Tag: Ideology

Ideology Critique and Its Limits

I have a new article out in New Political Science. You can read it here. Here’s the abstract:

Legitimacy and ideology both involve explaining controversial action. Discourses of legitimacy emphasize the sense in which these explanations can be genuinely meaningful, while discourses of ideology emphasize the sense in which these explanations are insufficient. It follows that discourses of legitimacy and ideology can be too one sided. In periods of social fragmentation, it becomes harder to successfully legitimate controversial action, and ideology critique proliferates. The existing order is disgraced, but this does not necessarily cause a viable alternative to emerge. Writing in the 1970s, Jürgen Habermas proposed to overcome social fracturing through forms of management. But instead of uniting subjects around a legitimate alternative, management has tended to reinforce and contribute to the fracturing that generates ideology critique. It has also produced subjects whose horizons are always already managerial, who tend to make demands in exclusively managerial terms. Rather than provide an alternative to ideology critique and managerial horizons, political science has internalized these features, becoming merely another instantiation of this problem. Instead of engaging in discourse management or ideology critique, radical political scientists need to take a sincere interest in discovering, articulating, and operating with the diverse plurality of legitimation stories that do in fact persuade the people they live among to accept controversial action. This has become particularly pressing at a time when the humanities and social sciences are struggling to legitimate themselves to the public and have consequently become perennial targets for the Trump administration. Without a capacity for legitimation, political science is susceptible to ideology critique.

Some of you may have heard that S. Matisko and I have gotten married. There will be a major post on Substack this coming Sunday discussing the modernization of my life, including the enlarged role that Substack is going to play going forward.

Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies Affordable Paperback Release

My second book, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies, has been released today in paperback. It’s available for under $25 (under £20). You can get it from the publisher:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-legitimacy-in-liberal-democracies.html

Or you can get it from Amazon: https://a.co/d/0dtSVtsC

This is, in my view, the best thing I have made, at the most affordable price we are likely to see for the foreseeable future. If it does well, I am hopeful that I will be able to publish more affordable books.

My Second Book

I have another book coming out – Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies. In this book I develop a theory of legitimacy to explain the crisis of liberal democracy in established democracies, like the United Kingdom and the United States. In these countries there is deep dissatisfaction with political procedures, yet no credible alternatives have emerged. Without alternatives, the crisis cannot produce revolution. Instead, I suggest that the disagreements that ordinarily lead to political violence instead proliferate throughout the state and society. As the distinction between legitimacy and ideology blurs, efforts to generate legitimacy instead generate greater inequality, pluralism, and gridlock. As different factions try to save democracy in radically different ways, diverse advocates of democracy get in each other’s way and even begin to appear authoritarian to one another. I depict a legitimacy crisis rife with state capacity problems, in which citizens tell each other many conflicting legitimation stories as they search for ways to live with a dissatisfying political system they cannot replace. The result is a legitimation hydra – a state that is burdened by an excess of narratives, that struggles to take any action at all.

The book will be out with Edinburgh University Press this November. There’s a discount code – “NEW30” – that can be used to get 30% off if you preorder the book directly from EUP. That can be done here:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-legitimacy-in-liberal-democracies.html

The cover was done by Michael Scowden. Michael used to work as art director with my dad when my dad was editor-in-chief of a magazine about process automation called Control. As my dad died of prostate cancer in 2021 at age 67, it’s wonderful to have a cover from Michael. He’s really terrific, and I love what he did for the book. Check it out:

Liberal Hypocrisies and the Alternatives to Them

All social orders are supported by “legitimation stories”. These are the reasons orders give us to support them, or at least to stay out of their way. Legitimation stories don’t have to be true, but they have to be persuasive. The social order has to create a set of conditions that are similar enough to the stories that we mistake what we have for what we were promised. Legitimation stories are chiefly about “good order”. Order is straightforward–social orders promise to protect us from violence, starvation, instability, and precarity. They promise to make us feel secure. “Good” is less obvious, because “good” tends to mean different things to different people in different contexts. Liberal legitimation stories understand “good” in three senses:

  1. A good order is one in which the subjects of the order are “free” or have “liberty” in some relevant sense.
  2. A good order is one in which the subjects of the order are treated as “equal” to one another in some relevant sense.
  3. A good order is one in which the order “represents” the subjects in some relevant way.
  4. A good order is “dynamic”, it is capable of delivering real change.

The trouble is that terms like “free”, “equal”, and “representative” don’t have stable social meanings. Our understandings of these terms can easily slide out of alignment with the understandings we need to have for legitimation stories to work. If we understand “equality” to mean “a fair distribution of resources” but the liberal order wants us to understand “equality” as “everyone gets to have their say”, the order has to convince us that we’ve misunderstood the meaning of equality. It has to get us to think about it in a whole different way. When gaps open up between the conditions the order produces and our expectations, it is often because the order has lost control over how we understand the words it uses to tell its stories. When this happens, the order appears “hypocritical”–it appears to say one thing and do another, to tell stories it has no intention of realising. That’s what today’s post is about–the liberal order’s hypocrisies.

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