Alternative Paths to Revolution

In Chapter 1 I developed a theory of the perpetual struggle that, inter alia, explains why some evolved conceptions of hierarchy, such as the bargaining or exchange model, do not initially trigger revolution even when there is a widespread belief that hierarchs are abusing their power, while others, including the fiduciary model, indicate a much more direct route to revolution. Within the bargaining framework, the initial response to unsatisfactory behavior on the part of the hierarchs is to demand a renegotiation of the bargain, to compel the hierarchs to provide more substantial benefits in exchange for obedience to them. In the fiduciary framework, the option of revolution comes into view whenever the hierarchs’ status as fiduciary is terminated by the sovereign people. The hierarchs need not be guilty of malfeasance to lose their authority entirely – they serve at the people’s pleasure – and if they refuse to step down, revolution is thought to be justified. If the conceptualization of hierarchy undergoes what I have called the Siéyes shift, and the hierarchs are now deemed to be totally useless, the only reasonable option is revolution, to remove the nonfunctional parasites and replace them with something new. There is no prior stage of attempting to renegotiate a bargain or to evaluate their performance as fiduciaries, because the hierarchs, being useless, have nothing to offer. I have shown, that is, how the particular path the perpetual struggle takes with regard to changes in how hierarchies are conceived has different implications for the prospect of revolution. This chapter and the next focus on what happens when revolution has become a live option, regardless of which path was followed to reach that destination.

Revolution Distinguished from Revolt and Secession

Late in my engagement with the topic of revolution, I was surprised to learn that the original meaning of the term was a return to a previous state of affairs. It is this sense of “revolution” that is at work when we speak of an internal combustion’s RPMs (revolutions per minute). At least since the eighteenth century, however, the term has usually been understood in an opposite sense, as the bringing about of a fundamentally new state of affairs, not a return to a previous one.

With this modern understanding of revolution in mind, we can say that labeling the events in England in 1688 as “The Glorious Revolution” can be understood either as an exaggeration of how much change was brought about – since the main result of the overthrow of the Stuart Monarchy was to revert to the situation prior to Charles’s efforts to increase his power at Parliament’s expense – or as a return to the earlier sense of the term “revolution” (coming back to the traditional rights enjoyed under previous monarchs). Regardless of how or whether they use the term “revolution,” those seeking to bring about major change often find it expedient to portray themselves not as trying to create a new, untried state of affairs but rather as restoring some supposedly satisfactory if not ideal previous condition.

I will employ the term “revolution” in this and the chapters to follow in the modern sense. More specifically, my concern will be with political revolutions,Footnote ¹ understood as fundamental, relatively rapid changes in the more important political institutions of a society that are brought about by force rather than through consensus or legal processes, including amendments to constitutions. Here it should be noted that “force” includes but is not limited to violence (while admitting that the line between the two is sometimes unclear). For example, an attempt to overthrow a government and institute fundamental changes in political institutions might rely, inter alia, on blocking roads and highways or shutting down the power grid, which arguably are instances of the use of force, but not violence.Footnote ²

A change of government by extralegal, nonconsensual, and forceful means need not be a revolution if it merely replaces one set of institutional agents with another, without any significant change in the institutions. Thus, revolutions can be distinguished from coups.

One can also distinguish between revolutions, understood as involving efforts to effect fundamental changes in political institutions, and revolts, understood simply as repudiations of or attacks on the existing political authority or some particular dimension or exercise of it.

That distinction was implied when a minister informed Louis XVI of the storming of the Bastille and the King replied: “A revolt.” To which the minister said: “No, a revolution.” Up to that time, France had experienced a number of revolts, mainly peasant uprisings or wars of a segment of the nobility against the King. In peasant uprisings, the demand typically was for the redistribution of land or for less onerous obligations of peasants to big landowners. In the case of wars of the nobility against the King, it was often a matter of regional nobility resisting the efforts of the King to extend his domain or a battle to determine who would be king. The minister discerned that this time something different and potentially more momentous was afoot.

Rejection of political authority can be limited to repudiation of certain policies or laws. Revolution, in contrast, involves a comprehensive rejection of political authority. Revolution involves a denial of the existing government’s authority, but not all denials of political authority are revolutions. Coups involve rejections of the highest government authority in toto; unilateral (nonconsensual) secessions involve not a total rejection of government’s authority but only its authority over the portion of its territory that the secessionist aims to make an independent state. A secession may also be a revolution if the political institutions the secessionists seek to set up differ fundamentally from those in the state from which they seceded.

If we define revolution as a forceful, extralegal, nonconsensual attempt to make a fundamental change in the existing political institutional order, it is debatable whether the American Colonies’ successful struggle for independence from Britain was a revolution, but undeniable that the American Civil War was one. It has been argued that the so-called American Revolution did not produce fundamental changes in the political order inherited from Britain, with one chief exception: the rejection of monarchy. And that change, one could argue, was just the last step in a series of changes running from the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century to the growing ascendency of Parliament over the King that the English Civil War and the so-called Glorious Revolution brought, and which had already accelerated in the decades immediately preceding the Colonies’ rebellion.

In sharp contrast, the result of the American Civil War was to abolish the institution of slavery and thereby begin creating the conditions for a genuine democracy. Given how central slavery was to the US economy and how deeply embedded it was in the legal system, including the Constitution and Constitutional jurisprudence in the wake of the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, this change was so fundamental as to qualify as a revolution.Footnote ³

Political versus Social Revolutions

Political revolutions also can be distinguished from social revolutions, though the former often bring the latter with them.Footnote ⁴ A social revolution involves fundamental changes in social or cultural practices, and/or non-political social institutions, attitudes, or values, that occur without any fundamental change in political institutions. An example might be the momentous social changes triggered by the availability of oral contraceptives for females. In this case, a social revolution brought significant changes in sexual behavior and arguably reduced to some extent the domination of men over women.

Sometimes social revolutions are brought about by agents who are government officials, acting through political institutions, as was the case with the profound economic changes the Chinese government introduced beginning in the mid-1980s.Footnote ⁵ These changes were fundamental and initiated by the government, but they did not constitute a political revolution because no basic change in political institutions occurred: The Chinese Communist Party continued its authoritarian rule and no significant constitutional innovations transpired. The label “social revolution” in this case is apt, because the changes in economic policy produce significant changes in cultural practices and individual values. The pursuit of personal or family gain through participation in market enterprises became acceptable and even to be regarded as laudable and perhaps even obligatory. Another example of a social revolution being brought about in part by a change in the law without any fundamental change in political institutions is the decriminalizing of same-sex behavior.

Voltaire’s famous statement that “Man will only be free when the last king is strangled with the bowels of the last priest” can be read as referring to the need – for the sake of freedom – of both a political revolution (to get rid of monarchical government) and a social revolution (destruction of the priesthood and its power over social life and the minds of individuals). Thus, the most radical stream of the family of philosophies we call the Enlightenment advocated both a social revolution, especially regarding the liberation of the human mind from superstition and self-imposed non-adult status, along with the abandonment of cultural habits of deference to the clergy in a wide range of matters, and a political revolution, involving the destruction of the Church’s political power and a transition toward democracy or at least some form of republic.Footnote ⁶

If revolution is defined to include fundamental changes in political institutions, the concept is unavoidably indeterminate in its boundaries, since there will often be a dispute about what counts as fundamental changes. In my view, little is to be gained from taking sides in these disputes. For my purposes, they can be sidestepped, because the most important cases I will examine in detail are not on the periphery of the concept but squarely at the core. They are instances of what it is relatively uncontroversial to call fundamental changes in the political institutions of a society.

Sometimes fundamental changes in political institutions can be achieved without violence or even the use of nonviolent force. This was the case with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (though not with the British destruction of the slave trade, which involved violent actions by the British Navy). In this volume, the focus will be on fundamental changes in political institutions brought about through violent means. Because the violence is conducted by groups and typically provokes violent responses from other, opposing groups, a theory of the ethics of revolutions requires a theory of just revolutionary war. But, as I shall presently argue, it also requires a theory of the ethics of what might be called prewar revolutionary violence, the revolutionaries’ use of violence against their own people to solve the participation and coordination problems that must be solved before revolutionary forces can make war against the regime’s armed forces.

Democratic Revolutions versus Fascist Revolutions

My focus in this chapter and in those that follow will be on democratic revolutions as distinguished from fascist revolutions. That is because my chief concern is with revolution as a potential engine of morally progressive change. By democratic revolutions, I mean, roughly, those that at least purport to be aimed at achieving more accountable, representative institutions of governance that feature rights of equal political participation. Fascist revolutions, such as those that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power, are inherently antidemocratic, so far as they foreground an extreme leadership principle, and inegalitarian, so far as they include a commitment to institutionalizing a supposed natural racial hierarchy. On this understanding, fascist revolutions are regressive, not progressive, and hence as such are not objects of explanation and assessment, given my normative agenda, which focuses on morally progressive social change. This is in no way to deny that a comprehensive theory of the perpetual struggle would have to include an account of fascist revolutions and the reactions to them; it is only to acknowledge that my focus in this book is narrower. Nevertheless, much of what I say in Chapter 4 about the role of a particular variety of revolutionary political ideology in solving the revolutionaries’ participation and coordination problems will apply to fascist revolutions.

I hope that this preliminary characterization of revolution will suffice for now. A more nuanced understanding will emerge as the argument of the book unfolds. If the reader feels the need for more at this stage, I suggest consulting The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on revolution, of which I am a coauthor.

Revolution, Large-Scale Social Change, and Moral Progress

What I say about revolution is, I believe, interesting in its own right, but my chief interest is in the larger project of constructing a normative theory of large-scale social change. Among the questions such a theory would address are these: Which means of trying to achieve large-scale social change are permissible? Is paternalism sometimes justified in the pursuit of large-scale social change? What constitutes morally progressive large-scale social change? When are incremental, reformist efforts to achieve large-scale social change preferable and when is revolution a better alternative?

Some contemporary philosophers, including Peter Singer, Dale Jamieson, Michelle Moody-Adams, Philip Kitcher, and myself and my coauthor Rachell Powell, have begun to develop theories of moral progress, but they have not considered revolution as a way of achieving it.Footnote ⁷ A further and more basic limitation of that work is that it does not situate morally progressive change in a general theory of how social change occurs. A better understanding of how revolutions work and the moral questions they pose would be one important part of the construction of a theory of large-scale social change, with significant implications for an account of progressive change.

Opting for Reform Can Be Opting for Revolution

One might think that a central question, if not the central question, that a normative theory of large-scale social change ought to answer is: To achieve large-scale progressive social change, which is the right path: reform or revolution? In fact, that question is extremely misleading and that the conservative answer to it, “Reform, not revolution!” is facile. What the question and the conservative answer to it ignore is that, as a matter of historical fact, in most cases, what became a revolution started out, not as a revolution, but as an attempt at reform.

The French Revolution is a paradigm case. When the First and Second Estates, the clergy and the nobility, pressured Louis XVI into convening the Estates General (which had not met for 150 years), they were not seeking a revolution, a fundamental change in the political institutions of France, and certainly not the end of the monarchy. Instead, they wanted a better deal within the existing institutional order: to reduce Louis’ expropriation of resources they regarded as belonging to themselves and perhaps to establish a requirement that they must consent to new taxes proposed by the King or other policies that eroded their wealth or privilege. But then Louis makes the mistake of convening the Estates General in Paris. This enables the poorest, most discontent element of the city to push events in a much more radical direction, hurtling down a path that leads to revolution. The conviction that revolution, understood as involving the destruction of the monarchy, not reform, was the proper course may have been confirmed by the aborted flight of the King and his family. Many believed that in attempting to leave France, Louis’ aim was to secure Austrian military intervention to quell the opposition without conceding any significant reforms. This contingent trigger for the transition from reform to revolution could not have been foreseen.

Nor were the first actions in defiance of British authority in the American Colonies an attempt to start a revolution. The initial demand of the Colonists was clearly reformist, not revolutionary: to be granted the same rights, including the right of representation in Parliament, that Englishmen in the Mother Country enjoyed.Footnote ⁸

These and other examples show that under certain conditions – including those in which reform is most needed – efforts at reform can generate revolution, even if no one initially wants it. Given that this is the case, it is false comfort to rely on the banality that reform is preferable to revolution because it is less risky. The problem is that it may be hard to determine in advance when a reform effort will become a revolution and when it will not. In other words, to act responsibly, one needs to know not just the possible benefits but the risks of reform, and for that one needs a theory of how revolutions actually come about. To the extent that it develops some of the main elements of an empirical, descriptive-explanatory theory of revolutions, this book will shed light on the perennial debate between conservatives, who advocate only incremental reform to improve social and political institutions, and radical progressives, or revolutionaries, who propose more rapid and fundamental changes that are not brought about through legal processes or consensus.

The Necessarily Inconclusive Debate between Conservatives and Revolutionaries

Conservatives typically overgeneralize from those conditions in which there are institutional and cultural resources for incremental improvement. Radical progressives typically underestimate the risks of revolution while overestimating their capacity to bring about progressive change rapidly. The upshot is that the dispute between these opposing positions is not only misconceived, so far as it assumes the one or the other view is universally valid but also unresolvable by philosophical analysis that is not naturalistic. In brief, I will argue that the polarity in responses to the question “Is revolution justified?” is based on a failure to distinguish quite different kinds of revolutionary contexts, which, in turn, is due to the tendency to theorize revolution without knowing much about it.

Once it becomes clear that there are fundamentally different revolutionary contexts and that their different natures influence the probable course and consequences of revolutions, the stark disagreement about the justifiability of a revolution between major figures in the history of political philosophy such as Kant and Locke is seen to rest on a misunderstanding. Locke is most naturally read as holding that revolution is morally justified whenever the government seriously violates the terms of its trusteeship, more specifically, by infringing the most important natural rights of those it rules. Kant, in contrast, avers that revolution is never morally permissible, even against the worst tyranny.

To be fair to Locke, his view may only be that the violation of natural rights is a necessary, not a sufficient condition for justified revolution. But that is not the most natural reading of his view. He says that when the government violates the terms of its trusteeship, the only recourse is to make “an appeal to heaven” – a line from a Protestant hymn sung by Puritans marching into battle in the English Civil War, which was taken to mean that it is time to take up the pike and the musket and let God decide who wins. That means that the government’s default on its fiduciary role is sufficient to justify a violent revolution. Another reason to interpret Locke as saying that violation of the trust is sufficient for justified revolution is that he thinks that the destruction of the government does not mean the destruction of civilized life. If that is true, then a major consideration against revolution – the prospect of violent utter anarchy – is undermined.

Kant, in sharp contrast, can be read as holding that the consequences of revolution are so dire as to make it always morally impermissible. That is because he thinks that justice is all important and that there can be no justice without an actually functioning authoritative power – precisely what is destroyed by revolution, he thinks.Footnote ⁹

Both Locke and Kant are wrong if their views are taken to be true with respect to all revolutions, but both are right if their claims are indexed to different revolutionary contexts. Contrary to Kant, some revolutions occur in contexts in which there is a reasonable prospect that the result will not be violent anarchy and the utter destruction of justice. And, in the case of especially brutal and lawless regimes, revolution may be the only option for creating the conditions in which there can be justice. Other revolutions occur in contexts that make it highly probable that the result will be a disaster – in Lockean terms, that the destruction of government will result in the collapse of civil society. The mistake to avoid is focusing exclusively on one context or the other and then overgeneralizing from it.

Similarly, Burke makes a sweeping condemnation of revolution. He argues instead that incremental change and reform is superior, not that it is superior in some or most contexts. The problem here, too, is overgeneralization. The British political order with which Burke was most familiar did, in fact, have considerable cultural and institutional resources for incremental reform; but it is another thing altogether to assume that every system does. And, of course, it has been argued that the resources for incremental reform were lacking in all three of the most momentous revolutions to date: the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese revolutions. My approach to the question, “Is revolution justified?”, then, is to reject, if it is understood to assume a single answer applicable across quite different revolutionary contexts.

Let us pause a moment and reflect on the Burkean type of argument. On the face of it, it seems reasonable. Given the risks of revolution, isn’t it better to exhibit patience, to be sure to preserve what is valuable in the existing order and undertake successive reforms rather than revolution? Even if in some cases revolution would not be a bad thing, those cases are few and far between and our ability to discern them in prospect is very limited. So, the best strategy is to draw a sharp line and adopt a norm ruling out revolution across the board.

The most obvious worry about this reformist line is that it seems callous to expect those suffering injustice to be patient when the injustices they suffer have been going on for decades if not centuries. And, as I already noted, Burke’s counsel of prudence and patience ignores the fact that there may be extremely stable bad equilibria – that significant reform may be practically impossible in some cases due to the fact that the character of the existing order makes incremental improvements utterly infeasible or extremely unlikely. Further, the instances in which the moral case for revolution is strongest – where the existing regime is an extreme tyranny that excludes all who complain of its injustices from access to institutions, which could otherwise be resources for reform – are those in which the label “stable bad equilibrium” most clearly applies. Even if in such cases we can’t be certain that the revolution will produce a better outcome, the status quo is so horrible and the prospects of reform are so remote that taking the risks of revolution may be permissible or even obligatory.

There is, however, a less-noticed problem with the reformist line: As I have already noted, choosing reform may not avoid revolution but trigger it. Under certain conditions, even attempts at rather modest, incremental improvement can unleash forces that lead to revolution.

It is hardly novel to say that the decision to start a revolution is morally momentous because of the uncertainty of the outcome. But it has not been widely recognized, by Burke or those sympathetic to his views, that efforts to achieve reforms can carry the risk of revolution. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that revolutions typically begin as reform movements. Further, in some cases, reform movements that are the most successful may even be more likely to trigger revolution, because success may encourage people to seek more fundamental changes and to try to achieve them rapidly. One of the reasons we require an empirically informed theory of the ethics of revolution is that we need to know enough about how revolutions actually come about in order to identify the conditions under which reform is likely to spark a revolution.

With this preliminary clarification of the concept of revolution and a critique of the slogan “reform, not revolution” in hand, I now turn to the task of providing an account of the full extent of the explanatory power of a particular conception of political ideology, including its role in revolutions.

Doubts about the Explanatory Value of the Concept of Ideology

Some political philosophers – whom I will call ideology skeptics – have offered what could be seen as a justification for the lack of attention to ideology, arguing that the concept isn’t needed to explain the phenomena whose explanation is supposed to be its chief or only raison d’être, “voluntary servitude,” the curious fact that the oppressed, who are much more numerous and potentially much more powerful than their oppressors, usually do not revolt. The ideology skeptics claim that voluntary servitude can be explained as the result of collective action failures and consequently that the concept of ideology is not needed to explain this phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁰ The basic idea is that even though the oppressed would be better off if the oppressive regime were overthrown, each oppressed individual will calculate that whether the revolution succeeds will depend on whether enough others join it, regardless of what she does and, since participation in the revolution is a cost to her, each will conclude that she should not join in.Footnote ¹¹ This is the free-rider version of the collective action problem we encountered in earlier chapters.

Failures to achieve collective revolutionary action can also be explained as a result of the assurance problem. Even if individuals do not refrain from participating in the production of a good because they wish to be free-riders, they may refrain because they lack assurance that others will contribute. If the explanatory power of the concept of ideology consists solely or chiefly in its ability to explain voluntary servitude, and if voluntary servitude can be explained without recourse to the concept of ideology as a matter of collective action failures due to the free-rider or assurance problem, then the concept of ideology lacks explanatory power. The ideology skeptics raise a question of considerable importance: What is the explanatory power of the concept of ideology – what sorts of phenomena can it explain?Footnote ¹² As I will show, in addressing this question, one should not assume, as the ideology skeptics do, that the only valuable function of the concept of ideology is to explain voluntary servitude, the absence of revolution. It can also help explain why revolutions do sometimes occur.

In this part, I argue that the explanatory reach of the concept of ideology is quite extensive once we abandon the arbitrarily restrictive concept of ideology popular among some contemporary analytic philosophers in the critical theory-Marxist tradition and adopt instead a concept widely used in the social sciences. The core idea of the social science conception, or rather, family of conceptions, since there are variations in detail,Footnote ¹³ is that an ideology is an evaluative map that makes sense of the most important features of the social world and, on some accounts, that provides a shared orientation that can facilitate coordinated joint action as well as foster group-based identities. On the broad conception, ideologies include beliefs and attitudes, but also belief-management mechanisms, the chief function of which is to preserve their core beliefs in the face of apparently contradictory evidence or testimony.Footnote ¹⁴ These belief-management mechanisms constitute what I refer to as an ideology’s doxastic immune system.

The evaluative aspect of ideologies typically involves the use, whether implicit or explicit, of moral concepts, more specifically, concepts that are used to evaluate aspects of the social world as the ideology presents them. In the case of political ideologies, various features of the social landscape for which the ideology provides a shared map are characterized by the use of concepts such as justice or injustice, rightful authority or the lack of it, legitimacy or illegitimacy, progress or regression; and when groups are among the salient landmarks, they are often characterized in terms of vices or virtues, and with ascriptions of praise or blame for desirable or undesirable features of the landscape.

Some might complain that the broad social science conception is too broad, in effect, equating an ideology with a worldview. There are two responses to this complaint. First, the broad conception’s emphasis on belief-management mechanisms and the role of ideologies in coordinating beliefs and actions of various individuals is more contentful than the notion of a worldview. Second, the difference between an ideology and a worldview comes into even sharper focus still if one distinguishes political ideologies. As I have already noted, political ideologies not only provide a shared evaluative map of the social world and include not only beliefs and attitudes but also belief-management systems; in addition, groups and typically a distinction between Us and Them are prominent landmarks in the landscape the map portrays. More importantly, political ideologies include beliefs about the proper and improper uses of power and the appropriate means for obtaining and maintaining it, in effect, beliefs about legitimacy – that is what makes them political. And that is what makes them powerful resources for deployment in the perpetual struggle.

Locating Political Ideology in the Conceptual Landscape

This conception of political ideologies is a specification of the broad social science conception. If one finds the broad social science conception too broad, one can simply focus on the characterization of the political conception offered here. It is with political ideologies and their explanatory power that I am concerned in this book.

Although political ideologies thus understood are a subset of ideologies on the broad social science conception, they are still more inclusive than the restricted conception popular among some critical theorists in the Marxist tradition. According to that conception, ideologies only serve to support existing oppressive social orders. According to my conception, political ideology can also challenge, rather than support, such orders.Footnote ¹⁵

So, the conception of political ideologies on offer here can accommodate both status quo-supporting ideologies, those that bolster existing orders, and resistance ideologies, including revolutionary ideologies. My aim in this chapter is to make the case for this conception of political ideologies, chiefly by showing just how explanatorily potent it is.

As I noted earlier, it is puzzling that philosophers who employ the restricted Marxist-critical theory conception and hold that any other use of the concept is incorrect, simply do not respond to the fact that the broad conception is routinely employed by social scientists and, more specifically, that a good deal of social science analysis of actual revolutions assigns a causal role to revolutionary ideologies.Footnote ¹⁶

Unlike the restrictive critical theorists’ conception, neither the broad social science conception nor the political conception is pejorative; nor do they imply a positive attitude toward ideologies. Consequently, the broad social science conception and its specification in the political conception allow for the possibility that some ideologies are an obstacle to progress toward justice or liberation or are otherwise undesirable, while others may be valuable and progressive. The broad social science conception and the political conception allow for ideologies that contain false beliefs (e.g., about power and in whose interests it is wielded), but neither stipulates that illusion or “false consciousness” are essential features of ideologies.Footnote ¹⁷

A Cultural Difference in How Ideology Is Regarded

Here it is worth noting that while no American politician would publicly say that she has an ideology, many politically active people in the Global South, whether they are politicians or ordinary citizens, unapologetically and publicly endorse some political ideology as an ideology.Footnote ¹⁸ This difference in usage of the term “ideology” is perfectly understandable, once one distinguishes between the arbitrarily restricted Marxist-critical theorists’ conception, which makes “ideology” a pejorative term, and the broader political conception, which allows for non-pejorative uses. If one assumes the Marxist-critical theorists’ conception, one will take “ideology” to be a pejorative term and understandably not want to admit that one has an ideology. In the conclusion of this chapter, I will explain why some politically active people cheerfully acknowledge that they have an ideology and why they stress the importance of sharing an ideology with others who have the same political goals. And I will show why it is perfectly reasonable for them to do so.

Making the Case for the Explanatory Power of the Concept of Ideology

In this section, I will begin my analysis of the explanatory power of the concept of ideology by arguing that the fact that voluntary servitude is sometimes the result of a failure to solve the free-rider problem or the assurance problem does not imply that the concept of ideology is lacking in explanatory power. I do this by explaining how an ideology can prevent the oppressed from getting to the point where they would encounter a collective action problem, either (i) by convincing them that the existing social order is natural and therefore unalterable or sacrosanct, or (ii) by preventing them from seeing that the social order is oppressing them, or (iii) by convincing them that they lack the agency needed for there to be a reasonable prospect of successful revolution. When (political)Footnote ¹⁹ ideologies function in either of these three ways, the oppressed will not even consider attempting to overthrow the existing order to be a viable option. Hence, their inaction will not be explained as a failure of collective action, because both types of collective action failures occur only when individuals contemplate acting. Everything I say in this first part is congenial to ideology theorists who operate with the restricted, Marxist-critical theory conception according to which ideologies only function to support the existing oppressive orders. But since the Marxist-critical theory conception is a specification of the broader conception of political ideology I endorse, this section will support my claim that the broader political conception has impressive explanatory power.

I will then exploit the resources of the conception of ideology I have advanced, arguing that when ideologies do not prevent people from reaching the point at which they would even consider revolting, as in (i)–(iii), they nonetheless can avoid collective action problems that would otherwise thwart action against the existing order. They can do this in either of two ways, both of which are a function of the moral commitments that political ideologies include. First, their ideologically embedded moral commitments can lead people to act directly, as it were, without engaging in the reasoning that can stymie collective action, via the free-rider and assurance problems. Second, if they do engage in reasoning about the costs and benefits of participating, their ideologically embedded moral commitments will be added to the scales and will override considerations of self-interest. In the latter case, even if calculations of self-interest would endorse free riding, that conclusion is overruled by the superior weight their ideology leads them to accord to moral norms that require participation. The moral commitments that ideologies include and solidify can also lead individuals to believe they must act even if they lack assurance that others will do so as well. The explanatory power that this part of the chapter describes employs a broader conception of ideology than the restricted, Marxist-critical theory conception.

I will also demonstrate that the concept of ideology can play a valuable explanatory role if one assumes that collective action problems are in some cases central to the success or failure of revolutions. I will argue that the assumption that both sides of revolutionary conflicts are motivated by ideologies can help explain the extreme character of the spiral of violence that often occurs in such conflicts: The revolutionary leadership resorts to coercion against the masses to solve the latter’s collective action problem by penalizing those who don’t participate in the revolution; and then the regime responds by using coercion to raise the costs of participating so as to stymie collective action by the oppressed; and then the revolutionary leadership ups the ante by using more extreme forms of coercion to penalize non-participation, and so on.

Because ideologies can portray conflicts in extremely moralized terms – in effect as struggles in which the highest moral stakes are to be won or lost – and can also de-humanize the enemy, they can motivate both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries to disregard ordinary moral constraints on violence in the arms race of coercion and counter-coercion that characterizes the strategic interaction centered on the revolutionaries’ collective action problem. In this way, the concept of ideology can help explain the extreme violence of the spiral of coercion and more generally the especially brutal character of ideologically driven armed conflict.

By allowing for revolutionary ideologies, my conception of political ideologies extends even further the explanatory domain of the concept of ideology. The following outline makes the relationships between the various conceptions of ideology clear.

1. I. Social science conception of ideology: Shared evaluative, interpretive maps of the social world, including beliefs, attitudes, and belief-management systems.

   1. A. Broad conception of political ideology: Shared evaluative, interpretive maps of the social world, with belief-management systems, and featuring beliefs and attitudes regarding the proper accession to and exercise of political power.

      1. 1. Revolutionary political ideologies (challenge the existing order)

      2. 2. Status-quo supporting political ideologies (bolster the existing orders)

How Ideologies Can Avoid Collective Action Problems by Preventing Individuals From Considering Revolution to Be an Option

There are at least four ways in which an ideology can prevent an individual from even seriously considering whether to participate in an attempt to reform or overthrow the existing social order and hence from reaching the point at which she would confront a collective action problem of either the free-rider or assurance variety. First, the ideology can present the existing social order as natural and therefore as inevitable or at least as not something that anyone should attempt to alter or overthrow or could succeed in altering or overthrowing. Ideologies perform this function when they portray deeply inegalitarian social orders as reflecting a hierarchy of different natures for different groups of individuals, in rank order from inferior to superior. Ideologies that support caste systems or sexist systems typically include the belief that the social hierarchy is natural, a reflection of the different natures of those who have power and those who are subordinate. If something is regarded as natural, that is enough in many cases for people to think it would be wrong or at least futile to try to change it.

If one thinks of the existing social order in this way, one will not get to the point of calculating the costs and benefits of trying to overthrow it because one will not regard overthrowing it as a viable option. Nor will one get to the point of even considering whether one should attempt to overthrow if one cannot expect that others will participate in revolutionary action. Those who strive to mobilize the oppressed to resist or revolt understand this; that is why they devote considerable energy to trying to convince people that the inequalities of the social order are not natural, but rather are human constructs, subject to alteration through human action.Footnote ²⁰

Second, as theorists in the Marxist tradition emphasize, an ideology can help sustain an unjust social order by masking its injustices. This would be the case, for example, with an ideology that portrays the worst off in a capitalist social order as people who lack drive or self-discipline and who fail to exhibit the bourgeois virtues. If one thinks that the existing order is just or at least not gravely unjust, one is not likely to take seriously the idea of seriously modifying or overthrowing it; and if that is the case, one will not reach the stage of calculating the cost and benefits of participating in such efforts or of deciding to refrain from participation because one doubts that others will do so. The behavior of leaders working for reform or revolution suggests that they are aware of this function of ideology: They work hard to convince the masses that their inferior position in the social order is not their fault but rather is the result of fundamental structural features.

Third, an ideology can convince the oppressed that they are powerless to effect significant reforms or to overthrow the system. One way ideologies do this is by exaggerating the power of the oppressors while portraying the oppressed as inherently weak. Those who attempt to convince others to join a revolutionary struggle take this function of ideology seriously: They advocate “the propaganda of the deed,” where this includes acts of violence against people identified with the regime, especially police personnel and other public officials. The message that such acts send is that “We can hurt Them!” In other words, the would-be revolutionary leadership proceeds on the assumption that part of the task of generating “revolutionary consciousness” in the masses is to convince them of their agency, and more specifically their potential to inflict costs on the oppressors. The first, relatively minor acts of violence toward regime officials are usually not so much designed to convince the oppressors to give up their power as to convince the oppressed that they have power. Unless the oppressed become convinced that they have power, they will not even reach the point at which a collective action problem will be encountered, because they will not contemplate taking revolutionary action or even attempt significant reforms. Ideologies can prevent them from reaching that point by robbing them of an appreciation of their own agency.Footnote ²¹

Fourth, an ideology can place revolution off limits by presenting obedience to the existing authorities as the preeminent virtue of the ordinary person. The strain of Confucian thought that the current authoritarian leader of China promulgates and exploits fits this description. Such an ideology may also include the belief that disorder is the worst state of affairs and that disorder can only be reliably avoided by obedience to the existing authorities.

How Ideologies Can Avoid Failures of Collective Action When Individuals Do Consider Whether to Participate in Revolutionary Action

When individuals do contemplate whether to engage in collective action, an ideology can avoid failures of collective action, if it includes a moral element that motivates the oppressed either to refrain from or to disregard the calculations that generate the free-rider problem and to not base their decision on whether others will participate.

Ideologies – including revolutionary ideologies – typically have a moral dimension. For example, contemporary capitalist ideologies present capitalism not only as the most efficient economic system but also as one that maximizes individual freedom and rewards people according to merit. Consequently, capitalist ideologies can lead people to be morally motivated to support capitalism. Similarly, Marxist-Leninist ideology presents capitalism as an economic order that necessarily exploits workers, stunts their development as human beings, and alienates them from one another. Even if Marx sometimes wrote as if he thought his critique of capitalism was nonmoral and strictly scientific, the appeal of his views was surely due in part to the fact that they employed moral concepts and engaged moral motivations.Footnote ²²

Moral considerations can function as exclusionary reasons – they not only supply reasons for acting but exclude certain reasons from consideration for acting. In doing so, they can serve to dismiss calculations of self-interest, to exclude them from consideration in an agent’s decision-making process. Some moral considerations, in particular, those framed in terms of rights, serve to trump calculations of self-interest and social utility. Given that this is so, an ideology, because of its moral dimension, can motivate the individual to refuse to base her decision whether to participate in resistance movements on the calculations of costs and benefits that generate the free-rider version of collective action problems.

In Reflections on Violence, Sorel provides a vivid portrayal of the effects of this aspect of ideologies. He describes a soldier in the French revolutionary army who dies with a smile on his face as his comrades tread on his broken body through a breach in the enemy’s defenses.Footnote ²³ The clear implication is that the revolutionary zeal of this individual motivated him to participate in the revolution, indeed to participate to the point of self-sacrifice, without any calculation as to whether his action would produce a benefit that exceeded the costs to himself (the free-rider problem). Nor does the ardent revolutionary soldier consider whether others will make similar sacrifices (the assurance problem). Because some of the most fundamental moral commitments serve to exclude basing one’s conduct on calculations of what would maximize net benefits and are understood not to depend upon reciprocation by others, ideologies that include such commitments can avoid failures of collective action of both the free-rider and assurance problem variety. In this way, recourse to the concept of ideology can explain why the oppressed sometimes do rise up, even though in principle their doing so could be stymied by collective action problems and it is not rational for them to revolt according to the simplistic assumptions of rational actor theory.

One need not to look only to historical examples of revolutionary ardor that side-steps or overrides calculations of costs and benefits or considerations of whether others will participate in the revolutionary endeavor. Contemporary behavioral economics experiments yield the same result: People who are morally motivated can often achieve collective action when they would not be able to do so in the absence of that motivation.Footnote ²⁴ They don’t determine how to act on the basis of the calculations that are supposed to thwart collective action according to simplistic rational choice theories. Nor do they always make their participation in collective action conditional on credible assurance that others will participate.

Even if the moral motivation that ideologies supply does not simply bypass the calculations that generate the collective action problem, it can override them. This occurs when an ideology leads the individual to believe that the moral stakes are extremely high. In that case, even if the individual makes the calculation that it would be best, from the standpoint of his own interests or even from the standpoint of the maximization of social utility, to refrain from participation, his ideology-embedded moral priorities (at least if they are deontological in nature) may override any such calculations. Similarly, with regard to the assurance version of the collective action problem, an individual’s ideology may lead her to conclude that it is important to participate, even if others are not likely to do their fair share. In other words, depending on the character of the moral commitments they include, ideologies can present participation as unconditionally mandatory, not mandatory conditional on congruence with one’s own interests or the maximization of utility or on reciprocation by others. In this way, ideologies, because they include moral beliefs, can avoid failures of collective action that would otherwise stymie revolution.

The role of ideology in overcoming the assurance problem warrants elaboration. If an individual knows that many others subscribe to the same ideology to which she subscribes and appreciates the appeal and motivational potency of that ideology, she may be more confident that her participation in activity aimed at reforming or toppling a hierarchy will not be wasted and that enough others will participate to provide a good prospect of success. In brief, the conviction that we are deeply committed to the reform or revolution can help avoid the assurance problem.

Further, an ideology can make one moral commitment among others salient. In other words, the ideology may offer guidance as to how individuals should order their commitments and in doing so it can facilitate more effective, coordinated resistance to hierarchy.Footnote ²⁵

The Epistemic Functions of Political Ideologies

So far, I have identified a number of ways in which a concept of political ideology can help explain various aspects of the struggle between hierarchs and resisters. Given that this is so, one needs an explanation of why ideologies are a common phenomenon. At least part of the answer is that ideologies are attractive because they perform several functions that individuals tend to find valuable.

It is commonly said that ideologies can help satisfy the desire for meaning, for making sense of the social world; and that is surely part of their appeal. In addition, because political ideologies typically feature a pronounced in-group/out-group distinction and attributed valuable characteristics to one’s group, they can also satisfy the desire for belonging and for having an identity as a member of a group. And, as I have already stressed, because they function as evaluative maps of the social world, political ideologies enable individuals to navigate its complexities rather than being overwhelmed by them to the point of paralysis. I now want to propose that there are in addition two epistemic functions of political ideologies that help account for their popularity. The first is that they provide guidance for what stands to take on political issues and confidence in the rightness of one’s stand without having to incur the costs of becoming adequately informed on the issues. The second is that they provide guidance for information seeking and for evaluating information. The first function makes them attractive for so-called low-information individuals, the second for high-information individuals.

A political ideology can convince people that it is important to take a position – or rather take a particular side – on a political issue and also make them confident that they are in the right about that issue, while remaining in a state of partial or total ignorance about the relevant political matters. Ideologies identify certain issues as being important and supply guidance for determining the correct positions to take on them. When they do this, they are only one example of a much more general phenomenon: our reliance on short-cuts, that is, on heuristics. More specifically, they act as an action-guiding heuristic that enables one to avoid costly information searches and still feel confident that one is taking the right stand on political issues. In other words, if one is a low-information individual (concerning political issues) an ideology can in effect substitute for information, making certain issues salient and enabling one to take confident stands on them, in spite of one’s lack of information. One way they do this is by identifying certain individuals as reliable sources of information and judgment. If one believes that A knows the truth one can simply take on board what A says, without researching the facts. When one’s ideology identifies some sources of information as authoritative, it enables one to avoid the difficult task of trying to decide who is an expert and who is not. In terms of the discipline of social epistemology, an ideology can solve “the novice/expert problem,” the difficulty one faces if one lacks knowledge about certain matters and seeks expert advice, but finds it difficult to identify genuine experts due to the same lack of knowledge that leads one to seek them out in the first place. Ideologies can also fill gaps in an individual’s information, without the individual having to engage in costly searches for the missing information.

It is worth emphasizing that in saying that ideology can explain the political engagement of low-information individuals, I am not saying that only those low-information individuals who have an ideology are politically engaged. Nor am I saying that high-information individuals do not have ideologies. For them, ideologies perform a different function: They do not substitute for information; rather they spur the search for information that confirms their core beliefs, identifying some information as relevant and trustworthy, while discounting other information and ignoring information from sources they regard as unreliable. High-information individuals may therefore find ideologies attractive because they provide a belief-management service, helping the individual who values information to selectively organize what might otherwise be a daunting avalanche of information.

How the Broader Concept of Political Ideology Illuminates the Spiral of Extreme Coercion in Revolutionary Conflicts

Contemporary empirical research on violent revolutions and other intrastate armed conflicts supports the assertion that collective action problems sometimes loom large. In some cases, appeals to a revolutionary ideology may not by itself be sufficient to solve or avoid such problems. Moral appeals are not absent, but they are insufficient unless force is also employed.

These theorists also document a spiral of extreme forms of coercion that often occurs as a result of strategic interactions between the revolutionaries and regime forces – strategic interaction that is centered on the revolutionaries’ collective action problem.Footnote ²⁶ Because the revolutionary leadership knows that collective action problems may result in lack of sufficient participation in the revolution, they employ coercion against those they hope to mobilize, in order to make the costs of not participating exceed the cost of participating. This would be the case if they surmised that their revolutionary ideology by itself was not persuasive enough or widely shared enough to avoid collective action problems.

The coercion revolutionary leaders employ runs the gamut from acts of terrorism against members of the oppressed group, to conscription enforced by harsh penalties, to confiscation of the means of subsistence. The regime then responds by using similarly coercive means to thwart this effort to solve the collective action problem by raising the costs of participation in the revolution.

An example from the Vietnam War will make this point clearer, though many, if not all, cases of insurgency, civil war, or revolution would serve as well. Suppose the year is 1968. The Viet Cong enter your village and threaten to kill everyone if the village doesn’t make some of its young men join their ranks and provide hidden storage for Viet Cong weapons and supplies. If these threats are credible, they change the pay-off matrix that otherwise might have produced a refusal to participate in the revolution. According to the logic of collective action, this means that if the costs the Viet Cong credibly say they will impose exceed the benefits of non-participation, then (so far as you base their decision on cost–benefit calculations), you and your fellow villagers will decide that the best alternative is no longer to refrain from participation. Similarly, if American forces come into your village the next day and tell you that they will destroy it if any member of the village aids the Viet Cong, their strategy is to convince you that the costs of participating in the revolution outweigh the benefits of participating, including the avoidance of the costs that the Viet Cong may impose if you don’t participate.

Regime leaders know that revolutionaries will try to solve the revolutionary collective action problem by raising the costs of non-participation; so they respond by raising the costs of participation, also using various forms of coercion, from imprisonment or summary execution of those suspected of participating in the revolution or cooperating with the revolutionaries, to confiscating property and conscripting potential revolutionaries into the regime’s armed forces. The revolutionary leadership then responds by escalating their use of coercion, in order to tilt the cost–benefit ratio in favor of participation. And so on. That is the spiral of coercion at the locus of the revolutionaries’ collective action problem.

The spiral of coercion is extreme. It typically proceeds in violation of the most basic rules of just warfare, often exhibiting a lack of restraint that is exceptional even in interstate conflicts. An explanation of why participants in the struggle would be motivated to engage in such extreme violence is needed. Ideology theory can provide it. The fact that ideologies typically if not always contain a moral dimension and can frame conflicts in heavily moralized terms – as a contest in which the moral stakes are extremely high – can help explain why the spiral of coercion in the revolutionary context exhibits an exceptionally flagrant disregard of ordinary moral constraints on armed conflict.

If one’s revolutionary ideology convinces one that the regime is evil and the fate of human progress or at least the liberation of oneself and many others from a soul-crushing tyranny depends on the success of the revolution, one may in effect regard oneself as being in a “Supreme Emergency” situation and accordingly be willing to set aside the moral constraints on the use of force that one would take to be mandatory in any other context. Similarly, if one’s counter-revolutionary ideology convinces one that the success of the revolution will mean the destruction of all that is good and wholesome, then one may be willing to engage in the most extreme forms of coercion and violence to convince potential revolutionaries that they should not become revolutionaries.

Ideologies, both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, can also “dehumanize” the Other, depicting them as less than human, as dangerous, unclean beasts not entitled to the basic moral regard accorded to human beings. As the extensive literature on genocides attests, dehumanization prepares the way for the most ruthless and cruel violence.

The belief-management mechanisms of ideologies contribute to the development of more extreme views by filtering out beliefs that challenge the beliefs that help constitute the ideology. Ideologies also tend to promote loyalty and solidarity, which can deter people from associating with those who might question shared beliefs. When this occurs, opportunities for qualifying and moderating those beliefs in the light of such challenges are precluded. The result is the so-called echo-chamber effect: Beliefs tend to become more extreme and extreme beliefs can fuel extreme behavior.Footnote ²⁷ It is a commonplace that ideologies can encourage people to violate widely accepted rules of war in interstate wars as well as revolutions, and that ideologically motivated wars of either type can be more savage than those motivated simply by interests.

In brief, once one acknowledges the moral dimension of ideologies, and recognizes that ideologies can both support and challenge the existing social order, one can take seriously the possibility that the concept of ideology can help explain the extreme violence that characterizes revolutionary conflicts. And one can do so while foregrounding, rather than ignoring, the role that collective action problems sometimes play in the revolutionary context.

My point in focusing on revolutionary wars is that in this sort of conflict one party’s collective action problem looms large: The revolutionaries lack the resources that states enjoy, including standing armies and institutions that encourage collective action in times of conflict.

This fact about the revolutionary context has important implications. It is the starting point for the spiral of coercion that ensues when the revolutionary leadership tries to give the masses effective incentives to participate in revolution and the regime responds by raising the cost of participation in order to thwart revolutionary collective action. An appreciation of this feature of the revolutionary context, then, shows that it is a mistake to think that the failure to revolt must either be understood either as a failure of collective action or as an effect of ideology – that collective action failure explanations and ideological explanations are competitors. Instead, ideology can affect the means by which the oppressed attempt to solve their collective action problem and the nature of the response to that attempt by the regime. Contrary to what the ideology skeptics suggest, we need not choose between an explanatory framework that focuses on collective action problems and one that includes a significant role for ideology.

So, even if one believes that the key to understanding why revolutions fail – when they do fail – is that the oppressed were unable to solve a collective action problem, the broader conception of political ideology can play a valuable role in explaining both the extremes to which revolutionaries are willing to go in trying to solve their collective action problem and the equally extreme response of regimes in their efforts to thwart revolutionary collective action.

Piercing the Ideological Veil: Engineered Epistemic Disruptors

Before a revolutionary ideology can be successfully promulgated, it will often be necessary first to loosen the grip of the regime-supporting ideology. This is typically done in two ways. First, discursively, by employing reasoning and evidence to rebut key beliefs in the regime-supporting ideology. For example, in meetings of workers, revolutionary leaders can try to convince their audience that the current hierarchical arrangements are not natural and inevitable, that they have been constructed (and recently at that), and that there are viable alternatives; and more generally, they can explain just how the current order systematically thwarts the interests of the majority of people. Second, the revolutionary leaders can engineer what I call “epistemic disruptions,” events that rend the fabric of the social-epistemic environment on which the viability of the regime-supporting ideology depends, and do so by acting directly on the emotions, rather than discursively. What follows are two examples of epistemic disruptions commonly employed in revolutions.

The first is “the propaganda of the deed as noted earlier.” Acts of violence are perpetrated against easy targets associated with the regime. For example, a petty bureaucrat or policeman is assassinated in a public place. Revolutionaries who employ such violence are under no illusion that it will have any significant effect on the regime. Their aim, rather, is to dislodge a key belief of the regime-supporting ideology, namely, that the regime is invulnerable or, more accurately, that the people are powerless against it. Doing this is extremely important, because it is a fundamental feature of ideologies that support a repressive regime that they deprive those who are taken in by them of a sense of agency. The propaganda of the deed is designed to foster a sense of agency. The message is simple: “We can hurt Them!”

The second type of engineered epistemic disruption consists of deliberately provoking the regime to brutal retaliation against challenges to it. For example, the police or soldiers present at a demonstration can be taunted and insulted to the point of losing control, or rumors can be spread that the demonstrators are armed and bent on violence, or some member of the revolutionary group can secretly be assigned to violate the commitment to a peaceful protest. The expectation is that if the regime forces respond with extreme and indiscriminate violence, this will convince people that the regime is utterly ruthless, willing to do anything to preserve its power. To put the point differently, when the regime is provoked into brutal behavior, the belief that its leaders really care about the welfare of the people and have only been mistaken as to how to achieve it is shattered. Both the first and the second types of epistemic disruptions destroy regime-supporting ideological beliefs, not through the discursive provision of evidence and reasoning, but instead by creating experiences that act directly on the emotions, revealing a reality that has hitherto been obscured by the regime-supporting ideology.Footnote ²⁸

Mark Twain provides a dramatic example of an epistemic disruption that is fortuitous rather than engineered. Huck Finn, to his astonishment, has the sudden realization that Jim, a slave, cares deeply about his family, just as White folks do. This revelation shatters one important belief in Huck’s racist ideology, namely, that Black people are morally primitive, lacking the robust, finer moral sentiments of beings with fully developed moral capacities. It is a crucial feature of Twain’s depiction of this case of epistemic disruption that it occurs outside of the normal social-epistemic environment, an environment that is thoroughly structured by systematic racism and which poses serious obstacles to the sorts of interactions between Blacks and Whites that could challenge racist beliefs. The revelation occurs when Jim and Huck are in the middle of the Mississippi River, on a raft. They interact directly, in a kind of social-epistemic state of nature, as it were, not through institutionalized systematically racist practices; and there are no supposed epistemic or moral authorities (parents, teachers, clergy) to prevent this direct interaction or to explain away Jim’s apparent deep attachment to his family.

Many works of fiction depict fortuitous epistemic disruptions. A familiar device for doing this is shipwreck on a desert island. In this state-of-nature setting, where an institutionally structured social-epistemic environment is not present to mask and make palatable relations of domination between man and wife or master and servant, the veil of ideology is torn and the dominated begin to assert themselves.

The strategic value of epistemic disruptions is that they can contribute to the disempowering of an ideology by demonstrating, rather than arguing, that an ideological belief is false. They can sometimes lead persons to abandon ideological beliefs that were impervious to discursive measures. The examples of revolutionary recourse to epistemic disruptions I have described are morally problematic because they involve harm to innocents. Fortunately, not all epistemic disruptions have this character. In the American civil rights movement, Black protestors showed extraordinary discipline and adhered rigidly to their commitment to nonviolence in the face of brutal physical attacks and painful racial insults by police. In doing so, they provided emotionally charged visual proof (on national television news) that negative stereotypes of Blacks as unruly, lacking in self-control and prone to violence were dead wrong. It is important to note, however, that these civil rights protests were directed to a government that was amenable to reform and which was not prone to efforts to eradicate opposition to it. That is often not so in revolutionary situations and for that reason recourse to peaceful, nonviolent epistemic disruptions may not be viable in those contexts. The more robust the “just cause” for revolution – that is, the closer the regime is to being a resolute, severe tyranny – the more difficult it will be for revolutionaries to devise strategies that are both effective and in compliance with the prohibition on harm to innocents.

The main point of this discussion of epistemic disruptions is to show that a well-developed theory of ideology should explain not just how ideologies shape individual behavior and large-scale social changes such as revolutions, but also how individuals can come to abandon their ideology, something that may be necessary before they can come to have a new ideology that facilitates their collective action against the dominant hierarchy. In addition, the discussion of the propaganda of the deed raises a question that a comprehensive normative account of the role of ideology in social change must address: What are the moral constraints on efforts to dislodge a pernicious ideology?Footnote ²⁹ This question is especially pressing if, as I think is likely to be the case, discursive efforts and peaceful engineered epistemic disruptions to dislodge pernicious ideological beliefs are not always effective. If I am right about this, then the role of ideology critics – if they really wish to effect progressive social change – will involve painful choices that purely discursive and other nonviolent approaches manage to avoid.

Ideology and the Struggle for Cultural Hegemony

The work of Antonio Gramsci highlights a prior role for ideology, one that comes into play before its function of motivating revolutionary collective action.Footnote ³⁰ In his view, the bourgeoisie maintains its dominance not just through economic and coercive power, but through using its influence over educational, religious, and other institutions to promulgate an ideology that is culturally hegemonic. Gramsci stresses that before the masses can undertake direct action against the capitalist hierarchy (conduct the war of maneuver, in his phrase), they must win the struggle for cultural hegemony (the war of position), where this means destroying the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie and elevating to a position of hegemony a culture that not only repudiates the bourgeois values that serve to support capitalist exploitation, but which also instills an alternative set of values that will guide the development of a new order. In other words, Gramsci recognizes that dismantling an ideology that supports a dominating hierarchy may require the successful promulgation of a counter-ideology. On this point, I am in full agreement, for as I have emphasized, the struggle between resisters and hierarchs is often a co-evolutionary contest between ideologies. I also concur with his emphasis on the fact that domination is typically not sustained by force alone, or even primarily by force, but rather depends heavily on normative power, of which what he calls cultural hegemony is one important instance. Further, my emphasis on the epistemic dimension of the struggle between hierarchs and resisters fits nicely within Gramsci’s framing idea of cultural hegemony. For the dominant elite’s cultural hegemony means, among other things, that they control access to education and more generally to the processes by which ideas and values are formed and disseminated. To be successful, resistors must improve their epistemic position, for example, by winning the struggle for freedom of expression and then gaining influence over educational policies, if they are to develop their own values and make them culturally hegemonic.

Conclusion

I have argued for adopting a broader conception of political ideologies than that employed by some contemporary critical theorists by demonstrating its impressive explanatory power. In particular, I have shown that the fact that voluntary servitude can sometimes be explained as the failure to solve collective action problems does not show that the concept of ideology is explanatorily otiose or of negligible explanatory power. Recourse to this concept of political ideology can explain both why the oppressed do not even reach the point where action against a hierarchy would be stymied by collective action problems and also explain how, when individuals do contemplate whether to act against a regime, ideologies can supply moral motivation that avoids failures of collective action either by excluding calculations of interest that would lead to such failures or by giving preponderant weight to moral commitments in reasoning about what should be done.

Ideologies can prevent people from encountering collective action problems by depriving them of the sense of agency that would be necessary for them even to contemplate acting or by convincing them that the existing order is natural and inevitable, or by masking its oppressive character. Ideologies can also help people to overcome collective action problems when they do consider action to be an option, by virtue of including moral commitments that either lead individuals to refrain from calculating the costs and benefits of various actions or to disregard the results of those calculations. They can also lead people to regard their participation in anti-hierarchy actions as unconditional – not dependent upon assurance that enough others will participate to achieve success. Finally, ideologies can be used to create communities united by the same extremely resilient beliefs that tend to become more extreme through a kind of echo-chamber effect. This, too, can help to explain the extreme violence employed in efforts to solve collective action problems, or to thwart an opposing group’s efforts to solve its collective action problems.

That most philosophers who describe themselves as critical theorists focus on how ideologies function to sustain oppressive social orders is laudable. But if my arguments are sound, then I have shown that the way in which ideologies perform this function are more diverse than is generally thought. In addition, I have demonstrated that the broader conception of political ideology of which the critical theorists’ concept is only one particular specification can explain both the fact that people do not always persist in a condition of voluntary servitude and the spiral of extreme coercion that often occurs when resistance takes the form of revolution. The explanatory power of the conception of political ideology I am advancing, then, is impressive.

I have noted that some people today openly acknowledge that they and others with whom they act politically have an ideology. In fact, they view their having an ideology as an asset, not a cognitive or moral defect. My analysis explains why this is so. An ideology can be a valuable political resource, especially for people who wish to alter or abolish an order that they regard not only as oppressive and as embodying and transmitting an opposing ideology that shores it up.

It is a familiar point among ideology theorists, especially those associated with the Frankfurt School critical theory approach, that an oppressive order includes ideological apparatuses, institutions, and social practices that promulgate and sustain an ideology that supports that order.Footnote ³¹ This advantage of the status quo-supporting ideology is formidable. To overcome it, a counter-ideology may be an indispensable resource.

For example, if the status quo- supporting ideology includes the belief that the existing order is natural or inevitable or that the masses lack the power to oppose it successfully, a counter-ideology that refutes these beliefs may be an important asset for the opposition. Simply providing information, in this case, stating that the existing order is not inevitable or that the masses have the power to oppose it may be ineffective, however, unless these beliefs are embedded in a larger web of beliefs, attitudes, moral sentiments, mechanisms for managing beliefs, and distinctions between Us and Them that motivates people to act together against the status quo. Ideologies do include information that contradicts beliefs included in the opposing ideology, but much more than that, they make this information salient and motivationally powerful by embedding it in the larger evaluative map that the ideology provides. That they do helps explain why ideologies can be a valuable political resource, especially in the struggle to overthrow an order propped up by its own ideology. The awareness that the order we oppose is supported by an ideology creates demand in us for a counter-ideology.

Given that this is so, instead of terminating ideology critique when it has been shown how the dominant ideology supports the existing order, as contemporary analytic philosopher critical theorists typically do, a more comprehensive understanding of ideology critique would require going farther. It would also consider the ways in which a recognition that the existing oppressive order is supported by an ideology can and perhaps should generate demand for a counter-ideology. The point is that in the contest between those who support the status quo and those who challenge it, both sides may find ideology a valuable political resource.Footnote ³² If there is a potent ideology supporting resistance or revolution, proponents of the status quo may be compelled to develop a counter-ideology or to modify an existing one to make it more effective in the face of the challenges that the anti-hierarchy ideology poses. And then a modification of the anti-hierarchy ideology may be needed. Critical theorists who only see ideologies as supporting existing oppressive orders are thus stuck with a grossly truncated conception of what ideology theory encompasses. If they also assume that discursive methods will suffice to dismantle oppression-supporting ideologies, they are arbitrarily limiting the tasks that they should shoulder as ideology critics and conveniently ignoring the possibility that they may include engineering epistemic disruptions that are morally problematic.

I have shown that it is a momentous mistake to ignore the role of morality in social change. I do not wish to make the opposite mistake, to suppose that morality or moral appeals embedded in ideologies are all-powerful, self-sufficient sources of social change. Moralized strategies are often only efficacious when disparities of coercive power are not too severe and where there is synergism between force and normative power.

In concluding this chapter, I wish to forestall a misinterpretation of its claims. I have not claimed that ideologies and, more generally, moral strategies make force unnecessary. As will become clear in the next chapter, ideologies can provide moral justifications for uses of force that would otherwise be regarded as impermissible by most people and can motivate people to accept or even participate in such behavior. Nor am I attributing decisive, autonomous efficacy to morality or to ideologies so far as they include moral elements. I am emphasizing, however, that in many cases force alone, even when it is necessary to create or sustain a coalition, can be insufficient for achieving effective cooperation either for or against hierarchies, or more generally for solving collective action problems, and that ideologies, due to the moral commitments they foster, can be especially important in such instances.

The next chapter deepens my account of the explanatory power of the political conception of ideology by describing how a particular kind of revolutionary ideology can be exploited by aspiring revolutionary leaders to achieve sufficient, coordinated participation in the revolutionary endeavor, where this includes overcoming or avoiding collective action problems. I will argue that this success comes at a high price: The very features of the ideology that facilitate solutions to the participation and coordination problems make it very likely that the outcome of the revolution will not be liberation, but a new authoritarian, oppressive regime.Footnote ³³