Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) Read Online Free PDF Page B

practice in the world. We might refer to ideology as a thought-practice. This simply means a recurring pattern of (political) thinking, one for which there is evidence in the concrete world. The evidence for our thinking lies in our actions and utterances. Our thought-practices intermesh with, and inform, material and observable practices and acts. Sometimes it makes more sense to trace a movement from theory to practice; at other times the theory can be extracted from the practice itself. We are always looking at a two-way street.

     
    4. Antonio Gramsci .
     
    For example, a belief in free choice is a recurring pattern among liberals, applied to innumerable situations such as voting, shopping, or choosing a partner. In the case of voting it can be held as a conscious general ideological principle. Voting is a deliberateexercise of political choice at the heart of liberal ideologies, linked to the core notion of consent. Shopping is participation in economic free-market transactions, though shoppers are rarely aware that their practice embodies the principle of free trade. Selecting a partner for emotional and sexual relationships is a conscious ideological thought-practice only when put in the context of arranged marriages. Otherwise it is an ideologically unconscious practice that has to be decoded by analysts as an embodiment of the voluntary principle. We do not choose partners just because we wish to demonstrate our adherence to the principle of free choice, but it is a largely invisible instance of such choice. The upshot of all this is to see ideologies as located in concrete activities, not as floating in a stratosphere high above them. The dichotomy between doing and thinking is challenged, for thinking is an activity that displays its own regularities. Political thinking is evident in reflection on how to organize collective behaviour, but it may also be retrieved through unpacking empirically observable acts.
    Marx and Engels had dismissed German philosophy as a metaphysical form of ideology, practised by a few professionals. Gramsci sought to bring philosophy down to earth by suggesting that most people were philosophers in so far as they engaged in practical activity, activity constrained by views of the world they inhabited. At a stroke, Gramsci demystified philosophy and reintegrated it into the normal thought-processes of individuals. He did this, however, while retaining a threefold structure of political thought. There were individual philosophies generated by philosophers; broader philosophical cultures articulated by leading groups; and popular ‘religions’ or faiths. The second type was an embodiment of hegemony, and displayed the features of coherence and critique that hegemonic groups eventually imposed on the thinking under their control. The third type existed in embryonic form among the masses, for whom general conceptions of the world emerged in sudden and fragmented flashes. Importantly for Gramsci, each of these three levels could be combined in varying proportions to produce a different ideological cocktail. Thedistinction between the philosophical and the ideological began to evaporate the moment political thought was situated in the concrete world and directed at it.
    What do we know about ideology, with Gramsci’s help, that we might not have known before? As with Mannheim, Gramsci elevated ideology to the status of a distinct phenomenon worthy of, and open to, study. It inhabited a broad political arena that included moral and cultural norms and understandings, disseminated through the mass media and voluntary associations. And quite crucially it was to be found at various levels of articulation. True, ideology tended to a unity – central to the consensus and solidarity it forged – because the leading intellectuals of a given period subjugated other intellectuals through the attraction of their ideas, and directed the masses. These intellectuals, unlike Mannheim’s, did not dispense