Chapter 3: Political Ideologies
On the evening of 10 December 1948, delegates from fifty-eight countries sat in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. They had spent nearly two years arguing over a single document of thirty short articles. It was called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it tried to set down what every human being anywhere is owed.
The arguing had not been about wording alone. Delegates from the Western democracies pressed for freedoms the state must not touch — speech, worship, movement, a fair trial, a vote. Delegates from the Soviet Union and its allies replied that such freedoms mean little to a person without work, food or schooling. They argued that the text said too little about the economic conditions of ordinary life, and that it reached into matters each state should settle for itself.
India’s delegation voted for the text. Hansa Mehta, who sat on the drafting commission, had already won one important change: the first article would speak of all human beings, not of all men.
When the vote came, forty-eight states voted in favour and none against. Eight abstained, among them the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe.
Nobody had been defeated. Two rival pictures of a good society had simply refused to become one picture. Those two pictures — liberalism and communism — are the subject of this chapter.
Diagram
Fig. 3.0-1 Caption: The United Nations General Assembly met at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris in December 1948. Brief: Source an archival photograph of the 1948 General Assembly session in Paris; label the venue and the year; emphasise the scale of the assembled delegations rather than any single figure.
3.1 What Is A Political Ideology?
Political opinions rarely arrive one at a time. A person who wants higher taxes on the rich usually also holds views about schools, hospitals, trade unions and land.
Those views hang together. They rest on a shared picture of what society is like, what is wrong with it, and what a better arrangement would look like.
A political ideology is a connected set of ideas about how society works, how it ought to work, and what should be done to close the gap between the two. It is not a single belief but a package of beliefs held together by a few basic commitments.
The word itself is younger than the thing. Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French writer, coined idéologie — literally ‘the science of ideas’ — in the 1790s, during the years following the French Revolution. He meant it as the name of a serious study; within a generation it had become a word people threw at their opponents.
3.1.2 Ideology, Political Theory And Everyday Politics
Political theory and political ideology use the same vocabulary — liberty, equality, justice, authority — but they use it differently.
Political theory, which you met at the start of this course, examines these concepts and is willing to leave a question open. It can end a long argument by concluding that the matter is genuinely unsettled.
An ideology cannot afford that ending. It has to arrive somewhere, because people are waiting to be told what to do. Theory asks; ideology commits.
The difference is one of purpose, not of quality. A careful ideology draws on theory, and most theorists write from within some ideological tradition, whether or not they announce it.
Where You Already Meet Ideology
You meet ideologies more often than the unfamiliar word suggests. Before a general election, every party publishes a manifesto — a public statement of what it promises to do and why — and a manifesto is an ideology cut down to a working list.
Parties also name themselves ideologically, and constitutions borrow the same vocabulary. The words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ were inserted into the Preamble of the Indian Constitution by the Forty-second Amendment in 1976.
Two Senses Of A Slippery Word
The word carries a second, sharper sense that you should be able to recognise.
In their early writing of 1845–46, Marx and Engels used ‘ideology’ critically. On their account, the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling class, dressed up as truths that hold for everybody. You will meet this argument again in section 3.5.1.
In that critical sense, an ideology is not simply a belief system but a distorted one — a set of ideas that conceals whose interests it serves. Calling an opponent ‘ideological’ still carries the sting of that usage.
This chapter uses the word in the first, neutral sense. Liberalism and communism are treated here as two rival packages of political ideas, each with reasons behind it and each open to objection.
3.2 Liberalism: Meaning
The name announces the idea. Liberalism comes from the Latin liber, meaning ‘free’, and it is the political doctrine that places the free individual at the centre of political life.
The label reached politics late. In Spain, in the years around 1812, those who wanted a written constitution to limit the monarchy were called the Liberales. The word spread across Europe as a name for people who wanted the same thing.
But the ideas were already two centuries old by then. To see what liberalism means, it helps to see what it was arguing against.
3.2.1 The Setting In Which Liberalism Arose
In medieval Europe, a person’s place in society was fixed at birth. Land, rank and occupation were inherited; a serf’s grandson expected to be a serf.
Religion was equally settled. The state enforced one faith, and dissent from it was punished as both sin and crime.
From the sixteenth century this order began to crack. The Renaissance revived an interest in human capability and worldly life; the Reformation split Western Christianity and forced rulers to face subjects who would not share their religion.
At the same time, a new class was growing rich. Merchants, bankers and manufacturers needed predictable laws, secure property and the freedom to trade — and they resented a nobility that held privileges they could not earn.
Meanwhile monarchy grew stronger, not weaker. Kings in France, Spain and elsewhere claimed absolute authority, answerable to God alone and not to their subjects.
Liberalism took shape against exactly these two targets: privilege that came from birth, and power that answered to nobody. The thinkers of the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century movement that applied reason to religion, science and government, gave the protest its arguments.
Its first work was therefore negative. Early liberalism spent its energy removing obstacles — arbitrary arrest, censorship, religious compulsion, trade monopolies, inherited privilege — rather than describing an ideal society.
3.2.2 The Central Claim Of Liberalism
Strip away the detail and liberalism rests on one claim: the individual is the basic unit of political life, and society exists for individuals rather than the other way round.
This commitment is called individualism — the view that the human individual, not the community, the class or the nation, is the ultimate bearer of value and of rights.
Two further claims follow from it. The first is about capability: ordinary people are reasonable enough to judge what is good for their own lives.
The second is about authority: if people can judge for themselves, then no king, church, caste or community may impose a way of life on them without their consent.
Put these together and you get the liberal test of power. Every restriction on an individual must be justified to the person restricted. The burden of proof lies on whoever wants to interfere, never on the person who wants to be left alone.
The English thinker John Stuart Mill gave that test its sharpest statement in 1859, in a short book called On Liberty. It has been argued over ever since.
Read the sentence slowly. Mill is not saying that power may never be used against a person; he is saying that only one reason for using it will do.
Your own dislike of how somebody lives is not a reason. Nor is the belief that they would be happier living differently. Only harm to somebody else counts.
Now notice what the sentence does not settle. It does not tell us what counts as harm, and almost every hard political argument turns on precisely that. Is a factory’s pollution harm? Is an insult?
Notice, too, what a source of this kind can and cannot show. It records what one thinker argued in one book. It does not tell us how liberal governments actually behaved — and in 1859 Mill’s own country was ruling an empire in which the liberties he defended were not extended to the governed.
3.2.3 Two Phases: Classical And Modern Liberalism
Liberalism is not one fixed doctrine. It has had two broad phases, and they disagree about what the individual most needs protecting from.
Classical liberalism, dominant from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, saw the state as the main danger. Its ideal was negative liberty — freedom understood as the absence of interference by others.
From this came the demand for a minimal state, often described as a ‘night-watchman’: it should keep order, enforce contracts, defend the borders and otherwise stay out of the way.
In economic life the same logic produced laissez-faire, a French phrase meaning roughly ‘let them do as they please’ — the doctrine that markets work best when governments do not manage them.
Industrialisation exposed the difficulty. Nineteenth-century factory towns were full of people whom no law was restraining and who were nonetheless unable to do very much: children in mills, families without schooling, workers who fell ill and starved.
Such a person is free in the classical sense and helpless in every other sense. That observation produced the second phase.
From the 1880s, thinkers including T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse reworked the idea of freedom. Green argued that liberty is not merely being left alone but the positive power to do something worth doing; Hobhouse argued that society owes its weaker members the conditions of a decent life.
This is positive liberty — freedom understood as the actual capacity to act, which may require schooling, health care and a minimum income. Modern liberalism accordingly accepts an active state, funded by taxation, that removes obstacles the market leaves standing.
The two conceptions were given their familiar names by Isaiah Berlin, in a lecture at Oxford in 1958 titled ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Berlin also entered a warning: rulers who claim to deliver a person’s ‘real’ freedom may end by overriding what that person actually wants.
Before comparing the phases in a grid, be clear about what they share. Both keep the individual at the centre, both insist that power be justified, and both reject rule by birth or by force.
3.3 Features Of Liberalism
Four features carry the liberal argument, and they are best read as a chain rather than a list. Each one gives the next its reason for existing, as Figure 3.3-1 shows.
Diagram
Fig. 3.3-1 Caption: The four features of liberalism, each following from the one before it. Brief: Draw four linked boxes in sequence — Importance of individuals, Human rights and freedom, Constitutional and liberal government, Support for democracy — with a connecting arrow between each pair; label the arrows ‘therefore’.
3.3.1 Recognition Of The Importance Of Individuals
Liberalism treats the individual as the basic unit of society and the ultimate bearer of rights. Every other body — family, caste, community, party, nation, state — is an arrangement made up of individuals.
Each person is held to have intrinsic worth and dignity. That worth is not earned by being useful to the state, and it is not increased or reduced by birth, sex, wealth, religion or caste.
Two practical consequences follow. The first is a test for institutions: a government, a law or a policy is judged by what it does to the lives of individual people.
The second is a limit on collective goals. A society may pursue growth, glory or order, but it may not treat a person merely as material for those projects.
There is a third consequence, easy to miss. If every person has worth and reason, then each is the best judge of how to live their own life.
The state may therefore not impose one idea of a good life on everybody. From this comes the liberal insistence on toleration, and on a government that stays neutral between the religions and ways of life of its citizens.
That claim has always drawn a strong objection. Critics reply that no such free-standing individual exists: we are shaped by the language, family, faith and community we are born into, and liberalism describes a person who was never born anywhere.
A second objection is more practical. Treating everyone simply as an individual can leave untouched the disadvantages people suffer as members of a group — a point communism presses hard, as section 3.6 will show.
3.3.2 Support For Human Rights And Freedom
Human rights are claims a person can make simply by being human, rather than favours granted by a ruler. Liberals regard them as universal, belonging to everyone, and inalienable, meaning they cannot rightfully be taken away.
The list liberals defend is long and familiar: freedom of speech and expression, of conscience and worship, of assembly and association, of movement, the right to own property, to a fair trial, and to privacy.
Liberals do not want these written on paper alone. They want them written into a constitution and enforced by courts, so that they bind the government of the day and not merely private citizens.
The document you read about at the start of this chapter was an attempt to do the same thing internationally, for people whose own governments might not protect them.
None of this makes rights absolute. Liberals accept that one person’s freedom can destroy another’s, and Mill’s test in section 3.2.2 was an attempt to say when the state may step in.
Indian constitutional practice follows the same shape. A freedom is guaranteed, and the grounds on which it may be restricted are then stated separately.
So a liberal system does not promise unlimited freedom. It promises that any limit must be publicly stated, generally applicable, and open to challenge before a court.
The honest difficulty is that this shifts an enormous question onto judges. Somebody must decide which restrictions are reasonable, and that somebody was not elected.
3.3.3 Constitutional And Liberal Government
Rights are useless against a government that can simply ignore them. The third feature is therefore about how power itself is organised.
Constitutionalism is the principle that the powers of government are defined and limited by a higher body of law, which the government cannot alter at will.
A constitution does four jobs at once. It creates the organs of government, distributes powers among them, states what those organs may not do, and guarantees the rights of citizens.
What, then, does ‘limited government’ actually mean? It is limited in four distinct ways, and a liberal system needs all four.
First, by the text of the constitution itself, which grants powers and by doing so marks their edges. A power not granted is a power not held.
Second, by rights that place certain matters outside the reach of ordinary law-making, so that a temporary majority cannot vote them away.
Third, by the rule of law — the principle that everyone, including ministers, officials and the police, is subject to the same law, applied by independent courts. A ruler who can be sued is a ruler under law.
Fourth, by the separation of powers — the division of authority among a legislature that makes law, an executive that carries it out, and a judiciary that interprets it. Each is expected to check the others.
One warning belongs here. Possessing a written constitution does not by itself make a government liberal, and governments with elaborate constitutions have often ruled arbitrarily.
What distinguishes a liberal government is whether the limits actually bite — whether a court can rule against a minister, and whether the ruling is then obeyed.
The objection to all this is that limits cost time. Checks slow governments down in emergencies, and unelected judges can block what an elected majority plainly wants.
3.3.4 Support For Democracy
The fourth feature answers a question the first three leave open. Who should exercise the power that has been so carefully limited?
The liberal answer is the people. Political authority is legitimate only when it rests on the consent of the governed, an idea liberalism inherited from social contract theory.
In practice this means representative democracy. Its working parts are regular and competitive elections, a vote for every adult citizen, an opposition free to campaign, a press free to criticise, and officials who can be removed.
Two arguments support it. If each person is the best judge of their own interests, then each should have a say in the decisions that bind them.
And rulers who must face the voters have a standing reason not to abuse them. Democracy is valued here as a restraint on power, not only as a way of expressing a popular will.
It is important to see that liberalism and democracy are not the same thing. Democracy answers the question of who rules; liberalism answers the question of how far anyone may rule.
The two can pull apart. A majority can vote to silence a newspaper or to strip a minority of its property, and nineteenth-century liberals, Mill among them, warned against this ‘tyranny of the majority’.
The system liberals defend is therefore a liberal democracy — majority rule for ordinary decisions, combined with constitutional limits and guaranteed rights that majorities may not override.
Critics answer that this arrangement is fairer in form than in fact. Every adult has one vote, but wealth buys newspapers, campaigns and access, so influence remains unequal.
That criticism is the doorway to the second half of this chapter, where an ideology built on exactly that objection begins.
3.4 Communism: Meaning
Like liberalism, communism carries its idea in its name. Communism comes from the Latin communis, meaning ‘common’ or ‘shared’, and it holds that the great productive resources of a society should be owned in common rather than privately.
The resources it has in mind are the means of production — land, mines, factories, machinery and raw materials, everything used to produce goods for others. Personal belongings such as your clothes or your books are not what is at issue.
From that single demand a whole doctrine follows: an account of how history moves, a diagnosis of what is wrong with the present, and a picture of the society that is to replace it.
3.4.1 The Setting In Which Communism Arose
Communism is a child of the factory. From the late eighteenth century, machine production transformed Britain and then Western Europe, and the transformation was brutal for those who worked the machines.
Millions who had once farmed or worked in trades now sold their labour by the hour. Capitalism — an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and goods are produced for sale at a profit — had arrived in its industrial form.
The conditions in the new mill towns are well documented. Working days ran to twelve hours and more; children worked alongside adults; wages were low, injuries common, and dismissal instant.
Here was the fact that started everything. These workers were not slaves or serfs. They were legally free persons, holding exactly the freedoms liberals had fought for, and their lives were still miserable.
That gap between legal freedom and actual condition is where communism begins. Liberalism, it argued, had removed the chains of birth and left the chains of ownership untouched.
Answers were already being attempted. From the 1820s, reformers such as Robert Owen tried to build model industrial communities run on cooperative lines.
The doctrine that became communism was the work of two Germans, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their short pamphlet The Communist Manifesto appeared in London in February 1848, only weeks before revolutions broke out across Europe.
3.4.2 The Central Claim Of Communism
The communist argument can be set out as four linked claims. Take them in order, because each rests on the one before.
The first is about causes. The way a society produces and distributes its material life shapes everything else in it — its laws, its politics, its education, its religion and its ideas of right and wrong.
The second is about division. In every society since the earliest, the means of production have been owned by a few, and this splits people into classes whose interests genuinely conflict.
Under industrial capitalism the two principal classes are the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who own nothing to sell but their capacity to work.
The third claim is about exploitation — the process by which an owner pays a worker less than the value that the worker’s labour creates, and keeps the difference. On this account exploitation is not the fault of cruel employers; it is built into private ownership itself, and kind employers cannot abolish it.
The fourth claim is about direction. History is not drifting. It is moving, through the struggle between these classes, towards the abolition of private ownership of production, and the working class is the force that will carry it there.
What is the destination? A society without classes, because nobody owns the productive property that creates them, and without a state, because there are no longer class conflicts for a state to manage.
In such a society, production is organised to meet needs rather than to earn profit. Marx gave the arrangement its best-known formulation in an 1875 commentary on a German party programme.
The sentence has two halves and they are doing different jobs. The first half asks people to contribute what they are capable of; the second promises them what they require, whether or not their contribution matched it.
Read together, they cut the link between what a person produces and what a person receives — the link on which wage labour rests.
But hold the sentence to the same standard you applied to Source 3.1. It is a statement of a goal, written in a few words to criticise somebody else’s party programme.
It says nothing about the machinery. It does not tell us who assesses needs, how disagreements about them are settled, or what happens to a person whose assessment differs from the assessor’s.
A Note On Two Words
Students often meet ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ used as though they were the same word, and it helps to be clear.
In Marx’s usage, common ownership arrives in stages. An earlier stage, in which the state owns and directs production and people are still paid according to work done, is followed by a fuller stage in which the state has disappeared and distribution follows need.
Communism, in this chapter, means that fuller stage and the doctrine that aims at it. The features examined next are the four that the doctrine rests on.
3.5 Features Of Communism
Four features carry the communist argument. The first explains how history moves, the second identifies its engine, the third describes the passage out of capitalism, and the fourth names the destination.
3.5.1 Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism is the philosophical method underlying Marxist theory. It holds that reality develops through the conflict of opposing forces within it, and that the forces which matter most are material rather than spiritual.
Take the two words separately, because each carries half the meaning.
A dialectic is a way of understanding change through contradiction. Nothing is simply stable; every arrangement contains within it the forces that will undo it, and change comes from the struggle between them.
The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had used such a method, but applied it to ideas: history for him was the working out of thought. Marx accepted the method and rejected the subject matter, arguing that Hegel’s dialectic had to be turned the right way up.
Materialism supplies the correction. In this context the word has nothing to do with a love of possessions. It means that the material conditions of life — how people feed, clothe and house themselves — are the basic reality, and that ideas grow out of those conditions rather than the other way round.
Figure 3.5-1 shows the pattern of change that results.
Diagram
Fig. 3.5-1 Caption: Change through contradiction: an existing order generates its opposite, and the clash produces something new. Brief: Draw three labelled stages — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — with the first two facing each other and both arrows converging on the third; add a faint rising spiral behind them to show that the new stage becomes the starting point of a further cycle.
The pattern is often summarised as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Engels set out three laws of this movement: the unity and struggle of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation.
The second law is worth pausing on. Small changes accumulate without altering the system, until a threshold is crossed and the system changes its character — as water heated degree by degree suddenly becomes steam.
The third law explains why history does not simply go round in circles. Each new stage cancels the one before but keeps what was useful in it, so development is better pictured as a rising spiral than as a straight line or a wheel.
Historical Materialism
Applied to human society, this method is called historical materialism. Its central idea is a two-storey model of any society.
The economic base consists of the forces of production — tools, machines, skills, resources — and the relations of production, meaning who owns what and who works for whom.
On that base stands the superstructure: law, government, religion, education, art and the ideas people hold about what is normal and right.
Diagram
Fig. 3.5-2 Caption: The base and superstructure model used in historical materialism. Brief: Draw a broad lower block labelled ‘Base — forces and relations of production’ supporting a narrower upper block labelled ‘Superstructure — law, politics, religion, education, culture’; add an upward arrow from base to superstructure.
When the forces of production develop faster than the relations of production allow, the two come into conflict. The old ownership arrangements now obstruct what the new machinery could produce, and the superstructure built to defend them becomes outdated.
That conflict, on this account, is what social revolutions resolve. History moves not because rulers decide or because ideals advance, but because a way of producing has outgrown the way of owning.
Engels himself narrowed the claim in his later years, insisting that the economic factor was decisive only in the final analysis, and that politics and ideas act back upon the base.
3.5.2 Class Struggle
If dialectical materialism explains how history changes, class struggle names the force that changes it. It is the continuing conflict between social classes over the ownership of productive resources.
A class, in this theory, is defined by one thing only: its relation to the means of production. Not income, not status, not education — simply whether a group owns productive property or must work for those who do.
Marx and Engels opened their pamphlet of 1848 with the claim that gives the theory its shape.
‘Hitherto existing’ means ‘up to now’. The sentence claims that class conflict is not one theme in history among others; it is the thread on which history is strung.
Each stage of production has produced its own pair of opposed classes. Ancient society set masters against slaves, feudal Europe set lords against serfs, and industrial society sets the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
The ruling class in each case holds power not only through wealth but through the state, the law, the schools and the religion of the age — the superstructure of section 3.5.1 at work.
Marx traced this succession through four stages that have already occurred:
- Primitive communism — no private ownership of productive resources, and therefore no classes.
- Slave society — the owners of land and of people, set against those they owned.
- Feudalism — lords holding land, served by peasants tied to it.
- Capitalism — the bourgeoisie owning the means of production, the proletariat selling labour.
Two further stages were to come: a transitional phase of working-class rule, examined in section 3.5.3, and finally communism itself. You will sometimes see the whole sequence listed as six stages for that reason, and there is no contradiction between the two counts.
Why should the proletariat be the class that ends the sequence? Because, on Marx’s argument, it is the first subordinate class that owns nothing to protect, so its victory cannot install a new form of ownership over anybody else.
Now weigh the claim against the century that followed. Marx expected revolution first in the most industrialised societies, yet communist revolutions came in largely agricultural Russia in 1917 and China in 1949.
In Western Europe, meanwhile, wages rose, trade unions won legal recognition, and welfare provision softened the conditions Marx had described. The polarisation into two hostile camps did not arrive on schedule.
Even the sentence in Source 3.3 was qualified by its own authors. When Engels prepared an English edition in 1888, he added a note excepting the earliest societies, which had no classes to struggle.
3.5.3 Dictatorship Of The Proletariat
Capitalism, in this theory, will not simply hand over the factories. Between its collapse and the arrival of communism, Marxist theory places a transitional phase called the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the working class holds state power.
The word ‘dictatorship’ is the source of endless confusion, so read it carefully. In nineteenth-century usage Marx meant class rule — the state serving the interests of the working majority — rather than the personal tyranny of one leader.
On this reading, capitalism was already a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, since the state served the owning minority. The transition replaces the rule of a minority class with the rule of the majority class.
Four tasks belong to the phase. The means of production are taken into public ownership; attempts to restore the old order are put down; planning replaces the market; and law, education and administration are rebuilt to serve the new arrangement.
Marx thought he had seen the phase begin once, and briefly.
The twentieth century tested the idea on a far larger scale, and the record has to be stated plainly. In states that described themselves as exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat, power was concentrated in a single party, rival parties were banned, and dissent was punished by imprisonment.
The state in those countries did not shrink during the transition. It grew — and that fact bears directly on the feature examined next.
3.5.4 Stateless And Classless Society
The destination has two halves, and the second follows from the first.
A classless society is one in which nobody owns the means of production privately, so no group can live off the labour of another. With ownership held in common, the division between an owning class and a working class has nothing to stand on.
Exploitation ends by definition rather than by regulation. There is no surplus for an owner to keep, because there is no owner.
A stateless society is the further step. It rests on a distinctive Marxist claim about what a state is for.
The state, in this theory, is not a neutral referee standing above society. It is an instrument through which a dominant class maintains its position — its army, police, courts and bureaucracy exist because society is divided.
Remove the division and the instrument has no function. Engels described the result in 1878 with a phrase that has stuck: the state is not abolished, it withers away.
What replaces it is not disorder. Public affairs still need coordinating, but coordination passes to councils, assemblies and associations, and the governing of persons gives way to the management of things.
Two objections deserve an answer, and communism has not fully supplied either.
The first is analytical. Conflict has many sources besides ownership — religion, region, language, sex, and simple ambition — and it is not obvious why abolishing classes would end them.
The second is historical. No state that adopted this doctrine has withered away, and several became more centralised the longer the transition lasted. Whether that failure lies in the theory or in what was done in its name remains a live argument.
3.6 Liberalism And Communism: The Points Of Disagreement
The two ideologies in this chapter are not simply opposites. They grew from the same soil, and their quarrel is sharper for it.
Both are modern doctrines, born of the collapse of a world in which rank was inherited and power was said to come from God. Both hold that political arrangements are made by human beings and can therefore be remade.
Both, in their own terms, claim to be working for human emancipation. They disagree about what stands in its way.
Where They Part
The first disagreement is about the basic unit of political analysis. Liberalism starts with the individual and treats every group as a collection of individuals; communism starts with the class and treats the individual as a person shaped by their place in production.
The second is about freedom. For a liberal, a person is unfree when someone interferes with them, or when they lack the capacity to act on their own choices. For a communist, a person is unfree while they must sell their labour to survive, however many legal permissions they hold.
The third is about private property. Liberalism treats property as a right that shields the individual from the state and gives independence. Communism treats private ownership of productive property as the root of division and therefore as the thing to abolish.
The fourth is about the state. In liberal theory the state is a framework that can be made neutral, provided it is limited by a constitution, rights and courts. In Marxist theory it is an instrument of whichever class owns production, and no arrangement of paper limits changes that.
The fifth is about how change should come. Liberals expect improvement through elections, legislation, courts and argument, because these can be repeated and reversed. Marxists have argued that a class which owns the state will not vote itself out of ownership, so reform is not enough.
Before setting these side by side, notice how much the grid will leave out.
Facts, Values, Or Both?
When liberals and communists disagree, what exactly are they disagreeing about?
Some of it is factual, and evidence can in principle settle it. Does competition raise living standards over time? Does central planning allocate resources efficiently? Does a state entrusted with all productive property give it up? These are questions about what happens.
Some of it is evaluative, and no amount of evidence will settle it. If a policy raises everyone’s income while widening the gap between the richest and the poorest, is that an improvement? Answering requires a judgement about what matters, not a further measurement.
Most real arguments mix the two, and confusion follows when the mixture goes unnoticed. Two people who agree on every fact may still disagree, because they weigh liberty and equality differently.
Neither Ideology Governs Alone
One last observation belongs at the end of this chapter, because it complicates everything above.
Neither ideology has ever been applied in a pure form for long. Liberal democracies built public schooling, health systems and pensions, all of which classical liberalism would have rejected.
Communist states, for their part, reintroduced markets, private enterprise and foreign trade in the closing decades of the twentieth century, while retaining single-party rule.
India’s own Constitution reflects the same mixture. It guarantees justiciable Fundamental Rights in the liberal manner, and it also sets out Directive Principles committing the state to reduce inequalities of income, status and opportunity.
Ideologies, then, are not blueprints that governments simply follow. They are arguments that governments draw upon, borrow from, and are judged against — which is why knowing the arguments is worth more than knowing the labels.
3.7 Summary
What An Ideology Is
- A political ideology is a connected package of ideas about how society works, how it ought to work, and what should be done about the difference.
- An ideology performs four tasks together: it explains the existing order, evaluates it, envisions a better one, and prescribes action. The fourth task is why it must give firm answers, and why it tends to resist correction.
- Political theory may leave a question open; an ideology cannot, because people are waiting to be told what to do.
- The word also carries a critical sense, used by Marx and Engels, in which an ideology is a set of ideas that conceals whose interests it serves.
Liberalism
- Liberalism, from the Latin liber meaning ‘free’, places the free individual at the centre of political life. It arose against two targets: privilege inherited by birth, and power answerable to nobody.
- Its central claim is that society exists for individuals, that ordinary people can judge their own good, and that therefore every restriction must be justified to the person restricted.
- Classical liberalism understood freedom as the absence of interference and wanted a minimal state. Modern liberalism, from the 1880s, understood freedom as the capacity to act, and accepted an active state providing schooling, health care and welfare. Isaiah Berlin named the two conceptions in 1958.
- Feature one, recognition of the importance of individuals: each person has intrinsic worth, institutions are judged by their effect on individual lives, and nobody may be used merely as material for collective goals.
- Feature two, support for human rights and freedom: rights belong to people as human beings, are universal and inalienable, and are written into constitutions so that they bind governments. They are not absolute; restrictions must be stated, general and open to challenge.
- Feature three, constitutional and liberal government: power is limited by the text of the constitution, by rights placed beyond ordinary majorities, by the rule of law, and by the separation of powers. Having a constitution is not enough; the limits must actually bind.
- Feature four, support for democracy: authority rests on the consent of the governed, exercised through competitive elections and removable officials. Liberalism and democracy are distinct, and liberal democracy joins majority rule to constitutional limits.
Communism
- Communism, from the Latin communis meaning ‘common’, holds that the means of production should be owned in common. It began from a single observation: industrial workers were legally free and materially wretched.
- Its central claims are that material production shapes everything else, that ownership divides society into opposed classes, that exploitation is built into private ownership rather than into cruel employers, and that history is moving towards common ownership.
- Feature one, dialectical materialism: reality develops through the conflict of opposites, and the decisive forces are material. Applied to society as historical materialism, it holds that an economic base of forces and relations of production shapes a superstructure of law, politics, religion and culture.
- Feature two, class struggle: a class is defined by its relation to the means of production, and the conflict between classes is the engine of historical change. Four stages have occurred — primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism — with a transitional phase and communism projected to follow.
- Feature three, dictatorship of the proletariat: a transitional period of working-class state power, meaning rule by a class rather than by a person, during which ownership is transferred and restoration prevented. In practice, twentieth-century states applying the doctrine concentrated power in a single party and grew stronger rather than weaker.
- Feature four, stateless and classless society: with no private ownership there is no owning class and no exploitation; with no classes the state loses its function and, in Engels’s phrase of 1878, withers away.
The Two Compared
- They disagree about the basic unit of politics, the meaning of freedom, the status of private property, the nature of the state, and whether change comes by reform or revolution.
- They agree in rejecting rule by birth or divine right, in holding that social orders must justify themselves, and in describing their goals in the language of freedom.
- Some of their disagreements are factual and testable; others are judgements about how much liberty is worth against how much equality. Most real arguments mix the two.
- Neither ideology has governed in a pure form. Liberal democracies built welfare provision; communist states reintroduced markets. India’s Constitution combines justiciable Fundamental Rights with Directive Principles aimed at reducing inequality.
The Arguments In One Place
The chapter’s central claim is that liberalism and communism are two answers to one question: what stands between human beings and their freedom?
Liberalism answers that the obstacle is unjustified power, and that the remedy is to limit power by rights, law and consent, leaving individuals to make their own lives.
Communism answers that the obstacle is ownership, and that limiting power leaves the owners in place — so freedom requires abolishing private ownership of production, whatever the constitution says.
The strongest reply to each is the other’s starting point. Liberals ask who will restrain a state that owns everything; communists ask what a right is worth to someone with nothing.
3.8 Key Terms
- Bourgeoisie — in Marxist theory, the class that owns the means of production under capitalism.
- Capitalism — an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and goods are produced for sale at a profit.
- Class — a group defined by its relation to the means of production, that is, by whether it owns productive property or works for those who do.
- Class struggle — the continuing conflict between classes over the ownership of productive resources, treated in Marxist theory as the engine of historical change.
- Classless society — a society in which nobody privately owns the means of production, so no group can live off the labour of another.
- Communism — the doctrine that the means of production should be owned in common, leading to a classless and stateless society.
- Constitutionalism — the principle that the powers of government are defined and limited by a higher body of law that the government cannot alter at will.
- Dialectical materialism — the Marxist method holding that reality develops through the conflict of opposing forces, and that material conditions rather than ideas are the basic reality.
- Dictatorship of the proletariat — the transitional phase in Marxist theory in which the working class holds state power between the fall of capitalism and the arrival of communism.
- Exploitation — the process by which an owner pays a worker less than the value the worker’s labour creates and retains the difference.
- Historical materialism — the application of dialectical materialism to society, holding that an economic base shapes the legal, political and cultural superstructure above it.
- Human rights — claims a person can make simply by being human, regarded as universal and inalienable rather than granted by a ruler.
- Individualism — the view that the human individual, rather than the community, class or nation, is the ultimate bearer of value and of rights.
- Laissez-faire — the doctrine that the economy works best when governments leave markets to operate without interference.
- Liberal democracy — a system combining majority rule for ordinary decisions with constitutional limits and guaranteed rights that majorities may not override.
- Liberalism — the political doctrine that places the free individual at the centre of political life and requires that every use of power be justified to the person it restricts.
- Manifesto — a public statement in which a party sets out what it promises to do and why.
- Means of production — the land, mines, factories, machinery and raw materials used to produce goods, as distinct from personal belongings.
- Negative liberty — freedom understood as the absence of interference by others.
- Political ideology — a connected set of ideas about how society works, how it ought to work, and what should be done to close the gap between the two.
- Positive liberty — freedom understood as the actual capacity to act, which may require education, health and a minimum income.
- Proletariat — in Marxist theory, the class that owns no productive property and lives by selling its capacity to work.
- Rule of law — the principle that everyone, including ministers, officials and the police, is subject to the same law, applied by independent courts.
- Separation of powers — the division of authority among a legislature that makes law, an executive that carries it out, and a judiciary that interprets it, each checking the others.
- Stateless society — a society in which, class divisions having ended, the coercive apparatus of the state has no function and gives way to cooperative management of common affairs.
3.9 Points to Ponder
An ideology has to give firm answers, because people are waiting to act on them. Can it give firm answers and still stay open to evidence that it is wrong?
Liberalism places the burden of proof on whoever wants to restrict a person. Who should carry that burden when the restriction is meant to protect the person from themselves?
A constitution restrains the government, and yet the government can amend the constitution. What, in that case, actually makes the restraint hold?
Marxist theory holds that ideas grow out of material conditions rather than standing above them. Does that claim apply to Marxist theory itself, and what follows if it does?
Communism expects the state to lose its purpose once classes disappear. If conflicts over land, language and belief would outlive the end of class, what would settle them?
Liberals and communists both describe their goal as freedom, while recommending opposite institutions. Can both be using the word correctly, or must one of them be misusing it?
3.10 Objective Questions
- The word ‘liberalism’ is derived from the Latin word— [1 mark]
- socius
- liber
- communis
- civis
- Negative liberty is best described as— [1 mark]
- the absence of interference by others
- the actual capacity to act on one’s choices
- the right to vote in regular elections
- the abolition of private property
- In Marxist theory, a class is defined by— [1 mark]
- the level of a group’s income
- the educational qualifications of its members
- its relation to the means of production
- the social status accorded to it by custom
- Which one of the following is NOT a feature of communism as studied in this chapter? [1 mark]
- Dialectical materialism
- Class struggle
- Separation of powers
- Stateless and classless society
- Assertion (A): Liberalism insists that the powers of government be limited by a constitution. [1 mark] Reason (R): In liberal theory, every restriction placed on an individual must be justified to that individual.
- Both A and R are true and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Assertion (A): Marxist theory expects the state to wither away after classes have disappeared. [1 mark] Reason (R): The state is regarded in that theory as an instrument through which a dominant class maintains its position.
- Both A and R are true and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Match the thinker in Column A with the contribution in Column B: [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. John Stuart Mill | i. Named and distinguished two concepts of liberty in a lecture of 1958 |
| b. T. H. Green | ii. Described the state as withering away rather than being abolished |
| c. Isaiah Berlin | iii. Argued in 1859 that power may be used over a person only to prevent harm to others |
| d. Friedrich Engels | iv. Reworked liberty as the positive power to do something worth doing |
Fill in the blank: The transitional phase in which the working class holds state power, between the fall of capitalism and the arrival of communism, is called the ____________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: In historical materialism, law, politics, religion and culture together form the ____________, which rests upon the economic base. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The existence of a written constitution is by itself sufficient to make a government liberal. [1 mark]
3.11 Check Your Concepts
Define political ideology. [2 marks]
What is meant by the means of production? Give one example. [2 marks]
State any two features of liberalism. [2 marks]
Differentiate between negative liberty and positive liberty. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why liberalism supports democracy. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, why constitutionalism requires more than the mere existence of a written constitution. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat means the rule of a single leader over the people. [4 marks]
Describe dialectical materialism: its central claim, how it is applied to society, and one criticism made of it. [6 marks]
Describe class struggle as the engine of historical change, naming the stages Marx identified, and state one limitation of the theory. [6 marks]
Compare liberalism and communism with reference to the basic unit of politics, the meaning of freedom, and the role of the state. [6 marks]
3.12 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- A municipal council in an Indian city issues an order prohibiting all public meetings in the central market area, giving traffic congestion as the reason. A residents’ association challenges the order in the High Court, arguing that the restriction is far wider than the problem requires.
- Which feature of liberalism is at stake in this dispute? [1 mark]
- Liberals accept that freedoms may be restricted. Explain the two conditions they attach to such restrictions. [3 marks]
- What does this single episode not tell you about how free that city is? [2 marks]
- Study the following description of a cartoon. A tall padlocked gate is labelled ‘Private Property’. Inside stands a well-dressed figure gesturing at the lock; outside, a crowd of workers wait with tools in their hands. The caption reads: ‘This gate is what keeps us all free.’
- Whose argument is the cartoonist presenting, and how do you know? [2 marks]
- State the reply that a liberal would make about the role of private property. [3 marks]
- State one thing this cartoon cannot show about the disagreement it depicts. [1 mark]
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. “In the mill towns of the 1840s, the working day ran to twelve hours and more. Children worked beside adults, wages were low, injuries were common, and a worker could be dismissed the same afternoon. Not one of these workers was a slave or a serf. Every one of them was a free person under the law.”
- Which claim of communism does this passage support? [2 marks]
- Explain what communism means by exploitation, and why it treats exploitation as built into ownership rather than into the character of employers. [3 marks]
- Would evidence that wages rose steadily after 1870 disprove that claim? Give a reason for your answer. [2 marks]
- In a country with a written constitution, the Supreme Court strikes down a law that had been passed by a large majority in the legislature, holding that it violated a guaranteed right. Some commentators call the judgment a defence of the constitution; others call it the overruling of the people’s elected representatives.
- Which feature of liberal government does the Court’s action illustrate? [1 mark]
- Explain the objection that such a judgment is undemocratic, and the liberal reply to it. [4 marks]
- Is this disagreement about facts, about values, or about both? Justify your answer. [2 marks]