Polar Stars. Why the Political Ideologies of Modernity Still Matter Mauro Barisione. Milano: Milano University Press, 2021, 302p. €22 (paperback)

Abstract

Ideology is one of the most discussed topics in political science. It has been the subject of some of the longest-lasting and most prolific agendas in the discipline, spanning over its hybridizations with sociology, psychology and economics. It has been used as a lens through which to study numerous political phenomena, from legislative to electoral behavior. Furthermore, it has been blessed by a fortunate fate for ideas: it has been declared dead too soon. Starting from prominent scholars dazzled by historical contingencies, passing by political actors trying to find a place for themselves out of traditional divisions, the rumor about the end of ideology has actually ensured its endurance, by breeding a fertile research field in turn. It is to this body of literature that the book by Mauro Barisione wishes to contribute. However, the goal of Polar Stars is more ambitious than just weighing in on the ‘end of ideology’ debate. The first contribution of this work is to provide a theoretical framework to understand political ideologies tout court, or more specifically, to connect the positions taken by political actors (being implemented policies or expressed preferences) with a concise set of guiding principles. These are the three ‘polar stars’ after which the book is titled: the principle of order (guiding the ideological ‘matrix’, or template, of conservatism), the principle of freedom (guiding the matrix of liberalism), and the principle of equality (guiding the matrix of progressivism/socialism). The way these principles arose in Western societies since the advent of modernity, their rationalization into the three ideological matrices, their ebbs and flows over the last four centuries, and their connection to ‘political’ (related to the organization of the society) and ‘metapolitical’ (related to the relationship between the state and society) goals, is the topic of three thematic chapters of the book. Moreover, a further chapter investigates the different hybridizations between the three ideological matrices, offering an interesting interpretation of extremism as the tendency to pursue a pure ideological type, that is, to follow one polar star to the detriment of the others. This discussion nicely integrates the tension between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’, two terms that are often associated with ideological labels in everyday speech, within the ‘polar stars’ framework. These chapters, which overall make about half of the book, draw on extensive literature in history and political philosophy. The second contribution of this book is to demonstrate, argumentatively and empirically by drawing on parties’ own political manifestos, how the three ideological matrices and their hybrids (and by extension, the polar stars guiding them) still characterize the political landscape in Western democracies today. This is where the book most closely contributes to the ‘end of ideology’ debate. Indeed, a thread running through the chapters is that the logic of modernity, which rationalized the critical conflicts of interest within societies giving rise to the three ideological matrices, is still alive and informing current political divisions. In this respect, a dedicated chapter