In 1985 Kenneth Minogue published a remarkable book with the forbidding title Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology. It wasn’t ignored, but it has been allowed to go out of print. Modest effort is required to find a copy: my local library discarded the one it had; the sole copy at the New York Public Library doesn’t circulate. People I expected to be familiar with the book didn’t know of it—or, for that matter, of Minogue, a longtime contributor to this magazine, who died in 2013. But the book speaks to the present moment, which is soaked in what he defines as “ideology.”
The word has a long and winding history, during much of which it’s been a term of abuse. Minogue applies it to any account of the world having certain specific ways of thinking, speaking, and acting. An ideology presents itself not as disinterested contemplation but as inseparable from action—or, to use the Marxist term, from “praxis.” Marxism is Minogue’s paradigm example and a rich subject for analysis because of its sustained and sophisticated development. He proposes to set out the logic of ideologies as such and, because they are bound up with action, their characteristic modes of rhetoric and argumentation. His abundant illustrations come not only from the literature of Marxism, but also from other ideologies, including radical (as distinct from liberal) feminism and chauvinistic forms of nationalism. One could easily add examples from the “ism” du jour, antiracism.
Minogue
