Popa Roxana BCS I - Essay On Part IV, Chapter 8 Ideology As A Cultural System

Popa Roxana BCS I – Essay on Part IV, Chapter 8 Ideology as a Cultural System
Geertz observed that the term ‘ideology’ had taken on a polemical or ‘evaluative’
connotation, which made it into a diagnosis of social, political, and intellectual pathologies that
diverted societies from a sensible appreciation of reality. In the aftermath of the Second World
War, and in the midst of the Cold War and postcolonial political turmoil, there was even a sense
that ideology actually ‘draws its persuasive power from any discrepancy between what is
believed and what can, now or someday, be established as scientifically correct’ (232).
Geertz’s essay was basically an attempt to define the term ‘ideology’ in a way that could
be useful to social scientists. He singled out The American Business Creed (1956), by Francis
Sutton, Seymour Harris, Carl Kaysen, and James Tobin for its use of this evaluative sense of
ideology while professing to use it as a neutral analytical term (though he deemed the book ‘in
many ways excellent,’ (193). Geertz noted the affinities between the evaluative sense of ideology
and Enlightenment criticisms of ‘superstition’, and marked the use of ideology by Marx as a way
of labeling distractions from class realities: religion was, of course, the ‘opium of the people’.
Then Marxism was recognized as an ideology. Raymond Aron pointedly called political
ideologies The Opium of the Intellectuals. In The End of Ideology ,D. Bell declared
intellectualized approaches to politics exhausted. The objective for intellectuals now was to
identify dangerous ideological frameworks, and to practice a more modest politics. Geertz
reckoned the intellectuals’ anti-ideological project ‘reminds one of nothing so much as the
literature of militant atheism…. We may wait as long for the ‘end of ideology’ as the positivists
have waited for the end of religion’ (199).
Mannheim had been led to the conclusion that identifications of ideology were
themselves ideological, depending on one’s own sense of reality, threatening analytical
nullification. Geertz called this Mannheim’s Paradox.For followers of Mannheim, notably
Werner Stark ,the task was to extricate oneself from the paradox. There was still a distinction to
be drawn between the ‘sociology of knowledge’ which ‘deals with the social element in the
pursuit and perception of truth, its inevitable confinement to one or another existential
perspective,’ and ‘the study of ideology,’ which ‘deals with the causes of intellectual error’(197).
Geertz divided diagnostic accounts of ideology into the ‘interest’ theory and the ‘strain’
theory. The interest theory goes back to Marx. In the interest theory, ‘ideas are weapons’ used
to promote this or that interested class in a ‘universal struggle for advantage’(201). He criticized
the possible psychologies and sociologies that can support the interest theory. Either they
supposed an excessively narrow utilitarian psychology ‘that sees men as impelled by rational
calculation of their consciously recognized personal advantage,’or a ‘broader, but no less
superficial, historicism that speaks with a studied vagueness of men’s ideas as somehow
‘reflecting,’ ‘expressing,’ ‘corresponding to,’ ’emerging from,’ or ‘conditioned by,’ their social
commitments.’ According to Geertz, ‘Within such a framework, the analyst is faced with the
choice of either revealing the thinness of his psychology by being so specific as to be thoroughly
implausible or concealing the fact that he does not have any psychological theory at all by being
so general as to be truistic.’ ( 202)
The strain theory, on the other hand, developed a psychology that was premised on ‘the
chronic malintegration of society’ (203), where individuals embrace ideology to ‘flee anxiety’
(201). Geertz identified it primarily with Parsons and the authors of the American Business
Creed monograph. According to the strain theory (according to Geertz), ‘In the modern world at
least, most men live lives of patterned desperation’ (204). They attempt to fulfill a certain social
function, and when they fail to do so, they are led into a state of existential anxiety, and so they
turn to reassuring ideology, ‘thus insuring the performance of roles that might otherwise be
abandoned in despair or apathy’ (205).
Of course, strain theorists take an evaluative view of ideology. Thus, they highlight the
irony of when ‘an ideologist sets out to air his grievances and finds himself contributing, through
the diversionary power of his illusions, to the continued viability of the very system that grieves
him.’ Geertz observed that strain theorists were aware of, and, indeed, ‘tend to stress negative
outcomes and possibilities rather more than the positive, and they but rarely think of ideology as
more than a faute de mieux stop-gap — like nail-chewing.’ ( 207) But, strain theory’s ‘analysis
of the consequences of [ideological] concern [remained] crude, vacillatory, and evasive’ (207).
Within it, ideology was a pathological result of social dislocation, but the contents of ideology
were not a subject for serious analysis.
To conclude , one can note that, though theorists of the ‘ideology of science’ referred to
Geertz, they might also be subjected to his critique. Berman, Mulkay, and Gieryn all view the
ideology of science through the frame of the ‘interest theory’ — Berman explicitly saw the
ideology as reinforcing a bourgeois capitalist social order (and his notion of ideology was
decidedly evaluative), while Mulkay and Gieryn saw it in terms of scientists creating their own
authority by drawing intellectual boundaries that distinguished their work. However, the need
for such an ideology of science is supposed by the strain theory — scientists attempt to function
as non-ideological arbiters of proper knowledge in a society, but are ‘chronically malintegrated’
into that society, as evidenced by serial controversy.

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