The revival of ideology, which began early in the second half of the last century, has led to reconsideration of the following questions: What underlies the pattern of the rise and decline of the ideological mode of thought? What leads young intellectuals to search for an ideology? What accounts for the changes in ideological fashion over time and nation, and shifts from one set of philosophical tenets to another? Who indeed are the ""intellectuals?""
Studies of ideology have tended to range themselves for or against particular viewpoints, or have concerned themselves with defining perspectives. The purpose of this book is to examine the common causal patterns in the development of various differing ideologies. Feuer finds that any ideology may be said to be composed of three ingredients: The most basic and invariant is some form of Mosaic myth. Every ideology also has its characteristic philosophical tenets spreading from left to right, which conform to the cycle of ideas; and, finally, an ideology must be taken up by some section of the population who can translate it into action.
Intellectuals in generational revolt find in some version of the ideological myth a charter and dramatization of their emotions, aims, and actions. Since each generation of intellectuals tends to reject its predecessors' doctrines, a law of intellectual fashion arises the alternation of philosophical doctrines. Ideology has inevitably made for an authoritarian presumption on the part of master-intellectuals and marginal ones and assumes their antagonism to objective truth and science. It is Feuer's contention that only when intellectuals abandon ideology in favor of science or scholarship will an unfortunate chapter in the history of human unreasonbe overcome.
Introduction to the Transaction Edition
Preface
CHAPTER I. THE STRUCTURE AND INGREDIENTS OF IDEOLOGY
1. The Three Ingredients in Ideology
2. The Mosaic Revolutionary Myth: the Invariant Ingredient
3. The Jacobic Myth of the Elect
4. The Mosaic Myth among the Classical Ideologists
5. The Mosaic Myth in Non-Marxian Ideology
a. African Negritude
b. Fascism
c. Nationalism
6. The Historical Determination of the Chosen Class
CHAPTER II. THE PHILOSOPHICAL TENETS IN IDEOLOGY: THE LAW OF WINGS AND THE LAW OF ALTERNATION
1. Ideology and the Re-anthropomorphization of the World
2. The Principle of Wings in the Ideological Use of Philo sophical Ideas
a. Kantianism
b. Utilitarianism
c. Pragmatism
d. Positivism
e. Nietzscheanism
f. Bergsonianism
g. Idealism and Transcendentalism
h. Determinism and Historicism
i. Existentialism
3. The Psychological Basis for the Laws of Wings and Alternation of Ideas
4. Periodic Movements in Ideology
5. The Laws of Wings and Alternation in Soviet Ideology
6. The Law of Wings in Ancient Ideology: The Case of Stoicism
CHAPTER III. THE GENERATIONAL BASIS FOR IDEOLOGICAL WAVES
1. Generational Revolt as the Source for Ideological Revolt: The Cycle of the New Wave and De-ideologization
2. The Power of the Generational Circle in Compelling Ideological Conversion
3. The Recurrent Waves of the De-ideologization and Their Irrelevance to the Successor'Generational Postulates'
4. Clusters in Ideological Periods and Ideological Mobility
5. Conservatism and the Generations
CHAPTER IV. THE TRAITS OF THE IDEOLOGICAL MODE OF THOUGHT: LOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL
1. The Empirical Ingredient
2. Isomorphic Projection upon the Universe
3. Twofold Theory of Truth
4. Anti-Truth and Marginal Intellectuals
5. The Insurgence against Value-Neutrality
6. The Authoritarianism of the Master Ideologists
7. The Masochist Pole in the Ideologist's Psyche
8. The Totalist Presupposition
9. Catchwords
10. Gemeinschaft and Anti-Semitism
11. Regression to Primitivism
CHAPTER V. IDEOLOGY AND SOCIETY
1. The Indifference of the Working Classes to Ideology
2. Variations of Societies as'Ideology-Prone'
3. Britain and the United States as Relatively Non-Ideological
4. Ideology and Religion: The Divergence of Intellectuals and Workers
5. The Women's Movement and Feminist Ideology 173
CHAPTER VI. IDEOLOGISTS, PROPHETS, AND INTELLECTUALS
1. Ideological and Scientific Definitions of'Ideology'
2. The Distinction between Philosophy and Ideology
3. The Basic Consequence of Ideology: The Irrationalization of Human Life
4. Prophets as Ideologists: the Prophetic Masochists
5. Intellectuals are Ideologists
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX
Biography
Rosenthal, Howard
