Bachelor Thesis an der Aston University

Considerations on Green Political Thought - A new, ecological ideology?

von Florian Heyden
2005

Index

Introduction ... 3

1st part - Ideology as a Concept ... 5

2nd part - Keys to Understanding Green Thought ... 9

3rd part - The Distinctiveness of Green Ideology ... 18

Conclusion: Unity in Diversity and a New Approach ... 23

Bibliography and References ... 25

Introduction

The idea of a Green political ideology is a relative newcomer to political theory. Even though Green writings have developed rapidly since the early 1970s, the issue of Green ideology has remained on the whole much neglected. It was not until the mid-1990s that the question of Green ideology emerged fully into theoretical discourse, some scholars still contest the existence of a separate and independent Green political ideology.
But is Green thought really an ideology? Is it not rather an accumulation of various different, often contradictory elements of thought gathered from a range of other ideologies?
The question which will be considered in this essay is in how far the claim of a separate Green ideology is actually justified and what the term “Green” stands for, if it concerns merely questions of ecology or goes beyond this narrow definition. In order to do this, this study will begin by providing the reader with a number of fundamental considerations concerning ideology, including structural and practical formations. This part will most fundamentally try to answer the question “what is ideology”. These reflections will be followed in part two by a broad outline of Green thought in which a number of fundamental assumptions will be discussed, which will be expanded on in part three. A conclusion will be drawn on a number of contextual and normative considerations, resulting from these assumptions and more detailed aspects will be discussed to clarify that in fact Green political thought should be seen as a distinct ideology in its own right, addressing a wide range of social concerns having permeated into larger political discourse.

Ideology as a Concept

The question “what is ideology?” has been a long standing issue in studies of politics since Karl Marx’s¹ claim that ideology was little more than a supportive framework of capitalist rule, “ruling ideas”, which are “nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” used to legitimise positions of hegemony² . According to Marx, bourgeois ideology would equal a ‘false consciousness’ resting on illusions, while proletarian beliefs are nevertheless not illusory since as class ideology, unlike bourgeois ideology, they arguably represent their class-interest. This original Marxist idea of class ideology has in its consequentiality largely been rejected by later thinkers who, like Pareto, have attributed a much more important “non-rational” interpretation to ideology ³.
One major problem arising during the study of ideologies is that, even though found among the most important terms in modern politics, it clearly remains one of the most complex and debatable political ideas, being invested not only with reflective and critical thought but also with strong emotions. Therefore various approaches have been produced, many of them nevertheless owing a great deal to Marx: very broadly speaking, most scholars agree that ideologies constitute various systems of political thinking, more or less rigid or loose, deliberated or unintended, through which individuals or groups construct an understanding of their surrounding social and political world in order to act upon it ⁴. One can therefore aptly assert that ideology manifests itself in everyday life, through written and spoken elaboration, as the general underlying framework of most, if not all political opinion and action within society⁵ .
This study shall, broadly following Michael Freeden’s modular considerations ⁶, approach ideology as constituting clusters of partially deliberate, partially unintentional beliefs reflecting people’s understanding of their political environment rather than simply a tool of dominant classes: being of a descriptive and explanatory nature, they are attempting to indicate particular visions of how things are, how they came to be, how they should be, and how society shall get to that point.
In this undertaking, ideologies accord particular meaning and legitimacy upon individual constituent concepts by arranging them in an internally coherent and logical manner. Through interaction with other concepts arranged in an ideology these individual constituent concepts have the potential to drastically assume different meanings – the socialist concept of “community” refers to something drastically different from the conservative or the Green concept of “community”⁷ .
 

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1 different points in his life.
2 Marx; Engels, 1974
3 Plamenatz, 1970
4 Plamenatz, 1970
5 Ibid.
6 See Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, published by Oxford University Press, 1996
7 Freeden, 1996