An excellent piece. I do however have a quibble with the way you express your conclusion.
You say
"Ideological debates matter because political ideas have power and can help change the world. But they do not do so because ideas that are “correct” or “right” from a purely abstract point of view win and convince people. Instead, political ideas become successful largely to the extent that they are able to articulate the interests of large coalitions with a conceptual framework based on principles that are consistent and facts that are credible."
Ideas do indeed have power and clearly have changed the world. And I agree that this is not because they are necessarily "right" n some epistemically deeply grounded sense.
However
Where i am having a problem is when you go in to say that "political ideas become successful largely to the extent they are able to articulate the interests of large coalitions with a conceptual framework based on principles that are consistent and facts that are credible."
I believe this is seriously overstating the case. What matters is that such ideas can MOBILIZE the large coalitions, whether such mobilization truly is or is not in the interests of the group in question) and for this purpose the conceptual framework need not only not be deeply epistemically grounded but it also need not be "based on principles that are consistent and facts that are credible." A charismatic leader can MOBILIZE a coalition with a deeply flawed factually broken message.
To repeat myself - the issue is the ability to mobilize and historically many, indeed probably most, such ideologies have been deeply flawed. Emotional appeals to tribal loyalties need not be intellectually persuasive and built in a solid factual substructure.
I agree with you. A more careful phrasing would be "to articulate the perceived interests". I mentioned along these lines in the post on democracy: "Like on any market, there are imperfections. An important result in economics is that when consumers are uninformed, and when it is costly for them to get informed, firms obtain market power: they can increase the price and decrease the quality compared to the situation where consumers would be perfectly informed. The same mechanisms are bound to happen in politics. With citizens imperfectly informed about the complexities of public policy, there is a possibility for political elites to propose programmes that are not necessarily the best for their coalition—or rather, that are not necessarily best for the least informed members of their coalition, while the most informed subset of the coalition gets a better deal."
evolutionary prestige all teh way down, happening here too
also "coalition" thing is misleading, same as bs ideas of democracy or "people power", everything has to be organized in a particular space and time in the world, it doesn't happen "togethere", it can only happen to down. There can be more than one significant players at the top but that's not the image of "coalition" that comes to mind in that phrasing
None of your sources (Marx, Weber, Grammsci) actually get to the heart of the matter.
The idea of mind has been deeply involved in political ideology. Those who believe in the soul desire that the mind is consistent with what is good for the soul. Others believe that the mind is a term for the processing of the brain and has no independent existence
This single difference accounts for many of the differences in society. To one group trans and homosexuality are bad for the mind and soul, for the other group there is no real mind to damage, we are just the sum of our interactions. To one group the opposing of authoritarian/totalitarian socialism is essential if people are to have free will for their mind and soul, for the other group 'who cares if we can have a good job'. etc. etc.
If we could get rid of the pro-mind lobby evolution could continue to its logical conclusion of machine intelligence replacing humanity. The pro-mind lobby would see this as satanic.
A few points: 1) I don't think Gramsci claimed ideologies are "purposefully designed". That's a horribly cynical caricature. 2) Many Marxist materialists also clearly believed in the power of ideas to shape the world—they just think ideas develop from the tensions in one's historical situation. 3) I think you should be much clearer about the fact that your analysis of ideology is heavily premised on certain contentious frameworks (e.g. Rawlsian liberalism, game theory) to the exclusion of others. Terms like cooperation, distribution, costs, benefits, competition, entrepreneurship, innovation obviously provide an interesting and incredibly popular way of looking at things but you surely realize the issues with reducing everything to economic logic. IMHO the contemporary intellectual landscape is so overly inundated with these sorts of "life is a game"-style thinking that what's needed right now above all is for intellectuals to offer more balanced perspectives.
1. You are right, the phrasing was not the best and could suggest a conspiratorial interpretation, which I did not intend. I have corrected it.
2. I do not disagree with that. The post agrees with the materialist starting point of Marx, but it does not intend to characterise all Marxists as purely cynical (it would be, in a way, paradoxical for intellectuals to deny they are doing anything of any use).
3. I understand where you come from, but here I disagree. First, I am very clear about where I come from. It is spelled out on the "About" page: https://www.optimallyirrational.com/about. This Substack's posts follow the perspective that economics and game theory are the grammar of life. As you'll see on the page, I anticipate the type of accusations that such a perspective can evoke. I'd invite you to suspend your judgement at first and give the posts a bit of time to be assessed on their own terms. Far from reducing life to a very limited economic metaphor, the posts I write often aim to show how a proper use of fundamental economic principles helps us explain and decipher the rich complexity of human life and social behaviour. The present post’s conclusion, for instance, is that political ideas matter, they are not simply hypocritical claims masking naked interests.
Fair enough. Though I should say, I was raised with status games, evolutionary psychology, cognitive biases, incentives, etc. as my intellectual bread and butter, so I'm not just being dismissive here. I simply came to suspect that there's much more to social life than that, right? So many things precede behavior, but they get left out of these analyses because on the liberal perspective people just have the preferences/utility-functions they do. So you never get at the root causes/explanations. I should add that sociologists inclined toward game-like explanations largely draw from Bourdieu, who offers many more resources to bridge some of these explanatory gaps. And in full honesty, it's hard to see what economics-centred explanations of social life explain which Bourdieu's theoretical system does not explain more persuasively. I do think you'd enjoy his work, and it'd perhaps help you elaborate your approach's distinctive contributions more precisely.
I would first push back against this statement: "So many things precede behaviour, but they get left out of these analyses because on the liberal perspective people just have the preferences/utility-functions they do." This conflates two different things: a normative liberal framework (which makes claims about what should be permitted or valued in a society) and a positive modelling approach, where preferences are simply a way to represent goals agents try to achieve in given contexts.
More importantly, I would disagree that this perspective leaves things out or fails to get at “root causes.” The approach I develop explicitly aims to go deeper than the caricature of homo economicus one might find when economists venture into sociological discussions. By incorporating repeated interactions, information costs, and endogenous rules of the game, we can model strategic behaviour that includes trust, reputation, norms, and morality. Many of the phenomena that might seem to escape economic analysis become intelligible once we take the structure of interaction and the cognitive limits of agents seriously.
On Bourdieu, I wouldn’t say that sociologists thinking about social games mostly draw on him. Think of Erving Goffman or Diego Gambetta, both offer game-like models of social interactions in a non-Bourdieusian perspective. That said, Bourdieu’s theory is in many ways an economic theory. His concepts, capital, field, strategy, are all economic in structure, even if framed sociologically. His agents are often depicted as cynical and calculating.
Where I think my approach differs and improves from Bourdieu is that I bring in the formal tools of game theory, which he largely lacked. Because of that, his view of action can at times feel overly deterministic or pessimistic. His view is at times overly cynical about the motives of agent and pessimisitic about their agency (it’s often implied they’re trapped in systems). My game-theoretic perspective can explain how field rules emerge as equilibria, how they evolve, and how they are contested by actors with different bargaining power. In fact, Bourdieu himself said that players struggle over the rules of the game, but he did not formalise what that struggle entails.
If you appreciate Bourdieu, I suspect you’ll find my posts resonate with some of his core insights, but also push them further. My perspective can help flesh out many of the ideas of Bourdieu as reflecting correct insights from a more general framework based in game theory. I have one project of a post about Bourdieu in my list of intended future posts.
I agree with this critique though much enjoyed the article.
Game theoretical modelling already presumes a certain kind of context. A genuinely broad history of political formation would demonstrate beyond doubt that the context relied on in this article is historically contingent and also an abstraction from reality.
The particular assumption that I find problematic is that there are certain regularities in human political behaviour that or more or less 'rational'. This is true at some times not at others. The author could benefit from reading Arendt on how ideology works in a totalitarian context. It is not to form coalitions of interest or to 'make sense' of the world. It is more about expressing a shared will to power and even then not always.
IMHO the key thing is that a would be political force finds a message it can weaponize. The proven ability of a message to strike a chord is the most important thing. And striking such a chord is an empirical matter.
A great example of this was when the Republicans were promoting the message that Democrats were promoting Critical Race Theory. Sadly this was a little too obscure so it was printed as teaching white kids to hate themselves.
BUT
I remember the very day they discovered "Woke"
Great message
CRT dropped like a hot brick.
Woke became the chosen weapon
A word that can be applied without any real justification to smear practically anything.
The key is the observation that some messaging hits a spot to mobilize tribal loyalties.
In the perspective I develop here, some social groups can be misled by an ideology about their interests, but it is unlikely to last long. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, says the idiom. People learn, and you would need some specific social configuration for people to keep supporting ideas that harm their practical interests.
In regard to wokeness, my take is different. Independently of how Republicans have used this word, I don't think we can deny that a set of new, interwoven ideas has gained prominence in parts of the left. This is actually a long-term trend. My next post will touch on that, and later down the track, I'll have a post on this nebulous ideological framework labelled as wokeness.
I had real doubts about whether people being fooled would likely be off short longevity. Looked into it it. I think it is just wrong. This isn't really the context for a full exploration of the point. I will give a quick example. The Catholic Church was an institution that immiseration a continent for centuries. The economic rent charged by the monasteries alone was enormous.
There is one key aspect of the perspective I follow, largely drawing from game theorist Ken Binmore, that is essential: social contracts within a group must align with the interests of individuals given their bargaining power. This point is crucial. In a society where a social group has very limited bargaining power (e.g. peasants in the Middle Ages), the social contract they accept will offer them fewer rights than those granted to groups with more bargaining power (e.g. the nobility). In that context, the Church’s teaching that one must respect authority might have been broadly acceptable, provided it was coupled with norms that offered Christian peasants some degree of protection from exploitation by lords.
This means that judging past societies by the standards of our current, more egalitarian social contracts can be misleading. What mattered for people then was not whether the system was fair by our standards, but whether it was acceptable given their available options and power.
In the long run, only religious ideas that are acceptable both to the powerful and to those at the bottom of the social hierarchy can persist in a stable way. In the history of Christianity, there have been numerous episodes of bottom-up rebellion supported by alternative religious messages. Some of these movements resembled proto-communist uprisings, offering radically egalitarian interpretations of Christian doctrine. These are examples of alternative ideologies attempting to build new coalitions. Most of these movements were eventually crushed by the ruling powers.
On the other hand, when dominant religious institutions became overly hierarchical and oppressive, they often provoked contestation, and sometimes schisms. The Protestant Reformation was one such bottom-up movement against the Catholic Church, its corpus of ideas and its hierarchical nature.
The lemma remains that once we agree that 'What mattered for people then was not whether the system was fair by our standards, but whether it was acceptable given their available options and power.' them we must presumably also accept that the situation is structurally the same today. Ie a social group can be disadvantaged but have limited power to change the situation and hence must accept it at least for the present, whilst rebellion of some kind remains on the cards. My key point is that this situation can persist for a long time.
Another stellar piece, Lionel! Many thanks for what you are doing here!
Thanks a lot Rob! Very glad that you (with your perspective) like it.
An excellent piece. I do however have a quibble with the way you express your conclusion.
You say
"Ideological debates matter because political ideas have power and can help change the world. But they do not do so because ideas that are “correct” or “right” from a purely abstract point of view win and convince people. Instead, political ideas become successful largely to the extent that they are able to articulate the interests of large coalitions with a conceptual framework based on principles that are consistent and facts that are credible."
Ideas do indeed have power and clearly have changed the world. And I agree that this is not because they are necessarily "right" n some epistemically deeply grounded sense.
However
Where i am having a problem is when you go in to say that "political ideas become successful largely to the extent they are able to articulate the interests of large coalitions with a conceptual framework based on principles that are consistent and facts that are credible."
I believe this is seriously overstating the case. What matters is that such ideas can MOBILIZE the large coalitions, whether such mobilization truly is or is not in the interests of the group in question) and for this purpose the conceptual framework need not only not be deeply epistemically grounded but it also need not be "based on principles that are consistent and facts that are credible." A charismatic leader can MOBILIZE a coalition with a deeply flawed factually broken message.
To repeat myself - the issue is the ability to mobilize and historically many, indeed probably most, such ideologies have been deeply flawed. Emotional appeals to tribal loyalties need not be intellectually persuasive and built in a solid factual substructure.
I agree with you. A more careful phrasing would be "to articulate the perceived interests". I mentioned along these lines in the post on democracy: "Like on any market, there are imperfections. An important result in economics is that when consumers are uninformed, and when it is costly for them to get informed, firms obtain market power: they can increase the price and decrease the quality compared to the situation where consumers would be perfectly informed. The same mechanisms are bound to happen in politics. With citizens imperfectly informed about the complexities of public policy, there is a possibility for political elites to propose programmes that are not necessarily the best for their coalition—or rather, that are not necessarily best for the least informed members of their coalition, while the most informed subset of the coalition gets a better deal."
evolutionary prestige all teh way down, happening here too
also "coalition" thing is misleading, same as bs ideas of democracy or "people power", everything has to be organized in a particular space and time in the world, it doesn't happen "togethere", it can only happen to down. There can be more than one significant players at the top but that's not the image of "coalition" that comes to mind in that phrasing
None of your sources (Marx, Weber, Grammsci) actually get to the heart of the matter.
The idea of mind has been deeply involved in political ideology. Those who believe in the soul desire that the mind is consistent with what is good for the soul. Others believe that the mind is a term for the processing of the brain and has no independent existence
This single difference accounts for many of the differences in society. To one group trans and homosexuality are bad for the mind and soul, for the other group there is no real mind to damage, we are just the sum of our interactions. To one group the opposing of authoritarian/totalitarian socialism is essential if people are to have free will for their mind and soul, for the other group 'who cares if we can have a good job'. etc. etc.
If we could get rid of the pro-mind lobby evolution could continue to its logical conclusion of machine intelligence replacing humanity. The pro-mind lobby would see this as satanic.
A few points: 1) I don't think Gramsci claimed ideologies are "purposefully designed". That's a horribly cynical caricature. 2) Many Marxist materialists also clearly believed in the power of ideas to shape the world—they just think ideas develop from the tensions in one's historical situation. 3) I think you should be much clearer about the fact that your analysis of ideology is heavily premised on certain contentious frameworks (e.g. Rawlsian liberalism, game theory) to the exclusion of others. Terms like cooperation, distribution, costs, benefits, competition, entrepreneurship, innovation obviously provide an interesting and incredibly popular way of looking at things but you surely realize the issues with reducing everything to economic logic. IMHO the contemporary intellectual landscape is so overly inundated with these sorts of "life is a game"-style thinking that what's needed right now above all is for intellectuals to offer more balanced perspectives.
Thanks a lot for your comment.
1. You are right, the phrasing was not the best and could suggest a conspiratorial interpretation, which I did not intend. I have corrected it.
2. I do not disagree with that. The post agrees with the materialist starting point of Marx, but it does not intend to characterise all Marxists as purely cynical (it would be, in a way, paradoxical for intellectuals to deny they are doing anything of any use).
3. I understand where you come from, but here I disagree. First, I am very clear about where I come from. It is spelled out on the "About" page: https://www.optimallyirrational.com/about. This Substack's posts follow the perspective that economics and game theory are the grammar of life. As you'll see on the page, I anticipate the type of accusations that such a perspective can evoke. I'd invite you to suspend your judgement at first and give the posts a bit of time to be assessed on their own terms. Far from reducing life to a very limited economic metaphor, the posts I write often aim to show how a proper use of fundamental economic principles helps us explain and decipher the rich complexity of human life and social behaviour. The present post’s conclusion, for instance, is that political ideas matter, they are not simply hypocritical claims masking naked interests.
Fair enough. Though I should say, I was raised with status games, evolutionary psychology, cognitive biases, incentives, etc. as my intellectual bread and butter, so I'm not just being dismissive here. I simply came to suspect that there's much more to social life than that, right? So many things precede behavior, but they get left out of these analyses because on the liberal perspective people just have the preferences/utility-functions they do. So you never get at the root causes/explanations. I should add that sociologists inclined toward game-like explanations largely draw from Bourdieu, who offers many more resources to bridge some of these explanatory gaps. And in full honesty, it's hard to see what economics-centred explanations of social life explain which Bourdieu's theoretical system does not explain more persuasively. I do think you'd enjoy his work, and it'd perhaps help you elaborate your approach's distinctive contributions more precisely.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I would first push back against this statement: "So many things precede behaviour, but they get left out of these analyses because on the liberal perspective people just have the preferences/utility-functions they do." This conflates two different things: a normative liberal framework (which makes claims about what should be permitted or valued in a society) and a positive modelling approach, where preferences are simply a way to represent goals agents try to achieve in given contexts.
More importantly, I would disagree that this perspective leaves things out or fails to get at “root causes.” The approach I develop explicitly aims to go deeper than the caricature of homo economicus one might find when economists venture into sociological discussions. By incorporating repeated interactions, information costs, and endogenous rules of the game, we can model strategic behaviour that includes trust, reputation, norms, and morality. Many of the phenomena that might seem to escape economic analysis become intelligible once we take the structure of interaction and the cognitive limits of agents seriously.
On Bourdieu, I wouldn’t say that sociologists thinking about social games mostly draw on him. Think of Erving Goffman or Diego Gambetta, both offer game-like models of social interactions in a non-Bourdieusian perspective. That said, Bourdieu’s theory is in many ways an economic theory. His concepts, capital, field, strategy, are all economic in structure, even if framed sociologically. His agents are often depicted as cynical and calculating.
Where I think my approach differs and improves from Bourdieu is that I bring in the formal tools of game theory, which he largely lacked. Because of that, his view of action can at times feel overly deterministic or pessimistic. His view is at times overly cynical about the motives of agent and pessimisitic about their agency (it’s often implied they’re trapped in systems). My game-theoretic perspective can explain how field rules emerge as equilibria, how they evolve, and how they are contested by actors with different bargaining power. In fact, Bourdieu himself said that players struggle over the rules of the game, but he did not formalise what that struggle entails.
If you appreciate Bourdieu, I suspect you’ll find my posts resonate with some of his core insights, but also push them further. My perspective can help flesh out many of the ideas of Bourdieu as reflecting correct insights from a more general framework based in game theory. I have one project of a post about Bourdieu in my list of intended future posts.
I agree with this critique though much enjoyed the article.
Game theoretical modelling already presumes a certain kind of context. A genuinely broad history of political formation would demonstrate beyond doubt that the context relied on in this article is historically contingent and also an abstraction from reality.
The particular assumption that I find problematic is that there are certain regularities in human political behaviour that or more or less 'rational'. This is true at some times not at others. The author could benefit from reading Arendt on how ideology works in a totalitarian context. It is not to form coalitions of interest or to 'make sense' of the world. It is more about expressing a shared will to power and even then not always.
So plainly written, so judicious. Excellent.
Better )
IMHO the key thing is that a would be political force finds a message it can weaponize. The proven ability of a message to strike a chord is the most important thing. And striking such a chord is an empirical matter.
A great example of this was when the Republicans were promoting the message that Democrats were promoting Critical Race Theory. Sadly this was a little too obscure so it was printed as teaching white kids to hate themselves.
BUT
I remember the very day they discovered "Woke"
Great message
CRT dropped like a hot brick.
Woke became the chosen weapon
A word that can be applied without any real justification to smear practically anything.
The key is the observation that some messaging hits a spot to mobilize tribal loyalties.
Forget facts
Forget arguments
If it works
If it mobilize
Double down
In the perspective I develop here, some social groups can be misled by an ideology about their interests, but it is unlikely to last long. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, says the idiom. People learn, and you would need some specific social configuration for people to keep supporting ideas that harm their practical interests.
In regard to wokeness, my take is different. Independently of how Republicans have used this word, I don't think we can deny that a set of new, interwoven ideas has gained prominence in parts of the left. This is actually a long-term trend. My next post will touch on that, and later down the track, I'll have a post on this nebulous ideological framework labelled as wokeness.
I had real doubts about whether people being fooled would likely be off short longevity. Looked into it it. I think it is just wrong. This isn't really the context for a full exploration of the point. I will give a quick example. The Catholic Church was an institution that immiseration a continent for centuries. The economic rent charged by the monasteries alone was enormous.
There is one key aspect of the perspective I follow, largely drawing from game theorist Ken Binmore, that is essential: social contracts within a group must align with the interests of individuals given their bargaining power. This point is crucial. In a society where a social group has very limited bargaining power (e.g. peasants in the Middle Ages), the social contract they accept will offer them fewer rights than those granted to groups with more bargaining power (e.g. the nobility). In that context, the Church’s teaching that one must respect authority might have been broadly acceptable, provided it was coupled with norms that offered Christian peasants some degree of protection from exploitation by lords.
This means that judging past societies by the standards of our current, more egalitarian social contracts can be misleading. What mattered for people then was not whether the system was fair by our standards, but whether it was acceptable given their available options and power.
In the long run, only religious ideas that are acceptable both to the powerful and to those at the bottom of the social hierarchy can persist in a stable way. In the history of Christianity, there have been numerous episodes of bottom-up rebellion supported by alternative religious messages. Some of these movements resembled proto-communist uprisings, offering radically egalitarian interpretations of Christian doctrine. These are examples of alternative ideologies attempting to build new coalitions. Most of these movements were eventually crushed by the ruling powers.
On the other hand, when dominant religious institutions became overly hierarchical and oppressive, they often provoked contestation, and sometimes schisms. The Protestant Reformation was one such bottom-up movement against the Catholic Church, its corpus of ideas and its hierarchical nature.
I agree
The lemma remains that once we agree that 'What mattered for people then was not whether the system was fair by our standards, but whether it was acceptable given their available options and power.' them we must presumably also accept that the situation is structurally the same today. Ie a social group can be disadvantaged but have limited power to change the situation and hence must accept it at least for the present, whilst rebellion of some kind remains on the cards. My key point is that this situation can persist for a long time.
One might like to imagine it won't last long and in some cases this may be true but I'm not persuaded on this point.
On ‘woke’ agreed