The cultural turn: emphasizing the role of the ideational

The whole of social science has been influenced but what is often called the ‘cultural turn’. In this collection that ‘turn’ is most evident in the chapters by Schmidt and Finlayson and Martin.

This influence is particularly evident in the new-institutionalist literature examine by Schmidt. Certainly, sociological, historical and, especially, discursive institutionalism have acknowledged the causal role of ideas and culture in explaining the form and actions of the state. In addition, the cultural turn has also played a crucial role within feminism, in many ways being at the core of third-wave feminism, and in much modern Marxism.

At the same time, of course, green political practice is based in large part on the view that ideas, green ideas, can subvert the material ‘reality’ involved in capitalist exploitation of the environment. In a rather different vein, pluralism has always allowed space for the role of ideas, seeing the political process as analogous to the market, with interest groups promoting ideas and policies competing for influence over government.

So, there is a general recognition of the role of the ideational realm in contemporary state theory. However, while poststructuralism prioritizes discourse, and views any distinction between the material and the idea­tional as meaningless (both are constructed in and through discourse), most Marxists see the relationship between the material and the ideational realms as dialectical. So, the ideational realm helps construct an understanding of the material world and through that construction changes it, while the material world affects the resonance, that is the effectiveness, of those idea­tional constructs. Again, this is an issue we return to in the next section.