- Minogue, Kenneth.
Alien Powers.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1985] 2007.
ISBN 978-0-7658-0365-8.
-
No, this isn't a book about Roswell. Subtitled
“The Pure Theory of Ideology”, it is a
challenging philosophical exploration of ideology,
ideological politics, and ideological arguments and
strategies in academia and the public arena. By
“pure theory”, the author means to
explore what is common to all ideologies, regardless
of their specifics. (I should note here, as does the
author, that in sloppy contemporary discourse
“ideology” is often used simply to denote
a political viewpoint. In this work, the author restricts
it to closed intellectual systems which ascribe a structural
cause to events in the world, posit a mystification which
prevents people from understanding what is revealed
to the ideologue, and predict an inevitable historical
momentum [“progress”] toward liberation from
the unperceived oppression of the present.)
Despite the goal of seeking a pure theory, independent of
any specific ideology, a great deal of time is necessarily
spent on Marxism, since although the roots of modern
ideology can be traced (like so many other pernicious things)
to Rousseau and the French Revolution, it was Marx and Engels
who elaborated the first complete ideological system, providing
the intellectual framework for those that followed. Marxism,
Fascism, Nazism, racism, nationalism, feminism,
environmentalism, and many other belief systems are seen as
instantiations of a common structure of ideology. In essence,
this book can be seen as a “Content Wizard”
for cranking out ideological creeds: plug in the oppressor and
oppressed, the supposed means of mystification and path to
liberation, and out pops a complete ideological belief system
ready for an enterprising demagogue to start peddling. The
author shows how ideological arguments, while masquerading as
science, are the cuckoo's egg in the nest of academia, as they
subvert and shortcut the adversarial process of inquiry and
criticism with a revelation not subject to scrutiny. The
attractiveness of such bogus enlightenment to second-rate
minds and indolent intellects goes a long way to explaining
the contemporary prevalence in the academy of ideologies
so absurd that only an intellectual could believe
them.
The author writes clearly, and often with wit and irony so dry it may
go right past unless you're paying attention. But this is nonetheless
a difficult book: it is written at such a level of philosophical
abstraction and with so many historical and literary references that
many readers, including this one, find it heavy going indeed. I
can't recall any book on a similar topic this formidable since
chapters two through the end of Allan Bloom's
The Closing of the American Mind.
If you want to really understand the attractiveness of ideology to
otherwise intelligent and rational people, and how ideology corrupts
the academic and political spheres (with numerous examples of
how slippery ideological arguments can be), this is an
enlightening read, but you're going to have to work to make the
most of it.
This book was originally published in 1985. This edition includes a
new introduction by the author, and two critical essays reflecting
upon the influence of the book and its message from a contemporary
perspective where the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the
Cold War have largely discredited Marxism in the political arena, yet
left its grip and that of other ideologies upon humanities and the
social sciences in Western universities, if anything, only stronger.
March 2008 