The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender is a reader comprised of many of Himani Bannerji's English writings over a long period of teaching and research in Canada and India. Bannerji creates an interdisciplinary analytical method and extends the possibilities of historical materialism by predominantly drawing on Marx, Gramsci, and Dorothy Smith. Essays here instantiate Marx's general proposition that while all ideology is a form of consciousness, all forms of consciousness are not ideological. Applying this (...) insight to issues ranging from patriarchy through race, class, nationalism, liberalism and fascism, Bannerji breaks through East-West binaries, challenging the mystifying approaches to the constitution of the social, and shows that a sustained struggle against ideological thinking is at the heart of a fundamental socialist struggle. (shrink)

World history is currently one of the most exciting areas of discussion amongst historians.

Unravels the many different definitions of ideology, explores the history of the concept from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and interprets the works of ...

Preface.--Science, ideology, and world view.--Objectives and methods in intellectual history.--The Kuhnian paradigm and the Darwinian revolution in natural history.--Biology and social theory in the nineteenth century.--Darwin as a social evolutionist.--Darwinism as a world view.--From Huxley to Huxley.--Postscript.

...this work covers a great deal of philosophical ground, and it does so in a competent, workmanlike fashion which should be comprehensible even to a student in a lower level undergraduate introductory course.

discipline a general science of our "intellectual faculties, their principal phenomena, and the more remarkable circumstances of their activities" (1801, p. 4). Convinced of the sensationalist epistemology of Locke and Condillac, Destutt de Tracy believed one could resolve all ideas into the sensations that produced them and thereby test their soundness. The sensationalist assumptions of his project led him to propose that "ideology is a part of zoology" (1801, p. 1), and he consequently paid close attention to the way (...) physiological.. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of ideology in the context of its normative and regulatory function. The author's contribution to the further knowledge of the ideology was the following main conclusions. The emergence of ideology as a regulatory mechanism was primarily due to the transition from a traditional society to a modern one. Ideology is an attribute of modern society, since it acts as an intermediary between a person and social reality, (...) determining and regulating the activities of all people and relations between them in any sphere of society. In the XIX – first half of the XX centuries political ideology in its theoretical form dominated. As a regulatory mechanism, it functioned alongside religion, morality, and law, complementing them. In the second half of the XX – XXI centuries, as a result of the third STR, ideology in an ordinary and practical form became widespread. It began to replace the traditional regulatory mechanisms, surpassing them in the degree of influence on public consciousness and becoming the main mechanism of social regulation. (shrink)

This study deals basically with a critique of ideological and policy-oriented approaches in area studies, and problems of political interventions and ideological inclinations in the Middle Eastern studies. Politics and ideology not only makes the area more complex to understand, since they aim to meet the needs of the governments, but also prevents the academic studies to develop independently. The study aims at putting forth a historical analysis required both to take the issues of the Middle East studies within (...) their unique socio-economic settings, and to regard them from the historical point of view. Central for the paper is to propose bases for the development of area studies depending on the interactions of regional histories and politics with each other. The study argues that Middle East studies in particular and area studies in general would produce reasonable knowledge and add up to the literature within a working relationship with world history, and in a comparative and multi-dimensional manner. (shrink)

In the space of barely more than five years, with the publication of four pathbreaking books, Slavoj Žižek has earned the reputation of being one of the most arresting, insightful, and scandalous thinkers in recent memory. Perhaps more than any other single author, his writings have constituted the most compelling evidence available for recognizing Jacques Lacan as the preemient philosopher of our time. In _Tarrying with the Negative_, Žižek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens (...) the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Žižek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various discursive practices and where our subjectivity is dispersed through a multitude of ideological positions? _No_ is his answer, and the way out is a return to philosophy. This revisit to German Idealism allows Žižek to recast the critique of ideology as a tool for disclosing the dynamic of our society, a crucial aspect of which is the debate over nationalism, particularly as it has developed in the Balkans—Žižek's home. He brings the debate over nationalism into the sphere of contemporary cultural politics, breaking the impasse centered on nationalisms simultaneously fascistic and anticolonial aspirations. Provocatively, Žižek argues that what drives nationalistic and ethnic antagonism is a collectively driven refusal of our own enjoyment. Using examples from popular culture and high theory to illuminate each other—opera, film noir, capitalist universalism, religious and ethnic fundamentalism—this work testifies to the fact that, far more radically than the postmodern sophists, Kant and Hegel are our contemporaries. (shrink)

A discussion of Lloyd's Tarner Lectures at Trinity College. The importance of Lloyd's previous scholarship is characterized and these sweeping, erudite lectures are placed in the context of that scholarship. In the broadest terms, the lectures are a call to culturally and historically comparative study of human reasoning. At their heart is a comparative history of scientific theorizing from the ancients through to modern science. Lloyd rejects the positivist picture, and the view of modern and ancient science as discontinuous; (...) he urges scholars to undertake comparative work on the ancient sciences in different traditions. This critical notice evaluates Lloyd's view and raises several questions for further reflection. (shrink)

Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring (...) Burke to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived. (shrink)

Mandelstam’s criticism of the Rayleigh theory of the blue color of the sky (1907) and his polemic with M. Planck (1907–1908) did not become notable events in the history of physics. However, the method of their coverage in the Soviet and in the post-Soviet physics literature is remarkable. Most of Soviet physicists and historians of physics supported Mandelstam's point of view in his criticism of both Raleigh and Planck. The situation changed only at the beginning of the 21st century: (...) in the Russian literature the publications appeared emphasizing that in the Raleigh–Mandelstam and Planck–Mandelstam controversies Mandelstam was not right, Raleigh and Planck were closer to the truth. Which presumptions of this trend can be noted? This was patriotism of the scientific school peculiar to Mandelstam’s graduate students and the former graduate students, the patriotism connected with solidarity which helped Mandelstam’s community to survive in the Soviet totalitarian regime and in the totalitarian organization of science. This was also progressionism which was popular among academics and among men in the street. The phenomenon of common knowledge, mutual knowledge among the members of a scientific community should be taken under consideration. Common knowledge is connected with the non-thematized anonymous inclusion of the ideological terminology into scientific discourse. (shrink)

Thought of the people in modern China has experienced three different stages of historical evolution: the Opium War to Sino ideology before people began to shake the stage; Hundred-dimensional people thought of the decay phase of the new era; people during the 1911 Revolution and the demise of political ideology end of life stage. There are three characteristics of its evolution: First, the thought of the people has always been the evolution of the principal contradiction in Chinese society (...) with modern developments and changes linked; Second, the democratic ideas of development in modern China, and indeed the people of the gradual collapse of the disintegration of the ideological and theoretical system, functional the process of shrinking role; Third, the evolution is always thought of the people and the ruling class and the advanced Chinese people's ideals and beliefs, linked to theory and practice. The waning stage, which lasted from the Opium Wars until the time before the Sino-Japanese war . The declining stage, during the year of the Reform Movement of 1898. The decaying stage, during the year of The Revolution of 1911. There are three features of their decay: They were interwoven with the escalation of the principal social problem of modern China. The development of democracy in modern China contributed to the gradual collapse of these ideologies. The decline of these ideologies was interwoven with the ideals, beliefs, theories, and practices of the ruling class and progressive Chinese people. (shrink)

Oscar Kenshur’s “Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism” should go a long way toward convincing most readers that the cure for “ideological” criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the “more-historical-than-thou” offensive against Marxists and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1 There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about the nature (...) of ideological analysis that should be debated. However, he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur’s argument is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants to tile—most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a “corrective” to overzealous claims for the significance of ideological criticism that has the effect not of “sav[ing history] from its friends” but of returning it to the status of “background” or “context” that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The terms in which he casts his argument—epistemology and/or ideology—redefine “ideological criticism” in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save “history” from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length study of the various discourses in which and against which their works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur’s argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for ideological analysis. 1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA 102 : 292-303. Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is the author of Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the Discourses of Natural Philosophy. (shrink)

This book was undertaken before the terms 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' were coined and the further escalation of America's ideological civil war. It was prompted by deep wonderment at the way people tend to be wholly enclosed within their ideological frames and deaf to claims about reality that come from the opposite camp, no matter how valid they might be. Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this (...) normative vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book does not focus on the normative aspect of ideology, which is largely subjective, but on its factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, the normative commitment. After theorists around 1960 proclaimed the 'death of ideology', ideological divides and clashes have reemerged with renewed intensity throughout the world, including in the liberal democracies. In the United States they have become particularly venomous. The other side is widely viewed as malicious, irrational or downright stupid, and, often, as barely legitimate. The zeal of the opposing sides is often scarcely less than that which characterized the religious ideologies of old. Indeed, historical religious ideologies have largely been replaced by 'secular religions' or 'religion substitutes'. The book is not another survey of past and present ideologies. It is an attempt to understand the cognitive, emotional and social roots of ideology and ideological fixation. It combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities with a broad sweep through history. It proceeds from the Stone Age to the rise of civilization, the great religions and modernity, to a critique of fundamental factual premises that underlie some of the major debates dominating today's liberal democracies. (shrink)

The mismatch between common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth‐century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called “science” represents the establishment of an unstable ideology (...) of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modern science are accordingly described as “natural philosophy” and “instrumentality” . The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations. (shrink)

The paper deals with the phenomenon of mythicism of the history in the contemporary period of globalisation. It pays attention also to its roots in the history of Slovak nationalism in the first half of the 20th century. The author points to the importance of the mythicized history not only for nations involved in the processes of their national emancipation, in which it serves the legitimization of national communities, but also for the preservation of the national idea (...) even in fully developed and stabilised nations. She focuses mostly on several basic kinds of myths, often recurring in the ideologies of nationalism and having their representations also in the history of Slovak nationalism. (shrink)

Kenya’s land question concerns the distributional inequalities that were occasioned by colonial land policies, and which impact the country’s political stability. There are two main schools of thought that explore how the land question and attendant political issues may be resolved. These are the dominant and the subaltern. The dominant school of thought has largely informed Kenya’s land law system, but it has failed to effectively address issues around political stability. This has meant that subaltern ideology, which was historically (...) ignored in the formulation of the country’s land policy, is now increasingly informing land policy. Gender is primarily included in the dominant school of thought, but is excluded from subaltern ideology. The exclusion of gender from subaltern ideology results in the mis-framing and lack of holistic understanding of how women experience inequality with regard to land. This article explains why the subaltern ideology excludes gender and demonstrates the importance of including gender lenses in this ideology. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the conceptual origins of ideology as a term that described ideology as positive science, which analysed thoughts and ideas, ideology in analogy to sociology, the science of ideas, and the science of society respectively. From here the chapter investigates how ideology was transformed into a concept that epitomized a set of principles about society and government. Ideology became an action-oriented concept for shaping the future. The concept moved away from its original meaning (...) of studying ideas conforming to law, although this meaning still played a certain role in the debate. (shrink)

Does Marxism reflect uncritically the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on innovative work in anthropology, history and philosophy, Professor Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically different social order: the former Maale kingdom of southern Ethiopia. Unlike capitalism, where inequality is organized by contracts between 'free' individuals, powerful men in Maale were conceived as 'begetting' others through control of biological fertility and material fortune. The author scrutinizes this (...) unusual system of domination in order to sharpen issues in social and cultural theory. He concludes that the interpretation of symbols and analysis of historical contingency should be crucial steps in any Marxist investigation. This unusual combination of social theory and ethnography will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. (shrink)

Essay Review: A Socialized History of Science: Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Science, Technology and the Military, Scientific Knowledge Socialized .

The history of ideology and its definition continues to occupy scholars across a range of disciplines. Contrary to the vast volume of earlier work on ideology however, this books provides a challenging new theory of ideology, one that is capable of explaining not only the internal structures of ideologies, but also how ideologies function in society. In formulating theory that is capable of providing the first insights into the internal structures of ideologies while simultaneously explaining how (...) discourse structures may be used in the production and reproduction of ideologies, van Dijk offers a highly important theoretical bridge between the micro and macro structures of society. This book will be essential for all students of discourse studies, communication, social psychology, sociology, and political science. (shrink)

For my present purposes, and in terms of my immediate concerns, the problem of ideology in American literary history has three different though closely related aspects: first, the multivolume American literary history I have begun to edit; then, the concept of ideology as a constituent part of literary study, and, finally, the current revaluation of the American Renaissance. I select this period because it has been widely regarded as both the source and the epitome of our (...) literary tradition; because it has become, accordingly, the focal point of the critical revision now under way in American studies; and because, from either of these perspectives, literary or critical, it seems to me a particularly fitting subject for the occasion. For one thing, we owe the idea of an American Renaissance to F. O. Matthiessen, who was a prime mover of the Salzburg Seminar, and a member of its first faculty in 1947. Moreover, American Renaissance was a classic work of revisionist criticism. It reset the terms for the study of American literary history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired the growth of American studies in the United States and abroad. It is not too much to say that Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and the Salzburg Seminar brought American literature to postwar Europe. What followed, from the late forties through the sixties, was the flowering of a new academic field, complete with programs of study, periodicals, theses, conferences, and distinguished procession of scholarly authorities, including many graduates of the Salzburg Seminar.Matthiessen figures as a watershed in this development. For if American Renaissance marked the seeding-time of a new academic field, it was also the harvest of some three decades of literary study. I refer, first of all, to the dual legacy that Matthiessen acknowledges of T. S. Eliot and Vernon Parrington—which is to say, the partnership in American Renaissance between the terms “literary” and “history”; or, in the words of Matthiessen’s subtitle, between Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman: “art,” meaning a small group of aesthetic masterpieces, and “expression,” meaning representative works, reflecting and illuminating the culture at large. It was the remarkable achievement of Matthiessen that his book yokes these concepts gracefully together. Somehow, one concept seems to support the other. The historical designation American seems richer for its association with an aesthetic renaissance; Emerson’s and Whitman’s art gains substance by its capacity to express the age. Matthiessen himself did not feel it necessary to explain the connection. But we can see in retrospect that what made it work—what made it, indeed, unnecessary for Matthiessen to explain the connection—was an established consensus, or rather a consensus long in the making, which American Renaissance helped establish. I mean a consensus about the term “literary” that involved the legitimation of a certain canon, and a consensus about the term “history” that was legitimated by a certain concept of America. Sacvan Bercovitch is Carswell Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is the Author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad, among other works. He has also edited several collections of essays, most recently Reconstructing American Literary History. (shrink)

Nanotechnology is viewed by those in favor of its development in two different ways, and the divide is not recent. This article describes the origins of the differing visions of nanotechnology and examines their broader impacts. The typical history of the field tells nothing about these differing visions, which perhaps misleads. At least two distinct camps among scientists and engineers pursue work on the nanoscale, but they rarely interact, and when they do, they get nowhere. This article looks first (...) at definitional issues in the field; then turns to the common history of nanotechnology, the history's shortcomings, and one particular episode that highlights the divide; and then examines the broader impacts of this dispute. The divide among those interested in nanotech tells something about the way different groups of people see technology and the application of science. This historical review clarifies controversy over societal issues and terminology in nanotechnology. (shrink)

Bishop Elliott's book is a great tool for defending Catholic sexual ethics as humane and reasonable. His experience representing the Holy See at the United Nations has given him a ring-side seat in the battles showing just how radical the sexual revolutionaries really are. He offers a rare combination of sound theology and practical experience." -- Jennifer Roback Morse [taken from back cover].

During the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries interpretations of the British Industrial Revolution became embedded within debates over competing systems of political economy, primarily liberal democracy (free trade) versus socialism (state regulation). At the heart of this contest was also the question of epistemology. A picture emerged of the Industrial Revolution that reflected such contrasting perspectives; for those with a Western liberal bent Britain industrialized first due to a weak state, an emphasis upon individual liberty, the right institutions and culture of (...) creativity born of free minds and free markets. At the heart of this was the emergence of science; objectivity and Western democracy became a key cornerstone of this perspective. This view was first especially spearheaded by the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and, slightly later, Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992). The debate subsequently became particularly fierce during the Cold War, and since the fall of the Berlin Wall the role of the state and protectionism within Britain’s industrial history has greatly diminished. Indeed today’s dominant historiography continues to erase Britain’s actual industrial experience and, instead, reflect entrenched liberal and neoliberal prescriptions. A major axiom of this ideological viewpoint is the centrality of science and its history. (shrink)

The French Revolution had a complex relationship with historical thought. In a significant sense, the politics of 1789 was built upon a rejection of the authority of the past. As old institutions and practices were swept away, many champions of the Revolution attacked conventional historical modes for legitimating authority, seeking to replace them with a politics anchored in notions of reason, natural law and natural rights. Yet history was not so easily purged from politics. In practice, symbols and images (...) borrowed from the past saturated Revolutionary culture. The factional disputes of the 1790s, too, invoked history in a range of ways. The politics of nature itself often relied on a range of historical propositions and, as the Revolution developed, a new battle between “ancients” and ‘moderns’ gradually emerged amongst those seeking to direct the future of France. This article explores these issues by focusing on a series of lectures delivered at the École Normale in the Year III (1795), in the wake of Thermidor and the fall of Robespierre. The lectures, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, were designed to lay out a program for historical pedagogy in the French Republic. Their author, Constantin-Francois Volney (1757–1820), was one of a group of figures who sought, during these years, to stabilise French politics by tying it to the development of a new form of social science—a science that would eventually be labelled “idéologie.” With this in mind, Volney sought to promote historical study as an antidote to the political appropriation of the past, with particular reference to its recent uses in France. In doing so, he also sought to appropriate the past for political purposes. These lectures illustrate a series of tensions in the wider Revolutionary relationship with history, particularly during the Thermidorian moment. They also, however, reflect ongoing ambiguities in the social role of the discipline and the self-understanding of its practitioners. (shrink)