Unit 4: The Major Idelogies of Political Science: Liberalism,Socialism, and Conservatism

What is Ideology?

“ An ideology is a set of ideas by which men posit, explain and justify the ends and means of organized social action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order (Seliger, 1976:14.)”

Above is the definition of ideology summoned from the classical books of Andrew Heywood, Andrew Vincent, and Michael Freeden on ideologies. Although ideologies are complex and modular structures which are intermixed and overlapping as discussed in the literature, the definition derived from three classical books given below divide the ideologies into different prefabricated parts called chapters.

In these three classical books, liberalism, conservatism and socialism are always ranked as the first three ideologies with the rest of the ideologies such as environmentalism, feminism with no significant order and no one has indicated anything about the origin of this order. Only Michael Freeden tried to explain this using standard method pf collection. According to him, some concepts are core , some are adjacent and some are peripheral. Still this has theory fails to explain the difference between the major and minor ideologies.

What makes liberalism, socialism and conservatism different from others is that these three ideologies refer to every subject, every citizen in the world as a part of the universe regardless of features such as sex and nationality. This is why they always come first as the first three ideologies in the books. However, the order is not liberalism, conservatism and socialism but liberalism, socialism and conservatism as studied in this chapter.

Liberalism

According to the definitions in the literature, liberalism means freedom, toleration and individualism which reduces even diminishes the authority of power and the tradition. Liberalism is not a total political principle in itself. Like every political doctrine, liberalism is illegitimate unless it is rooted in the concept of people who have to live under it.

According to Harold Laski, an individual has a total right to shape his own destiny regardless of any authority. Besides, L.T. Hobhouse states that society can only be founded on a self-directive power of society.

Liberalism can be regarded as the core ideology since it criticizes religion, tradition and authority. However, it cannot be defined as anarchy because order is something that liberalism concerns deeply. What liberalists mean by order is law.

According to liberalists, the world is composed of three parts: what is intrinsically necessary (the self), what is necessary to support that intrinsic necessity (rules, laws) and what is contingent (all other beliefs).

Liberal view of law consists of three principles: firstly, freedom for all members of a society, secondly, dependence on a common set of laws and lastly, legal equality for everyone.

Since liberalism has a simple criterion, it is the fundamental form of modern ideology. Having this simple criterion, the direct appeal to the self, makes enlightenment possible and a liberal way clearer than other ideologists. For liberalists the only debt is owed to the self. However, the self, which liberalists have grounded even each principle of liberalism on, is unstable and cannot be separated from its conditions and this is criticized by other ideologists and this is something that cannot be refuted.

Socialism

While the debts are owed to the self for liberalism, the debts are owed to the self as constituted by society. Liberalism gives value to the individuals and considers the rest of the society composed of these individuals. However, society and the sociability of the individuals are of great importance rather than each individual. Society means the sum of individuals for socialists. The self cannot be judged or valued apart from society.

Socialism always criticizes liberalism. The critics of liberalism noticed that while liberalism has a motive for political equality, it also fosters economic inequality. What will overcome this contradiction is socialism according to the critiques of liberalism.

Liberalism and conservatism have nothing to do with Marxism. Liberals try to explain everything in the name of law based on the self. Conservatives believe that everything is based on already an existing order. However, socialists have much more complicated task that they always try to relate the self to the society.

Marxism stemmed from the attempts to see the failures of liberalism. The shift from the unenlightened order to an enlightened was not successful as expected, so a Marxist is the who can see the reasons behind that. Socialism can be the completion of this shift.

Marxism has a historical materialism concept. It means that history consists of only material conditions regardless of the mental states of those who are a part of these conditions. Thus, all the changes realized in social, political and institutional superstructures are based on these materialistic conditions. However, some recognized that historical materialism had no predictive power.

Critique can be said as the root of socialism. It is very successful in detecting the failures of capitalism. This can be regarded as its biggest achievement.

Socialism always has far more hope for the future than liberalism and conservatism. Socialists believe that mankind could live a state of equality and mutual love. It is believed that this could be achieved by the freedom of liberalism for everyone but it is vital that liberalism be transformed into something else. However, the faith in this transformation should not be lost. Otherwise, socialism will turn into some sort of confused liberalism.

Socialism becomes more abstract when it tends to liberalism and it becomes more historical when it tends to conservatism. Socialists remain socialists despite all these dangers just because they focus on the problems of the world such as poverty and alienation. According to Marx’s view derived from Hegel, people are compelled to see themselves as objects. They create their own reality and form their essence by giving value into the objects they pursue. Not the human essence itself but the objects are important. This creates some sort of alienation.

Socialism have noticed the fact that individuals are not alone but live in society. Thus, the self is no more selfish but formed by its existence in the society.

Conservatism

While the self is of great importance for liberalism, the self constituted by the society is the common criterion of socialism, both are very abstract for conservatism. For conservatives, we have a debt to those who are dead as well as to those who are alive and to those who are to be born. This means that conservatives tend to hold on to what he has rather than look for what he does not have. Conservatives believe that we should not strive to change the world because human imperfection and unpredictable consequences makes it impossible to know if the change will be for the better. If the change is necessary, we should realize it in terms of the judgments of the past, so we can not depend on our own experiences.

While the anarchy is the negative moment of liberalism and critique is of socialism, the negative moment of conservatism is resistance to change. Conservatives do not look forward but backwards and they are very keen on traditions that liberalists and socialists have always questioned. They are religious people. Even though they are not, they respect it. Thus, they are less secular than liberalists and socialists. Conservatives believe that they have to obey the rules of an order which emerged from a revolution in which they could never have had a chance of being a part of it. They also do not deal with the future as much as liberalists and socialists because they believe that everything about future even the end of the world has already been in religion.

The conservative people distrust argument because they believe it simplifies everything. That’s why an argument with a conservationist turn into some sort of reaction. Also, they believe that we do not only owe a debt to the self and the society but also to history.

Comparison of Ideologies

An ideology is a view about what should be thought, said and done about politics by taking a core criterion into consideration. All the ideologies can be considered as a modern idea since before the era of enlightenment no one thought of taking a sole criterion as the base of political judgment.

To what or whom a fundamental debt is owed id the basic question of all the ideologies. For each ideology, the debt is owed to the self but they describe the self differently.

Conservatism has the most complicated version of criterion compared to liberalism and socialism. Liberalism has the simplest form. The common point is that each ideology is enlightened and critical and each one takes order seriously. Liberalism critics older order. Socialism is a criticism of liberalism and of all the other orders that liberalism criticizes. Conservatism subjects to any other orders. These three ideologies can be best compared in terms of three important concepts: emancipation, equality and religion.

In terms of emancipation, which means the act of freeing a human being from the control of any other, liberalism is an emancipation from liberties justified by tradition to individual liberty. Socialism is an emancipation even from individual liberty. Conservatism is an emancipation even from this and the recognition of any abstract or unhistorical liberty.

In terms of equality, liberalism is the equality of the self in relation to all other selves in terms of a shared structure of law. Socialism is looking for equality offered to every self as constituted socially. Lastly, if there is any equality in conservatism, it is in the sense that we are all equal before God.

In terms of religion, liberalism separates church from the state and forms a secular society in which religious subjects are private and secular state is dominant in public. However, socialism refuses this separation and believes that church and state have to be transformed. It is either the secularization of religion itself or secular interpretation of the rules of religion. Lastly, for conservatism both ideologies are wrong in this aspect because religion should not be replaced or displaced. It should remain authoritative.