Saturday, March 15, 2008

Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology

A fine episode of William F. Buckley's long-running political debate show Firing Line, from 1985, featuring political scientist Kenneth Minogue on the subject of his book Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, is available in full on YouTube

related: A superb summation of the book's central argument is contained in this review by Joseph Sobran, who also featured in the Firing Line programme:
The word "ideology" has suffered so much abuse that it has become little more than a term of abuse. I have principles, you have an ideology. Kenneth Minogue tries to restore a useful clarity in Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology.

As Minogue sees it, Karl Marx invented ieoelogy in the modern sense. The Enlightenment had bequeathed a double tradition of social and polotical theorizing. On the one hand, idealistic reformers sought to organize society rationally. On the other, economists were fascinated by the way society took shape from the unintended consequences of numberless spontaneous human actions. Marx brought these two styles of thought together in a radically new way.

Not only social forms but ideas themselves were, for Marx by-porducts of economic interests. Minogue is far from the first to point out the inherent difficulty with this theory: "The proposition 'material conditions determine ideas' is itself an idea." If it is itself only a part of the process, how can "scientific socialism" be a comprehensive account of the process?

From the beginning Marxism has been intellectually vitiated but rhetorically enabled by its ambiguous status as a science. It purports to explain man's alienation exclusively in terms of impersonal economic structures, yet its power to move its votaries comes from its fiery moral animus agants "capitalism." Against the politician it claims the authority of an academic discipline, while it scorns theoretical rivals for lacking its own political engagement and sophistication. Even as it lays claim to being a science, it has invested charismatic authority in a series of leaders, beginning with Marx himself, who have excommunicated heretics, including dissident Marxists, with verbal and often physical violence.

Minogue sees these paradoxes not as hitches in Marxist ideology but as part of its essence. He defines an ideology as "any doctrine which presents the hidden and saving truth about the evils of the world in the form of social analysis." He adds: "Its is a feature of all such doctrines to incorporate a theory of the mistakes of everyone else."

The "ideologist"--Marxist, feminist, nationalist, racist--interprets the world holistically as a field of power, divided between oppressors and oppressed. The oppressors typically mask their oppression with "mystifications" that fool themselves as well as their victims. The key to "liberation" is to realize that this is the situation...
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