Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology

...Ideology," writes Minogue, "is systematically destructive of political ideas and values because it represents the imperfections of the human condition as the necessary deficiencies of an oppressive system, judging everything in terms of a concealed absolute constructed from the human essence itself...

...He defends himself against the charge that any critic of ideology is himself an ideologist...

...ideology is responsible for the fratricidal civil wars in Cambodia and Lebanon, and the scandalous failure of African regimes to face the practical problems posed by drought...

...The reason for the attractions of ideology to the Third World mind is less obvious, especially since the particular ideology most popular with that public is Marxism...

...The word "ideology" may be said to be just about as old as the thing...

...In both capitals, the pragmatic pursuit of self-interest is the first principle of government and foreign policy...

...he only said that they deceived themselves into thinking that a policy to the private advantage of their class was in fact something of universal value...

...The void of modernity is disturbing for many people...

...The people Minogue criticizes in these pages would not accept the appellation...

...The study of Marx's theories would be the worst possible guide as to what to expect from Moscow or Peking...

...They all want to be called "philosophers...

...for it is one of the favorite ploys of ideology to argue that no one can be neutral, that all who are not friends are enemies...

...But where those sociologists were wrong was in foreseeing a decline in the threat of ideology-a threat to politics itself as well as to freedom...

...Ideology provides the wrapping and the rhetoric...

...Ideologists call for "mass participation," but what they want is mass assent, not the expression of people's own opinions...

...Ideology, even for those French revolutionists who first introduced the word, was meant to be scientific...

...In a word, the present-day consequences of ideology are literally murderous...

...The intellectual class is thus promised something like the special position enjoyed by the clergy in medieval Christendom, when they were the only men who had any education and on the strength of that could direct the minds of everyone else...

...But the ordinary reader will recognize the author of this important book as a very fair as well as eloquent and witty champion of common sense against bogus metaphysics, of democracy against the regimentation of thought, and of the spirit of inquiry against the tyranny of dogma...

...Ideology" was another name for "false consciousness...

...A here is a great deal about Marxism in Alien Powers, but Minogue does not suggest that Marxism is the only important ideology-nationalism, feminism, indeed most "isms" that have become fashionable with the decline of religion in the modern world, have many of the characteristics by which Minogue identifies an ideology...

...Fourth, ideology holds out a promise of redemption and a program of universal betterment...

...Hence the characteristic "philosophical" activity of Marxist reasoning is not analytical, critical, or speculative thinking, but "unmasking" or "demystifying" the beliefs of those who disagree with Marxism...

...since ideology has a "scientific" program, a public debate is at best a time-wasting activity and at worst an impediment to progress...

...In this sentence, Minogue gives us a clue to the appeal of ideology...

...Second, ideology asserts that the freedom provided by Western democracies is not true freedom...

...He did not deny the sincerity of those bourgeois philosophers such as Locke who proclaimed a natural right to property...

...if it is philosophy, it is philosophy for the masses at the same time as it is philosophy for the rootless, rebellious intellectual class in whom our culture's "self-loathing" is most pronounced...

...It is their followers and apologists who engage in ideological thought...

...For although ideologists make great claims to be rational, and to have a "philosophy," ideology has far more features in common with religion, especially the more dogmatic religions of sectarian movements...

...As Minogue reminds us, however, Marx did not like the word "ideology...

...Of course, the exponents of ideology will not accept Minogue's plea...

...first used as ideologic during the French Revolution, and it has never lost its association with the idea of revolution as such...

...Minogue shows us why neither Marx nor any other exponent of an ideology can properly be called a philosopher...

...Ideological thinking emerged at a time when religious thinking was losing, or had lost, its hold on many people's minds...

...As Minogue points out, this particular pejorative use of the word "ideology" by a theorist who was, in the more generally accepted sense of the word, himself a classic case of the ideologist, has a paradoxical consequence: No one wants to be considered an ideologist...

...It is arguable that the regimes least responsive to ideology in deciding their own actions are those that have done most to export ideology and promote it to other parts of the world, the Soviet Union and China...

...Ideological politics," he writes, "is political activity going into liquidation...

...Politics entails a continuous discussion of alternative policies so that decisions can be reached in the light of competing proposals...

...in large areas of the media and the educational establishment...

...It is perfectly reasonable to adopt an attitude of indifference or impartiality towards any question...

...Marx himself had no sympathy for the nationalist aspirations of the backward subjects of Western empires: On the contrary, he favored the enlargement of empires as a progressive force to take those societies out of feudalism into bourgeois capitalism and so onwards to socialism...

...Ideological thinking is widespread, not to say rampant, in certain international institutions, in UNESCO, for example, and some other UN...

...It is the appeal of the absolute...

...When Marx called the theory of democratic freedom an "ideology," he designated it as a body of thought that masked the vested interest of the property-owning classes...

...This is perhaps why it appeals to those many modern minds that since the eighteenth century have ceased to respond to the sacred and mystical ideas of the Christian tradition, and are able only to accept, or understand, theories which can be presented in rationalistic language...

...Where ideology differs from even the most heretical forms of religion is that it is entirely centered on this world and claims to depend entirely on reason, as opposed to faith or revelation...

...Third, ideology has an overall theory that explains human history and society...

...Up to a point they were right, and if Minogue is correct there was no way politics could remain politics if ideology was allowed to triumph...

...bodies as well...

...First, ideology suggests that modern man is alienated, that he is not living according to his own true nature even if he believes he is...

...Ideology simplifies things at the same time as it constructs its elaborate theoretical edifices...

...They will call him an ideologue of the status quo, a reactionary...

...Fifth, ideology has a doctrine to explain why its critics resist its truths...

...The decline of religion has left them with nothing to be sure of: Without faith in God, and the unseen world, they feel ill at ease in the visible world, dismayed by the injustice and suffering they witness, bewildered by the seeming absurdity of life...

...and yet, as Minogue shows, it is essentially inimical to politics, and not least to democratic politics...

...Moreover, ideology, like the most authoritarian religions of the past, is attractive both to the most sophisticated and to the least sophisticated people...

...He shows that ploy to be sheer sophistry...

...no Russian or Chinese leader will feel he could afford the luxury of actually believing it, or rather, one should say, believing in it, for ideology is something you believe in, subscribe to, commit yourself to, rather than merely believe...

...It was Lenin who introduced the anti-imperialist element into his Marxism, promising what Marx had considered historically impossible, an immediate passage from imperialist domination to socialist liberation...

...Ideology has come in the twentieth century to play an increasingly powerful role in politics...

...The end-of-ideology sociologists were correct again, to the extent that at the highest level of policy-making, the Communist leadership is no longer (as it was still perhaps in Lenin's time) guided by ideology...

...It was Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...

...The charm of ideology for the intellectual is perhaps its total comprehensiveness...

...Hostile to all politics, ideology is especially hostile to democratic politics, since "it means that the ignorant, those suffering from false consciousness, may choose their rulers...

...Professor Minogue ends his book with a plea for scholarship...

...Some thirty years ago, several leading American-and French-sociologists predicted the end of ideology, suggesting that the pragmatic approach might be expected to govern both national and intellectual politics in the coming years...

...for the newly emancipated colonial people it is perhaps its indictment of oppression...

...Marx begins with affirmation: Marxism "knows," and it brushes aside any criticism of its "knowledge" as irrational resistance to truth, prompted directly or indirectly by some vested interest which is challenged by that "knowledge...

...Indeed, one of the leading theorists of ideology in the present century, Karl Mannheim, argued that while the thinking of every other group and class in society was determined by its sociological condition, the "free floating intellectual" could rise above such enslavement to causality, and think autonomously...

...Minogue mentions first among the constituencies of ideology, the academic world, and second, the Third World...

...in the governments and anti-government movements of most Third World countries...

...Ideology puts an end to doubt-not, assuredly, by restoring genuine faith but by providing what it calls "knowledge," a systematic body of doctrine or dogma where everything is given a place...

...And Marx, the greatest and most thoroughgoing ideologist of modernity, liked to call his own ideology "scientific socialism...

...and undoubtedly it owed its success to its ability to fill the emotional and intellectual void that the decline of religion had created...

...The intellectual class can see a privileged place for itself in the ideological picture of the world...

...and indeed it is part of the the moral duty of the genuine judge to uphold the standard of impartiality...

...Ideology," says Minogue, "is the purest possible expression of European civilization's capacity for self-loathing...

...Those "isms" are mainly political, but as Minogue points out in one of his most interesting chapters, ideology destroys politics...

...Ideology, which Professor Kenneth Minogue sets out to examine in his latest book, is just such a new-model "philosophy" which seeks to explain the world only in order to change it...

...Martin's Press/$27.50 Maurice Cranston Marx once said that the purpose of philosophy should be to transform the world rather than to interpret it...

...And there are a great many readers-and teachers in universities-who are perfectly happy to speak, for example, of "Marxist philosophy...

...For philosophy must begin, as Descartes said, with doubt...

...It was a word he applied to his adversaries...