The Major Ideologies of Political Science: Liberalism, Socialism and Conservatism

 Plato in Phaedrus (265c-e) wrote that whenever we think about something we must engage in both ‘synagógé and diairesis’ ‘collection’ and ‘division’. ‘Collection is evidently to consist in bringing together specific Ideas under a common generic Idea, division is the hierarchical arrangement under that generic Idea of all its constituent sub-genera and species’.

According to Seliger (1976:14) a fairly standard definition of ideology is;

“An ideology is a set of ideas by which men posit, explain and justify the ends and means of organized social action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order.”

 Liberalism, conservatism, and socialism are the ‘major ideologies’, and liberalism is the most important or the original of the three.

 Ideologies may be likened to rooms that contain various units of furniture… If we [enter a room and] find liberty, rationality, and individualism at its center, while equality—though in evidence— decorates the wall, we are looking at an exemplar of liberalism. If order, authority, and tradition catch our eye upon opening the door, which equality is shoved under the bed or, at best, one of its weaker specimens is displayed only when the guests arrive, we are looking at a version of conservatism. Core, adjacent and peripheral units pattern the room and permit its categorization (Freeden, 1996: 86-7.)

The ideologies share many core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts, but they arrange and order them in different ways.

Putting ideology in its historical place, enables us to explain the difference between the major and minor ideologies. Minor ideologies  are concerned with the status of a particular subject or object which may have been neglected and may deserve our commitment whereas major ones address every subject, every self, every citizen, as if universal.

Cevap: This is why the standard studies of ideologies are right to suggest that liberalism, conservatism, and socialism form a triad of major ideologies, in relation to which all other ideologies are minor. But the order—the logical order—is not liberalism, conservatism and socialism, as they would have it, but liberalism, socialism and conservatism. 

Liberalism is often treated as if it is a ‘complex of doctrines’ which cannot be simplified. So we are told that it seems to involve an enthusiasm for freedom, toleration, individualism and reason on the one hand and a disapproval of power, authority and tradition on the other. 

‘The idea of limited government, the maintenance of the rule of law, the avoidance of arbitrary or discretionary power, the sanctity of private property and freely made contracts, and the responsibility of individuals for their own fates’, complicated by ‘state involvement in the economy, democracy, welfare policies, and moral and cultural progress’ 

[Liberalism] is the mistake of subjecting to human judgements those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond or independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the existing authority of the Divine Word.

Liberalism is the original of the major ideologies because it offers the simplest critique of what Hannah Arendt called the ‘Roman trinity’ of religion, tradition, and authority.

The liberal always divides the world into three: into what is intrinsically necessary (the self), what is necessary to support that intrinsic necessity (a system of standards, rules, laws), and what is contingent (everything else, including all other beliefs, practices, and institutions). 

Although Immanuel Kant was nothing as simple as a liberal, his writings clearly state the liberal view of law. He makes it clear that an order is founded upon ‘three principles, firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as man); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens)’ 

As expressed in Rawls’s first principle of justice, it means that ‘each person has an equal right to the most extensive equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all’. So that, as he puts it, ‘liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself’.

Socialism adjusts the criterion of liberalism in such a way that it is radically altered. If the criterion of liberalism is that debts are owed to the self, then the criterion of socialism—the standard by which it judges entities, institutions and events—is that debts are owed to the self as constituted by society. 

 ‘Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves’. 

A Marxist is someone who attempts to understand why the shift from an unenlightened order to an enlightened order was not as successful as many had anticipated, and then attempts to understand how socialism can be the historical completion of this shift. Marx did not succeed in making full sense of it. ‘For all its grandeur his achievement remained fragmentary when measured against the original plan of his work’. 

Historical Materialism is the fundamental tenet of Marxism in all its ‘classical’ varieties. History is the product not of conscious decisions and ideas, but of ‘material’ processes and conditions which can be identified and described without reference to the mental states of those who participate in them. It is the changes in these material conditions which make necessary and bring about those changes in social, political and institutional superstructures which in aggregate form the substance of history. 

A century ago George Bernard Shaw wrote that socialism has a ‘twofold task’. One is to keep capitalism ‘up to the mark by legislation’; the other is to ‘get rid of it altogether by constructive substitution of socialism’.  But these tasks are clearly completely contradictory. They are only compatible if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

 Conservatism extends the criterion even further. While liberalism offers the self—whatever that is—as a criterion of judgement, and while socialism offers an extension of this criterion so it includes the social—whatever that is—as a criterion of judgement, conservatism supposes that both of these are too abstract. 

Conservatives argue that there is no obligation to change the world: because human imperfection on the one hand and unforeseen consequences on the other make it impossible to know that any change will be for the better (Stove, 2003). If we do change anything, it should be in terms of the considered judgements of the past, for the reason that we cannot depend on our own experience. ‘We ought to be wary of dismissing doctrines merely because we ourselves can see little or no reason to believe them, even if we hardly understand them’. 

As Evelyn Waugh states: “I believe that man is by nature an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; that his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries, and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives.” 

The act of freeing a human being or class of human beings from the control of another, usually when this control is enshrined in some legal privilege or right.