Ideology is a word that was coined by Destutt de Tracy to refer to the scientific study or categorical arrangement of ideas, much as biology refers to the categorical arrangement of facts and processes of living organisms or sociology refers to that regarding societies. Ideology, that is, is the categorical arrangement of ideas, such that they cohere together into a common schema or taxonomy. Over time, the concept broadened from de Tracy's proto-psychologism, so as to include different approaches to the arrangement of ideas from de Tracy's. This brought about different ideologies, which often clashed.
Pierre Proudhon saw the clash between ideologies as evidence that there existed a space for relation between them. He proposed a sort of super-ideology (though he would hate the term) or grand narrative of ideologies (which became his sociology, Proudhon being among the first sociologists), which understood them to exist in a dialectical tension of metaphysical contradiction that brought society ever closer to an equilibrium that he referred to as a "balance of forces," those forces being largely those of disparate ideologies. This balance of forces included the balancing of martial forces, a sort of stalemate for belligerents that would result in the evolutionary abolition of the state, which he referred to as an "external constitution" of the social power. An internal constitution of such power would entail a culture that supported and encouraged the formation of mutualist societies, the sort of which that led to the abolition of external government, or anarchy (and the same sorts of which had created governments over others in the first place).
Proudhon had witnessed such societies as were formed by Pierre Charnier, upon which his faith in such a situation was founded. But he also went about, like Charnier, prefiguring the sorts of institutions and institutional economics that might bring such conditions about consciously, one could argue through the means of what would later be understood as a sort of Spencerian or Baldwinian evolutionary process of intentional, creative evolution, but that would be referred to generally as Proudhonian gradualism. Proudhon proposed mechanisms such as mutual banks, mutual insurance programs, and associations of workers, not entirely unlike Charnier, though worked into a fairly different proposal with regard to specifics. These sorts of institutions, as Proudhon understood them, would assist in the development of a pluralistic and federalistic society that increasingly approached the conditions of anarchy through a gradual abolition of the state, as predicated upon the progressive level of moral development reached by the society.
Ideologies in imbalanced conflict created the conditions whereby the state could justify its rule by addressing matters of tort that faced "the public," while voluntary associations formed into self-governing federations decreased or eliminated such tortuous conflicts, thereby abolishing the grounds upon which government is justified, while enabling the ideology of each to play out within its own contractual sphere of influence (its own set of affiliated landholdings). Proudhon's grand vision, which he'd refer to as his "general idea of the revolution," was one in which basically any ideology could exist, owing to the absence of government, so long as it did so at its own expense within the context of fair economic conditions having been brought about through moral acts of culture, by the people themselves.
Proudhon's demand for moral foundations would be shaken by Bakunin's anti-authoritarian collectivism, Karl Marx's communism, and by Catholic personalism and other forms of cultural Marxism, such as those coming from out of the Frankfurt School. Whereas mutualists had maintained a great deal of respect for individuals such as founders, Bakunin's anti-authoritarianism, which was in fact just a continuation of his pan-Slavic and Mazzinian illuminism masked as anarchism, served to disrupt the founders' cults of the mutualists with ochlocratic impulses and to enable secret rule by means of adhocracies accepting charismatic leaders as propped up from outside, much as in the tradition of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati as was carried through the neo-Babouvists (itself coming from Mongol Tengrist traditions, important for warfaring purposes of co-opting enemies and persuading their war chiefs to engage in treason). Karl Marx's communism, a reaction to Bruno Bauer as much as Pierre Proudhon, served to pollute socialism (of which mutualism was understood a liberal or libertarian variety) with confused conceptions about the labor theory of value and to orient socialism instead of gradualism toward immediatism and expediency, which always enables the existence of the state for short-term gains at the loss of the long-term. Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx, would consolidate a unique American impulse toward cultural Marxism alongside sexually confused figures like Havelock Ellis and other deranged perverts. The personalism of people like Charles Peguy, one of the first ever national socialists and a critic of Proudhon, and Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Movement, would denounce individual rights and individualism on the grounds that individual freedom was not founded on perverse conceptions of dignity (divorced from honor). The Frankfurt School, through people like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, were instrumental in culturally breaking down the class reductionist orientation of the Old Left and ushering in the New Left, which today privileges perversions and unnatural equalities over class liberation and the freedom of ideologies.
The conditions of postmodernity and the demands of the New Left were inspiring to some for some time (particularly for artists, whose mainstream variants typically answer to Medici bankster types for expedient results), and certainly worked to create the sort of "mystique" that Peguy was after in his reaction against Proudhon, but these conditions have since become so successful as to fall under the criticism of the common person of the multitude, who increasingly rejects the toxic identarianism of the New Left, and even now threatens us with alternative identity politics from the alt- or New Right, thus swinging the pendulum toward an opposite vice. These sorts of pendulum swings, whereby one extreme has its way against the other, are the very stuff of the state, which co-opts these cultural reactionary swings to its own ends, both putting a stop to them at the bottom and employing them at the top until it is time to swing back. Mutualism was trying to stop this before it became an issue. It is still a viable means of stopping it, but it seems to require first a cultural remodernization away from postmodernities premodern preferences, as is required to re-establish the sorts of moral foundations that enabled mutualist institutions to arise in the first place. To this end, mutualism is probably best situated as a retroprogressive super-ideology (sociology), its purist form being paleo- rather than neo-mutualism, the latter of which being rhetorically based on the very postmodernism that wrecked the moral foundations mutualism required to exist, such as those pertaining to the importance of being a virtuous individual capable of participating in a pluralistic and federated society.
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You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:
- Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
- Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
- Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature
... as well as other topics related to natural philosophy, natural theology, science, and history, including but not limited to:
- Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
- Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
- Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism
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