IB History Role of Ideas Notes

The Role of Ideas: How Ideologies Shaped Popular Movements

Overview

1. The French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined the term "ideology" around 1796, during a period of restlessness in France where people began to demand social and political change.
2. He saw ideology as a rational "science of ideas".
3. The term has since widened to mean the set of commonly held beliefs within a particular group.
4. In popular movements, ideas are debated, shaped and refined as the movement emerges, sometimes attracting more people, sometimes causing rifts.
5. Dr Leor Zmigrod identifies two components to every ideology.
6. The doctrinal component involves the beliefs essential to the ideology, which can harden into dogma (a doctrine that cannot be questioned).
7. The relational component involves the human element: ingroup favouritism towards fellow members and prejudice towards outsiders.
8. Sociologist Charles Tilly argues that popular movements contain three claims: programme (what the movement supports or opposes), identity (how the movement is unified) and standing (how it relates to other political actors).

Key ideological traditions

1. The Enlightenment championed rational thought over superstition and laid foundations for subsequent ideologies.
2. Its key ideas included opposition to absolute monarchy, separation of powers, individual rights, equality and free-market capitalism.
3. Liberalism grew directly from Enlightenment thinking and is still used today to denote ideologies around human rights, democracy and free markets.

1. Marxism (Karl Marx, 1818 to 1883) argued that workers will come into conflict with factory owners when their interests clash.
2. Marx believed revolution was an inevitable outcome of capitalist exploitation.
3. The New Social Movement (NSM) theory moves away from class-based analysis, arguing that from the 1960s movements organised around identity (gender, sexuality, ethnicity) rather than class alone.
4. Feminism highlights oppressive patriarchal structures.
5. It is often organised in waves: the first wave fought for voting rights, the second focused on social equality, and the third challenged the dominance of white upper-class women through intersectional feminism.
6. Environmentalism emerged in the 1970s, while Indigenous theory calls for alternative relationships with the earth, advocating against consumerism and profiteering.

Case studies

1. This section examines the role of ideas across four case studies:
2. The British suffragette movement shows how liberal and Marxist feminism competed for the movement's direction.
3. The Indian national movement traces how anti-imperialism, secularism and debates over partition shaped Indian nationalism.
4. The Indigenous rights movement in Canada examines how Indigenous worldviews challenged Western capitalism and patriarchy.
5. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 analyses how secular youth movements, Islamism and feminism converged against Mubarak.