Polar Stars : : Why the Political Ideologies of Modernity still Matter / / Mauro Barisione.

• VerfasserIn: Barisione, Mauro,
• Place / Publishing House: Milano : : Milano University Press,, 2021.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (302 pages)

Against the cliché that ours is a post-ideological age, the thesis of this book is that political ideologies are part of the very logic of modernity and continue to permeate 'hypermodern' politics. Using a multitude of primary sources (texts) and data, the author identifies the 'polar stars' - guiding principles such as order, freedom and equality - around which ideological camps, mainly in Europe, have developed in recent centuries. As an alternative to the overly reductive concepts of "left" and "right", this book adopts a different strategy to analyse the orientations of contemporary political movements, parties, policies and voters: it reconstructs the main ideological "matrices" of modern politics in their historical origins and in the subsequent phases of radicalisation and hybridisation, which still continue, both between these political matrices and with "metapolitical" ideologies such as populism. Moreover, the book outlines a broader theory that helps to interpret recent ideological trends as reflecting a peculiar "double movement" of modernity: the continuous tension between liberalizing pressures for more individual rights and, conversely, "centripetal" countermovements along both the matrix of order and that of socioeconomic equality.

Table of Contents

List of figures -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 -- Pursuing a polar star: political ideologies and metapolitical goals -- 1.1. Beyond a unidimensional (left and right) representation of the ideological field -- 1.2. The rationales of an ideological matrix-approach to the study of politics -- Chapter 2 -- The ideological matrices of modernity -- 2.1. The ideological logic of social modernity -- 2.2. The 'post-doxic' essence of modern ideologies -- 2.3. The double movement of modernity and its hypermodern radicalisation -- 2.4. The farewell to ideologies as a historical parenthesis and intellectual blunder -- Chapter 3 -- Reconstructing the conservative matrix of order -- 3.1. The social anthropology of the modern conservative matrix 3.2. The liberal metapolitical dilutions of British 'conservatism' 3.3. The counterrevolutionary genesis of the conservative matrix 3.4. The antiliberal matrix of order in politics and metapolitics 3.5. The conservative matrix in mass politics: integrating the nation and closure to out-groups -- 3.6. On the non-inertial nature of conservatism: the German Conservative Revolution' -- Chapter 4 -- The distinctive liberal matrix in metapolitics, politics and economics -- 4.1. The prepolitical genesis of the liberal matrix -- 4.2. Economic extensions of the liberal polar star -- 4.3. British ideas, French grandeur? The Rights of Man and of the Citizen -- 4.4. From liberalism to radical populism: the Revolutionary Constitution of 1793 -- 4.5. Ramifications of early political liberalism -- Chapter 5 -- The progressive/socialist matrix and its particular principle of equality 5.1. From socio-historical structures to symbolic politics: the genesis of the progressive/socialist matrix -- 5.2. Philosophical anticipations of 'that' equality -- 5.3. Proto-socialist historical antecedents of the egalitarian matrix 5.4. When progress turns social: the French ideologists of the 1830s 5.5. A repertoire of early ideological manifestations of the progressive/socialist matrix -- Chapter 6 -- Ideological hybridisations -- 6.1. The interstellar' leaning and the metapolitical goals of the Christian Social doctrine -- 6.2. Fascism, within and beyond the matrix of order -- 6.3. The metapolitical and racist distinctiveness of Nazism -- 6.4. Applying the ideological-matrix approach to contemporary politics -- Chapter 7 -- Contemporary ideological directions -- 7.1. The strategic thirdness' of liberalism in the mechanisms of historicity -- 7.2. A (neo) liberal takeover of the economy, the social democrats in power from pragmatism to ideology -- 7.3. Old struggles, new framings. Identity politics and the distinctiveness of the liberal-progressive fusion -- 7.4. Towards the restoration of the polar stars after the turn of the millennium -- 7.5. Beyond classification: reflections on the dynamic and directional elements of the ideological matrix -- Chapter 8 -- Ideological types and party voting -- 8.1. A micro-level approach epistemological and methodological -- issues -- 8.2. Analysing ideological voters in seven European countries in the 21st century -- 8.3. Outlining a polar-star approach to the study of voter party/ideology interconnections -- Conclusions -- Appendix -- References.