Politics and Ideology

Abstract

Along with the replacement of one party, one leader and one legislature by another, as well as the dialectic between formal and extraparliamentary politics, political activities involve theory or ideology. Ideology, according to the dissident Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, ‘however grotesquely remote from reality, is the main, indispensable instrument for legitimising power systems. … There is no other means of justifying power except adducing its ideologically established meaning; doctrine becomes a substitute for other mechanisms of legitimacy’. Thus, every actual or would-be ruler or ruling party feels obliged to adopt some statement of principle and either to align policy to that principle or rework the principle as conditions change. At some times, the ideology is not clearly defined; at other times, the ideology is largely the manifestation of the leader’s will; another variation is a carefully preserved corpus of principles. The political ideologies dominant in 1900 — which traced their origins to the French Revolution — metamorphosed in the postwar period. Traditional monarchism, loyal to king, aristocracy and official religion, dissolved into a democratic parliamentarianism with a figurehead monarch. Old-style conservatism had seen itself outdistanced on the right by the ideology of fascism and its kin movements in interwar Europe; old style liberalism, meanwhile, gave way to the more interventionist Keynesian liberalism of the welfare state.