Ideals vs. Ideologies

As we approach the "ides" of March, it behooves us to recall the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE and its commemoration in Shakespeare's play of about 1599 CE. In Shakespeare's tragedy, the conspirators who murdered their friend did so--at least professedly--out of their love for a "greater friend," the Roman republic. True to his art, Shakespeare drew a series of enigmatic portraits with his cast of characters: there does not appear to be any clear hero or villain in this tale for, as Cicero notes, "...men may construe things after their fashion,/clean from the purpose of the things themselves" (1.3.34-5). Politics then, as always, place one waist deep in the Big Muddy.

Even so, scholarly treatment of this fact ought to help us achieve some degree of clarity rather than muddy the waters further. In an otherwise helpful essay on the play ("Julius Caesar: A Modern Perspective") by Coppelia Kahn, we find this:

The republican ideal that Cassius evokes to seduce Brutus into opposing Caesar, and that Brutus uses to justify murder, is closer to myth than to history (though it was also dearly cherished as an ideal even during the worst conflicts of the republican era). Or we might call it an ideology, which, according to Louis Althusser, is a set of imagined relations as opposed to the actual political conditions of Rome.

Kahn's enlistment of Althusser in this instance is helpful, but her conflation of "ideal" and "ideology" is not. In the citation above, the conflation is not evident. In the sentence that follows this citation, it emerges: "Cassius correctly assumes that Brutus shares this ideology."

An ideology, for Althusser, substitutes "a set of imagined relations" for "the actual political conditions" that obtain "on the ground," as it were. It is a form of self-delusion. Ideals, on the other hand, are not necessarily forms of self-delusion but, rather, values one cherishes and/or goals one strives to achieve. Kahn's use of Althusser here implies that Cassius appealed to Brutus' self-delusion about "the actual political conditions of Rome" in 44 BCE. That is one possible way to read the historical evidence as dramatically presented in Shakespeare's play; another way to read the evidence is to regard Cassius as appealing to Brutus' ideals. In the latter case, Brutus joins the conspiracy against Caesar not because he fails to understand the true nature of the Roman state but because he perceives that Caesar's rise to power threatens the realization of his ideals in the immediate future.

It is a small point, perhaps, but, in my view, a politically significant one. For if we permit ideals and ideologies to be conflated, ideals become suspect rather than cherished.

Beware, then, the Ides of March: beware the dismissal of your ideals as so much ideological delusion.