Ideology

Author(s): Michael H. Hunt

Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jun., 1990), pp. 108-115
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians
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 Ideology

Michael H. Hunt

Ideology is the proper concern of all diplomatic historians. Its relevance rests on a
simple proposition of fundamental importance. To move in a world of infinite com-
plexity, individuals and societies need to reduce that world to finite terms. Only
then can they pretend an understanding of their environment and have the
confidence to talk about it and the courage to act on it. Policy making, like any other
individual or collective activity, requires that simplifying clarity. Policy makers get
their keys to "reality" in the same ways that others in their culture do. Policy makers
are formed by a socialization that begins in childhood and continues even as they
try and retain those keys or discard them as a result of experience in making de-
cisions.
Every diplomatic historian thus, like it or not, constantly comes in contact with
the problem of ideology. Those intent on a better understanding of its importance
and complexity may turn to a rich, suggestive body of literature. Part of that litera-
ture comes from political scientists preoccupied with the problem of definition.
Their work catalogs the senses in which ideology is used (some twenty-seven ac-
cording to one count) and sorts through the variations in meaning. Historians will
find these writings particularly helpful in formulating a working definition with the
greatest utility and applicability to their concerns.' Those who think of the concept
of ideology as unproblematic will see the importance of being explicit about what
it is and what it does, while anyone inclined to downplay the role of ideas or to
regard them as freestanding may well reconsider after encountering definitions wi
clear interpretive promise.
Of the many possible definitions, I favor one that identifies ideology as "an inter
related set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particu
slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of
dealing with that reality." Foreign policy ideologies are thus sets of beliefs and
values, sometimes only poorly and partially articulated, that make international re-
lations intelligible and decision making possible. This broad notion launches diplo-

Michael H. Hunt is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I owe thanks to Susan
Armeny, Michaela Hdnicke, John Kasson, Lloyd Kramer, Thomas Paterson, and David Thelen for their thoughtful
comments.

I For helpful essays in definition, see Willard A. Mullins, "On the Concept of Ideology in Political Science,"
American Political Science Review, 66 Uune 1972), 498-510; and Malcolm B. Hamilton, "The Elements of the
Concept of Ideology," Political Studies, 35 (March 1987), 18-38. For a succinct, critical, clear-headed introduction,
see David McLellan, Ideology (Minneapolis, 1986).

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 Ideology 109

matic historians on a quest for ideas that give structure and meaning to the way
policy makers see the world and their country's place in it. That this definition corre-
sponds closely to that reached independently by two other recent examinations does
not make it correct, but it at least suggests that the understanding is plausible and
worth testing against other definitions.2
Arriving at a definition is an important step, which immediately alters the frame
of reference for studying policy makers. The question becomes "not whether they
have an ideology but to what ideology they subscribe; not whether ideology makes
a difference but what kind of difference it makes for the shaping of their intentions,
policies, and behavior."3 The basic premise that ideology matters and that it is nei-
ther simple nor rigid leaves us with a question of overriding importance. What fun-
damental notions (for example, about human nature, the constituents of power, and
national mission) do policy makers carry in their heads? The search for an answer
can go in a variety of directions. It can lead us to look at the mind-sets of individuals
or collectives. Biographical studies dealing with formative, early years are invaluable
for the former, while prosopographical techniques are indispensable for the latter,
especially as we attempt to identify commonalities or divergences within or between
groups, even generations.4 It can alert us to the need for greater sensitivity to lan-
guage and especially to the meaning embedded in key words such as "progressive
change," "terrorism," or "free world" in our reading of conventional diplomatic
documentation and personal correspondence. It asks us to examine rhetoric in a
more sophisticated way, and to extend our scrutiny to symbols and ceremonies that
can reveal much about the form and content of ideology that conventional sources
usually leave implicit.5
Writings about cultural systems further broaden our understanding. They tell us
(in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz) that ideology springs from those
"socially established structures of meaning" associated with culture.6 As long as cul-

2 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987), xi. For similar definitions, see Mullins,
"On the Concept of Ideology in Political Science," 510; and Hamilton, "Elements of the Concept of Ideology," 38.
3 Seweryn Bialer, "Ideology and Soviet Foreign Policy," in Ideology and Foreign Policy: A Global Perspective,
ed. George Schwab (New York, 1978), 86.
4As examples of biographies, see Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979); an
M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, 1978). Anyone who doubts the relevance of
personality to an understanding of ideology in foreign policy should read M. Brewster Smith, Jerome S. Bruner,
and Robert W. White, Opinions and Personality (New York, 1956); and RobertJervis, "Political Psychology- Some
Challenges and Opportunities," Political Psychology, 10 (Sept. 1989), esp. 487-92. Lawrence Stone, "Prosopo-
graphy," in Historical Studies Today, ed. Felix Gilbert and R. Graubard (New York, 1972), 107-40.
5 On decoding, see Daniel T Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence
(New York, 1987). On rhetoric, see Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy, 15-16. On symbols and ceremonies,
see Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations ofAmerican Nationalism (Chapel Hill,
1988).
6 Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in Clifford Geertz, The In-
terpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 12. Most pertinent here is his classic, Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a
Cultural System," in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (London, 1964), 47-76. The deep impact of
cultural anthropology on intellectual history can be gauged in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New D
tions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979). For the broader impact, see Ronald G. Walters, "Signs
of the Times: Clifford Geertz and the Historians," Social Research, 47 (Autumn 1980), 537-56. For a reassessment,
see Aletta Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn
Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 72-96.

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 110 The Journal of American History June 1990

tures create meaning, there will be ideologies that can be understood only by en-
tering into those cultures and decoding their meanings. But a system of culture can
seem sprawling and amorphous and far too static to suit the needs of historians.
Neo-Marxist writings can help overcome such limitations, providing insights into
causation and process. Their clear focus on class and the hegemonic ideology as-
sociated with the dominant class has provided an attractive way of making culture
more comprehensible and analytically manageable. Their attention to conflict be-
tween different social groups injects a dynamic element missing in the concerns of
anthropologists and warns against treating ideology as a unitary or finished product.
Neo-Marxist studies also show that ideology is closely tied to patterns of privilege
and the exercise of power. Finally, they offer a conception of the relationship be-
tween the system of production and consciousness that is complex and indirect, not
simple and straightforward. The consciousness of elites may have but a tenuous rela-
tionship with the economic system on which their power ultimately rests.7
What has been called the new cultural history can also contribute to our enlight-
enment and help us guard against an overly superficial and schematic notion of
ideology. It offers, not a model or paradigm, but an argument that alerts students
of ideology to linguistic and philosophical complexities. The proponents and practi-
tioners of this approach urge scholars to look beneath the explicit meanings texts
convey to the deeper structures of language and rhetoric that both impart and cir-
cumscribe meaning. Those structures will help us understand what policy makers
can and cannot say about the world. No diplomatic historian will be able to regard
evidence in quite the same way after reading the new cultural historians on the rela-
tions of language to knowledge and power, the complexity of reading a text and
relating it to context,- and the creation of meaning through discourse. Although the
new cultural history is sometimes couched in convoluted and obscure language, the
approach remains an important source for a sophisticated conception of ideology.8
Ideology cannot be understood apart from cultural context, relationships of
power, and the creation, transmission, and interpretation of meaning. Once this be-
comes clear, it is no longer possible to treat, however tacitly, policy as autonomous.
What goes on in the heads of policy makers is inseparable from the social setting
broadly understood. This perspective on the state's policy-making function prompts
a series of questions about ideology. How do policy makers' systems of belief relate

7 See Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," in Raymond Williams, Prob-
lems in Materialism and Culture (London, 1980), 31-49; Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (London, 1983);
and T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical
Review, 90 Uune 1985), 567-93. Antonio Gramsci has won a following on the basis of fragmentary observations,
available in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. by
Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971).
8 See Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," in New Cultural History, ed. Hunt, 1-22; Patricia
O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," ibid., 25-46; Lloyd S. Kramer, "Literature, Criticism, and Histor-
ical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra' ibid., 97-128; and John E.
Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and Irreducibility of Experience,"
American HistoricalReview, 92 (Oct. 1987), 879-907. For an account that offers a helpful introduction to the "lin-
guistic turn" but does not demonstrate precisely how it might contribute to historiographical or historical under-
standing, see Frank Ninkovich, "Interests and Discourse in Diplomatic History," Diplomatic History, 13 (Spring
1989), 135-61.

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 Ideology 111

to those of the broad public and the small portion of it keenly interested in foreign
affairs? How do ideologies held by policy makers and the public relate to the pat-
terns of privilege and structures of power in the society? How do fundamental policy
assumptions and core ideas assume their meaning, and how does that meaning shift
depending on time and context? How does change, even crisis, within a society alter
ideological formulations?
Those questions, whether applied to a particular policy maker or a particular de-
cision, should induce diplomatic historians to step more often out of the archives
to explore the broader literature of American history dealing with the cultural values
and concerns that sustain ideas relevant to policy and give them meaning. Interpre-
tive guidance and inspiration are to be found in topics and themes in American
history as diverse as the influence of economic systems and economic interests, the
role of social class and ethnicity, the impact of regional identity and national polit-
ical culture, the process of nation and state building, and even (as Emily Rosenberg
reminds us here) the constraints of gender.9 To establish the intellectual context of
policy making, our research must become more wide-ranging, imaginative, and in-
genious.

The notion of ideology as a complex structure with potentially far-reaching influ-

ence and with intimate links to social and economic conditions builds on and offers
advantages over older approaches dominant in the field. Diplomatic historians have
been slow in coming to terms with ideology, preferring to consider ideas in a some-
what disembodied form. On the one hand, the impact of ideas on policy was often
only implied or impressionistically developed. On the other hand, ideas were fre-
quently left free-floating, divorced from economic or social processes or needs.
"Realists" during the early Cold War tried for the first time to clear room for
ideology. But their conception of it as an intellectual deformity characteristic of
totalitarian states converted the United States into a special case, thus nullifying
the value of the breakthrough. According to the realists, United States policy
makers, as the leaders of the "free world," had shown a lamentable tendency to fall
under the sway of such pernicious influences as moralism and idealism, but they
were not ideological.l1
Finally, in the 1960s and 1970s an explicitly ideological treatment of United
States policy came into its own thanks to William Appleman Williams and like-

9 See, for example, Robert Kelley, "Ideology and Political Culture fromJefferson to Nixon," American Historical
Review, 82 Uune 1977), 531-62; Tennant S. McWilliams, The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and
the Southern Sense of Self 1877-1950 (Baton Rouge, 1988); and Geoff Eley, "Nationalism and Social History,"
Social History, 6 Uan. 1981), 83-107.
10 For a stark example of the neglect of the function and origin of ideas characteristic of much of the early diplo-
matic history literature, see Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in Amer-
ican History (Baltimore, 1935). For a classic exposition, itself strikingly ideological, see George F. Kennan's Amer-
ican Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago, 1951). This denigrative notion of ideology informs the entry by Edward Shils
in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (18 vols., New York, 1968), VII, 66-76; it
lingers in Paul Seabury's "Ideology and Foreign Policy," in Encyclopedia ofAmerican Foreign Policy, ed. Alexander
DeConde (3 vols., New York, 1978), II, 398-408.

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 112 The Journal of American History June 1990

minded revisionist historians associated with the New Left." Their critics' passion-
ately held Cold War convictions, however, trivialized the discussion of ideology and
overshadowed abstract considerations of method and theory. Those critics, most of
them open or closet realists, summarily dismissed as absurd the suggestion that
Open Door ideology or any other ideology had fundamentally influenced United
States policy.12
Over the past decade and a half, with the cooling of controversy over the origins
of the Cold War, a new concern with ideology has infiltrated the field of diplomatic
history from a variety of directions. Of the various clusters of scholarship concerned
with ideology, that focusing on corporatism (discussed here by Michael J. Hogan)
is the most intimately connected to United States diplomatic history. By high-
lighting how organizational forms articulate economic needs and shape the men-
tality of policy makers, corporatist historians have built on earlier efforts to link the
economy to dominant policy conceptions. The resulting literature, much of it
devoted to the 1920s, shows how a society dominated by corporate institutions and
values gives rise to a corporatist outlook in foreign policy.13
Other clusters of work incorporating the concept of ideology fall on the margins
of the field; scholars associated with these various clusters think of themselves as pe-
ripheral to, if not completely outside, the field of United States diplomatic history.
Writings issuing from political and intellectual history have used the theme of
republicanism to illuminate early American foreign policy. This work has helped
break free of the older views of early foreign policy as a battle between "idealism"
and "realism" or as the expression of clear-cut marketplace needs. The work of
specialists in American culture wrestling with the meaning of the Vietnam War has
uncovered ties between the interventionist impulse and American society that the
specialists, locked in the archives, were missing.'4
Other work, also peripheral to the field, has issued from area studies with its multi-
disciplinary basis and strong orientation toward the study of culture. As the area
studies approach has grown in range, resources, sophistication, and influence, it has

" William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, 1959). For a thoughtful ap-
praisal, see Bradford Perkins, "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-Five Years After," Reviews in American
History, 12 (March 1984), 1-18. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion,
1860-1898 (Ithaca, 1963), is an early and impressive revisionist attempt to demonstrate the importance of ideology
to policy making.
12 A striking instance is the comments of Andrew Ezergailis and Richard Pipes, "Communications," American
Historical Review, 75 (Dec. 1970), 2158-59. The comments were in response to Les Adler and Thomas Paterson,
"Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism,
1930's-1950's," ibid. (April 1970), 1046-64.
13 For a broad application of the corporatist approach, see Emily S. Rosenberg's Spreading the American Dream:
American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York, 1982). For key appraisals of corporatism, see
Thomas J. McCormick, "Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History," Reviews in
American History, 10 (Dec. 1982), 318-30; John Braeman, "The New Left and American Foreign Policy during
the Age of Normalcy," Business History Review, 57 (Spring 1983), 73-104; and Michael J. Hogan, "Corporatism:
A Positive Appraisal," Diplomatic History, 10 (Fall 1986), 363-72.
14 On republicanism, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
(Chapel Hill, 1980); and Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian
America (Ithaca, 198 5). On the Vietnam War, the prime example is Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History ofHow Amer-
ican Culture Led Us into Vietnam andMade Us Fight the Way We Did(New York, 1985). See also John Hellman,
American Myths and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986).

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 Ideology 113

encouraged diplomatic historians touched by it to reflect on the seemingly self-

evident beliefs and long-hidden assumptions of our own country and culture. No-
where has the resulting attention to culturally grounded world views, both elite and
popular, been more marked than in the study of American-East Asian relations.15
A fifth cluster of relevant work comes from political scientists who examine the
policy-making process and contemporary international relations. Their work has
shown a fascination with the intellectual underpinnings of United States Cold War
policy and with the post-Vietnam War breakdown of foreign policy consensus.'6 A
last identifiable cluster is associated with British and British Commonwealth
historians, who have the advantages of both distance from and familiarity with the
United States. Those informed outsiders have brought into sharp relief racial
thought, nationalist ideas, and imperial attitudes familiar from the earlier British
experience. Shy on theory, these works have been notably strong in exploiting com-
parisons.17

While a concern with ideology has developed within diplomatic history, resistance
remains -for good reasons as well as bad. Some diplomatic historians are troubled
by concerns that have long worried intellectual historians. Any attempt to assign
ideology its proper influence and to anchor it in a specific social and economic con-
text is attended by a daunting array of pitfalls. Reductionism is the most frequently
mentioned. Stressing one complex of ideas, the anxious contend, not only will fail
to illuminate the complexity of policy making but may also divert attention from
other, more eligible kinds of explanations.
While those concerns are justified, diplomatic historians should take them, not
as a deterrent, but (as they have proved for intellectual historians) as a spur to try
fresh approaches and rethink old ones. Historical writings that take risks in order
to analyze ideological assumptions and structures deserve to be judged by the stan-
dards that we usually apply, in other words (as one intellectual historian has put
it), according to "the clarity, the ingenuity, and the soundness and spread of
documentation with which the argument is advanced."18 The best test of an in-

15 John W. Dower, Wfar without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific Wfar (New York, 1986); Michael H. Hunt,
The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York, 1983). Training in area
studies provided much of the impetus for Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy. On the rise of area studies,
see Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies andAcademic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure ofAmerican
Learning (New York, 1984); and Paul M. Evans, John Fairbank and the American Understanding of China (New
York, 1988).
16 Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid
and Social Science (Princeton, 1973); D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US. Counterinsurgency
Policy (Princeton, 1988); Ole R. Holsti and James N. Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam
and the Breakdown of Consensus (Boston, 1984); Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, America's Quest for Supremacy
in the Third World: A Gramscian Analysis (London, 1988).
17 Christopher Thorne, Allies ofa Kind: The United States, Britain, and the Wfar againstJapan, 1941-1945 (New
York, 1978); Phillip Darby, Three Faces-of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa,
1870-1970 (New Haven, 1987); David McLean, "American Nationalism, the China Myth, and the Truman Doc-
trine," Diplomatic History, 10 (Winter 1986), 25-42.
18 Laurence Veysey, "Intellectual History and the New Social History," in New Directions in American Intellec-
tual History, ed. Higham and Conkin, 19.

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114 The Journal of American History June 1990

terpretation is not whether it can withstand a sweeping dismissal, but whether it

can help illuminate specific cases, perhaps even by revealing complexities not previ-
ously recognized.
Yet other critics of efforts to study ideology in United States foreign policy have
reacted with barely disguised hostility, prompted by a well-founded sense that im-
portant interpretive notions face vivisection under the knife of ideology. "Power pol-
itics," "international realities," "containment," and "geopolitics" are all terms that
often assume a privileged interpretive role. But they are also terms with strong ideo-
logical dimensions. To recognize those dimensions is to advance revisionism at the
expense of the long-dominant view of the Cold War to which most critics of ideology
are still attached. By calling into question fundamental categories preferred by
historians who identify with the views underlying United States policy, the ideolog-
ical approach threatens to reawaken slumbering Cold War controversies.
Yet other historians, wedded to a narrow conception of the policy process and
devoted to closely researched archival studies, have proved indifferent, if not averse,
to the historical study of ideology. They ask, "What has intellectual history to do
with diplomatic history?"'19 Committed to the herculean task of assimilating a
mountain of materials from government archives and presidential libraries, such
scholars want their job of reconstructing the day-by-day development of policy made
simpler, not more complex and time consuming. Among social science approaches,
they have chosen those that highlight bureaucratic behavior and decision making,
prizing their help in making sense of the mass of paper generated by the Cold War
state. A concern with ideology, by contrast, threatens to increase the scholar's
burden as archival texts become denser and questions of societal context proliferate.
Whatever objections or misgivings may exist, ideology is likely to remain an im-
portant, perhaps even a central preoccupation of diplomatic history for the foresee-
able future. The concept is an invaluable tool whose versatility can help expand the
concerns and methods of diplomatic historians, whatever their topic or orientation.
Ideology forces us, as no other approach does, to focus on the consciousness of policy
makers and the cultural values and patterns of privilege that shape that conscious-
ness. Reflecting its broad application, the study of ideology overlaps with several ap-
proaches discussed in this round table. Its connections to culture, gender studies,
and corporatism have been noted. The study of ideology also encompasses the study
of national security, which is an intellectual construct created and defended by
bureaucrats and policy makers as well as intellectuals closely identified with them.
That study is also a valuable auxiliary to dependency and world systems approaches
as they develop the claims to dominion that issue from centers of imperial power
alongside the attitudes of collaboration and resistance that spring up in response
among subjugated or dependent peoples.
An interest in ideology is likely to persist as much for its relevance to the contem-
porary world as for its interpretive utility. Historians, who are shaped by their times,

19 That very question was the focus of an inconclusive discussion at a panel at the 1989 annual meeting of the
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

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 Ideology 115

have of late watched established ideologies undergo challenge, and they have
thereby gained both a distance from and an interest in them. Within the United
States the Vietnam experience has given rise to the emotional alienation and in-
tellectual distancing from Cold War constructs that first showed up in New Left
writings. Liberal mission and anticommunist crusading slowly relaxed their grip on
diplomatic history, paradoxically revealing just how strong and deep had been their
influence on the underlying beliefs, fears, and hopes that drive policy makers. An
even more fundamental challenge to old certitudes abroad - in Eastern Europe, the
Soviet Union, and China -has reinforced historians' interest in ideology. Watching
old state ideologies falter and new visions struggle to take form can only further
heighten our own sensitivity to both the power and the mutability of ideology.
These developments serve as a welcome reminder that ideologies form a universal
web in which even American leaders have been entangled.

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