Laclau and Mouffe’s Solution to Mannheim’s Paradox

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy II

Abstract

Although Mannheim’s paradox is not broadly well-known, the puzzle to which it points is a familiar one. Mannheim argued that our perception of historical and political facts is always shaped by our socio-political and material context, as well as the political and material ambitions of the social group to which we belong. In other words, all historical and political thought is inescapably ideological: our judgements are always partial, and tainted with the material and political aspirations of the individual and their social group. Thus the paradox: how can we distinguish what is ideological and what isn’t if any assessment of an ideology is always made from the vantage point of another ideology?
In Ideology and Utopia (1929), Mannheim posited the inescapably ideological character of all point of views in reaction to the Marxists of his days who argued that, since the workers are the dispossessed class, one should favor the point of view of the working class above the others. Rather than privileging the workers, Mannheim entrusted the task of building an objective viewpoint to the modern intelligentsia. He argued that this class was relatively detached from its material conditions and tended to represent the different strata of society. Therefore, an intelligentsia committed to the pursuit of the truth should be able to create a point of view that represents the different ideologies of society and assess them in a relatively objective way. However, Mannheim’s solution was widely criticized (would that intelligentsia be truly detached and objective?), and even Mannheim came to doubt his own solution to the paradox.
There is a solution to Mannheim’s paradox in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). In this work, Laclau and Mouffe had a similar objective to Mannheim: in light of the emergence of the New Social Movements (e.g. racial or feminist causes), they also aimed at rejecting Orthodox Marxism’s preference for the workers in order to leave room to these emerging groups. However, and contrarily to Mannheim, they did not privilege the viewpoint of one group. Instead, they argued that, since all ideologies are partial, the attempt to create such an objective viewpoint is itself the supreme ideological illusion. The task of the Left is not to provide a major actor with an objective point of view, but to criticize the ways in which capitalism aims at masking its own partial and ideological character. Capitalism should not be criticized solely from an economistic perspective, but from a variety of points of view – for instance, through a critique of masculine and sexual forms of normativity. For Laclau and Mouffe, any ideology that singles out one group above all others is a victim of the illusion of ideological closure, and any ideology that claims such impartiality is incompatible with democracy as it will seek to make the claims of this group prevail at the expanse of all others.
Laclau and Mouffe give us a way out of Mannheim’s paradox: since all thought is indeed partial, the study of ideologies should not aim to create an overarching and objective point of view. Instead, it should illuminate how ideologies resist their partial and ideological character. This solution has been highly successful and, today, we are witnessing a bourgeoning of scholarships and departments dedicated to assessing the ways in which masculine, sexual, and racial normativities seek ideological closure – often by claiming, for instance, that their norms correspond to a natural biological or moral order. Though Laclau and Mouffe’s solution is not Mannheim’s overarching point of view, they provide a framework for studying ideologies in a way that analyzes how ideologies seek to mask their character as ideologies and as partial representations of social facts.
However, Laclau and Mouffe’s solution is not fully satisfying from a Mannheimian point of view. For Mannheim, the scholar of ideologies could only achieve objectivity by examining the viewpoints of various ideologies within a given society. There is no such requirement in Laclau and Mouffe’s solution since the critique of ideological closure is the point of departure of their approach. Therefore, this essay will look at the potential pitfalls of a study of ideologies that neglect the perspectives of other ideologies. It will explore the risks of ideological closure that may arise from such an approach and propose potential strategies to mitigate these issues.

Author

• Pedro Moreira, Texas Christian University