N all of these books the ideologies are compartmentalised into prefabricated categories-called chapters…Liberalism, conservatism and socialism are the ‘major ideologies’, and liberalism is the most important or the original of the three. He discusses three books in particular that take this approach: Heywood’s Political Ideologies Vincent’s Modern Political Ideologies and Freeden’s Ideologies and Political Theory. As he points out, there is a certain irony to the fact that all those authors who focus on the complex and plural nature of the three ideologies still tend to separate them out and, usually, assume some hierarchy between them. He wants to focus on what makes the ideologies different from one another. Instead of collecting and grouping, he prefers to distinguish and differentiate. Nevertheless, they think that ideologies are complex assemblages of these properties, and that the distinctions between the different ideologies are blurry and often a matter of emphasis rather than something more fundamental.Īlexander favours a different approach. Authors often proceed to categorise these properties and features, suggesting that some are ‘core’ and others ‘peripheral’. Instead, there are many different liberals, each emphasising different properties or features of the ideology. There is no one canonical version of liberalism, for example.
Authors who adopt this approach tend to think that there is nothing simple about any of the ideologies.
The collectivising approach tries to group different conceptualisations of the respective ideologies together. In his case, the point of departure is the ‘collectivising’ approach to ideologies that is characteristic of most previous attempts to taxonomise and define liberalism, socialism and conservatism. a disagreement with the existing literature). I start with his general approach to understanding ideologies.Īlexander’s article - like most academic articles - starts from a point of departure (i.e. It is a unique and somewhat idiosyncratic take on the topic, suggesting that there is one core defining feature to each of the three ideologies and that they can be arranged in a logical/hierarchical order. That attempt comes from James Alexander’s article ‘ The Major Ideologies of Liberalism, Socialism and Conservatism’. In this post, I want to share one recent attempt to capture the distinction between these different ideologies. To borrow a phrase, it often seems to be the case that ‘one man’s liberalism is another man’s conservatism’ and so on.
There are many different definitions and understandings of liberalism, socialism and conservatism. These terms effectively define the major points on the landscape of political opinion. But what do they really mean? If I am a liberal what makes me different, if anything, from a socialist or conservative? These are important questions. We frequently use these terms to describe our political beliefs and ideological preferences. Are you a liberal, socialist or conservative? Are you fiscally conservative but socially liberal? Or socially conservative and fiscally liberal? Are you a classical liberal or a neo-liberal? Are you a Marxist socialist or a neo-Marxist socialist?
0 kommentar(er)
