POLİTİKA BİLİMİ

“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 (Seliger, 1976: 14).”

Après moi, la déluge is a political expression that is translated as “After me, the flood.”

Liberalism, socialism, and conservatism are different. They address every subject, every self, every citizen, as if universal. They address all of us, and not because of some end outside ourselves, not because of this or that value, but because of a claim about the fundamental criterion by which all of us should act in the world.

Harold Laski thought that liberalism is ‘not a clearcut body of doctrine.’ But he defined it nonetheless by saying the liberal seeks ‘to indicate the right of the individual to shape his own destiny, regardless of any authority which might seek to limit his possibilities’ (Laski, 1936: 14-15).

Socialism has had most success in the form of critique.

As many have observed, resistance to change is the abstract concept or negative moment of conservatism.

Michael Oakeshott said that conservatism, understood as a ‘disposition’, is ‘to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the convenient to the perfect’ (Oakeshott, 1991: 408).

Emancipation: 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 (Scruton, 2007: 206).

Liberalism separates ‘church’ and ‘state’, by locating all matters of religion in privacy, so leaving the secular state dominant in public. Socialism alleges that the separation is an error, which leaves the self in thrall to religion.

It explains why liberals are concerned with law, why socialists are concerned with economy, society and power, and why conservatives are concerned with tradition and the religion manifest in tradition.

liberalism, socialism, and conservatism are considered the three major ideologies in the literature.

A century and a half ago J.H. Newman declared that the fundamental theoretical principle of liberalism is that ‘no one should believe what he does not understand’ (Newman, 1890: 294.)

In liberalism the relation between one self and another is contingent, not constitutive; and it is law which enables the freedom of separate selves to co-exist. As expressed in Rawls’s first principle of justice, this 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’ (Rawls, 1972: 244).

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.

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.

The seminal work of Karl Marx is Grundrisse.

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.

The conservative seeks no liberation from tradition. He has a criterion which is an extension of the original criterion, but which is extended so far that it appears to require the restoration of a traditional order, even religious order, which, according to the criterion, cannot be restored. To put it another way, the conservative has to accept the existence of an order which emerged from a revolution he could never have sanctioned at the time

Emancipation: 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 (Scruton, 2007: 206).

John Rawls is among the supporters of liberalism