Showing papers on "Ideology published in 1980"

The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology

Abstract: This essay attempts to describe political consciousness in collectivities. Symbolist thought, focused on the idea of “myth,” seems linked with material thought, focused on the concept of “ideology.” It is suggested that a description of political consciousness can be constructed from the structures of meaning exhibited by a society's vocabulary of “ideographs.”

The socio-spatial dialectic

Abstract: An increasingly rigidifying orthodoxy has begun to emerge within Marxist spatial analysis that threatens to choke off the development of a critical theory of space in its infancy. The concept of a socio-spatial dialectic is introduced as a means of reopening the debate and calling for the explicit incorporation of the social production of space in Marxist analysis as something more than an epiphenomenon. Building upon the works of Henri Lefebvre, Ernest Mandel, and others, a general spatial problematic is identified and discussed within the context of both urban and regional political economy. The spatial problematic is not a substitute for class analysis but it can be an integral and increasingly salient element in class consciousness and class struggle within contemporary capitalism. Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be “...

Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America

Abstract: Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.

The Dominant Ideology Thesis

Abstract: As a radical critique of theoretical sociological orthodoxy, The Dominant Ideology Thesis has generated controversy since first publication. It has also been widely accepted, however, as a major critical appraisal of one central theoretical concern within modern Marxism and an important contribution to the current debate about the functions of ideology in social life.

The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology

Abstract: Few concepts have been so intensely discussed or so widely sponsored as that of 'ideology'. Whether read as the expression of social classes or attributed a material independence and efficacy, whether devalued as false and non-scientific or asserted as the necessary element of social practice, 'ideology' has become an ineluctable conceptual reference across a range of works dealing with subjects as varied as science and politics, gender and cultural production. In this book, Goran Therborn makes a decisive contribution to the contemporary debate. Beginning with some critical reflections on Lois Atlhusser's influential writings in the late sixties, Therborn develops a theory of the formation of human subjects. He then goes on to consider the material matrix of ideologies and the problem of ideological change, the ideological constitution of classes and the characteristics of the discursive order that regulates it. Turning to questions of state power and political struggle, Therborn provides a remarkable account of ideological domination that displaces traditional categories, and a fascinating analysis of the process of political mobilization. Brief yet wide-ranging, probing yet succinct, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology is a work of theoretical exploration that establishes new bearings for the current discussion of ideology.

Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology

Abstract: Ancient slavery and modern ideology the emergence of a slave society slavery and humanity the decline of ancient slavery.

Liberal ideology and the postindustrial city

Abstract: A new ideology of livability in urban development changed the Vancouver landscape between 1968 and 1978. The agents of liberal ideology were a new elite of professional, technical, and administrative workers whose consolidation coincided with Vancouver's transition toward a service oriented postindustrial city. This group founded an urban reform party which assumed political power in 1972. They challenged the commitment to growth, boosterism, and the city efficient held by former civic administrations, presenting in its place a program of apparently humane, socially progressive, and aesthetic urban development. Despite some significant successes, the new ideology was also elitist and has generated new problems of social justice, giving rise to a countervailing political movement in the late 1970s. Except in special circumstances it seems the ideology of the livable city is rarely compatible with criteria of social equity or economic efficiency.

Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism

Abstract: Had anyone the prescience, ten years ago, to pose the question of defining a "feminist" literary criticism, she might have been told, in the wake of Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women,' that it involved exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism and, as well, demonstrating the inadequacy of established critical schools and methods to deal fairly or sensitively with works written by women In broad outline, such a prediction would have stood well the test of time, and, in fact, Ellmann's book continues to be widely read and to point us in useful directions What could not have been anticipated in 1969, however, was the catalyzing force of an ideology that, for many of us, helped to bridge the gap between the world as we found it and the world as we wanted it to be For those of us who studied literature, a previously unspoken sense of exclusion from authorship, and a painfully personal distress at discovering whores, bitches, muses, and heroines dead in childbirth where we had once hoped to discover ourselves, could-for the first time-begin to be understood as more than "a set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions"2 With a renewed courage to make public our otherwise private discontents, what had once been "felt individually as personal insecurity" came at last to be "viewed collectively as structural inconsistency"3 within the very disciplines we studied Following unflinchingly the full implications of Ellmann's percepient observations, and emboldened by the liberating energy of feminist ideology-in all its various forms and guises-feminist criticism very quickly moved beyond merely "expos[ing] sexism in one work of literature after another,"4 and promised, instead, that we might at last "begin to record new choices in a new literary history"5 So powerful was that impulse that we experienced it, along with Adrienne Rich, as

Philanthropy and cultural imperialism : the foundations at home and abroad

Abstract: Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism is intended as a source book on the origins, workings, and consequences of modern general-purpose foundations. The text encompasses the activities of foundations-prinicpally Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford-in the production of culture and the formation of public policy. Particular attention is given to the policies of the big foundations in the fields of education and social science research. The authors write from the perspectives of history, sociology, comparative education, and educational policy studies. Their chapters are based on original research. While the contributors do not share a uniform ideological framework, they do have in common a structural point of view-they examine foundations with regard to their functioning in society. They analyze the implications of foundations' organizational characteristics, modus operandi, and substantive decisions for social control or social change. A distinguishing feature of Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism is its systematic, critical analysis of the sociopolitical consequences of these powerful institutions. A central thesis is that foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society's attention.

Ideology and popular protest

Abstract: In this paper, I shall be using the word 'protest' to mean a social act (generally a collective act) that seeks to rectify an injustice, to ventilate a grievance of public concern, or to offer a more fundamental challenge to society or its established norms; and the 'people' with whom I shall be concerned will be the peasants, wage-earners or menu peuple mainly of 'pre-industrial' society in England, France and North America. The term 'ideology' of course presents a greater problem, as every writer in the social sciences I am thinking in particular of Marx, Mannheim, Lukacs, Clifford Geetz uses it in his own manner, some (since Marx's German Ideology) seeing it as a form of 'mystification' or 'false reality', others defining it strictly in terms of a structured set of values or political beliefs, others again favouring a more elastic approach in which myths, 'attitudes' and* what the French call mentalites all have their part. As a social historian I, too, lean towards this latter view, preferring an allembracing concept that takes account of all sets of ideas whether 'sophisticated' and structured or not that underlie or inform popular protest. (Therefore, in this paper at least, as I am concerned with action and not silent meditation or passivity, I shall take no account of such expressions of popular ideology as Oscar Lewis's 'culture of poverty.') In my sense of the term, ideology and, in this case, specifically 'popular' ideology is not a purely internal affair and the sole property of a single class or group. It is a 'mix', made up of the fusion of two elements, of which only one is the peculiar property of the 'popular' classes and the other is superimposed by a process of transmission and adoption of ideas from outside. Of these, the first is the 'inherent', traditional element a sort of 'mother's milk' ideology, based on direct experience, oral tradition or folk-memory and not learned by listening to sermons or reading books. In this fusion the second element is the sets of ideas and beliefs that are 'derived' or

Politics and ideology in the age of the Civil War

Abstract: Insisting that politics and ideology must remain at the forefront of any examination of nineteenth-century America, Foner reasserts the centrality of the Civil War to the people of that period. The first section of this book deals with the causes of the sectional conflict; the second, with the antislavery movement; and a final group of essays treats land and labor after the war. Taken together, Foner's essays work towards reintegrating the social, political, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century.

Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith

Abstract: This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917. Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power. Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.

Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a“Hindu” community

Abstract: Always have Indians identified themselves by their caste, by theirancestral village: “Our family were Khatris from the West Punjabcountryside.” “Murud, at one time a fairly prosperous village, is mynative place.” In the late nineteenth century, however, an important new process of forging group identities which transcended these local attributions came to characterize South Asian social history. This was in part prompted by the efforts of an alien British administration to identify the constituent units in Indian society. Drawing on European historical experience, the administrators applied the collective labels "Hindu" and "Muslim" to groups who were far from homogeneous communities.

Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French State, 1630-1660

Abstract: Courtesy, etiquette, or civility scarcely seem related to the rise of the modern state. Patterns of greeting and paying respect, of conversing, leave-taking, addressing letters and compliments may tell us of familial and social behavior; but they would appear to fall below the level of power politics. Yet seventeenth-century anecdotes about personal relations with political implications come to mind almost immediately.' In forcing the nobility to pay respects to him at Versailles, did not Louis XIV weaken their political influence? In the crucible of state building that was seventeenth-century France what was familial and social remained ineluctably linked to what was political; particularly in the age of Richelieu the signs of power could scarcely if ever be distinguished from power itself. Courtesy codes, sustained by absolutist ideology, provided the state's first line of offense against French society after about 1630. Individuals and corporations of various ranks and wealth suddenly found themselves charged with being insolent, impolite, and slanderous by royal officials. Still worse, royal officials humiliated them by declining to perform the established courtesies toward them. Nobles, judges, and town councillors in particular found themselves slighted by representatives of the king on all matters of political power and ceremonial. In the nineteenth-century historiographies about the rise of the modern state, as in the largely functionalist sociologies of the twentieth century, those dramatic confrontations between kings and subjects, intendants and local elites and other royal officials often have

Religious Ideology and Social Change: The Islamic Revival in Malaysia

Abstract: HE WORLD CANNOT BUT BE IMPRESSED by the resurgence of a newly confident and powerful Islam, whose political and economic impact has affected the course of many events during the late 1970s. The Islamic revival can be seen both as an international movement and one which has specific implications for individual Muslim countries with different meanings in local situations. What follows is a preliminary review of how the Islamic revival has impressed itself on the Muslim population of Malaysia and become an integral part of the political, economic, ethnic, linguistic and cultural scene. Over the past ten years in particular, Islam has been both an agent and symbol of the many rapid social changes now occurring on the peninsula. Not only has religion become a source of identity for various elements in Malaysian society, distinguishing Malays and non-Malays, but it also lies at the centre of a crisis of legitimacy now emerging among the various elites of Malay society.

Sex Roles in Social Movements: A Case Study of the Tenant Movement in New York City

Abstract: Many recent studies have documented the presence of sexism in American society, charted the oppressive impact of discrimination against women, and traced its sources.1 So ubiquitous is sexism, and so pervasive the engines supporting it, that, ironically, its trace may be found even within movements for social justice. A literature is now developing that describes the part women have played in social movements and the sexism they encountered there. This is largely descriptive, focusing on the ideological interchange between party leadership and feminists.2

Postmodernism and China

Abstract: Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism. Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a postsocialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity in—as well as its resistance to—the culture of global capitalism. Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has so far been confined—in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds—to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism. First published as a special issue of boundary 2 , Postmodernism and China includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies. Contributors . Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang, Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, Xudong Zhang

Teacher Education and the Ideology of Social Control.

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between teacher education and the ideology of social control. It does this by looking at the dialectical tension that exists between teacher-education programs ...

The Fading of the Maoist Vision: City and Country in China's Development

Abstract: First published in 1980. This book analyzes Chinese society and evaluates the achievements and failures of the Maoist ideology. The central theme is the urban and rural balance in China's development from the Revolution to the late twentieth century. The Fading of the Maoist Vision shows how the original Revolutionary blueprint was altered and the ways in which China has steered a different course from that charted by Mao as the ideological vision encountered an increasingly pressing set of economic realities. The book: * Is particularly valuable in setting China's achievements in the larger context of global ideas about the problems of national development and by comparing them to the experience of India in its pursuit of the Gandhian ideal.

World Distribution of Theories of Illness

Abstract: Anthropological attention was first drawn to the significance of theories of illness in I932 by Forrest E. Clements in a pioneer paper on "Primitive Concepts of Disease" (University of Californiv Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 32: I85-252). This clearly demonstrated that the explanations of illness current among most of the peoples of the world have little in common with those recognized by modern medical science and relate much more closely to the ideology of primitive religion. Indeed, such scholars as Edward B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, London, I87I) have suggested that religion itself is derived from them. The reader who accepts such a view prematurely, however, is likely to form a seriously erroneous conception of primitive medicine and overlook its substantial component of sound pragmatic knowledge. In every human society countless generations have faced their health problems, like their technological problems, by trial-and-error behavior, during the course of which maladaptive responses have gradually given way to better adjustments in the normal cumulative process which we know as cultural evolution. To avoid later misunderstanding it seems advisable to underline this point by citing examples of genuine medical achievements in several of the societies we shall consider as reported by the senior author in an earlier publication (Our Primitive Contemporogries, New York,

Work, Ideology, and Science: The Case of Medicine:

Abstract: This article discusses the nature of work, ideology, and science in Western capitalist societies. It analyzes how capitalist or bourgeois ideology reproduces capitalist dominance in the spheres of production (Section I), politics (Section II), and science and medicine (Section III). Also, this article explains how the working class responds to that capitalist dominance through a continuous process of class struggle. Sections I, II, and II show how class struggle affects bourgeois dominance in the processes of production, politics, and science and medicine, respectively. Special focus in Section III is on the analysis of (a) how bourgeois dominance appears in science and medicine, (b) how bourgeois ideology appears and is reproduced in medical knowledge, and (c) how class struggle determines the nature of scientific and medical knowledge. In this section, an alternative mode of production of scientific and medical knowledge, different from the prevalent bourgeois one, is presented and discussed. In all thr...