Imperialist ideology, romantic anti-capitalism and J.A. Hobson

Abstract

Imperialist ideology remains an elusive concept. Most often it is taken to indicate a body of texts that justify and legitimize imperialism and are employed more or less consciously by imperialists to rationalize and propagandize their political behaviour and economic goals. Or, imperialist ideology is conceived as an organically related group of ideas or themes, a body of thought, so to speak, which make up the substance and contents of such texts and can be pointed out by means of critical analysis to be also existing as the hidden meaning of a more varied canon of literature, if not of the literature of a whole period or "epoch". Both definitions run the risk of reductionism and of bringing together under one heading texts and concepts that are heterogeneous and contradictory. An alternative way of defining imperialist ideology would be to see it as the expression of a certain historically determined mentality or psychology, in which case the decoding of imperialist ideology must consist in the systematic construction of the essence or structure of such a mentality or collective (un)conscious. More reasonably, perhaps, imperialist ideology may be regarded as a "mental structure" or "way of thinking" by means of and through which several different and often contradictory types of contents can be communicated and brought to function.