Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Freeden Page A

pre-empt the unequal distribution of resources in the first place, by designing a society in which members contribute to a common pool according to their abilities and extract from it according to their needs (given sufficient resources in the first place). A fifth would be to redistribute resources from the better- to the worse-off.

     
    8. The pun on ‘nothing to lose but our chains’ also conjures up the multiple and indeterminate routes that ideological decontestations can take .
     
    The first two options are not open to civilized societies: morality and decency, as well as practical considerations, render them culturally invalid. Logic, however, is quite blind to questions of good or evil. The third is an attempt to reconceptualize poverty, but it flies in the face of common-sense usages of the term – another cultural constraint that ideologies would ignore at their peril. Nor would it remove the fact that many people cannot make ends meet: we would simply need to coin a new term for what used to be called poverty. The fourth option envisages an organizational and ideological revolution. It might happen, but would require a major political upheaval. The fifth option, however, operates within current cultural constraining parameters. It is in line with prevailing understandings in many societies, though that is not to claim that it is therefore conservative, or that it is particularly successful in achieving its aim. Moreover, even within thoseconstraints, there are many alternative methods of redistribution – recall the many conceptions of the concept of equality.
    We conclude that meaning is culturally privileged and that, when ideologies construct their arguments, they draw on an exceptionally broad range of conventions and symbols, such as value-systems, religious beliefs, common practices, and scientific and artistic fashions. In that very important sense, ideologies are always located in a particular context. Even when they employ the language of universalism and of abstraction, it refers to understandings that emanate from particular societies at a specific historical time. The notion of universal human rights is a Western cultural notion, developed over the past 400 years or so, that attempts to occupy the high ground of a generic claim about human nature and needs. It is resisted by other cultures for whom differences among humans are more important than their commonalities, or for whom culturally justified suffering – at levels unacceptable to most Western societies – may be inflicted on individuals. However, while cultural constraints may trump logical ones, by blocking off some unpalatable logical possibilities, they may also – in the hands of ideologues – obscure the dictates of logical clarity. The novelty of the notion of cultural constraints, in the final count, is to advance the idea of context a little way further than it was taken by earlier analysts of ideology. Previously, they had seen context as a backdrop to understanding the genesis of ideological thinking and how it reflected the social interests of their bearers. Now, context as a cultural constraint becomes a continuous, living aspect of forming ideologies, integral to their structure and hence to the messages they impart.
The four Ps
    Having paid attention to the complex conceptual structure of ideologies, all that remains is to add one final packet of ingredients to the morphological brew. That refers to the four Ps of ideological composition: proximity, priority, permeability, andproportionality. The feature of
proximity
indicates, as we saw above, that political concepts make no sense on their own. They can only be understood when examined within a particular idea-environment of surrounding concepts. If individuality is proximate to an atomistic conception of human nature, a conception that sees the individual as largely self-sufficient, it will play a different role in the given ideology than it would have were individuality