Ideology and government

Abstract

The root of the modern issue of government and ideology lies in the awareness that political power is no longer underpinned by any ‘a priori ideology’, any system of beliefs, values, behaviour, and culture that can be taken unquestioningly by a government as read. The state now has to handle ideological communications, and that is only possible if it manages to secure a monopoly on a unifying political ideology which becomes, or at least should become, a patrimony of beliefs, values and cultural interpretations shared by all its members. This could be realized by two eminently ideological operations: people's ability to elaborate and to hierarchically arrange values and judgments about the world. So ‘discourse’ becomes central and the ability to ‘dominate discourse’ determines who occupies the position of government. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the scope of government became more and more ideological through being forced into two classic forms of expression: the appeal for popular confidence, and the announcement of a platform. It seems that the success of a government is linked to its ability to ‘predict the future’ ideologically far more than to its capacity of confronting concrete political problems.

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