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Authors: Michael Freeden
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the 1940s and 1950s by Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, or Jacob Talmon, emphasized negative liberty.It preferred the absence of deliberate intervention in a person’s actions to a conception of liberty that allowed the state to intervene and regulate the conduct of individuals in order to release, or free, their potential. For this ideological reading of liberty to be properly understood it has to be set against the background of the oppressive totalitarian regimes to which these thinkers reacted. This aspect of hermeneutics dovetails with Mannheim’s emphasis on the social conditioning of ideology.
Another guideline of hermeneutics refers to the texts themselves. Texts open up manifold possibilities for their comprehension – they do not sanction one authoritative reading. The main reason for that is that the meanings of words, sentences, and by extension, ideologies, cannot be pinned down unequivocally. The multiple meanings they carry, their polysemy, forever render them indeterminate. A radical version of this standpoint was captured in the phrase ‘the authorless text’. Once a text was produced, the argument went, it embarked on a life of its own, subject to the understandings of its diverse future readers, rather than the control of its author. This idea threw a lifeline of great importance to analysts of ideology. The realization that ideologies – as texts – contained infinitely variable forms reinforced the argument that the term ‘ideology’ in the singular could no longer be employed to substitute for the multiple ideologies it concealed. However, polysemy could be taken too far. Its theoretical boundlessness was none other than an abstract logical property of texts. It suggested that we could never ascertain all the meanings that an ideology could carry, which may be true, but it offered no criteria on how to select the more significant from the less significant variants. That made it impossible to get a handle on the real world of ideologies. If there are infinite interpretations, all of which are valid simply because they make sense under certain conditions, how can we ever understand, let alone appraise, an ideology?
The response to that problem came from some theorists of ideology who contended that cultural and historical constraintsnarrow down that indeterminacy considerably. Although we may always offer a new reading to an ideology, we need to take into account that the formulators of ideologies have ploughed distinct furrows and have made their specific marks on the field. As we have seen, the accumulative history of extant ideologies with their own staying power – conservatism, liberalism, or socialism – encouraged the major ideological movements to focus on a certain range of meanings and arguments, encompassed in a tradition, rather than to appear in inchoate and discontinuous forms. Questions such as individual liberty, the limits on state activity, or what to do with the poor, reappeared in many ideologies and obliged them to organize around those issues instead of others. From the standpoint of a given ideology this narrowing went even further, as the typical arguments of each ideology are presented in language that attempts to be as determinate as possible.
The way was now open to regard ideologies as devices specifically capable of coping with the indeterminacy of the political messages that circulated in a society. They handled that indeterminacy by selecting, privileging, and prioritizing certain social meanings among all those available, using various mixtures of persuasiveness, cajoling, and verbal force. Whereas, for example, the concept of change logically carried a host of meanings, conservatives attached the qualifiers ‘gradual’, ‘safe’, or ‘natural’ to the notion of change they wished to legitimate, while barring the qualifiers ‘radical’, ‘revolutionary’, and occasionally even ‘planned’. There were thus three steps in analysing ideologies. The logic of
Another guideline of hermeneutics refers to the texts themselves. Texts open up manifold possibilities for their comprehension – they do not sanction one authoritative reading. The main reason for that is that the meanings of words, sentences, and by extension, ideologies, cannot be pinned down unequivocally. The multiple meanings they carry, their polysemy, forever render them indeterminate. A radical version of this standpoint was captured in the phrase ‘the authorless text’. Once a text was produced, the argument went, it embarked on a life of its own, subject to the understandings of its diverse future readers, rather than the control of its author. This idea threw a lifeline of great importance to analysts of ideology. The realization that ideologies – as texts – contained infinitely variable forms reinforced the argument that the term ‘ideology’ in the singular could no longer be employed to substitute for the multiple ideologies it concealed. However, polysemy could be taken too far. Its theoretical boundlessness was none other than an abstract logical property of texts. It suggested that we could never ascertain all the meanings that an ideology could carry, which may be true, but it offered no criteria on how to select the more significant from the less significant variants. That made it impossible to get a handle on the real world of ideologies. If there are infinite interpretations, all of which are valid simply because they make sense under certain conditions, how can we ever understand, let alone appraise, an ideology?
The response to that problem came from some theorists of ideology who contended that cultural and historical constraintsnarrow down that indeterminacy considerably. Although we may always offer a new reading to an ideology, we need to take into account that the formulators of ideologies have ploughed distinct furrows and have made their specific marks on the field. As we have seen, the accumulative history of extant ideologies with their own staying power – conservatism, liberalism, or socialism – encouraged the major ideological movements to focus on a certain range of meanings and arguments, encompassed in a tradition, rather than to appear in inchoate and discontinuous forms. Questions such as individual liberty, the limits on state activity, or what to do with the poor, reappeared in many ideologies and obliged them to organize around those issues instead of others. From the standpoint of a given ideology this narrowing went even further, as the typical arguments of each ideology are presented in language that attempts to be as determinate as possible.
The way was now open to regard ideologies as devices specifically capable of coping with the indeterminacy of the political messages that circulated in a society. They handled that indeterminacy by selecting, privileging, and prioritizing certain social meanings among all those available, using various mixtures of persuasiveness, cajoling, and verbal force. Whereas, for example, the concept of change logically carried a host of meanings, conservatives attached the qualifiers ‘gradual’, ‘safe’, or ‘natural’ to the notion of change they wished to legitimate, while barring the qualifiers ‘radical’, ‘revolutionary’, and occasionally even ‘planned’. There were thus three steps in analysing ideologies. The logic of
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