Abstract
I argue that contemporary accounts of ideology critique—paradigmatically those advanced by Haslanger, Jaeggi, Celikates, and Stanley—are either inadequate or redundant. The Marxian concept of ideology—a collective epistemic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements—has recently returned to the forefront of debates in contemporary analytic social philosophy. Ideology critique has similarly emerged as a technique for combating such social ills by remedying those collective epistemic distortions. Ideologies are sets of social meanings or shared understandings. I argue in this paper that because agents must coordinate on them to be mutually intelligible, ideologies, on the fashionable contemporary account, are conventions. They are equilibrium solutions to a particular kind of social coordination problem. The worry is that changing pernicious conventions requires more than the epistemic remedy contemporary critical social theorists prescribe. It also requires overcoming strategic impediments like high first-mover costs. Thus contemporary proponents of ideology critique—the “new ideology critics,” as I’ll call them—face a dilemma. Either their account of social change fails to account for important strategic impediments to social change, in which case it is inadequate, or it incorporates a theory of strategic behavior, and thus merely reinvents the wheel, poorly. It adds nothing to prominent convention-based accounts of social change in the social sciences. More generally, this is an example of a pernicious trend in contemporary critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theorists have abandoned their predecessors’ commitment to engaging with social science, thereby undermining their efforts.
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Notes
For example, in 2016 Yale held a conference on ideology, which has resulted in a forthcoming edited volume. Cf. Celikates et al. (2019).
"Strategic" just means that the outcome of some action that someone might take depends on what actions other people take. The study of strategic behavior is called game theory. Most broadly Marxian social theory fails to account for strategic behavior; notable (and noble) exceptions include Elster (1985) and Sensat (1988).
Cf. Haslanger (2017a, 8): "Ideology…is intended to function as an answer to the explanatory question: What explains persistent racial injustice?".
Rosen (1996, Ch. 6).
Horkheimer (1937); Haslanger has explicitly self-identified as a critical theorist. I explicitly lay out my targets in footnote 3 above.
For our purposes, ideology is defined functionally. This is not the same thing as "functionalism" about ideology, according to which the functional role of an ideology causally explains its prevalence. Cf. Cohen (2001, Ch. IX, X), and Cohen (1982), the rejoinder to Cohen by Elster (1982). None of what I attribute to my interlocutors entails their being committed to a functionalist explanatory strategy; perhaps some of them are. For more on this debate cf. Heath (2015a)
Boas and Gans-Morse (2009).
Cf. Eagleton (2004): "As with bad breath, ideology is always what the other person has".
Jaeggi (2008, 64).
Haslanger (2017a, 16).
The idea of a "perspective" from analytical political philosophy is also similar: viz., "Perspectives are simply the filters that we use to view the world….we…(consciously or unconsciously) choose to group certain features together, choose to ignore certain information while focusing on other information, and choose systems of representation and interpretation." (Muldoon 2016, 48–49) Cf. also Gaus (2017, 158–176); cf. also Bicchieri (2006, 93–94) on "schemata" and "scripts".
Geuss (1981) distinguishes between ideology in the descriptive and the pejorative sense. The new ideology critics and I use the term in the pejorative sense; ideology in the purely descriptive sense is just constituted by feature 1. Geuss and Shelby use the term "form of consciousness" to denote ideology in the merely descriptive sense. Haslanger uses the term "cultural techne" for the same purpose, presumably to emphasize that inhabiting such a thing is a kind of learned practical skill.
Cf. Muldoon (2017) for a clear statement of how this works.
Wood (1972) is a lovely, clear account of how this works.
Wood (1972, 257).
Ibid. 256–257.
Ibid. 255.
Haslanger (2017b, 150).
Haslanger (2017c, 11).
Shelby (2014, 66).
Note that the new ideology critics embrace a somewhat broader application of ideology than their predecessors. Traditionally, ideology is a collective irrationality that's supposed to explain why people help reproduce their own oppression. Cf. Heath (2001, 163). The new ideology critics, however, don't seem to restrict themselves to cases of people acting against their own interests. Rather, they're concerned with oppression and domination more generally. Thanks to Allen Buchanan and an anonymous referee for making this clear to me.
Cf. Goodman (1989, 80): The terms “convention” and “conventional” are flagrantly and intricately ambiguous. On the one hand, the conventional is the ordinary, the usual, the traditional, the orthodox as against the novel, the deviant, the unexpected, the heterodox. On the other hand, the conventional is the artificial, the invented, the optional, as against the natural, the fundamental, the mandatory.
Technically, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Each player's best response, conditional on the strategies of all the other players, is to play the same strategy as each of the other players.
There are lots of different equilibrium concepts and I'm trying to stay neutral among them, because it's not clear which one applies here.
Haslanger (2017a, 13).
Tomasello (2014, 85).
Haslanger (2017c, 12).
Schelling (1960, 91).
Haslanger (2017c, 43–44). Capitalization in the original.
Ibid. 1007.
This common way of understanding rational choice theory comes from e.g. Green and Shapiro (1994) and Satz and Frerejohn (1994). Cf. Lovett (2016, 238): "For the most part, people view [Rational Choice Theory] as a species of intentional explanation. Roughly, according to this view, the point of RCT is to explain social phenomena by showing how they arise from the deliberate or intentional pursuit of self-interest by social actors (and especially, individual persons)." Lovett (2016) is an extended, and to my mind, convincing argument against this position.
Cf. Elster (1986).
But cf. Heath (2001) for some skepticism about this.
Celikates (2006, 33).
Haslanger (2017a, 19).
Haslanger (2017b, 169).
Haslanger (2017c, 46–47).
Mackie (1996, 1008).
Ibid.
Ibid. 1004.
Ibid. 1004: "The most common explanation given by participants is that infibulation is required for marriage and honor".
Cf. also Bicchieri (2017, 108–111).
Mackie (1996, 1000, 1003).
Kuran (1995, 78).
Mackie (1996, 1011).
Mackie (1996, 1008): "As measured by a sociologist's data, for example, the population of Tinghsien, a conservative rural area 125 miles south of Peking, went from 99 percent bound in 1889 to 94 percent bound in 1899 to zero bound in 1919".
Mackie (2000, 257).
Haslanger (2017c, 24).
Haslanger (2017c, 25).
Feminist consciousness-raising groups might also be an example of this.
A representative example is Haslanger (2017b, 169); this theme appears throughout the paper.
This should not be taken as an endorsement of the "meta-ethical" claim that morality is conventional, though I think that's a stance I endorse; rather, by the phrase "moral convention" I mean a set of moral commitments accepted in general, and which have the formal structure of conventions.
Bicchieri (2017, 121).
Bicchieri (2017, 132).
Ibid.
Both good and bad ones, but let's concentrate on the pernicious ones.
Bicchieri (2017, 133).
Mackie (1996, 1004).
Mackie (1996, 1009).
Bicchieri (2017, 137).
Bicchieri (2017, 139).
Ibid. 139–140.
Haslanger (2017a, 10).
Jay (1996, Ch. 7).
Celikates (2017, 846). Italics in original.
One notable and noble exception is Joseph Heath.
Buchanan and Powell (2018, 147). There are a number of examples of social-scientific literature on topics of interest to the New Ideology Critics. Here is an incredibly abbreviated list of works on the causes of persistent racial inequality: cf. Fryer (2010), Hutt (1964), Loury (1994), and Rothstein (2017).
Haslanger (2017b, 156).
Kahan et al. (2012).
Cf. Bolinger (2017, Section IV, and fn.19–31) for a discussion.
Buchanan and Powell (2018, 318).
Ibid., 316.
Ibid.
Stanley (2015).
Brennan (2017).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks especially to Matthew Adams, Jake Monaghan, and Daniel Muñoz, all of whom read multiple drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Jonny Anomaly, Jacob Barrett, Allen Buchanan, Cesar Cabezas, Gianna Englert, Dave Estlund (who suggested the title), Arianna Falbo, Jeff Feldman, Jerry Gaus, Nick Geiser, Adam Gjesdal, Charles Larmore, Rachel Leadon, Ferris Lupino, Chad Marxen, Sam Meister, Thomas Moore, Alex Motchoulski, Julian Mueller, Ryan Muldoon, Adam Pautz, Phil Smolenski, Valerie Soon, Bobby Wallace, Taylor White, various anonymous referees, and audiences at the 2016 Princeton Workshop in Social Philosophy, 2017 Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Society, New England Political Science Association meeting, and North American Society for Social Philosophy meetings, ECAP IX, and the Brown Graduate Political Philosophy Workshop for comments, feedback, and helpful discussion.
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Sankaran, K. What’s new in the new ideology critique?. Philos Stud 177, 1441–1462 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01261-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01261-9