Ideologies and Everyday Life
The study of political ideas often takes place at a rather rarefied level, as if the only texts worthy of study are those produced by thinkers in ‘the canon’ of western political theory, or contemporary political philosophers. While not disputing the importance of the study of the works of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls et al., research in this strand of CSPI focuses on ‘everyday’ political thinking. If we want to understand how political ideas actually operate in social contexts, we need to examine how those who do not specialise in the production of political ideas adopt, use, and recycle political ideas in their social interactions with other people. In this sense, as Gramsci put it “everyone is a philosopher, though in his own way”.
CSPI conducts research into ‘everyday’ political thinking in both historical and contemporary contexts. Part of this is about looking at how certain political ideas circulate, and are re-used and re-purposed, across time and place at the level of the everyday. This approach was employed by Humphrey and Umbach in their 2018 book Authenticity: A Cultural History of a Political Concept. A second strand of research is more contemporary, analysing how key political concepts are understood and articulated by ‘non-specialists’. These may be revealed in dialogical exchanges, either in-person or online, or through responses to interviews and/or in written comments and texts.
What distinguishes CSPI’s line of inquiry from other more common approaches to popular political expression is that we study these articulated political ideas as ideas, worthy of conceptual analysis in their own right, rather than treating them as mere expressions of a sociological position – such as class-based reasoning or forms of ‘false consciousness’, or as strategic frames on the part of social movements.
Recently or currently running research projects in this strand include: