Kenneth Minogue - Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology

Martyn P. Thompson

This is a challenging and very rewarding book by one of the foremost conservative thinkers in contemporary Europe. Professor Minogue offers an uncommon and thoroughly critical pure theory of ideology. His starting point is refreshingly different from that of the vast majority of writers on this subject. Most books begin with the word ideology and ask how it has been used since it was first coined in the late eighteenth century. When they encounter a confusion of incompatible usages, they simply select a handy definition which they then employ to explain and criticize a wide range of political beliefs bundled together as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, fascism, libertarianism, feminism, and so on. The results are always disappointing in at least two ways. First, the intellectual questions that they invite tend to be very dull. Is writer X a liberal? Is belief Y a distinctively Marxist belief? Is nationalism an ideology or not? Second, they invariably assume that each ism is equally as ideological as all the rest. Yet this is a confused and thoroughly confusing view, as the argument of Alien Powers shows.

So what is different about Minogues study of ideology? What do the majority of studies miss that Alien Powers supplies? A few remarks on its conception of ideology and on an important implication of its pure theory may provide at least preliminary answers and set the scene for the adventure that follows.

No reader can get far into the book without realizing that it weaves together historical reflections with philosophical analysis. Its starting point is not a search for the word ideology but a relatively uncontroversial, although immensely important, historical observation. By the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, a new and aggressive style of political thinking had established itself amidst older, more traditional styles of practical discourse. This new style had a distinctive substance, a distinctive logic, and a distinctive rhetoric. Armed with some privileged knowledge, this style construed the world in terms of exploiters and exploited. The logic of its arguments was always in terms of oppression, followed by struggle and leading eventually to emancipation. Its rhetoric was parasitic upon science, philosophy, history, or religion. The most prominent and the most intellectually gifted representative of this new style was Karl Marx. Even if Marxs observation in 1848 that the old European powers were all haunted by the specter of communism was a gross exaggeration at the time, nonetheless in hindsight it seems to have been a fairly good prediction. For whatever else Marx and Marxism may have achieved, they were certainly instrumental in helping to establish and to sustain what has often been called the Age of Ideology in modern Europeanand eventually in worldpolitics.

So the starting point of Alien Powers is a historical observation about innovation in mid-nineteenth-century European political culture. The argument is anchored in concrete historical experience rather than in the quicksand of capricious linguistic usage. Since Marx was arguably the most thoughtful of all the innovators, the philosophical analysis in Alien Powers focuses first and foremost upon his ideas. The purpose of the analysis is to uncover the pure theory of ideology. And this, in turn, requires identifying those characteristics of the substance, logic and rhetoric of Marxs ideas which are paralleled, to a greater or lesser degree, in all of the other contemporary forms of revolutionary political thinking such as fascism, Nazism, various religious fundamentalisms, and some, if not all, forms of nationalism, feminism, and the so-called liberation ideologies.

The conception of ideology at work here is more limited, more narrowly and precisely defined, than is usually the case. A brief comparison with Michael Oakeshotts deployment of the term ideology in his famous essay Rationalism in Politics (1947) is instructive. Practically everything that Oakeshott says about the character and destructive impact of the increasingly fashionable rationalism of modern politics is compatible with, indeed reinforces, the argument of Alien Powers . But Oakeshotts use of the term ideology is much broader than Professor Minogues. Modern rationalism, the illegitimate child of the scientific revolution, is the enemy of authority, prejudice, the traditional, the customary, and the habitual in modern life. For all its varied manifestations in intellectual life since the sixteenth century, its distinctive form in political activity is what Oakeshott calls ideology.

So politics understood on the analogy of engineering, the politics of destruction and creation rather than repair, politics that privileges technical knowledge at the expense of traditional knowledge, politics derived from supposed scientific expertiseall these, according to Oakeshott, are forms of ideological politics. On this view, Machiavellis Prince (1513) was the prototype of ideological politics, offering new and inexperienced rulers a set of techniques for ruling rather than a political education. In Locke, Bentham, and Godwin, and especially in Marx and Engels, this rationalist, ideological impulse became particularly pronounced. Each of these writers in their separate ways offered new actors on the stage of European politics political cribs, consisting of the supposed substrata of rational truths that they took to underlie the obscurities of traditional political thinking. Although Oakeshott did not express it in this way, each of them might be understood to be applying directly to the political concerns of their different constituencies something like the central proposals first formulated by Antoine Louis Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy as idologie: that is, the emancipation of humanity from the shackles of false ideas by establishing and applying, for the first time, a genuine science of ideas, or a set of true ideas. One further observation by Oakeshott is relevant here. He noted that an instructive example of the politics of modern rationalism, or ideological politics as he loosely characterized it, is the early history of the United States of America.