Ideology Critique and Its Limits

Abstract Legitimacy and ideology both involve explaining controversial action. Discourses of legitimacy emphasize the sense in which these explanations can be genuinely meaningful, while discourses of ideology emphasize the sense in which these explanations are insufficient. It follows that discourses of legitimacy and ideology can be too one sided. In periods of social fragmentation, it becomes harder to successfully legitimate controversial action, and ideology critique proliferates. The existing order is disgraced, but this does not necessarily cause a viable alternative to emerge. Writing in the 1970s, Jürgen Habermas proposed to overcome social fracturing through forms of management. But instead of uniting subjects around a legitimate alternative, management has tended to reinforce and contribute to the fracturing that generates ideology critique. It has also produced subjects whose horizons are always already managerial, who tend to make demands in exclusively managerial terms. Rather than provide an alternative to ideology critique and managerial horizons, political science has internalized these features, becoming merely another instantiation of this problem. Instead of engaging in discourse management or ideology critique, radical political scientists need to take a sincere interest in discovering, articulating, and operating with the diverse plurality of legitimation stories that do in fact persuade the people they live among to accept controversial action. This has become particularly pressing at a time when the humanities and social sciences are struggling to legitimate themselves to the public and have consequently become perennial targets for the Trump administration. Without a capacity for legitimation, political science is susceptible to ideology critique.