How important is the role of ideas in the political upheavals that have marked great historical changes? Are they mere mental epiphenomena of much profounder material and social processes, or do they possess a decisive autonomous power as forces of political mobilization?footnote1 Contrary to appearances, the answers given to this question do not sharply divide Left from Right. Many conservatives and liberals have, of course, exalted the transcendent significance of lofty ideals and moral values in history, denouncing, as base materialists, radicals who insist that economic contradictions are the motor of historical change. Famous modern exemplars of such idealism of the Right include figures like Friedrich Meinecke, Benedetto Croce or Karl Popper. For such thinkers, in Meinecke’s words: ‘Ideas, carried and transformed by living personalities, constitute the canvas of historical life.’ But we can find other major figures of the Right who attack rationalist delusions in the importance of artificial doctrines, upholding against them the far more enduring significance of traditional customs or biological instincts. Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Namier, Gary Becker were all—from differing standpoints—theorists of material interests, intent on sardonically deflating the claims of ethical or political values. Rational choice theory, hegemonic over wide areas of Anglo-Saxon social science, is the best-known contemporary paradigm of this kind.
The same bifurcation, however, can be found on the Left. If we look at great modern historians of the Left, we find complete indifference to the role of ideas in Fernand Braudel, contrasted with passionate attachment to them in R. H. Tawney. Among British Marxists themselves, no-one would confuse the positions of Edward Thompson, whose whole life’s work was a polemic against what he saw as economic reductionism, with those of Eric Hobsbawm, whose history of the twentieth century contains no separate sections devoted to ideas at all. If we look at political leaders, the same opposition repeats itself even more pointedly. ‘The movement is everything, the goal is nothing’, announced Bernstein. Could there be a more drastic devaluation of principles or ideas, in favour of sheer factual processes? Bernstein believed he was loyal to Marx when he pronounced this dictum. In the same period, Lenin declared—in an equally famous maxim, of exactly antithetical effect—as something every Marxist should know, that ‘without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’. The contrast here was not just between the reformist and the revolutionary. In the ranks of the revolutionary Left itself, we find the same duality. For Luxemburg, as she put it, ‘in the beginning was the deed’—not any preconceived idea, but simply the spontaneous action of the masses, was the starting-point of major historical change. Anarchists never ceased to agree with her. For Gramsci, on the other hand, the labour movement could never gain durable victories unless it achieved an ideal ascendancy—what he called a cultural and political hegemony—over society as a whole, including its enemies. At the head of their respective states, Stalin entrusted the building of socialism to the material development of productive forces, Mao to a cultural revolution capable of transforming mentalities and mores.
How is this ancient opposition to be arbitrated? Ideas come in different shapes and sizes. Those which are relevant to major historical change have typically been systematic ideologies. Göran Therborn has offered a penetrating and elegant taxonomy of these, in a book whose very title—The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980)—offers us an agenda. He divides ideologies into existential and historical, inclusive and positional types. Among them, those which have had the greatest reach, spatial or temporal, have been characterized by a feature that was perhaps best caught by the English conservative T. S. Eliot, in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). We can readily substitute for his notion of ‘culture’ the term ‘ideology’. Eliot’s key observation was that any major belief system constitutes a hierarchy of different levels of conceptual complexity, running from highly sophisticated intellectual constructions at the top—accessible only to an educated elite—through broader and less refined versions at intermediate tiers, down to the crudest and most elementary simplifications at a popular level: all of these nevertheless unified by a single idiom, and supported by a corresponding set of symbolic practices. Only such a totalized system, he argued, was worthy of the name of a real culture, and capable of generating great art.
Eliot was thinking, of course, of Christianity as the prime example of such a system, uniting the most arcane theological speculations with familiar ethical prescriptions and naïve popular superstitions in a single all-encompassing faith, sustained by sacred stories and images from a common stock of scriptural sources. The world religions that emerged in the so-called Axial Age certainly offer a striking initial test of any hypothesis about the role of ideas in major historical change. Few could doubt the enormous impact of these belief systems over vast areas of the world, and across millennia. Nor is it easy to identify their origins in preceding material or social upheavals on any scale commensurable with their own transformative influence and diffusion. At most we might say that the unification of the Mediterranean world by the Roman Empire provided a favourable institutional setting for the spread of a universalist monotheism, such as Christianity, or that a militarized nomadism in a desert environment under demographic pressure was likely sooner or later to find a distinctive religious expression, like Islam. The disproportion between imputable causes and ascertainable consequences appears to be a strong argument in favour of granting remarkable—even extraordinary—autonomous power to ideas in the civilizations of that epoch.
The political impact of these religions was not, of course, strictly comparable. Christianity gradually converted an existing imperial universe from within, without any significant alteration of its social structure. But by creating in the Church a parallel institutional complex to the state that survived the eventual collapse of the empire, it ensured minimal cultural and political continuities for the subsequent emergence of feudalism. Islam, by contrast, redrew the whole political map of the Mediterranean and the Middle East at a stroke, by lightning military seizure. We are still in Antiquity, however. In either case, the belief systems that conquered the region did so without what we would later describe as a battle of ideas. No sustained ideological struggle was fought between pagans and Christians, or Christians and Muslims, as the terms of belief capsized in Rome or Cairo. Conversion proceeded essentially by osmosis or force, without articulated ideological collision.
When we move to the modern epoch, matters are different. The Protestant Reformation, unlike the teaching of either Christ or Mohammed, was a written doctrinal system—or rather a set of them—from the outset, developed in the polemical texts of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, before it became a major force or institutional power. Less distant in time, it is easier to track the proximate social and material conditions of its emergence: corruption of Renaissance Catholicism, rise of national sentiment, differential access of European states to the Vatican, arrival of printing, and so on. What is striking is now something else: the emergence of the Counter-Reformation within the Catholic Church, and therewith an all-out ideological battle between the two creeds, sustained at the highest levels of metaphysical and intellectual debate, as well as every means known to popular propaganda—we owe the term to this epoch—unleashing a titanic series of rebellions, wars and civil wars across Europe. Here, if ever, ideas appear to trigger and shape historical change. Indeed, no subsequent revolutions were to be set off as directly by questions of intellectual belief as the first great upheavals in the chain of modern state-creation in Europe: the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain in the sixteenth century, and the Great Rebellion and Glorious Revolution in England in the seventeenth. In all three cases, the immediate precipitant of revolution was an outburst of theological passion: the breaking of sacred images in the name of scriptural purity in the Low Countries, the imposition of a new prayer-book in Scotland, the threat of Catholic toleration in England.
By comparison, the outbreaks of the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century were far more materially determined. In neither case did any developed system of ideas motivate the initial assault on the old—colonial or royal—order. Rather, in the North American colonies economic self-interest of the narrowest kind—dislike of taxes levied to pay the cost of protection against the Indians and the French, seasoned with conspiracism—set off a rebellion against the British monarchy; while in France, a fiscal crisis triggered by the cost of helping the American rebels forced the summoning of a late feudal institution, the Estates-General, whose reforms were promptly swept overboard by the eruption of mass discontent in the countryside and the towns, under the pressure of a bad harvest and high grain prices. In both cases, the breakdown of the old order was an unpremeditated process, in which grievances of a material rather than ideological kind predominated. In the background, however, lay the cumulative critical culture of the Enlightenment—a vast store of potentially explosive ideas and discourses—waiting, as it were, to be activated in just such emergency conditions. It was this arsenal of pre-existing iconoclasm that converted a disintegration of the established order into the revolutionary creation of a new one, and the forging of an ideological imaginary with which we are still living today. The ideals of the American and—above all—French Revolutions have remained active inspirations to political action long after the institutions that each threw up have fossilized or been forgotten.