IDEOLOGIES

An ideology is The term was coined by

a consistent French philosopher
pattern of Count Antoine Destutt
de Tracy who used it to
opinion on
refer to a new science of
particular issues ideas.
that stems from
a core belief or An ideology is
set of beliefs. basically a plan to
improve society.
 PARTY
IDEOLOGY PLATFORM

GOVERNMENT
GOVERNMENT
PROGRAMS & POLICIES
PROJECTS
In this discussion, we will talk about
your view regarding giving the
government a bigger role in the area of
your economic/financial life; whether you
are in favor, or opposed;

and your view regarding giving the

government greater role in the
area of our social lives/values; whether
you are in favor, or opposed.
People who favor giving the government a bigger role
in the area of economic security are Economic/Fiscal Liberals.

People who oppose giving the government a bigger

role in the area of economic security are Economic/Fiscal
Conservatives.

People who favor giving the government a bigger role

in the area of social lives Social Conservatives.

People who oppose giving the government a bigger role

in the area of social lives are Social Liberals.
Classical Liberalism
• began in 1776 with the publication
of the book The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith.

• The central thesis of The Wealth

of Nations is that capital is best
employed for the production and
distribution of wealth under
conditions of governmental
non-interference, or laissez-faire,
and free trade.
In Smith's view,
• the production and
exchange of goods can be
stimulated, and a
• consequent rise in the
general standard of living
attained,
• only through the efficient
operations of private
industrial and commercial
entrepreneurs acting
• with a minimum of
regulation and control by
governments.
To explain this concept of government maintaining a
laissez-faire attitude toward commercial endeavors,
Smith proclaimed the principle of the “invisible hand”:
Every individual in pursuing his or her own good is led,
as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for
all.

Therefore any interference with free competition by

government is almost certain to be injurious.
• He refuted mercantilism by saying
that the true wealth of nations is not
in the amount of bullion but in the
amount of goods and services
produced by the people of a
country.

• Under mercantilism, the government • This became

supervised the economy with plans, the ideology of
grants monopolies, subsidies, tariffs, liberalism
and other restraints on trade.
(from the Latin
liber, meaning
free).
The view of liberalism
is that :

• the market will regulate the

economy,

• with the result that efficient

producers will prosper and the
inefficient will die,

• so the public will get the best

products for the lowest prices.
• Prices will be determined
by supply and demand
and the economy will be
regulated by the
“invisible hand” (the
desire for profit).

• The ideology believes in

the maxim, “that
government is best that
governs less,” (Thomas
Jefferson).
In the late 19th Century, it split into two ideologies: modern
conservatism and modern liberalism.

Classical Liberalism

Modern Modern
Conservatism Liberalism
Modern Liberalism was a reaction to the
defects of the laissez-faire system.

it argued that since the free market was not

completely self-regulating , and the
competition was not perfect
(for manufacturers tend to rig the
market and monopolies arose},

it proposes that the government should step

into the marketplace to guarantee a level
playing field for everyone.
The laissez-faire system
produced an underclass (the
poor) who suffered the most
during economic depressions.

Even class positions turned out to

be inherited because children of
better-off families got a good
education and the right
connections.
Thomas Hill Green an
advocate of liberalism in the
1880s argued that while
liberalism tries to achieve a free
society, economic developments
take away that freedom.

Contracts prove to be unfair if

the bargaining power of the two
parties is unequal.
Classic conservatism proposes that the
best practices and institutions in history
should be conserved and change should
be gradual.

Edmund Burke argued that people are

only partly rational, because they also
have widely irrational passions.

Therefore society needs traditions,

institutions and standards of morality in
order to contain the irrational passions of
man.
In his classic treatise Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
argued that man’s natural state was war.

Governments, particularly a monarchy, was

necessary to restrain man’s bestial tendencies
because life without government was a “state of
nature.”

Without written, enforceable rules, people would

live like animals—foraging for food, stealing and
killing when necessary.
To escape the horrors of the natural state
and to protect their lives, Hobbes argued
men must give up to government certain
rights.

governments had to intrude on people’s

rights and liberties to control society and
provide the necessary safeguards for
property.
Modern Conservatism is the ideology that
continues its allegiance to Adam Smith’s original
doctrine of minimal government.

Milton Friedman (Nobel Laureate) argued that

Smith was right and that the free market is still
the best environment.
Conservatism emphasize the marketplace as
the means of distributing economic benefits.

It also looks up to the government in upholding

conservative values.

Advocates included US President Ronald

Reagan and British PM Margaret Thatcher.
Socialism/Communism can be defined
as an ideology that rejects individualism,
private ownership, and private profits in
favor of a system based on economic
collectivism, governmental, societal or
industrial group ownership of the means
of production and distribution of goods
and social responsibility.
François-Noel Babeuf who
advocated economic equality and
common ownership of land is the
Father of modern socialism.

His ideas were adapted and

moderated by the so-called utopian
socialists including Claude Henri de
Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simonde
(1760-1825) and François
Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837).
Louis Blanc (1811-1882), was active in
worker uprisings in 1848,

advocated a more down-to-earth form of

socialism, including the establishment of
worker-controlled councils and workshops.

Out of this ferment evolved the theories and

methods espoused by most left-wing
ideologies of the 20th century, from
revolutionary communism to democratic
socialism.
• Socialism/Communism is sometimes
labeled Marxism after its founder, Karl
Marx (1818-1883).

• Marx and his associate Friedrich

Engels broke with the more benign
utopian socialists, asserting that a
radical transformation of society could
only be attained by open class conflict.
Marx and Engels opened their Communist
Manifesto (1848) with the bold assertion “All
history is the history of class struggle.” This
statement is based on two premises:

Economic or material forces are behind all

human activity; and
In history, change and progress are produced
by a constant clash of conflicting economic
forces—or, to use the term borrowed from
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), by a process
Marxists call dialectic materialism.
• Marxist theory:

• Main feature of modern

industrial capitalism is the
streamlining of society into
two antagonistic classes—the
capitalists who own the
means of production, and the
proletariat, who have no
choice but to work long hours
for subsistence wages.
• The difference between
those wages and the
value of the products
created through the
worker’s labor is surplus
value, or excessive profits,
which the capitalists
pocket.

• In this way, capitalists

systematically exploit the
workers and unwittingly
lay the groundwork for a
proletarian revolution.
• The overthrow of capitalism
comes as a result of the
widening of the gap between
the rich and the poor.

• As human labor is replaced by

more cost-effective machine
labor, unemployment grows,
purchasing power dwindles,
and domestic market shrink.
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924),
the founder of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and
the foremost leader of the
Russian Revolution of 1917;

violent mass action is necessary

to bring about radical change.
Lenin argued that parliamentary
democracy and “bourgeois legality”
were mere superstructures designed
to mask the underlying reality of
capitalist exploitation.

As a result, these revolutionaries

disdained the kind of representative
institutions prevalent in the United
States and Western Europe.
Social Democracy as an ideology was articulated in the book
The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism by Eduard Bernstein.

He concluded that Marx has been wrong about the necessity for
collapse of the system and revolution.
He was criticised as a revisionist
for revising Marxism in this way.

No longer advocate
nationalization of industries but
the use of welfare measures to
improve living conditions.

is the process
Such welfare measures include of transforming private assets
employment insurance, national into public assets by bringing
medical plans, generous them under the public ownership
pensions, and subsidized food of a national government or
and housing. state.
Social democracies are no longer socialist
states as much as they are welfare states.

Welfare states however, have to impose high

taxes in order to pay for welfare measures.
Anarchism is an ideology that stresses belief in the ability of
men and women to establish functioning communities without
the need for the apparatus of state.
• It advocates the destruction of the existing society by
revolution for the birth of a new and better one.
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) and
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) claim
that the state is a parasite and an
enemy of the people.

They encouraged the abolition of

private property and the exposition
of fraud in the guise of religion.

They glorify revolution as the only

way to effect change.
Classical Anarchy. This is a kind
of anarchy where violence is a
necessity to uproot the old
system to counter resistance of
the ruling class. It is intensely
critical of social and political roles
of religion in deceiving the
people.

Anarcho-individualist. One’s
protest may be in the form of
radical pacifism, renouncing
revolutionary violence against the
state.
 Anarcho-syndicalist. This praises the role of trade unions,
advocates general strikes and prefers civil disobedience.
Its basis is the supreme value and
importance of individual freedom.

This freedom is deemed as the

superior moral right of man against
any law or policy of the state.

An individual bases his civil

disobedience on personal and ethical
consideration.
 Utopian Socialism

Socialists/
Communists/Marxists

Revolutionary Social Classical Anarchy

Marxist Groups Democracy Anarcho-Individualists
Anarcho-syndicalists
 is defined
as devotion to the interests
or glory of one’s own
country.

• It has been described as an

“exaggerated belief in the
greatness and unity of
one’s country.”

• It began as a mass
movement with the French
Revolution.
• It generally arises when a
population perceives that
there is an enemy or an
“other” to despise and
struggle against.

• It is fired by the
passionate feeling that it
is wrong to be ruled by
others.
It is weak on content as an ideology because it does not take
a definite ideological position on such issues as
unemployment, economic growth or mass poverty.
• In the past it was explosive as it sought to free a nation
from foreign domination; today it is implosive because
the more common thrust is to break up a state into
many nations.
 The extreme form of nationalism is fascism which held
sway in Italy and Germany in the 1930s to the 1940s.
In both, it was identifiable by “the uniform, the flair for
spectacle, the hatred for democracy, the one party
state, and the single dictator.”

Hitler utilized German racism by extolling the

Germans as a distinct and superior race.

Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by

dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong
regimentation of society and of the economy.

is a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race
above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government
headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and
forcible suppression of opposition.
 Classifications of Ideologies

Ideologies follow a system of classification described as

left, right, and centre.

This is based on the sitting arrangement of the French

National Assembly of 1789 where members are seated in
a semi-circular chamber.
The conservatives who
favoured the retention
of the monarchy were
seated to the Speaker’s
right.

The radicals (who favoured The moderates were seated in the centre.
abolition) to the left.
Today, “left” means an ideology that
favors equality, welfare programs and
sometimes, government intervention
in the economy.

The “right” stresses individual initiative

and private economic activity.

The “centre” tries to moderate the

views of the left and the right.
 Role for the government
in the area of economic security.

Favor Oppose

Role
of the Favor Populist Conservative
government
in the area of
upholding
traditional values. Oppose Liberal Libertarian
Populism is an ideology
that favours an activist
government as a means
of promoting economic
security as well as the
personal values of
people.

Libertarianism is an
ideology that rejects the
view of the government
as an instrument of
traditional values and of
economic security.
Political Spectrums