Joan Robinson on Ideology

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Nick Johnson draws attention to this quote by Joan Robinson:

“We must go round about to find the roots of our own beliefs. In the general mass of notions and sentiments that make up an ideology, those concerned with economic life play a large part, and economics itself (that is the subject as it is taught in universities and evening classes and pronounced upon in leading articles) has always been partly a vehicle for the ruling ideology of each period as well as partly a method of scientific investigation.”

Joan Robinson (1962), Economic Philosophy, Ch.1

The source. 

I have commented:

Joan Robinson is right. Through her own excellent work, she has made a great effort at being critical of ideology. I would like to add that not only the ruling ideology (in reality a complicated compound, if identifiable at all) deserves careful ongoing scrutiny but any ideology, including the ideology of the dominated and those seeking liberation.

Not everyone is prepared to search for his own ideological errors, to begin with; and every person, even the most self-critical one, has blind spots that make him incapable of seeing his own biases.

This is why I am a strong believer in (the possibility of) mass political competition, i.e. democracy, which is not primarily a mechanism to rule but one to question one another and keep us inclined to compromise as we all are prone to going-over-the-top, owing to our susceptibility to ideological conceit.

And I would add: 

Under the heading of political correctness, in the past 30 years, the political mainstream has tried to move away from a disputatious democrcay toward political leadership by ordained demureness.

Consensus is crowding out pluralistic discourse and dissent—nothing could be more dangerous. 

We can only know how bad we are, when others have a fair chance to tell us about it. That is true for everyone. 

Joan Robinson macht uns darauf aufmerksam, dass Ökonomie eine Mischung aus  Wissenschaft und Glauben darstellt. Wir müssen uns daher immer prüfen, wieviel Ideologie (ungerechtfertigter Glaube, den wir anderen aufzuzwingen bereit sind) in unseren Überzeugungen steckt.

Selbstüberprüfung ist wichtig, aber unzureichend. Wir bedürfen einer Kultur der offenen Kritik, die uns daran hindert, uns gegen die Kritik der Anderen abzuschotten. Das Aufspüren, dessen was unsere Überzeugungen unbrauchbar und gefährlich macht, ist eine der Hauptaufgaben der Demokratie — denn viele unserer Fehler können nur andere erkennen, aufdecken wollen und ernsthaft entgegenwirken.  Bei der Demokratie geht es nicht darum, dass die Mehrheit regiert, wie ein Diktator, sondern dass wir uns jederzeit durch Kritik gegenseitig in Schach halten und so lernen, Kompromisse unter einander einzugehen, so dass keine Gruppe über die Stränge schlagen kann.