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From core to sore concepts:Ideological innovation andconceptual changeTerence Ball aa Department of Political Science , Arizona State University ,Tempe, AZ, 852872001, USAPublished online: 19 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Terence Ball (1999) From core to sore concepts: Ideologicalinnovation and conceptual change, Journal of Political Ideologies, 4:3, 391-396, DOI:10.1080/13569319908420804

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Journal of Political Ideologies (1999), 4(3), 391-396

SYMPOSIUM: IDEOLOGICAL COMMUNITIESAND POLITICAL CONTEXTS*

From 'core' to 'sore' concepts:ideological innovation andconceptual changeTERENCE BALL

Department of Political Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2001,USA

'Ideology' remains a hotly contested concept. Few analysts agree on any singledefinition; indeed, there are many rival and competing conceptions of ideologyin the social sciences.1 But on one point there is virtually unanimous agreement.Ideologies are action-oriented; they move or motivate people to act in one wayor another.2 As the unhappy history of the twentieth century attests all tooclearly, these actions are often violent and sometimes genocidal. But beforeideologies inspire or motivate people to do things with weapons, they must firstdo things with words. Or, rather, in political struggles words are incorporatedinto ideologies, where they become weapons. These weapons may be crude orcomplex, simple or sophisticated; but they are wielded by members of one groupor party against those whom they perceive to be enemies.3 As my fellowsymposiast Michael Freeden notes, ideologies are, as it were, communityproperty and are deployed by the members of one ideological community againstthose of other, rival communities.4

Just what sort of things an ideology motivates the members of an ideologicalcommunity to do depends on what wordsor concepts5are central to theideology in question. We can, for convenience's sake, divide these into twocategories. The first, following Freeden, I shall call core concepts;6 the secondI shall, for want of a better term, call sore concepts. A core concept is one thatis both central to, and constitutive of, a particular ideology and therefore of the

* An earlier version of this debate took place at the round table on ideological communities and political contextsat the 1998 meeting of the American Political Science Association, chaired by Terence Ball. The four contributorswish to thank each other, and several members of the audience, for criticism and commentary.

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ideological community to which it gives inspiration and identity. For example,the concept of 'class' (and of course 'class struggle') is a key or core conceptin Marxism, as 'gender' is in feminism, and 'liberty' (or 'individual liberty') isin liberalism, and so on through the list of leading ideologies.

A sore concept is a core concept whose meaning is unstable, undecidedinshort, contested7from either or both of two directions. As Richard Daggernotes, it may be contested intramurally, from within the ideology, by its ownadherents; or it may be contested extramurally, from outside the ideology, byother, rival ideologies, or even by events in the external environment.8 These lastmight include cataclysmic socio-political or economic events (e.g. revolution, oreconomic depression) or even new scientific discoveries or developments (think,for example, of the ideological impact of Darwin's theory of natural selection).To be sure, these external events or developments require interpretation as aprelude to their (i) recognition and possible incorporation into the ideology or(ii) rejection or dismissal as unimportant or irrelevant to the ideology inquestion. One sees this quite clearly, for instance, in debates within Marxismregarding the (ir)relevance of Darwinian theory.9

Let us look a little more closely at contestation within an ideology. Soreconcepts typically rouse disagreements among adherents of an ideology. Some-times these disagreements are so severe and protracted as to lead to splits within,and from, the ideological community. Consider, for example, contests over theconcept of 'revolution' in Marxism. One such contest was mat between orthodoxand 'revisionist' Marxists at the turn of the last century. Eduard Bernsteininsisted that revolution was not a core concept within Marxian theory; thateconomic and political developmentsthe emergence of trades unions andworking-class political parties in particularhad rendered revolution obsolete;that these developments suggested that a peaceful, piecemeal and 'evolutionary'path to socialism was now far more plausible; and that the 'immiseration of theproletariat' predicted by Marx had not been borne out by events, but, on thecontrary, English and European workers were becoming better-off because oflegislation regulating workers' wages, hours, and working conditions. To takethese empirical facts into account and revise Marxian theory accordingly was,Bernstein insisted, in keeping with Marx's own 'scientific' outlook.10

Bernstein's proposed revision of Marxian theoryand his suggested scrappingof the concept and the prospect of proletarian revolution in particularled to himand other Revisionists being derided and drummed out of the ranks of orthodoxMarxists. Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and, most vociferouslyof all, V. I. Lenin, denounced Bernstein as a 'bourgeois' traitor to 'true' Marxism,which was necessarily and had to remain a radical and revolutionary ideology.11

Other splits within Marxism revolved around the perpetually sore concept ofrevolution. Leon Trotsky understood 'revolution' one way, Stalin in another. ForTrotsky, proletarian revolution was to be 'permanent revolution'the revolutionof all social, political and economic relations in all countries and at the same

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FROM 'CORE1 TO 'SORE' CONCEPTS

time, varying in accord with their level of socio-economic development.12 Stalin,by contrast, held that 'revolution from above' and 'in one country'the SovietUnionwas the 'true' or 'real' form for revolution to take in the twentiethcentury. That debate ended abruptly when one of Stalin's secret agents buried anice-axe in the back of Trotsky's head.

The foregoing illustrations should not be taken to mean that sore concepts arecharacteristic of Marxism only and/or always lead to splits within an ideologicalcommunity. Far from it. More typically, sore concepts continue to foment debatewithin an ideological tradition. And these debates help to keep that tradition vital.Consider the concept of liberty in liberalism. There is a long-standing debatebetween the proponents of 'negative' and 'positive' liberty. Against Bentham'sand Mill's 'negative' viewthat liberty means the absence of obstacles to thepursuit of one's own preferences and principlesT. H. Green formulated the'positive' view that the truest liberty is that of the higher self to pursue its highernon-selfish goals.13 That debate continues today within liberalism and between(roughly) those who agree with the late Isaiah Berlin's defence of negative libertyand those who lean toward a more positive or 'communitarian' conception ofliberty.14 There has also of late been a revival of and renewed interest in earlier'republican' political thought, and attempts to incorporate its hybrid view ofliberty, which shares affinities with both the negative and positive views.15

These and other conceptual contests sometimes become defining or identifyingfeatures of an ideology. This would seem to be the case with liberalism and itsongoing debate about 'liberty'. It also appears to be true of debates withinfeminism, in which 'gender' remains a sore concept. Are gender differencesnatural or artificial, i.e. are they the result of unchanging nature or of changeablenurture? Are they biologically innate or historically contingent?16 Should tra-ditional gender differences be downplayed oras some 'lipstick feminists'contendemphasised as a matter of female identity and pride? Versions of andvariations on this debate continue to characterise feminist discourse to such adegree that this may well be a defining feature of feminism as an ideology.

An ideology is, amongst other things, a conceptual construct: it is constituted byits core (and sometimes sore) concepts. These do not of course stand alone insplendid isolation; they figure in ongoing and sometimes divisive debates andarguments. The history of any ideology is in important ways the history of thesearguments and debates. Within any argumentand therefore within any ideol-ogythere is the perpetual possibility of 'cognitive dissonance' and a corre-sponding and countervailing 'strain towards consistency'.17 One of the mostdamning things a critic can say is that my ideology is incoherent or internallycontradictory. Philosophical inquiry, one might say, is merely the most sophisti-cated version of ideological thrust and parry. It persistently probes for weak-nesses in the logical structure and supporting arguments of rival ideologies even

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as it defends its own favoured ideology from criticism. To the degree that suchcriticism is deemed justifiable, it calls for adjustment within the conceptuallyconstituted framework of its favoured ideology and thus of the ideologicalcommunity of which it is a defining part.

Such philosophical analysis and criticism is the elan vital of any ideology.And any ideological community which eschews philosophy and embracescontradiction and thus the threat of ideological incoherence is already well on itsway to becoming moribund. We see this quite clearly in Stalin's infamousembrace of internal contradictions in Marxism-Leninism:

We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for thestrengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the mightiest and strongeststate power that has ever existed ... Is this 'contradictory'? Yes, it is contradictory. But thiscontradiction is bound up with life, and it fully reflects Marx's dialectics.18

Notably missing from this startling assertion is any recognition that Marx ingood philosophical fashion always advocated exposing contradictions as aprelude to overcoming, not accepting (much less celebrating), them. There couldhave been no clearer announcement than Stalin's statement of the intellectualbankruptcy of his brand of Marxism-Leninism.

Such admissions are relatively rare, however. Most ideologists, most of thetime, are acutely sensitive to charges of contradictoriness or incoherence and areprepared to make the necessary adjustments in arguments and the concepts thatfigure in them. These adjustments often take the form of altered meanings ofcore (and/or sore) concepts. Ideological debates, internal and external, are apt toresult in challenges toand alterations ofsuch concepts as 'revolution' or'liberty' or 'gender'. Which is another way of saying that ideologies contributeto and are in turn affected by conceptual change.19 The history of the conceptsconstitutive of political discourseliberty, justice, equality, authority, obli-gation, etc.is also the history of the ideologies that have rallied to, relied upon,redefined, and sometimes rejected these very concepts. Ideologiesor, moreprecisely, ideological debates and disputesare the engines of conceptualchange. The history of these concepts is therefore in important ways the historyof ideological disputation and philosophical argumentation.

As Andrew Vincent observes, the social sciencesand the academic disci-pline of political science in particularhave not attended very well (if at all) tothe part played by ideologies in inspiring and motivating the members ofideological communities.20 Ideologies have largely been viewed as rationalisa-tions of, or post hoc justifications for, the pursuit and promotion of non-ideologi-cal interests (although this appears to be changing, albeit slowly).21 Thecentrality and importance of this legitimating function has been gravely underes-timated, as Quentin Skinner's seminal studies have shown.22 For the need topresent one's programme of policies as legitimate imposes constraints upon thecourse of action that actors can rationally pursue. Not just any course of actionis open to a rational actor at any given time. S/he must operate within theconceptual constraints imposed by the concepts available to him or her. And

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typically these will prove to be sore concepts whose meanings have changedover time and in the course of ideological disputation and debate.

One particularly sore conceptthat of rightsis absent from my preceding listof political concepts. The omission is intentional, however, for I now want to turnthe discussion over to Richard Dagger, who will discuss 'rights' as an illustrationof themes to which I have alluded in an all too abstract and schematic way.

Notes and references1. For one listing amongst many, see Malcolm B. Halperin, 'The elements of the concept of ideology',

Political Studies, 35 (1987), pp. 18-38.2. I do not of course mean to suggest that this is the only feature common to all conceptions and/or formal

definitions of 'ideology'.3. This, it seems to me, is the core of truth in Schmitt's otherwise too-simple and overblown 'friend'/'enemy'

(freund/fiende) dichotomy as the main defining feature of 'the political'. See Alfred Schmitt, The Conceptof the Political [translated by G.Schwab] (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976).

4. See Michael Freeden, 'Ideologies as communal resources', in the present symposium.5. I take it that words are used to designate concepts. The best indication that a society has acquired a concept

is that its language includes a word to designate it. See Quentin Skinner, 'Language and political change',in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (Eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 1, at pp. 7-8.

6. See Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1996), pp. 62-3 & 77-84.

7. Not necessarily in W. B. Gallie's sense in his now-classic essay, 'Essentially contested concepts', Proceed-ings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955-56), pp. 167-98. See, further, the illuminating discussion inAndrew Mason, Explaining Political Disagreement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 2.

8. See Richard Dagger's contribution to the present symposium.9. For competing views of Darwinian theory within Marxism, see Terence Ball, Reappraising Political

Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. 10; for a wide-ranging survey of Darwin's influence on otherideological traditions, see Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought,1860-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

10. Vide Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961; first German edition1899).

11. See e.g. Lenin, 'Marxism and Revisionism' in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, I Vol. edn (Moscow: ProgressPublishers, 1968), pp. 25-32.

12. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969).13. T. H. Green, 'Liberal legislation and freedom of contract' [1880], in The Works of Thomas Hill Green

(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888), Vol. 3, pp. 370-6. Green was not, of course, the first toarticulate the idea of 'positive' liberty, which is as old as Plato and has echoes in Aquinas, Rousseau, andHegel, amongst many other thinkers.

14. Isaiah Berlin, 'Two concepts of liberty', in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1969). Amongst Berlin's numerous 'communitarian' critics, see Charles Taylor, 'What's wrong withnegative liberty', Philosophical Papers, 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 8.

15. Vide Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); PhilipPettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Part I.

16. See, e.g., Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totawa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld,1983).

17. See Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). Cf. Terence Ball,'Contradiction and critique in political theory', in John S. Nelson (Ed.), What Should Political Theory beNow? (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983), pp. 127-50; and the attempted applicationin Terence Ball, 'Ideology and consistency: a dialogical approach', Journal of Political Ideologies, 1(1996), pp. 97-102.

18. Josef Stalin, 'Political report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Party Congress', in Stalin, SelectedWorks (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952-55), Vol. 12, p. 381.

19. See Ball, Farr and Hanson, op. cit., Ref. 5; and Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse (Oxford:Blackwell, 1988).

20. Andrew Vincent, 'Ideology and the community of politics', in the present symposium.

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21. There is a small but growing literature on the explanatory primacy of 'ideas' (and thus presumably of thosesystems of ideas that we call ideologies) over 'interests'. See, inter alia, Judith Goldstein, Ideas, Interests,and American Trade Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

22. Vide Quentin Skinner, 'Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action', in James Tully(Ed.), Meaning and Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), ch. 5.

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