#12627 - Abercrombie Hill Turner The Dominant Ideology Thesis - Sociological Theory

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, giving an illusion of participation

• It is unclear whether Habermas thinks of ideology as one class acting upon another

  • he rejects the traditional model of class struggle, claiming that the power structure means that classes cannot confront each other as identifiable groups

  • nevertheless he accepts the existence of classes, and of latent class antagonisms

Althusser

• The economy is inconceivable without political and ideological structures

  • the economy presupposes their existence (e.g. a system of law)

  • the economy is still determinant in that it establishes which structure is to be dominant

• Ideology is necessary because it relates men to their conditions of existence

  • it constitutes individuals as subjects of the social structure, with functions within that structure

    • e.g. interpellation

  • ideology, however, conceals the agent’s role as part of the structure, and hence is an illusory representation of the world

• Ideology is an objective form that arises out of the mode of production

  • it is not generated intentionally by one class for the subordination of another

  • in which case, by what mechanism does it have consequences for class interests?

    • reproduction of the productive forces requires education/assimilation (this is the non-intentional derivation)

      • these functions can be carried out by ideological state apparatuses e.g. schools, religion, political parties, trade unions, media etc

        • but ISAs are the site of class struggle

The Dominant Ideology and the Dominant Class

• We need to avoid an account that is instrumentalist - that sees the mechanism of ideology as being one class indoctrinating another

  • one way to avoid this is to say that ideologies arise out of the structure of capitalist relations e.g. Althusser

    • but ISAs look a lot like an instrumentalist account

  • if social classes are not the origin of ideology, then what is the connection betwee the two?

  • the theory of commodity fetishism may provide an objective basis for ideology in economic relations, but there seems to be a limit to how much it can explain

The End of Ideology?

• What is the dominant ideology?

  • ideologies historically are not clear, coherent and effective, but fractured and contradictory

    • modern society’s ideology is particularly so

• What are the effects of the dominant ideology on the subordinate classes?

  • little effect - there is little incorporation of subordinate classes by a dominant ideology

• What is the effect of the dominant ideology on the dominant classes?

• What is the apparatus of transmission of the dominant ideology?

  • there are no uniform consequences of ideology for all social classes...