains of a social role." [Sutton et al., quoted in Geertz 1973, p. 204) A monarch must be awe-inspiring yet have the common touch, as the fictional Prince Hal said he needed to …. t become Henry V, or as the actual Elizabeth learned and practiced, becoming both terrible and beloved. Thus the "strain." The patterned reaction was in both cases a theory of the great chain of being. Or, at the other end of our story, Jane Austen's heroines must have both sense and sensibility. The strain was relieved in the English gentry c. 1810 by a theory of the self-fashioning ethical person, an essential bourgeois construction, free of the faux-aristocratic absurdities of Mr. ,,,,, claim to Position: QUOTE. You are who you make yourself, said bourgeois Jane; not who you were born as.

Geertz analyzes the strain theory into four sub-theories, of ideology as pressure-relieving, morale-building, solidarity-creating, and politics-pushing. But he notes that such a functional analysis will often crash on unintended consequences, called "latent" functions mainly to conceal the sound of the crash. "A group of primitives sets out, in all honesty, to pray for rain and ends by strengthening its social solidarity; a ward politician sets out to get or remain near the trough and ends by mediating between unassimilated immigrant groups and an impersonal governmental bureaucracy' [Geertz 1973, p. 206]. "Commonality of ideological perception may link men together, but it may also provide them, as the history of Marxian sectarianism demonstrates, with a vocabulary by means of which to explore more exquisitely the differences among them" [p. 206]. In other words, so far as the connection between a particular "strain" and its outcome is concerned, you pay your money and you take your choice.

The problem is that "Both interest theory and strain theory go directly from source analysis to consequence analysis without ever seriously examining ideologies as systems of interacting symbols, as patterns of interworking meanings" [p. 207]. That is, the students of ideology ignore the humanities {cf. Geertz, p. 208]. To be more particular--- Geertz confines the word to footnotes by-the-by, p. 209n22; 213n30---they ignore rhetoric. "Ideologies are ideas whose purpose is not epistemic, but political," declares the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/law-ideology/#1). The remark encapsulates the philosophical attitude towards rhetoric. "Epistemic" ideas are honest, rational, etc. "Ideology"---or, worse, "rhetoric"---is dishonest, emotional, etc. An ideology can exhibit "false consciousness" (falsches Bewusstsein). A philosophical history---historical materialism, for example---cannot.

Geertz gives as an example the attempt by American labor unions to attack the Taft-Hartley Act of 19… as a "slave-labor law." A more up-to-date example is the brilliant rhetorical move of Republicans recently to label the inheritance tax---agreed by economists to be close to ideal in its effects, by contrast with income or sales taxes---the "death tax." Not only do I die, but they tax me for it. If you don't understand the figurative nature of language you think that people are mechanically fooled by such a metaphor. You miss that they might be playing with it, or find it illuminating, or be making a joke, or staking out argumentative ground, forcing the opponents to explain awkwardly why a tax at death is not a tax "on" death. (And the trouble with that analysis is that language can't be mechanical in its effects, because it is such an inexpensive machine. If "death tax" is effective as rhetoric mechanically, then why is not a locution such as "a tax on the unjustly inherited wealth of spoiled rich kids" equally effective? And if so, why would not some inexpensive counter-move? And a counter-counter-move?) As Geertz points out, the very meaning of the mobile army of metaphors we call "an ideology" depends on the context, material and ideational. The metaphor of a "great chain of being" is drained of its meaning when the God term at the top is toppled. It's no longer an effective metaphor. Geertz quotes Kenneth Burke, who believed that Japanese smile rather than look properly sad when a friend's death is mentioned, presumably from the pleasant thoughts the mention evokes. Without that social context, particular to Japan, a Westerner regards the smile as macabre.

Mannheim explicitly takes Bacon's four idols as a "forerunner of the modern concept of ideology" [55], with of course Machiavelli, and Hume's History with its focus on interest and on the "feigning" involved in politics [56]. All these are anti-rhetorical thinkers. Attributions of (mere) ideology are ways of damning (mere) rhetoric. Another piece of evidence for the equation Ideology = Rhetoric comes from the very founding of the word. Destutt de Tracy writes in 1801 in Les éléments de l'idéologie, 1st edit. ( Paris, 1801), cited from the 3rd edit., the only one available to Mannheim ( Paris, 1817), p. 4 n.) of a science of ideas: "The science may be called ideology, if one considers only the subject-matter; general grammar, if one considers only the methods; and logic, if one considers only the purpose. Whatever the name, it necessarily contains these three subdivisions" (quoted in Mannheim p. 63n). The substitution "ideology" for "rhetoric" here is straightforward: it is a rewriting of the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

Mannheim thus subjected himself to the what Geertz calls the Mannheim Paradox, that one is ideological in opposing an ideology. As Mannheim himself put it, " it is no longer possible for one point of view and interpretation to assail all others as ideological without itself being placed in the position of having to meet that challenge. . . . Nothing was to prevent the opponents of Marxism from availing themselves of the weapon and applying it to Marxism itself" (Mannheim, pp. 66, 67).

Geertz: "But though science and ideology are different enterprises, they are not unrelated ones. Ideologies do make empirical claims about the condition and direction of society, which it is the business of science (and, where scientific knowledge is lacking, common sense) to assess. The social function of science vis-à-vis ideologies is first to understand them --what they are, how they work, what gives rise to them--and second to criticize them, to force them to come to terms with (but not necessarily to surrender to) reality" [Geertz 1964 (1973), p. 232]. But the same could be said of rhetoric.

So we are not studying "ideology." We can use a much older word, and take full advantage of the humanistic side of our civilization, by studying the rhetoric of capitalism and anti-capitalism. "Ideas" come in rhetorical form, and can no other.

"Rhetoric" has another virtue as a name for what we are studying here. It names the belief that ways are many. The Chinese philosopher Mencius put it so: "Why I dislike holding to one point is that it damages the tao. It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others" (quoted in Richards 1932, p. 344: find in Mencius). Jack Goody and Ian Watt find in this a remnant of oral, pre-literate culture (Goody and Watt, 1962-63 p. 344). "Philosophy" by contrast, and its disreputable little brother "ideology," names the belief that the way is one. Plato brought philosophy to maturity, as Hobbes brought political philosophy to maturity, after discovering mathematics as an adult. Hobbes story. Plato appears to have had a similar experience, since his dialogues suddenly, it appears (we are not entirely sure of their sequence), start giving Greek mathematics as an example of perfected thought. story of math undermining uniqueness of views---algebras first, then non-Euclidean, then Logic as bastion (Whitehead and Russell), which they themselves found insecure, then Godel and Turing et al.