Jason Blakely is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University in California. His writing often straddles the divides of academic and popular. He has contributed to leading public venues like Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic, and written on how to salvage politics and the human sciences from the abuses of scientific authority in his books We Built Reality and Interpretive Social Science (with Mark Bevir). His most recent book, Lost in Ideology, offers a critical account of ideology as a form of meaning-making. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Blakely discusses his philosophical influences, what distinguishes his theory from previous accounts of ideology, and what he hopes this offers readers.
What is your work about?
My book attempts to orient readers in a time of tremendous ideological tumult and confusion. I think in the case of ideology we are living through the classic philosophical case of a term everyone uses (experts and ordinary people alike) without anyone having a very good idea what they mean by it, or at least not a philosophically adequate one. The book really tries to begin in Socratic fashion from the provocation that we all think we know what “ideology” means but, in fact, we don’t.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
My argument emerges out of the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions of philosophy as advanced by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor. I believe that this tradition can offer a superior conception of ideology to the ones that dominate both among experts in philosophy and the social sciences and laypeople at the street level. Specifically, my book is an effort to offer a theory of ideology that does not reduce it to false beliefs or some supposedly more determining strata like demography or economic interests. Instead, I wanted to capture ideology in all its meaning-making depth. This required articulating a concept of ideology that was sensitive to how it exists from the first-person perspective. People hold their ideologies because they find them ethically compelling and they help them make sense of the world. They also normally think of them as true. At the same time, I did not think a notion of ideology that was merely descriptive and relativistic was adequate either. So, my goal was to offer a theory of ideology that was true to people’s experiences while remaining critical. I then offer a tour of the major ideologies employing my framework. If people are “lost in ideology,” maybe philosophy can play a small role in helping them reorient.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
I do not believe that there is a theory of ideology on hand that both takes it seriously as a form of meaning-making and political experience, without simply tumbling into relativism and losing all critical bite. Instead, the theories of ideology that remain critical (Marxism is an impressive case of this) also veer towards reductive explanations as to why people hold the political convictions they do, while those that are truer to the reconstruction of beliefs lose all critical force. Building off the work of geniuses like Taylor, Gadamer, and Clifford Geertz, I believe I was able to articulate a theory of ideology that avoids these many problems.
In short, what is your theory of ideology and how does it remain critical without falling into reductivism?
In the book, I begin from Clifford Geertz’s famous definition of ideology as cultural maps that orient people within social reality. However, I try to take Geertz a few steps forward by noting that these cultural maps are also what I call world-making and ethically magnetic. Ideologies are not simply attempts at description but always exceed description in efforts to inspire and inaugurate entire social worlds. Modern societies are in some sense comprised of these maps.
Where does criticism enter in? After all, Geertz, who was brilliant and to whom I am indebted, sometimes seemed to stall at a cultural and hermeneutic approach that remained only “thick description” in his famous phrase. In brief, I draw on my earlier work (especially my prior book We Built Reality) to argue that ideologies are objectively false whenever they cannot recognize or accept their own cultural and world-making dimensions. If, for example, Milton Friedman says that free-market economics is simply a “science” or an orthodox Marxist posits a predictive sociology of politics, this runs afoul of the very cultural definition of ideology. In this way, a cultural approach is critical of any particular ideological tradition that attempts to present itself as mere science, nature, commonsense, self-evident reason, and so on. Ideology is meaning-making and an effort at ethical recruitment. A range of ideologies that can account for their own cultural nature are more philosophically defensible. There are then more ways in which I argue that a hermeneutic or cultural approach is critical but this is a big one.
Throughout the book I draw on Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short fiction of map-makers who attempt to make a map the size of the world. Ideologists and partisans of ideology who claim their map is simply scientific or natural have mistaken cartography for geography. They have fallen into mistake of Borges’s fanatical map-makers.
Who has influenced this work the most?
Charles Taylor. I dedicate the book to him. I am in awe of him and his intellectual contribution to contemporary philosophy and the human sciences. He is in addition one of the warmest and most humane intellectuals I have encountered. Very rare!
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
I think we are all experiencing a mass befuddlement or even trauma in the realm of the ideological today. What’s the line from Shakespeare’s Richard III? Something about it’s a “reeling world”? We are all (myself included) reeling and spinning in the sheer velocity of ideological change and this book is an attempt to provide a compass, a map, or some other orienting instrument to readjust to our own times.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
I hope readers will find the book helpful for living in an ideological age. I hope the book provides them a novel overall interpretive framework for ideology as well as chapters that they can use as a reference to dive into selectively to grasp the rival ideological traditions better and in doing so more constructively engage, debate, cooperate, and even wrestle with their neighbors.
Jason Blakely
Jason Blakely (UC Berkeley, PhD) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University in California. His books on salvaging politics and the human sciences from the abuses of scientific authority include: We Built Reality and Interpretive Social Science (with Mark Bevir). A writer whose books and essays often straddle divides of academic and popular, he has also contributed to leading public venues like, Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic. He has been called “our finest critic of misplaced appeals to scientific authority in political life” and received accolades from luminaries like: Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart, and Craig Calhoun.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
