What Is Ideological Power?

Ideological power derives from three interrelated arguments in the sociological tradition. First, we cannot understand (and so act upon) the world merely by direct sense perception. We require concepts and categories of meaning imposed upon sense perceptions. The social organization of ultimate knowledge and meaning is necessary to social life, as Weber argued. Thus, collective and distributed power can be wielded by those who monopolize a claim to meaning. Second, norms, shared understandings of how people should act morally in their relations with each other, are necessary for sustained social cooperation. Durkheim demonstrated that shared normative understandings are required for stable, efficient social cooperation, and that ideological movements like religions are often the bearers of these. 

An ideological movement that increases the mutual trust and collective morale of a group may enhance their collective powers and be rewarded with more zealous adherents. To monopolize norms is thus a route to power. The third source of ideological power is aesthetic/ritual practices. These are not reducible to rational science. As Bloch (1974) has expressed it, in dealing with the power of religious myth, “You cannot argue with a song.” A distinctive power is conveyed through song, dance, visual art forms, and rituals. As all but the most fervent materialists recognize, where meaning, norms, and aesthetic and ritual practices are monopolized by a distinctive group, it may possess considerable extensive and intensive power. It can exploit its functionality and build distributive power on top of collective power. In later chapters I analyze the conditions under which an ideological movement can attain such power, as well as its overall extent. Religious movements provide the most obvious examples of ideological power, but more secular examples in this volume are the cultures of early Mesopotamia and classical Greece. Predominantly secular ideologies are characteristic of our own era—for example, Marxism. 

In some formulations the terms “ideology” and “ideological movements” contain two additional elements, that the knowledge purveyed is false and/or that it is a mere mask for material domination. I imply neither. Knowledge purveyed by an ideological power movement necessarily “surpasses experience” (as Parsons puts it). It cannot be totally tested by experience, and therein lies its distinctive power to persuade and dominate. But it need not be false; if it is, it is less likely to spread. People are not manipulated fools. And though ideologies always do contain legitimations of private interests and material domination, they are unlikely to attain a hold over people if they are merely this. Powerful ideologies are at least highly plausible in the conditions of the time, and they are genuinely adhered to. 

These are the functions of ideological power, but to what distinct organizational contours do they give rise?

Ideological organization comes in two main types. In the first, more autonomous form is sociospacially transcendent. It transcends the existing institutions of ideological, economic, military, and political power and generates a “sacred” form of authority (in Durkheim’s sense), set apart from and above more secular authority structures. It develops a powerful autonomous role when emergent properties of social life create the possibility of greater cooperation or exploitation that transcend the organizational reach of secular authorities. Technically, therefore, ideological organizations may be unusually dependent of what I call diffused power techniques, and therefore boosted by the extension of such “universal infrastructures” as literacy, coinage, and markets. 

As Durkheim argued, religion arises out of the usefulness of normative integration (and of meaning and aesthetics and ritual), and it is “sacred,” set apart from secular power relations. But it does not merely integrate and reflect an already established “society”; indeed, it may actually create a society-like network, a religious or cultural community, out of emergent, interstitial social needs and relations. Such is the model I apply in chapters 3 and 4 to the first extensive civilizations, and in chapters 10 and 11 to the world-salvation religions. Ideological power offers a distinctive socialspatial method of dealing with emergent social problems. 

The second configuration is ideology as immanent morale, as intensifying the cohesion, the confidence, and, therefore, the power of an already established group. Immanent ideology is less dramatically autonomous in its impact, for it largely strengthens, whatever is there. Nevertheless, ideologies of class or nation (the main examples) with their distinctive infrastructures, usually extensive and diffuse, contributed importantly to the exercise of power from the times of the ancient Assyrian and Persian empires onward. 

-excerpted from “The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1″ by Michael Mann” (1986)