The Ideology of 'Ideology'

...basic textbooks and introductory college courses frequently label the 20th century??and as often the 19th along with it??as "the age of ideology...

...More broadly speaking, the merit of Raskin's book, unlike Halle's, is its view of ideology: One can learn from him without sharing his perspective...

...Since the time of Napoleon, who was the first to put it to political use, its principal utility has been as a sophisticated and subtle means of calling one's opponents liars...

...then he proceeds to make it worse...

...I use "reactionary-liberal" in opposition to "radical-liberal...

...Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, the most comprehensive and selfless attempt to make sense of the idea, maintains that all thought is ideological or none is...

...Yet on the whole the book is better-written than most dissertations...

...By contrasting the ideology of British imperialism with his own, Raskin rubs flint against steel, and occasionally produces a spark...

...But in laying blame at the feet of Hobbes, Rousseau and especially Marx...

...This conclusion satisfied neither Mannheim nor his critics...

...Moreover, it renders serious consideration of complex problems virtually impossible, as both the radical Right and radical Left are fully aware...

...Reviewed by Bruce C. Vladeck Graduate student, University of Michigan "Ideology" has become a catchword of contemporary social discourse: The popular press throws the word around with almost as much abandon as it ordinarily reserves for "charisma...

...Raskin is hardly so humble...

...But at least he is whipping some relatively fresh horses, while Halle's book is almost enough to make one like Rousseau...

...The problem is how to discuss "ideological thought" without presuming a personal immunity from it??how to live in a world of lies without laying exclusive claim to truth...

...Halle can only expose the intellectual inconsistencies and logical weaknesses of a few thinkers...

...Initially Halle raises the hope that he will resolve this muddle...

...It comes as no surprise to discover, after plowing through the last parts of this tract, that Halle spent 15 years in the State Department...

...perhaps the Vice President has contributed something to contemporary political language...

...In general, though he is frequently wrong, he sheds new light on classics that had almost been milked dry by previous criticism...

...Unfortunately, if perhaps inevitably, ideology is a dangerous and misleading concept, containing far less than meets the eye...

...For the most part, this study is an attack on those Halle holds responsible for the excesses of modern ideology...

...As a partial solution to the problem of ideology, Mannheim proposed "relational thinking," a continual awareness that one's own ideas and beliefs were as subject to error as those of anyone else...

...Marx, of course, did more than anyone to popularize the term, and has long been pilloried for making explicit the contention that all thought was ideological except his own...

...If Marx is responsible for the Moscow Trials, Nietzsche and Wagner for Auschwitz, and Christ for the Spanish Inquisition, then philosophy is probably too dangerous a game for mere mortals??or gods...

...This sort of attempt to attribute the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism to a few intellectual faults has gone on long enough...

...Still, one must admire Halle's dog-gedness and imagination...

...Raskin's thesis is that the failure of Kipling, Forster and Cary as writers is their failure to transcend the limitations of British imperial society, and that Conrad and Lawrence are at their greatest when they try to expose the contradictions of England's ideology...

...Louis Halle begins The Ideological Imagination by arguing, with much justice, that the current disaster of American foreign affairs is largely the result of our policymakers' inability to distinguish between ideology and reality??witness the confusion, for example, of Russia and China as nation-states in a world of realpolitik with Russia and China as Marxist-Leninist entities in a world of ideas...

...Totalitarian" and "ideological" are essentially synonymous, although Halle cannot resist lumping anarchists, who can hardly be described as to-talitarians, with the ideologues...

...At best, it might be said that The Ideological Imagination is a stylish exposition of reactionary-liberal ideology...

...an ambitious politician can be saddled with no more damning epithet than that of "ideologue...

...Jonah Raskin attempts to examine the tacit ideology of Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, and Joyce Cary by judging it in terms of his own, which is perfectly clear...

...His use of the term "ideology" is quite explicit: The bad guys are ideological and the good guys are tolerant, open-minded and, supposedly, kind to children, animals and old ladies...

...To be sure, an advantage of assailing so specious a sin is that it permits one to draw clear and simple lines of causation all the way back to the original sinners...

...Not only does it diffuse the enormity of totalitarian evil, it also is founded on the ethical fallacy that men are culpable for what they think as well as for what they do...

...and it is certainly more fun to read Kim or Nostromo than to grapple with his amalgam of academic pedantry and Do It...

...Often the result is ludicrous: "Without the sea, Conrad is a nowhere man...

...nonetheless it is inescapable...

...it must be an occupational disease...

...The Mythology of Imperialism is a curious work...

...Raskin, who describes himself as "unofficial minister of education for the Youth International Party," has apparently gone back to his doctoral dissertation and inserted all the appropriate New Left cliches, including the spelling of America with a "k...

...While I am far from ready to buy, for example, his argument that the conflict between imperial society and the Third World elevated Forster, in A Passage to India, to a level of complexity he could not otherwise have reached, Raskin does make a powerful and interesting case...

...but he was only proclaiming openly what other condemners of ideology must implicitly assume...

...So is the fact that men do believe things that simply are not true, and often are unable or unwilling to accept demonstrable truths...

...and it contains a number of interesting, if somewhat conventional, critical insights...

...Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and others on the academic Right have been doing it better for quite some time...

...and hordes of graduate students are driven to discover and examine the "ideologies" of everyone from Pan-cho Villa to Henry Wallace to George Wallace...

...Disposing of Marx, Halle goes on to a discussion of various political phenomena in which his bias, over-generalization and simple errors of fact make one wonder if the title of his opus is deliberately ironical...

...nothing could be easier and more purely destructive...

...The book is dedicated to Ho Chi Minn...

...In The Mythology of Imperialism...

...he misses nary a cheap shot, even reviving Carlyle's patronizing trick of referring to Rousseau as "Jean-Jacques," as if he were a petulant child in need of a spanking...

...One is finally convinced of his opening argument, that the failure of American foreign policy is a product of the inability to distinguish ideology from reality...

...The Ideological Imagination is neither an original nor a particularly good example of its genre...

...it is obviously well-researched...