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PPE Notes Sociological Theory Notes

Abercrombie Hill Turner The Dominant Ideology Thesis Notes

Updated Abercrombie Hill Turner The Dominant Ideology Thesis Notes

Sociological Theory Notes

Sociological Theory

Approximately 77 pages

Notes on ideology, class, and methodology. Including summaries of Bourdieu, Durkheim, Weber, Zizek, Marx and Giddens....

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Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan Turner - The Dominant Ideology Thesis

Introduction

  • The apparent success of capitalism in surviving crises, the absence of violent revolutionary struggle and the general coherence of industrial society is often explained by Marxists in terms of the dominant ideology thesis

    • this thesis claims that there is a dominant ideology and that it creates an acceptance of capitalism in the working classes

    • dominant ideology:

      • is generated by the dominant class’s control over the means of mental production

      • is a set of coherent beliefs

      • these beliefs are more powerful, dense and coherent than those of subordinate classes

    • this thesis is comparable to other functionalist theories of common culture in sociology, which claim that societies require a shared set of values and beliefs

  • A dominant ideology thesis has to answer four questions:

    • what is the dominant ideology?

    • what effect does it have on the dominant class?

    • what effect does it have on subordinate classes?

    • what is the apparatus that transmits the dominant ideology in society?

      • is the dominant ideology active - the product of one class doing something - indoctrination, for example - to another class?

      • or is it structured in terms of relations, and hence not ‘instrumentalist’?

  • The dominant ideology thesis is both theoretically and empirically unjustified:

    • we can explain coherence in society without reference to a dominant ideology (or even ideology at all)

    • we can find no evidence of an accepted belief set that could constitute an ideology

Theories of the Dominant Ideology

  • Marx’s account (in the German Ideology) states that the ruling class control the means of mental production

    • hence it is a class theoretical account

    • are they saying that the ideology created merely controls public life, or controls all life, so that a subversive ideology couldn’t exist?

      • their belief in class struggle seem to suggest that they do not endorse a fully fledged incorporation theory

  • Early Marxism was driven by a crude positivism, which sought to derive law-like propositions governing society through economic analysis

    • post-Bernstein Marxists

      • were academics, not activists

      • were interested in the method of Marxism, and objected to positivism, emphasising human agency

      • supposed that the secrets of capitalism didn’t just lie in the economy, but in superstructural questions of politics and ideology

    • remoteness from the working class struggle promoted an academic interest in philosophy and art and a pessimistic belief in the essential stability of capitalism

Gramsci

  • Gramsci was motivated by his opposition to economism

    • cultural differences between societies are not epiphenomena; they have political, social and economic effects

    • politics and ideology are autonomous practices

  • Introduced the concept of hegemony - a leadership that is ideological, political and repressive

    • there is a historical variation in in balance between coercion (repression) and consent (ideology) in hegemony

      • Russia rules mostly through coercion, the West mostly through consent

      • consent is not automatic, but rather must be manufactured, through the civil society rather than the state

        • civil society is private, ideological institutions such as the church, trade unions and schools

    • relationships of hegemony are educational relationships - the intellectual stratum educates

      • this stratum is not autonomous; each intellectual belongs to a social class

  • Because Gramsci sees civil society as dominant in the West, the cultural ascendancy of the ruling class must explain the stability of the capitalist order

    • this allows it to rule the working class by consent

  • For Gramsci, ideology is not all determining; the working class is not completely subordinated to the dominant ideology

    • he argues that the working class has a dual consciousness, in which one conflicts with the other, but no self-consciousness

      • the dominant ideology produces moral and political passivity in the working class

        • rectifying this is the job of the party

Habermas

  • Elevates the superstructure; relegates economism

    • in early capitalism, the economy has primacy

    • in late capitalism, politics and economics are literally inseparable

  • Habermas claims that there needs (functional) to be a process that legitimates social systems, that is not reducible exclusively to conscious beliefs (also material achievements etc)

    • traditional societies are legitimated by a central world view e.g. religion

    • early capitalism is legitimated by reciprocal exchanges in the market - fair and equal markets suggest just results

      • hence the legitimation of early capitalism comes upwards, from economic relations, and is not imposed by a cultural superstructure

    • late capitalism involves state intervention, and is legitimated differently

      • it requires a legitimation that facilitates manipulation of state intervention that ‘secure the private form of capital utilization and bind the masses’ loyalty to this form’

        • this is the depoliticisation of the masses, so that state activities do not seem to be political activities, bu rational, technical, almost scientific solutions

          • there are processes, or mechanisms of legitimation, such as parliamentary democracy

            • this ameliorates the worst effects of capitalism and preserves its essential form,...

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