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Ideology

Ideology

An ideology is a collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a "science of ideas." An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (for the Marxist definition of ideology - see Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction).

Ideology in everyday society

Every society has an ideology that forms the basis of the "public opinion" or common sense, a basis that usually remains invisible to most people within the society. This dominant ideology appears as "neutral", while all others that differ from the norm are often seen as radical, no matter what the actual vision may be. The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about this concept of apparent ideological neutrality. Organisations that strive for power influence the ideology of a society to become what they want it to be. Political organisations (governments included) and other groups (e.g. lobbyists) try to influence people by broadcasting their opinions, which is the reason why so often many people in a society seem to "think alike". When most people in a society think alike about certain matters, or even forget that there are alternatives to the current state of affairs, we arrive at the concept of Hegemony, about which the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. The much smaller scale concept of groupthink also owes something to his work. Modern linguists study the mechanism of conceptual metaphor, by which this 'thinking alike' is thought to be transmitted. There are many different kinds of ideology: political, social, epistemological, ethical, and so on. Meta-ideology is the study of the structure, form, and manifestation of ideologies. Meta-ideology posits that ideology is a system of ideas and thoughts bound by an internal logic and a few basic assumptions about reality that have no real factual basis, but are arbitrary choices that serve as the seed around which ideologies grow. According to this train of thought, ideologies are neither right nor wrong, but only a relativistic intellectual strategy for categorizing the world.

Political ideologies

In social studies, a political ideology is a certain ethical, set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explain how society should work, and offer some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. It can be a construct of political thought, often defining political parties and their policy. Studies of the concept of ideology itself (rather than specific ideologies) have been carried out under the name of systematic ideology. Political ideologies regard policies of many different aspects of a society, the most central of which are: economy, education, criminal law, management of criminals, minors, animals, environment, immigration, eugenics, race, use of the military, forced nationalism, forced religion

List of political ideologies

There are many proposed methods for the classification of political ideologies. See the political spectrum article for a more in-depth discussion of these different methods (each of whom generates a specific political spectrum). The following list attempts to divide ideologies into a number of groups; each group contains ideologies that have a certain theme or idea in common. Note that one ideology can belong to several groups, and there is sometimes considerable overlap between related ideologies.

Ideologies emphasizing ethnicity or nationality


- ethnic supremacy
- fascism, neo-Fascism
  - clerical fascism
- Multiculturalism
- Nazism, neo-Nazism
- racism, racialism
- Pan-Arabism
- Pan-Africanism
- Pan-Iranism
- Pan-Slavism
- sultanism
- black nationalism
- white nationalism

Ideologies emphasizing class struggle


- Marxism, Leninism
  - 'Marxism-Leninism'
  - Stalinism
  - Maoism
  - Trotskyism
  - left communism
  - council communism
  - eurocommunism
- neo-Marxism
- anarchism
  - anarcho-syndicalism
  - anarcho-socialism
  - anarcho-communism

Ideologies emphasizing the individual


  - Christian anarchism
  - individualist anarchism
  - libertarian socialism
- liberalism
  - social liberalism
  - ordoliberalism
  - classical liberalism
  - liberal conservatism
  - market liberalism
  - economic liberalism
  - new liberalism
  - neoliberalism
- American liberalism
- libertarianism
  - anarcho-capitalism
  - neolibertarianism
  - minarchism
  - paleolibertianism
  - geolibertarianism
- georgism
- autonomism
- existentialism
- capitalism
  - unregulated capitalism
  - regulated capitalism

Ideologies and social-systems emphasizing the collectivity


- communitarianism
- communism, collectivism, egalitarianism
- Marxism
- socialism
  - African socialism
  - religious socialism
    - Christian socialism
  - democratic socialism
  - infosocialism
  - international socialism
  - libertarian socialism
  - Popular Socialism
  - utopian socialism
  - Peronism

Ideologies emphasizing territory


- nationalism
- regionalism
- Pan-Africanism
- Pan-Arabism
- Pan-Iranism
- Nazism

Ideologies based on religion


- Christian based ideologies
  - Christian anarchism
  - Christian communism
  - Christian democracy
  - Christian socialism
  - clerical fascism
- Hindu-based ideologies
  - Hindu nationalism
- Islamic-based ideologies
  - Islamism, Muslim fundamentalism
- Jewish-based ideologies
  - religious Zionism
- theocracy
  - neo-theocracy
- communalism (South Asia)
- religious communism
- religious socialism

Conservatism


- conservatism
  - liberal conservatism
  - paleoconservatism
  - neoconservatism
  - compassionate conservatism
  - social conservatism

Other ideologies


- centrism
- federalism
- feminism
- green politics
  - animal welfarism
- internationalism, cosmopolitanism
- pacifism
- republicanism
- syndicalism
- pragmatism
- majoritarianism
- utilitarianism
- law

Epistemological ideologies

Even when the challenging of existing beliefs is encouraged, as in science, the dominant paradigm or mindset can prevent certain challenges, theories or experiments from being advanced. The philosophy of science mostly concerns itself with reducing the impact of these prior ideologies so that science can proceed with its primary task, which is (according to science) to create knowledge. There are critics who view science as an ideology in itself, or being an effective ideology, called scientism. Some scientists respond that, while the scientific method is itself an ideology, as it is a collection of ideas, there is nothing particularly wrong or bad about it. Other critics point out that while science itself is not a misleading ideology, there are some fields of study within science that are misleading. Two examples discussed here are in the fields of ecology and economics. A special case of science adopted as ideology is that of ecology, which studies the relationships between living things on Earth. Perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson believed that human perception of ecological relationships was the basis of self-awareness and cognition itself. Linguist George Lakoff has proposed a cognitive science of mathematics wherein even the most fundamental ideas of arithmetic would be seen as consequences or products of human perception - which is itself necessarily evolved within an ecology. Deep ecology and the modern ecology movement (and, to a lesser degree, Green parties) appear to have adopted ecological sciences as a positive ideology. Some accuse ecological economics of likewise turning scientific theory into political economy, although theses in that science can often be tested. The modern practice of green economics fuses both approaches and seems to be part science, part ideology. This is far from the only theory of economics to be raised to ideology status - some notable economically-based ideologies include mercantilism, social darwinism, communism, laissez-faire economics, and "free trade". There are also current theories of safe trade and fair trade which can be seen as ideologies.

History of the concept of ideology

Perhaps the most accessible source for the original meaning of "ideology" is Hippolyte Taine's work on the Ancien Regime (first volume of "Origins of Contemporary France"). He describes ideology as rather like teaching philosophy by the Socratic method, but without extending the vocabulary beyond what the general reader already possessed, and without the examples from observation which practical science would require. Taine identifies it not just with Destutt de Tracy, but with his milieu, and includes Condillac as one of its precursors. The word "ideology" was coined long before the Russians coined "intelligentsia", or before the adjective "intellectual" referred to a sort of person (a substantive). Thus these words were not around when the hard-headed, driven Napoleon Bonaparte took the word "ideologues" to ridicule his intellectual opponents.

Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction

Karl Marx proposed a base/superstructure model of society. The base refers to the means of production of society. The superstructure is formed on top of the base, and comprises that society's ideology, as well as its legal system, political system, and religions. For Marx, the base determines the superstructure. Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, including its ideology, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. Critics of the Marxist approach feel that it attributes too much importance to economic factors in influencing society. The ideologies of the dominant class of a society are proposed to all members of that society in order to make the ruling class' interests appear to be the interests of all. György Lukács describes this as a projection of the class consciousness of the ruling class, while Antonio Gramsci advances the theory of cultural hegemony to explain why people in the working-class can have a false conception of their own interests. Louis Althusser proposed that ideology makes use of a special type of discourse: the lacunar discourse. A number of propositions, which are never untrue, suggest a number of other propositions, which are. In this way, the essence of the lacunar discourse is what is not told (but is suggested). For example, the statement 'All are equal before the law', which is a theory behind current legal systems, suggests that all people may be of equal worth or have equal 'opportunities'. This is not true, because the concept of private property over the means of production results in some people being able to own more (much more) than others, and their property brings power and influence (the rich can afford better lawyers, among other things, and this puts in question the principle of equality before the law). The dominant forms of ideology in capitalism are (in chronological order): #classical liberalism #social democracy #neo-liberalism and they correspond to the stages of development of capitalism: #extensive stage #intensive stage #contemporary capitalism (or late capitalism, or current crisis) Other dominant forms of capitalist ideology such as social darwinism cannot be related to a specific phase. The Marxist view of ideology as an instrument of social reproduction has been an important touchstone for the sociology of knowledge and theorists such as Karl Mannheim, Daniel Bell and Jürgen Habermas amongst many others.

Feminism as critique of ideology

Naturalizing socially constructed patterns of behavior has always been an important mechanism in the production and reproduction of ideologies. Feminist theorists have paid close attention to these mechanisms. Adrienne Rich e.g. has shown how to understand motherhood as a social institution. ko:이데올로기

External Links


- [http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/ The Strength of an Idea]

Destutt de Tracy

Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (July 20, 1754 - March 9, 1836), was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". The son of a distinguished soldier, he was born in the Bourbonnais. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who in 1420 had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France, and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army, and when the French Revolution broke out, he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais. Elected a deputy of the nobility to the states-general, he sat alongside his friend, the Marquis de La Fayette. In the spring of 1792 he received the rank of maréchal de camp in command of the cavalry in the army of the north; but the influence of the extremists becoming predominant he took indefinite leave of absence, and settled at Auteuil, where, with Condorcet and Cabanis, he devoted himself to scientific studies. Under the Reign of Terror he was arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studied Condillac and Locke, and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy. On the motion of Cabanis, he was named associate of the Institute in the class of the moral and political sciences. He soon began to attract attention by the memoires which he read before his colleagues--papers which formed the first draft of his comprehensive work on ideology, named Elements d'idéologie. He conceived ideology of it as the "science of ideas." The society of "ideologists" at Auteuil embraced, besides Cabanis and Tracy, Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney and Dominique Joseph Garat, professor in the National Institute. Under the Empire, Tracy was a member of the senate, but took little part in its deliberations. Under the Restoration he became a peer of France, but protested against the reactionary split of the government, and remained in opposition. In 1808 he was elected a member of the Académie française in place of Cabanis, and in 1832 he was also named a member of the Academy of Moral Sciences on its reorganization. He appeared, however, only once at its conferences, owing to his age and to disappointment at the comparative failure of his work. Destutt de Tracy was one of the principal advocates of liberalism during and after the Revolution. His advocacy of reason in philosophy and laissez-faire economics lost him favor with Napoleon. He died in Paris. Destutt de Tracy was the last eminent representative of the sensualistic school which Condillac founded in France upon a one-sided interpretation of Locke. He pushed the sensualistic principles of Condillac to their last consequences, being in full agreement with the materialistic views of Cabanis, though the attention of the latter was devoted more to the physiological, that of Tracy to the psychological or "ideological" side of man. His ideology, he frankly stated, formed "a part of zoology," (biology). The four faculties into which he divides the conscious life--perception, memory, judgment, will--are all varieties of sensation. Perception is sensation caused by a present affection of the external extremities of the nerves; memory is sensation caused, in the absence of present excitation, by dispositions of the nerves which are the result of past experiences; judgment is the perception of relations between sensations, and is itself a species of sensation, because if we are aware of the sensations we must be aware also of the relations between them; will he identifies with the feeling of desire, and therefore includes it as a variety of sensation. It is easy to see that such conclusions ignore important distinctions, and are, indeed, to a large extent an abuse of language. As a psychologist de Tracy deserves credit for his distinction between active and passive touch, which developed into the theory of the muscular sense. His account of the notion of external existence, as derived, not from pure sensation, but from the experience of action on the one hand and resistance on the other, may be compared with the work of Alexander Bain and later psychologists. His chief works are Eléments d'idéologie (1817-1818), in which he presented the complete statement of his earlier monographs; Commentaire sur l'esprit des lois de Montesquieu (1806; Eng. trans., Thomas Jefferson, 1811); Essai sur le génie, et les ouvrages de Montesquieu (1808). See histories of philosophy, especially F Picavet, Les Idéologues chs. v. and vi. (Paris, 1891), and La Philosophie de Biran (Académie des sci. mor. et pol., 1889).

References


- Destutt de Tracy Destutt de Tracy Destutt de Tracy

18th century

As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800 in the Gregorian calendar. European history scholars will sometimes specifically refer to the 18th century as 1715-1789, denoting the period of time between the death of Louis XIV of France and the start of the French Revolution.

Events


- 1701-14: War of the Spanish Succession
- 1703: Saint Petersburg founded by Peter the Great. Russian capital until 1918.
- 1707: Act of Union passed merging the Scottish and the English Parliaments, thus establishing The Kingdom of Great Britain.
- 1707: After Aurangzeb's death, the Mughal Empire enters a long decline.
- 1715: Louis XIV dies
- 1718: City of New Orleans founded by the French in North America
- 1720: The South Sea Bubble
- 1721: Robert Walpole becomes the first Prime Minister of Great Britain (de facto).
- 1721: Treaty of Nystad signed, ending the Great Northern War.
- 1722: Afghans conquer Iran, ending the Safavid dynasty.
- 1722: Kangxi Emperor of China dies.
- 1733-38: War of the Polish Succession
- 1735-99: The Qianlong Emperor of China oversees a huge expansion in territory.
- 1736: Nadir Shah assumes title of Shah of Persia and founds the Afsharid dynasty. Rules until his death in 1747.
- 1739: Nadir Shah defeats the Mughals and sacks Delhi.
- 1740: Frederick the Great crowned King of Prussia.
- 1740-48: War of the Austrian Succession
- 1741: Russians begin settling the Aleutian Islands.
- 1747: Ahmad Shah founds the Durrani Empire in modern day Afghanistan.
- 1750: peak of the Little Ice Age
- 1755: The Lisbon earthquake
- 1756-63: Seven Years' War fought among European powers in various theaters around the world.
- 1757: Battle of Plassey signals the beginning of British rule in India.
- 1760: George III becomes King of Britain.
- 1762-96: Reign of Catherine the Great of Russia.
- 1763-66: Pontiac's Rebellion in North America
- 1766-99: Anglo-Mysore Wars
- 1767: Burmese conquer the Ayutthaya kingdom.
- 1768: Gurkhas conquer Nepal.
- 1768-1774: Russo-Turkish War
- 1769: Spanish missionaries establish the first of 21 missions in California.
- 1772-95: The Partitions of Poland end the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and erase Poland from the map for 123 years.
- 1775-82: First Anglo-Maratha War
- 1775-83: American Revolution
- 1779-1879: Cape Frontier Wars between British and Boer settlers and the Xhosas in South Africa
- 1785-95: Northwest Indian War between the United States and Native Americans
- 1787: Freed slaves from London found Freetown in present-day Sierra Leone.
- 1788: First European settlement established in Australia at Sydney.
- 1789: George Washington elected President of the United States. Serves until 1797.
- 1789-99: The French Revolution
- 1791-1804: The Haitian Revolution
- 1792-1815: The Great French War starts as the French Revolutionary Wars which lead into the Napoleonic Wars.
- 1792: New York Stock & Exchange Board founded.
- 1793: Upper Canada bans slavery.
- 1795: Pinckney's Treaty between the United States and Spain grants the Mississippi Territory to the US.
- 1796: British eject Dutch from Ceylon.
- 1796-1804: White Lotus Rebellion in China.
- 1797: Napoleon's invasion and partition of the Republic of Venice ends over 1,000 years of independence for the Serene Republic.
- 1798: Irish Rebellion against British Rule
- 1798-1800: Quasi-War between the United States and France.
- 1799: Napoleon stages a coup d'état and becomes dictator of France.
- 1799: Dutch East India Company is dissolved.

Significant people


- Ueda Akinari (Japanese writer)
- Queen Anne (British monarch)
- Marie Antoinette (French royalty and symbol of anti-Revolutionary ire)
- Benedict Arnold, considered a traitor by many people on both sides (United States and Britain) of the American Revolutionary War.
- Johann Sebastian Bach (composer)
- Pierre Beaumarchais (French writer)
- Jeremy Bentham (English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer)
- Napoleon Bonaparte (general and first consul of France)
- François Boucher (French painter)
- Edmund Burke (British statesman and philosopher who supported the American Revolution)
- Robert Burns (Scottish poet)
- Catherine the Great (Russian Tsaritsa)
- James Cook (British navigator)
- Denis Diderot (French writer and philosopher)
- Leonhard Euler (mathematician)
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French painter)
- Benjamin Franklin (American revolutionary, inventor, printer, and diplomat)
- Frederick the Great (Prussian monarch)
- Thomas Gainsborough (painter)
- King George III (British monarch)
- Christoph Willibald Gluck (German composer)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German writer)
- Thomas Gray (British writer)
- George Frideric Handel (German composer)
- Alexander Hamilton (American revolutionary, lawyer, and statesman)
- Joseph Haydn (Austrian composer)
- William Hogarth (painter and engraver)
- David Hume (philosopher)
- Thomas Jefferson (American revolutionary, philosopher, and statesman)
- Samuel Johnson (British writer and literary critic)
- Immanuel Kant (philosopher)
- Wolfgang von Kempelen (Hungarian scientist, pioneer in experimental phonetics)
- John Law (Scottish economist)
- Louis XIV of France (monarch)
- Louis XV of France (monarch)
- Louis XVI of France (monarch)
- James Madison (American revolutionary, writer, and statesman)
- Maria Theresa of Austria (Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia)
- Michikinikwa (Miami tribe chief and war leader)
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer)
- Thomas Paine (British intellectual and philosopher who advocated for the American Revolution)
- Philip II, Duke of Orléans (Regent of France)
- Alexander Pope (British poet)
- Francis II Rákóczi (prince of Hungary and Transylvania, leader of the Hungarian freedom war)
- Jean-Philippe Rameau (French composer and music theorist)
- Sir Joshua Reynolds (painter)
- Maximilien Robespierre (French Revolutionary leader and dictator)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French writer and philosopher)
- Friedrich Schiller (German writer)
- John Small, Sr (Hambledon cricketer; the first great batsman)
- Adam Smith (Scottish economist and philosopher)
- Laurence Sterne (British writer)
- Edward "Lumpy" Stevens (Surrey cricketer; the first great bowler)
- Jonathan Swift (Anglo-Irish satirist)
- Tecumseh (Revolutionary)
- Voltaire (French writer and philosopher)
- George Washington (American revolutionary general and first president)
- John Wesley (Founder of Methodism, Anglican clergyman, English reformer, scholar, theologian and writer) See Founding Fathers of the United States

Inventions, discoveries, introductions

List of 18th century inventions
- Industrial Revolution begins
- The Encyclopédie by the Encyclopedists
- The English Dictionary by Samuel Johnson
- Economics by Adam Smith
- Rosetta stone discovered by Napoleon's troops.
- Vitus Bering discovered Alaska.
- James Cook mapped the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and discovered many Pacific Islands.
- Wahhabism by Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab

Decades and years


-
Category:Centuries Category:Industrial Revolution Category:Romanticism ko:18세기 ja:18世紀 th:คริสต์ศตวรรษที่ 18



IDEA

IDEA may refer to: #Electronic Directory of the European Institutions #IDEA League #Improvement and Development Agency #Individuals with Disabilities Education Act #Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance #Integrated Data Environments Australia #Intelligent Database Environment for Advanced Applications #IntelliJ IDEA - a Java IDE #Interactive Database for Energy-efficient Architecture #International Data Encryption Algorithm #International Debate Education Association #International Diving Educators Association #International Drama/Theatre and Education Association #Internet Delivery and Applications #Industrial Design Excellence Awards See also: Idea

Weltanschauung

A world view, (or worldview) is a term calqued from the German word Weltanschauung meaning a "look onto the world". It implies a concept fundamental to German philosophy and epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. It refers to the framework through which an individual interprets the world and interacts in it. The German word is also in wide use in English, as well as the "translated" form world outlook.

Weltanschauung and cognitive philosophy

One of the most important concepts in cognitive philosophy and generative sciences is the German concept of ‘Weltanschauung’. This expression refers to the 'wide worldview' or 'wide world perception' of a people. The Weltanschauung of a people originates from the unique world experience of a people, which they experience over several millennia. The language of a people reflects the Weltanschauung of that people in the form of its syntactic structures and untranslatable connotations and its denotations. A map of the world on the basis of Weltanschauung crosses political borders because Weltanschauung is the product of both political borders and common experiences of a people from a geographical region, environmental-climatic conditions, the economic resources available, socio-cultural systems and the linguistic family. The work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza aims to show the gene-linguistic co-evolution of people. The worldview map of the world would be similar to the linguistic map of the world. However, it would almost coincide with a map of the world drawn on the basis of music across people.

Weltanschauung as generative system

A worldview describes a consistent (to a varying degree) and integral sense of existence and provides a framework for generating, sustaining and applying knowledge. The linguistic relativity hypothesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf describes how the syntactic-semantic structure of a language becomes an underlying structure for the weltanschauung of a people through the organization of the causal perception of the world and the linguistic categorization of entities. As linguistic categorization emerges as a representation of worldview and causality, it further modifies social perception and thereby leads to a continual interaction between language and perception. The theory, or rather hypothesis, was well received in the late 1940s, but declined in prominence after a decade. In the 1990s new research has given further support for the linguistic relativity theory, in the works of Stephen Levinson and his team at the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen, The Netherlands [http://www.mpi.nl/world/]. The theory has also gained attention through the work of Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University. The 'construction of integrating worldviews' begins from fragments of worldviews offered to us by the different scientific disciplines and the various systems of knowledge. It is contributed to by different perspectives that exist in the world's different cultures. This is the main topic of research in the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Worldview and folk-epics

As natural language becomes manifestations of world perception, the literature of a people with common weltanschauung emerges as holistic representations of the wide world perception of the people. Thus the extent and commonality between world folk-epics becomes a manifestation of the commonality and extent of a worldview. Epic poems are shared often by people across political borders and across generations. Examples of such epics include the Nibelungenlied of the Germanic-Scandinavian people, The Silappadhikaram of the South Indian people, The Gilgamesh of the Mesopotamian-Sumerian civilization and the people of the fertile crescent at large, The Arabian nights of the Arab world and the Sundiata epic of the African people. See list of world folk-epics.

Influences of worldview

The term denotes a comprehensive set of opinions, seen as an organic unity, about the world as the medium and exercise of human existence. Weltanschauung serves as a framework for generating various dimensions of human perception and experience like knowledge, politics, economics, religion, culture, science, ethics. For example, worldview of causality as uni-directional, cyclic, or spiral generates a framework of the world that reflects these systems of causality. A uni-directional view of causality would generate a monotheistic view of the world with a beginning and an end and a single great force with a single end, e.g. Christianity and Islam; while a cyclic worldview of causality generates a religious tradition which is cyclic and seasonal and where in events and experiences recur in systematic patterns, e.g. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism and Hinduism. These worldviews of causality not only underlie religious traditions but also other aspects of thought like the purpose of history, political and economic theories, and systems like democracy, authoritarianism, anarchism, capitalism, socialism, and communism. The worldview of linear and non-linear causality generates various related/conflicting disciplines and approaches in scientific thinking. The weltanschauung of the temporal contiguity of act and event leads to underlying diversifications like determinism v/s free will. A worldview of Freewill leads to disciplines that are governed by simple laws that remain constant and which are static and empirical in scientific method; while a worldview of determinism generates disciplines that are governed with generative systems and rationalistic in scientific method. Some forms of Philosophical naturalism and materialism reject the validity of entities inaccessible to natural science. They view the scientific method as the most reliable model for building an understanding of the world.

Other aspects

In the language of the Third Reich, Weltanschauungen came to designate the instinctive understanding of complex geo-political problems by the Nazis, which allowed them to openly begin invasions, twist facts or violate human rights, in the name of a higher ideal and in accordance to their theory of the world.

See also


- Belief
- Cultural identity
- Ideology
- Metaphysics
- Ontology
- Paradigm
- Perspective
- Philosophy
- Point of view
- Reality
- Religion
- Scientific modeling
- Social reality
- Socially constructed reality

External links


- [http://cognation.stanford.edu/press/newscientist.pdf "You are what you speak"] - an essay on current research in linguistic relativity (Lera Boroditsky) (PDF) Category:Epistemology Category:Anthropology Category:Calques from German Category:Cognitive science Category:German loanwords category:Scientific modeling ja:世界観



Marxist

Marxism is the social theory and political practice based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and theorists of 19th century French socialism, to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his masterpiece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as Das Kapital. Since its inception and up to the present day, Marxism has been situated largely outside the political mainstream, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes exist in most countries around the world, and Marxism continues to enjoy significant intellectual respect in many circles. Das Kapital Das Kapital Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parliamentarian frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency (later known as Social Democracy) came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the Second International and these parties supported their own governments in World War One. This issue caused the communists to break away and form their own parties which became members of the Third International. The contemporary meanings of these terms was initially very different: Lenin, for example, was considered a social democrat until the mutation of the latter movement. Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary social movements and political parties around the world, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, relatively few countries have governments which describe themselves as Marxist. Although social democratic parties are in power in a number of Western nations, they long ago distanced themselves from their historical connections to Marx and his ideas. As of 2005, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China had governments in power which describe themselves as socialist in the Marxist sense. However, the private sector comprised more than 50% of the Chinese economy by this time and the Vietnamese government had also partially liberalized its economy. The Laotian and Cuban states maintained strong control over the means of production. While Marx theorized that such a socialist phase would eventually give way to a classless society in which the state essentially ceases to exist and workers collectively own the means of production (communism), such a development has yet to occur in any historical self-claimed Communist state, often due to an initial authoritarian regime's unwillingness to relinquish the power it gained in revolution. These historically communist states have generally followed a socialist, command economy model without making a transition to this hypothetical final stage. North Korea is another contemporary Communist state, though the official ideology of the Korean Workers' Party (originally led by Kim Il-sung and currently chaired by his son, Kim Jong-il,) Juche, does not follow doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism as had been espoused by the leadership of the Soviet Union. Libya is often thought of as a socialist state; it maintained ties with the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc and Communist states during the Cold War. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, describes the state's official ideology as Islamic socialism, and has labelled it a third way between capitalism and Marxism. Some libertarian members of the laissez-faire and individualist schools of thought believe the actions and principles of modern capitalist states or big governments can be understood as "Marxist". This point of view ignores the overall vision and general intent of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, for qualitative change to the economic system, and focuses on a few steps that Marx and Engels believed would occur, as workers emancipated themselves from the capitalist system, such as "Free education for all children in public schools". A few such reforms have been implemented — not by Marxists but in the forms of Keynesianism, the welfare state, new liberalism, social democracy and other minor changes to the capitalist system, in most capitalist states. To Marxists these reforms represent responses to political pressures from working-class political parties and unions, themselves responding to perceived abuses of the capitalist system. Further, in this view, many of these reforms reflect efforts to "save" or "improve" capitalism (without abolishing it) by coordinating economic actors and dealing with market failures. Further, although Marxism does see a role for a socialist "vanguard" government in representing the proletariat through a revolutionary period of indeterminate length, it sees an eventual lightening of that burden, a "withering away of the state."

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

market failure Marx's immensely rich and varied politico-theoretical preoccupations were initially influenced by his contact with Hegelian philosophy. Hegel proposed a form of idealism in which the progress of freedom is the guiding theme of human history. Freedom progresses by the development of ideas into their contraries. This process, dialectic, sometimes involves gradual accretion but at other times requires discontinuous leaps -- violent upheavals of previously existing status quo. World-historical figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte are, on the Hegelian reading, servants of a World Spirit whose Freedom has reconciled with the Necessity of History. Hegel's dialectical process included the personal as well as the natural, the ideal as well as the material. Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians and Marx attached himself to Bauer. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Marx and Engels quit the Young Hegelians and wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family," and "The German Ideology." Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of another Young Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach. (Feuerbach had not been one of Hegel's favorite pupils; when Feuerbach sent his thesis to Hegel, Hegel refused to reply. So, the title of Young Hegelian should be considered loosely when considering Feuerbach.) What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach, however, was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Friedrich Engels said in an 1846 essay they entitled "The German Ideology": :In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Also, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation and that was only published in the twentieth century), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper "Rheinische Zeitung" on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy. Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (although Engels was the one who coined this term and Marx himself never used it), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: :In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism. The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, but some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a short-hand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as "Grundrisse"). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists. In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History"), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism. Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the "Ethnological Notebooks" that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").

The political-economy roots of Marxism

Political economy is essential to this vision, and Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists. Political economy predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control. This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm] [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/ricardian.htm].) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take. Capital is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction. According to his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society. This investigation is commonly taken to commit Marx to a species of labor theory of value as described above. This and other intrinsic theories of economic value are incompatible with modern, predictive economics in which the theory of value is that of marginalism: on one side, technical production coefficients; on the other, subjective preferences. To neoclassical economists, the labor theory is the reason Marxism failed as an economic theory. Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory, are other important elements of Marxist economics. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary statistical techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible. Marx suggested that capitalist dynamics included the tendential law of a falling rate of profit. The general tendency could be explained by the actions of individual capitalists. Competition forced them to cut costs by boosting labour productivity, yet this technical change through mechanisation caused a corresponding fall in the "productivity of capital" (the output-capital ratio). As such the average rate of profit fell over the economy as a whole. Certain Marxist economists, such as Henryk Grossman and Paul Mattick Sr, have used this theoretical edifice to construct a theory of capitalist "breakdown". Others have explained it as an aspect of capitalist crisis, and prone to counter-tendencies during economic booms. Marx argues that capitalism is, in the words of Ernest Mandel, an editor of Marx's "Capital," a "gigantic enterprise of dehumanization." In "The Communist Manifesto," co-written with Engels and published in 1848, Marx and Engels describe the effects capitalism has on the individual and society: Capitalism "drowns the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalric enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation."

The liberal challenge

The Austrian School were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School; Marxist authors have decried the Austrian school as a "bourgeois" reaction to Marx. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists—including Rudolf Hilferding—attended his seminar in 1905-06. In the middle of the twentieth century, prominent US economist Paul Samuelson also devoted several journal articles to the alleged inconsistencies of Marxian theory. Later, neo-Ricardian Sraffians launched a significant attack on the labour theory of value.

Class analysis

Marxists believe that in its pure form capitalist society is divided into two powerful social classes:
- the working class or proletariat: Marx defined this class as "those individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production" whom he believed were responsible for creating the wealth of a society (buildings, bridges and furniture, for example, are physically built by members of this class). Ernest Mandel, in an introduction to Capital, updates this definition to mean people who work for a living (whether "white collar" or "blue collar") and who have no significant savings, where sufficiently large savings are typically invested in the abstract means of production on a shareholder basis.
- the bourgeoisie : those who "own the means of production" and exploit the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie: those who employ labor, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petty bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat. An example of this would be many small businesses giving way to fewer larger ones, without increasing the number of petty bourgeois bureaucrats required to administer each company. From a Marxist perspective, the actually-existing basic classes in today's advanced economies are the capitalist class, the new middle classes who engage in both labour and managerial responsibilities, self-employed proprietors, the working class and a lower "lumpenised" stratum. At first the bourgeoisie, and now the proletariat, are considered to be the universal class, the section of society best equipped to take human progress forwards a further step. Marx developed these ideas to support his advocacy of socialism and communism: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to change it." Communism would be a social form wherein this system would have been ended and the working classes would be the sole beneficiary of the "fruits of their labour". Some of these ideas were shared by anarchists, though they differed in their beliefs on how to bring about an end to the class society. Socialist thinkers suggested that the working class should take over the existing capitalist state, turning it into a workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures necessary, and then "wither away". On the anarchist side people such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin argued that the state per se was the problem, and that destroying it should be the aim of any revolutionary activity. Many governments, political parties, social movements, and academic theorists have claimed to be founded on Marxist principles. Social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries are particularly important examples. These struggles have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to specify its core. It is common to speak of Marxian rather than Marxist theory when referring to political study that draws from the work of Marx for the analysis and understanding of existing (usually capitalist) economies, but rejects the more speculative predictions that Marx and many of his followers made about post-capitalist societies..

Marxist revolutions and governments

Marx's views on the structure of communist society

Other than control by the working class, Marx laid out no plans for the structuring of a communist society or of the society that the working class would build on the way to communism. He assumed the working class could do that for themselves and that it would be a productive society able to meet the needs of the people and much more. The political parties who adopted his theories followed Marx in his optimistic approach and detailed plans for the structuring of socialist society were not put forth or developed. With the success of the October Revolution in Russia, a Marxist party took power, but without any blueprints for building the new society.

The October Revolution

1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Further, many, both inside and outside the revolution worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic development, as Marxism requires capitalism to have exhausted its mechanisms of growth before attaining socialism, and consequently the major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist within twenty-four hours, according to Jonathan Wolff. Socialist revolution in Germany and other western countries failed and the Soviet Union was on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was prosecuted at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term environmental devastation. Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution. Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Poland, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society. Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously developed. The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government - after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980 and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping - seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued self-proclaimed Leninist governments since the death of Lenin himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the 1920s was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian experience in Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt but especially after China's application to join the WTO this does not seem to apply universally. The death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has clearly retained final say over both commercial and political affairs. Questions remain however as to whether the Chinese Party has opened its markets to such a degree as to be no longer classified as a true Marxist party. A sort of tacit consent, and a desire in China's case to escape the chaos of pre-1949 memory, probably plays a role. See also: Communist government and Communist state. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed suit. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialism—or, more commonly, by aggressively neoliberal capitalism.

See also

Other articles about Marxism


- antagonistic contradiction
- communism
- council communism
- contributors to marxist theory
- Communist Philosophy of Nature
- Criticisms of communism
- Economic Determinism
- dialectical materialism
- dictatorship of the proletariat
- false consciousness
- historical materialism
- Marx's theory of alienation
- Marxian economics
- Marxist philosophy
- Marxist film theory
- Marxist historiography
- Marxist literary criticism
- Western Marxism
- Marxist humanism

See also


- anarchism
- Anarchism and Marxism
- crisis theory
- communist state
- communist party
- Freiwirtschaft
- historicism
- History of the Soviet Union
- History of the People's Republic of China
- Khmer Rouge
- Lao People's Revolutionary Party
- Lewis H. Morgan
- labor theory of value
- materialism
- Participatory Economics aka ParEcon
- political economy
- political philosophy
- Polylogism
- Producerism
- social-conflict theory
- social evolutionism
- socialism

External links


- [http://www.MarxismOnline.com Marxism Online]
- [http://www.marxismfaq.co.uk A Marxism FAQ - under construction]
- [http://www.libcom.org libcom.org - class struggle history, theory and discussion including many works by Marx and marxists]
- [http://www.dougdowd.org/NewFiles/articles/lebowitzhi.html Introductory article by Michael A. Lebowitz]
- [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/marxian.htm History of Economic Thought: Marxian School]
- [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/neomarx.htm Modern Variants of Marxian political economy]
- [http://www.marxist.com/ Marxist.com] In Defence of Marxism
- [http://www.marxists.org/ Marxists Internet Archive]
- [http://www.pathfinderpress.com Pathfinder Books, Marxist bookstore online]
- [http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/ Marxism Page]
- [http://www.marxist.net/ Marxist.net] Marxist Resources from the Committee for a Workers International
- [http://libcom.org/library/marxism Libertarian Communist Library Marxism archive]
- [http://www.newyouth.com/archives/theory/marxismfaq.asp Marxism FAQ]
- [http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/766.html The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy (Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath)] critique by Karl Popper
- [http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.asp?control=72 An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Volume II: Classical Economics (Ricardo, Marx and Stuart Mill)] critique by Murray Rothbard
- [http://www.mises.org/store/Resurrecting-Marx-The-Analytical-Marxists-on-Freedom-Exploitation-and-Justice-P22C1.aspx Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, and Justice] critique by David Gordon
- [http://www.zmag.org/debateiso.htm Debating Marxism]Michael Albert (ParEcon) vs. Alan Maass (Marxism) Category: Economic ideologies Category:Philosophical movements zh-min-nan:Marx-chú-gī ko:마르크스주의 ja:マルクス主義 simple:Marxism th:ลัทธิมาร์กซ

Society

:For the Brian Yuzna film, see Society (film). For the song by the California punk band Pennywise, see Society (song). A society is a group of beings distinguishable from other groups by mutual interests, characteristic relationships, shared institutions, ranking and a common culture. In political science, the term is often used to mean the amalgamation of all voluntary human relationships, generally in contrast to the State, an institution of legal aggression. :"I mean by it [State] that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are brought into being by extra-economic power... I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man..." - Franz Oppenheimer, The State.[http://www.opp.uni-wuppertal.de/oppenheimer/st/state0.htm] The social sciences use the term society to mean a group of people that form a semi-closed social system, in which most interactions are with other individuals belonging to the group. More abstractly, a society is defined as a network of relationships between social entities. A society is also sometimes defined as an interdependent community, but the sociologist Tonnies sought to draw a contrast between society and community. An important component of society is social structure in which roles and ranks are given (school[cliques and labels], work[boss, admin], and so on)

Etymology

The English word society emerged in the 14th century; derived from the French société. The French word, in turn, had its origin in the Latin societas, a "friendly association with others", from socius meaning "companion, associate, comrade or business partner". Thus the meaning of society is closely related to what is considered to be social. Implicit in the meaning of society is that its members share some mutual concern or interest, a common objective or common characteristics. As such, society is often used as synonymous with the collective citizenry of a country as directed through national institutions concerned with civic welfare.

Organization of society

Human societies are often organized according to their primary means of subsistence: social scientists identify hunter-gatherer societies, nomadic pastoral societies, horticulturalist or simple farming societies, and intensive agricultural societies, also called civilizations. Some consider Industrial and Post-Industrial societies to be qualitatively different from traditional agricultural societies. One Common theme for societies in general is that societies serve to aid individuals in a time of crisis; historically, when an individual in some community requires aid, for example at birth, death, sickness, or disaster, like-minded members of that community will rally others in that society to render aid, in some form, whether the aid is symbolic, linguistic, physical, mental, emotional, financial, medical, religious, etc. Cetain societies can also put down, and scapegoat other members of the society. Many societies will also distribute largess, at the behest of some individual or some larger group of people. This type of generosity can be seen in all known cultures; typically, prestige or other cultural factor accrues to the generous individual or group. Some societies will bestow a status on some individual or larger group of people, when that individual or group performs an admired or desired action; This type of recognition is bestowed by members of that society on the individual or larger group in the form of sosubliminal messageme name, or title, or dress, or monetary reward, etc. Males especially are susceptible to this type of action and subsequent reward, even at the risk of their lives. Action by some individual or larger group in behalf of some ideal of their culture is seen in all societies. Even subsistence-based societies exhibit the characteristics of community action, generosity, and shared risk/reward, in common with other more technology-based civilizations. Societies can also be organized according to their political structure: in order of increasing size and complexity, there are band societies, tribes, chiefdoms, and state societies, with varying degrees of political power, depending on the what cultural geographical, historical environments that these societies have to contend with. Thus, when a society exists at the same time as other societies at the same level of technology and culture, but is also isolated geographically, that society is more likely to survive than an equivalent society which is prey to others which can encroach on their resources. See the history article for examples. A society which is not able to offer an effective response to other societies which may be in competition with them will usually be subsumed into the culture of the competing society. See the technology article for examples.

Shared belief or common goal

Peoples of many nations united by common political and cultural traditions, beliefs, or values are sometimes also said to be a society (for example: Judeo-Christian, Eastern, Western, etc). When used in this context, the term is being used as a means of contrasting two or more "societies" whose representative members represent alternative conflicting and competing worldviews. Also, some academic, learned and scholarly societies and associations, such as the American Society of Mathematics, describe themselves as societies. In the United Kingdom these are normally non-profit making and have charitable status. In science they range in size to include national scientific societies including the Royal Society to regional natural history societies. Academic societies may have interest in a wide range of subjects, including the arts, humanities and science. In the United States and France, the term "society" is used in commerce to denote a partnership between investors or to start a business. In the United Kingdom, partnerships are not called societies but cooperatives or mutuals are often known as societies (such as friendly societies and building societies).

Ontology

As a related note, there is still an ongoing debate in sociological and anthropological circles if there exists an entity we could call society. Some Marxist theorists, like Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, argued that society is nothing more than an effect of the ruling ideology of a certain class system, and shouldn't be used as a sociological notion. Marx's concept of society as the sum total of social relations among members of a community contrasts with interpretations from the perspective of methodological individualism where society is simply the sum total of individuals in a territory.

See also


- Social
- Social relations
- Sociology
- Social theory
- Social class
- Social security

References

[http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/society Definition of Society] from the OED.
- [http://core.ecu.edu/soci/juskaa/SOCI2110/Lectures/Lect1 Lecture notes on "Defining Society"] from East Carolina University.
- [http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/glossary/society.html Learning Commons - What is Culture ? - Glossary Item - Society]
- Raymond Williams, "Society", in: Williams, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Fontana, 1976. Category:Society Category:Sociology ja:社会 ko:사회 nb:Samfunn simple:Society zh-min-nan:Siā-hōe

Dominant ideology

The dominant ideology in Marxist or marxian theory is the set of common values and beliefs shared by most people in a given society, framing how the majority think about a range of topics, from art and science to politics. It precedes and overlaps with the idea of a paradigm. Compare with Gramsci's hegemony.

Ideologies in history

In feudal societies, the dominant ideology took religious forms, such as Christianity, making sense of nature and society by means of traditional teachings, established