The Age of Ideology
The Age of Ideology
In its quest to create a national community, the state centralized power at the expense of intermediate institutions with an ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress. The introduction of egalitarianism into society destroyed the established hierarchies of traditional communities and fostered alienation among citizens where they have no recourse to fulfill their communal longing other than in the national state. The result was individualism where people pursued private interests instead of public obligation, leaving those tasks to intellectuals and bureaucrats. Not conceiving of anything higher than the state, both the intellectual and bureaucrat promoted secularism in order for the citizen to find meaning and significance in the realm of historical necessity; and this history had become redefined as progressive where the state would provide its citizens security and prosperity in the future.
The emergence of this ideology coincided with the state’s centralization of power — a process that was accelerated in times of war. The destruction of intermediate institutions and the removal of transcendence from the public sphere allowed the state to defined wars in moral and spiritual terms; and the democratization of society enabled the state to mobilize all resources of the population towards war, thereby making it a mass, ideological movement. Rather than the exception, the United States has been exemplar of these processes of democratization, centralization, and ideological justification. With its belief in exceptionalism and progress, the United States since President Wilson has conceived of history as one of necessity that inevitably will lead to liberal democracies and free-market economies.
The ideology of “making the world safe for democracy” contained a state-sanctioned moralism that enabled the United States to justify its wars to its citizenry. Wars are presented to the American public in ethical, moral, and sometimes even in spiritual terms to rationalize the curtailment of civil liberties, the nationalization of industries, or the monitoring of intermediate institutions. In the name of national security, the state was permitted to centralize its power; and with the promise of progress, the state was able to ask its citizens for sacrifice and commitment to its national cause. In the end, we are left with Tocqueville’s administrative despotic state and Foucault’s “bio-politics”: citizens are guided, supervised, and directed by the state from their birth to their death.
This ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress has even penetrated into the American military establishment, with its belief that bureaucracies some day will be able to guide and direct human events with perfect informational certainty. The practical consequences of such a belief were investment into technology, weaponry, and information systems instead of the cultivation of character and training of soldiers in intermediate institutions, where such values as honor and loyalty were best developed. As a consequence, the United States military was poorly prepared in confronting the new type of conflicts that emphasized flexibility, prudence, and the propaganda of ideas. Rather than relying upon a vast bureaucracy to control and dictate events, the United States military was forced to reinvent itself to make decisions not by certainty of information but from the contingency of events.
The inability for the United States military to diagnose the post-Iraqi situation correctly was due to this ideology of individualism, secularism, and progress. The emptying of transcendence from the public sphere has allowed ideologies to take its place under progressive causes, like “making the world safe for democracy.” This process of eliminating spiritual history from politics and society emerged during the early modern period with the introduction of nature and reason as equal metaphysical and epistemological realities to the realities of God and faith. By the nineteenth century, reality was conceived solely in the realm of historical necessity that was given significance and meaning by social evolutionary theorists and other ideologues. Progress became an immanent process, which contents could be filled by anyone’s speculative fantasy.
This removal of the Christian philosophy of history, with its two sets of account as historical and spiritual, reduced reality into the single realm of historical necessity. With this new condition, the re-introduction of religion into the public sphere now was understood not in the spiritual realm but only in the historical one: the city of God has been infused into the city of man. Spiritual progress became understood in the terms of historical progress. Thus, we should not doubt the sincerity of the religious declarations of political and intellectual elites, but we should question in which city did they understood their spiritual and religious views to be.
For Nisbet, significance and meaning in the realm of historical necessity was not possible, because “Patterns, rhythms, trends are inescapably subjective. There is no inherent relation to the data.” (SC, 285) Theories, as found in social sciences, that claim progress existed in history should be regarded as suspect. History was a series of discrete events with no inherent, intelligible laws. Whether it was the bureaucrat or intellectual, the attempt to discover such a meaning in history for Nisbet was hopeless.
The correction to this age of ideology was the recovery of the social sciences on classical foundations in order to diagnose the fundamental problems of society. Nisbet established the foundations of sociology on the traditions of political monism and social pluralism, with his understanding of unit-ideas as the new basis of this discipline. By taking into account culture, economics, and political factors into his methodology, Nisbet was able to avoid the intellectual reductionism of neo-conservatives in understanding reality, but he still was able to give preeminence to ideas as the primary motivating force in history. Nisbet also avoided the speculative fantasies in his analysis because he rejected the notion that history had any pattern or directional change inherent within it. In this sense, Nisbet’s sociology was able to provide us a diagnosis of reality without reductive analyses or extraordinary projections about it.
The quest for community was a permanent and constant one in human nature for Nisbet, so any attempt to eradicate this desire was impossible. The question that confronted him was where would this longing be fulfilled: in the state or in intermediate institutions? Clearly for Nisbet, it was intermediate institutions like the family, the church, and local associations. But for us, the problem is even more complicated because we lack the conceptual apparatus to make sense of our own alienation in this age of ideology. Nisbet also recognized this plight, which is why he sought to establish sociology on the classical foundations of nature and transcendence. The challenge before us now is whether we can follow in Nisbet’s footsteps.
References
The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom by Robert A. Nisbet (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1953; San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990). (QC)
“Foreward” to The American Family and the State, edited by Joseph R. Peden and Fred Glahe (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986). (AS)
“Conservatism and Sociology,” The American Journal of Sociology 48 (September 1952), 167-175. (CS)
The Degradation of Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1971). (DA)
“The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France,” The American Journal of Sociology 49 (November 1943), 156-64. (FS)
History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980). (HP)
The Making of Modern Society (New York: NYU Press, 1986). (MM)
The Present Age: Progress and Authority in Modern America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). (PA)
Sociology as an Art Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). (SA)
The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Society (New York: Knopf, 1970). (SB)
Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). (SC)
The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982). (SP)
The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). (ST)
Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). (TA)
Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968). (TR)
This article was originally entitled, “War, Progress, and Sociology in the Age of Ideology,” in The Political Science Reviewer 36:1 (2007): 311-43.