What metaphors do for ideology, politics, and policy

In this paper, I examine how metaphors have been used in support of ideological arguments in the history of modern political and economic thought, and analyse their impact. The usage of biological metaphors in modernist Eurocentric social science has a long tradition, wherein structural or functional elements of 'natural life' are employed to make ideological arguments in social science that underpin specific non-neutral ways of structuring 'society' and 'economy' or to canvass support for particular policy choices. Think of Smith and Keynes using Mandeville's fable of the bees for advancing a specific account of economic organisation by Smith, the comparisons of corals with socialist systems made by Kropotkin and Marx, the continued borrowing of pest and immunisation metaphors from invasive biology for xenophobic nationalist politics that Arendt presciently warned about. Even the structures, rhythms, and imaginaries of plant life have played an important role in how intellectual thought has functioned, from the signification of Voltaire's garden in Candide to the lush forests of St. Germain where Rousseau discovers both his transcendental self and the soul of humanity (to him). The arch neoclassical monetarist economist Friedman used the idea of the leaves in a tree in his 'as if' argument to support the use of unrealistic assumptions in economic theorising, ultimately using the plant imaginary to claim that perfect rationality can be assumed for human beings. The state has, of course, often been seen as a biological organism, Morgenthau referred to the clock mechanism for balance of power, complexity economics refers to forest metaphors, political conflict is modelled along the lines of the 'hawk-dove' game. This paper provides an innovative analysis of how metaphors have been, and can be, used in support of claims in the social scientific realm.