Ideology as Heresy

Ed Feser explores definitions of ideology, and argues that political ideologies are functionally equivalent to heresies which fall short of the truth about the Christian nature of political order.

The word “ideology” is ambiguous. It is sometimes used merely to refer to a system of ideas, in a manner that is neutral as to the value of those ideas. For example, when, in popular writing, a politician or political commentator is said to have an “ideology” of a liberal, conservative, socialist, or libertarian kind, this is typically meant simply to indicate what sort of political philosophy informs his opinions. It is not intended to say anything either positive or negative about that philosophy.

But the word also has more, narrow, technical, and pejorative senses. Sometimes, to call a system of ideas an “ideology” is intended precisely to indicate that there is something wrong with it. This is the sense of the word operative when someone is labeled an “ideologue,” a term never used as a positive or even neutral description.

There are two main ways in which “ideology” is used as a pejorative. One of them is associated with Marxism, in which an ideology is a false system of ideas that functions to uphold an oppressive economic order. Marxism itself, on this view, is not an ideology, but rather simply the correct description of socioeconomic reality, which exposes rival descriptions as ideological. There are various critical questions one could raise about this view, such as whether it can provide a non-question-begging rationale for taking Marxism alone to be exempt from unmasking as a mere ideology. But the Marxist sense of “ideology” is not what I’ll be addressing in this article.

I’ll focus here instead on the pejorative use of “ideology” common among conservative intellectuals (though not only among them). On this usage, an ideology is, to a first approximation, a system of ideas that describes social, political or economic reality in too simplistic and dogmatic a manner, and an ideologue is someone in thrall to such an ideology. Typically, for those who use the term this way, Marxism itself is indeed an ideology. But those who use the term in this way would not necessarily regard all views that they disagree with as ideologies. For on this usage, a view could be mistaken but nevertheless not simplistic or dogmatically held, and thus not “ideological.”

This usage describes a real phenomenon, since there are certainly views about social, political, and economic reality that are simplistic and adhered to dogmatically. But more needs to be said, which is why I described my characterization of this sense of the term “ideology” as merely a first approximation. For people of any political persuasion are, of course, capable of thinking simplistically and dogmatically. Is there something the terms “ideology” and “ideologue” capture that goes beyond these familiar human foibles? There is, but to see it requires a bit of explanation. Let’s start with a common but, I think, inadequate conservative approach to explaining what makes a view “ideological.”