Expanding Ideology Critique

There has been a resurgence of interest in ideology critique amongst political theorists in recent years, associated in particular with key works by Sally Haslanger, Rahel Jaeggi, Enzo Rossi and Jason Stanley, amongst others, but building on broader traditions of critical theory. In this paper, I argue that this revival of ideology critique as a central method of political theory is a welcome and vital development in the discipline, but that prevailing modes of ideology critique are unnecessarily narrow. I recommend two particular lines of expansion. First, ideology critics should expand their critical objections. At present, ideology critics have been overwhelmingly concerned with some kind of epistemic objection – that ideology constructs a misleading picture of reality by naturalizing, reifying, or rationalizing states of affairs that are in fact contingent, constructed, and vulnerable to contestation. I argue that ideology critics should be equally interested in what I will call praxical objections – that ideology provides frameworks of understanding and decision-making that, whether false or not, lead to defective political action. Placing praxical concerns on an equal footing with epistemic concerns should tie ideology critique into closer contact with concrete political decision-making and the operation of institutions, while also encouraging greater links with empirical political science. Second, ideology critics should expand the (implicit or explicit) theory of ideological power that underlies their critique. Recent ideology critics have overwhelmingly relied on a discursive account of ideology’s power, focused on the construction of ideology in language and the effect of particular discursive modes and forms, albeit sometimes linked to practice through the idea that discourses and practices are co-constitutive. I suggest that this misses a lot of the ideological action: in particular, it neglects more cognitive foundations for ideological influence widely researched in political psychology, and more institutional dimensions of ideology widely researched in political science. These various kinds of ideological influence can be tied together into an infrastructural account of ideological power, in which ideology sustains and shapes collective action through a number of causal mechanisms. Once this is recognised, critiquing ideology’s discursive manifestations becomes only one element of the task of ideology critique. More emphasis needs to be placed on diagnosing the psychological appeal and sources of resonance for particular ideas, and on tracing the particular configurations of institutional norms and interests through which ideologies shape political outcomes.