Ad hominem is a comment on or against an opponent, to undermine him personally, rather than his arguments. For this reason, academic writers tend to write about their practices and theories as if they can be considered separately from ideologies

In his work Phaedrus (265 c-e), Plato proposed that whenever we think about something, we must engage in both ‘synagógé’ and ‘diairesis’, that is ‘collection’ and ‘division’.

• Collection is evidently to consist in bringing together specific Ideas under a common generic Idea.

• Division is the hierarchical arrangement under that generic Idea of all its constituent sub-genera and specie.

The three main ideologies are:

• Liberalism

• Socialism

• Conservatism

According to Seliger, a standard definition for ideology is that it 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.

We can list the characteristics of ideologies as follows:

• They are complex.

• They are not hermetically sealed systems of thought.

• They are modular structures, frequently exhibiting a highly fluid morphology.

• They are internally complex, intermixed, and overlapping.

• To compartmentalize ideologies into prefabricated categories called socialism or liberalism is to fly in the face of the evidence.

According to him, ideologies are combinations of political concepts. Some concepts are ‘core’, some are ‘adjacent’, and some are ‘peripheral’.

 This is a political expression and it is translated as “After me, the flood.” All ideologies are après la déluge. They are a response to the imagined possibility of complete change in accordance with some fundamental criterion.

An ideology is a view about what ought to be thought, said, and done about politics in terms of a sole criterion, where that sole criterion is a suggestion about to what or whom a fundamental debt is owed.

An ideology is a view about what ought to be thought, said and done about politics in terms of a sole criterion, where that sole criterion is a suggestion about to what or whom a fundamental debt is owed; and where this view is contested by views dependent on rival criteria within a situation which is constituted by the continual contestation of criteria.

Each ideology is concerned with the status of a particular subject or object which may have been neglected and may deserve our commitment. Considering this, we can say:

• Environmentalism suggests that we owe a debt to the earth.

• Nationalism suggests that we owe a debt to the nation.

• Feminism suggests that we owe a debt to women.

• Liberalism, socialism, and conservatism suggest that we owe a debt to the self.

They claimed that liberalism involves:

• An enthusiasm for freedom, toleration, individualism, and reason

• A disapproval of power, authority, and tradition

• The idea of limited government

• The maintenance of the rule of law

• The avoidance of arbitrary or discretionary power

• The sanctity of private property and freely made contracts

• The responsibility of individuals for their own fates

• State involvement in the economy, democracy, welfare policies, and moral and cultural progress

J.H. Newman proposed that the major theoretical principle of liberalism is that no one should believe what he does not understand. He added that liberalism is the mistake of subjecting to human judgements those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond or independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the existing authority of the Divine Word.

Jeremy Waldron accepted that we are unlikely to find any single cluster of theoretical and practical propositions that might be regarded as the core or the essence of the ideology. He also claimed that liberalism politically rests on a certain view about the justification of social arrangements. According to him, a social and political order is illegitimate as long as it is not rooted in the consent of all those who have to live under it: the consent or agreement of these people is a condition of its being morally permissible to enforce that order against them.

Harold Laski thought that liberalism is not a clear-cut body of doctrine. On the other hand, he suggested the liberal seeks to indicate the right of the individual to shape his own destiny, regardless of any authority which might seek to limit his possibilities

L.T. Hobhouse put forward that the essence of liberalism is the belief that society can safely be founded on a self-directive power of personality.

Accoring to him, liberalism is not anarchism. It is because he rightly emphasized that liberalism is concerned with order. It recognizes that its emphasis on the self is only a means of judging an order, but is not by itself sufficient to enable that order to exist. The liberal must postulate the existence of an external order.

A liberal always divides the world into three:

• What is intrinsically necessary (the self )

• What is necessary to support that intrinsic necessity (a system of standards, rules, and laws)

• What is contingent (everything else, including all other beliefs, practices, and institutions)

Kant’s writings clearly state the liberal view of law. He makes it clear that an order is founded upon three principles:

• the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as man)

• the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects)

• the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens)

He expressed that each person has an equal right to the most extensive equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. In other words, liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself.

The self is criticized since it is too abstract in sketching someone who has never lived and never could. It is because the self is unstable internally (in relation to itself) and externally (in relation to society) that it has been criticized by psychologists and philosophers, and also by socialists and conservatives. However, the criticism centers around the same point: the argument that the self cannot be separated from its conditions. This is an objection which the liberal simply has to deny. It cannot be refuted. Therefore, liberalism begins and ends with the denial of any claim that the self is constituted by its conditions.

The other major ideologies have a strange relation to liberalism. It is not clear whether they are here to complete it or destroy it. Referring to this fact, John Dunn pointed out that there are two types of liberalism in history:

• the first is rational, transcendental, and concerned with consciousness - the one Marx came to fulfil

• the second is mechanical, reductive, and concerned with desires - the one Marx came to bury

Ludwig von Mises claimed that socialism is actually anti-liberalism, but camouflaged as superliberalism.

Whereas the criterion of liberalism is that debts are owed to the self, the criterion of socialism - the standard by which it judges entities, institutions and events - is that debts are owed to the self as constituted by society. This difference changes everything. For example, liberalism opposes the self to a system or structure, and then sees the rest of society as composed of selves also related to this system (and secondarily to each other). On the other hand, socialism takes the sociability of the self to be so fundamental that it cannot be abstracted from the self without error

According to Karl Marx, society does not consist of individuals. On the other hand, it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves.

After the French Revolution, liberalism was seen to be an ideological manifestation of a certain social order by the socialists. The socialists also complained that liberalism combines within itself a drive towards ideals of political equality with an actual fostering of economic inequality.

In his essay On The Jewish Question, Marx contrasts a liberal ‘political emancipation’ to a socialist ‘human emancipation’. He argues that the political emancipation achieved by liberals is ‘of course a great progress’, but it does not resolve anything. What does liberalism achieve? ‘Man is not freed from religion; he receives freedom of religion. He is not freed from property; he receives freedom of property. He is not freed from the egoism of trade; he receives freedom to trade.

Keeping this fact in mind, we can claim that a Marxist is someone who attempts to understand why the shift from an unenlightened order to an enlightened order was not as successful as many had anticipated, and then attempts to understand how socialism can be the historical completion of this shift.

Historical Materialism is the fundamental tenet of Marxism in all its ‘classical’ varieties. History is the product not of conscious decisions and ideas, but of ‘material’ processes and conditions which can be identified and described without reference to the mental states of those who participate in them. It is the changes in these material conditions which make necessary and bring about those changes in social, political, and institutional superstructures which in aggregate form the substance of history.

The opponents of Marxism claimed that it is a religion of the self-deification of mankind. A more generous analysis suggested that Marxism is a secularized version of the Christian judgement upon, rather than the Christian adaptation to, the secular present

A century ago, George Bernard Shaw wrote that socialism has a ‘twofold task’. However, these tasks are completely contradictory. They are only compatible if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. These tasks are:

• to keep capitalism up to the mark by legislation

• to get rid of it altogether by constructive substitution of socialism

In liberalism, men are given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as every other. In socialism, however, it is constructed, and there is a more liberal criterion than this, whatever its arguments. Thus, socialism recognizes that we are not mere selves, but selves in a situation or in a society, and that it is to these selves that a debt is owed. The self is no longer a merely selfish self, but a self constituted by its existence in society

Conservatism extends the criterion of the self even further than liberalism and socialism do. While liberalism offers the self as a criterion of judgement, and while socialism offers an extension of this criterion so it includes the social as a criterion of judgement, conservatism supposes that both of these are too abstract. The conservative goes even further and claims that the criterion of a self constituted by both social and historical existence means that there is no historical task, only the necessity of not sundering ourselves from history, as liberals and even socialists seem to require us to do. We have a debt to those who are dead as well as to those who are alive.

Edmund Burke explains that we have to see ourselves as involved in a partnership not only between those who are living, but also between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Michael Oakeshott has stated that conservatism is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, and the convenient to the perfect.

Ever since Robert Peel’s time, conservatism has involved the view that the highest virtue in politics is to resist change until change becomes inevitable, and then to concede to it with as little fuss and as much obeisance to tradition as possible. In other words, conservatism is compatible with all manner of change, provided only that change is also continuity. Therefore, conservatism can be forced to conserve in a later generation what it would not have conserved in an earlier one. 

To put it shortly, conservatives look backwards, not forwards. For this reason, they look to the very traditions which liberalism and socialists put into question. This is why they are less securely secular than liberals or socialists. Even if a conservative is not religious, he tends to respect religion. Unlike the liberal or the socialist, who attempts to liberate man from tradition, the conservative seeks no liberation from tradition.

Conservatism expects far less of the future or even the present than liberalism or socialism does. This is because even when it is not religious, it locates eschatology in, and only in, religion. For example, W.R. Inge put forward that secularism, like other religions, needs an eschatology.

Conservatism agrees with socialism that emancipation should not only be that of an abstract individual, but it lays such an emphasis on the debt to the past that it makes any sort of utopian or scientific socialism impossible. In fact, this becomes a great problem for the conservative.

Emancipation is the act of freeing a human being or class of human beings from the control of another, usually when this control is enshrined in some legal privilege or right.

The place of emancipation in the tree ideologies is as follows:

• Liberalism is an emancipation from the unenlightened liberties justified by tradition to an individual liberty, which is legal or political, justified by the secular criterion of the self.

• Socialism is this emancipation completed, so it is also an emancipation from individual liberty.

• Conservatism is an emancipation from even this, so that liberty is not in terms of the completion of this emancipation, but in terms of the recognition of the incomplete nature of any abstract or unhistorical liberty.

Equality is seen by the three ideologies as follows:

• Liberalism is wholly for equality, but only an equality of the self in relation to all other selves in terms of a shared structure of law.

• Socialism seeks an equality which does not offer the same to every self but offers the same to every self as constituted socially. This creates a difficulty about whether socialism is about equality as such or instead some sort of overcoming of inequalities according to phrases like ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’.

• Conservatism considers that we are all equal before God, if there is any enthusiasm for equality in conservatism at all, as more than a concession to secularity. This equality is so fundamental that it makes all other possible forms of equality, liberal or socialist, irrelevant. However, it is not a very extensive liberty in itself in this world.

The place of religion in the tree ideologies is as follows:

• Liberalism separates ‘church’ and ‘state’, by locating all matters of religion in privacy, so leaving the secular state dominant in public.

• Socialism alleges that the separation is an error, which leaves the self in thrall to religion: so it refuses the separation, and instead suggests that church and state together have to be transformed. This throws up two formal possibilities. First, it could involve the secularization of religion, so that religion is emptied of its mythical, metaphysical or transcendental content and restored to humanity, not merely as a ‘religion of humanity’ but as a praxis. Secondly, it could involve a secular interpretation of certain precepts of religion.

• Conservatism alleges that both are errors, since religion is what it is, in its publicity and its authority. For this reason, it should neither be displaced nor replaced. It should go through no form of secularization, but remain authoritative (or as authoritative as it happens to be in our time).

Bringing all information together, we can summarize that:

• liberals are concerned with law

• socialists are concerned with economy, society and power

 Plato in Phaedrus (265c-e) wrote that whenever we think about something we must engage in both ‘synagógé and diairesis’ ‘collection’ and ‘division’. ‘Collection is evidently to consist in bringing together specific Ideas under a common generic Idea, division is the hierarchical arrangement under that generic Idea of all its constituent sub-genera and species’.

According to Seliger (1976:14) a fairly standard definition of ideology is;

“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.”

 Liberalism, conservatism, and socialism are the ‘major ideologies’, and liberalism is the most important or the original of the three.

 Ideologies may be likened to rooms that contain various units of furniture… If we [enter a room and] find liberty, rationality, and individualism at its center, while equality—though in evidence— decorates the wall, we are looking at an exemplar of liberalism. If order, authority, and tradition catch our eye upon opening the door, which equality is shoved under the bed or, at best, one of its weaker specimens is displayed only when the guests arrive, we are looking at a version of conservatism. Core, adjacent and peripheral units pattern the room and permit its categorization (Freeden, 1996: 86-7.)

The ideologies share many core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts, but they arrange and order them in different ways.

Putting ideology in its historical place, enables us to explain the difference between the major and minor ideologies. Minor ideologies  are concerned with the status of a particular subject or object which may have been neglected and may deserve our commitment whereas major ones address every subject, every self, every citizen, as if universal.

Cevap: This is why the standard studies of ideologies are right to suggest that liberalism, conservatism, and socialism form a triad of major ideologies, in relation to which all other ideologies are minor. But the order—the logical order—is not liberalism, conservatism and socialism, as they would have it, but liberalism, socialism and conservatism. 

Liberalism is often treated as if it is a ‘complex of doctrines’ which cannot be simplified. So we are told that it seems to involve an enthusiasm for freedom, toleration, individualism and reason on the one hand and a disapproval of power, authority and tradition on the other. 

‘The idea of limited government, the maintenance of the rule of law, the avoidance of arbitrary or discretionary power, the sanctity of private property and freely made contracts, and the responsibility of individuals for their own fates’, complicated by ‘state involvement in the economy, democracy, welfare policies, and moral and cultural progress’ 

[Liberalism] is the mistake of subjecting to human judgements those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond or independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the existing authority of the Divine Word.

Liberalism is the original of the major ideologies because it offers the simplest critique of what Hannah Arendt called the ‘Roman trinity’ of religion, tradition, and authority.

The liberal always divides the world into three: into what is intrinsically necessary (the self), what is necessary to support that intrinsic necessity (a system of standards, rules, laws), and what is contingent (everything else, including all other beliefs, practices, and institutions). 

Although Immanuel Kant was nothing as simple as a liberal, his writings clearly state the liberal view of law. He makes it clear that an order is founded upon ‘three principles, firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as man); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens)’ 

As expressed in Rawls’s first principle of justice, it means that ‘each person has an equal right to the most extensive equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all’. So that, as he puts it, ‘liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself’.

Socialism adjusts the criterion of liberalism in such a way that it is radically altered. If the criterion of liberalism is that debts are owed to the self, then the criterion of socialism—the standard by which it judges entities, institutions and events—is that debts are owed to the self as constituted by society. 

 ‘Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves’. 

A Marxist is someone who attempts to understand why the shift from an unenlightened order to an enlightened order was not as successful as many had anticipated, and then attempts to understand how socialism can be the historical completion of this shift. Marx did not succeed in making full sense of it. ‘For all its grandeur his achievement remained fragmentary when measured against the original plan of his work’. 

Historical Materialism is the fundamental tenet of Marxism in all its ‘classical’ varieties. History is the product not of conscious decisions and ideas, but of ‘material’ processes and conditions which can be identified and described without reference to the mental states of those who participate in them. It is the changes in these material conditions which make necessary and bring about those changes in social, political and institutional superstructures which in aggregate form the substance of history. 

A century ago George Bernard Shaw wrote that socialism has a ‘twofold task’. One is to keep capitalism ‘up to the mark by legislation’; the other is to ‘get rid of it altogether by constructive substitution of socialism’.  But these tasks are clearly completely contradictory. They are only compatible if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

 Conservatism extends the criterion even further. While liberalism offers the self—whatever that is—as a criterion of judgement, and while socialism offers an extension of this criterion so it includes the social—whatever that is—as a criterion of judgement, conservatism supposes that both of these are too abstract. 

Conservatives argue that there is no obligation to change the world: because human imperfection on the one hand and unforeseen consequences on the other make it impossible to know that any change will be for the better (Stove, 2003). If we do change anything, it should be in terms of the considered judgements of the past, for the reason that we cannot depend on our own experience. ‘We ought to be wary of dismissing doctrines merely because we ourselves can see little or no reason to believe them, even if we hardly understand them’. 

As Evelyn Waugh states: “I believe that man is by nature an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; that his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries, and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives.” 

The act of freeing a human being or class of human beings from the control of another, usually when this control is enshrined in some legal privilege or right.