The following is an excerpt from Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology by Kenneth Minogue (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 400 pages, $18.

“Have I really been in a battle?” wondered Stendhal’s hero after many hours blundering around the field of Waterloo, and many people today share a similar perplexity. Like Stendhal’s hero, they eat and drink and sustain the business of life, but the meaning of it all depends upon their conviction of contributing to the liberation of workers, women, the colonized, or other varieties of the oppressed. Like Fabrizio del Dongo, they find a regiment and tag along—the Hussars against Patriarchy, the Dragoon Guards of the Proletariat, and so on. Quite where the real battle lies is hotly disputed, but its significance is agreed to be a final end to oppression.

For these are people who believe that the term “oppression” is not merely a useful component of our rhetoric of grievances, but reveals the systematic character of how we live. As a typical formulation has it, plucked at random from a vast literature, “So long as some groups in society dominate others, the problem of conflict between persons and groups will remain.”[1] Or again: “Only a planet freed from class division and imperial exploitation, in which liberty and equality were common international realities, could be a peaceful environment for the human race.”[2] The lived texture of an ideological life, then, is to be found in the endeavors of millions to improve the world. There can be no doubt that this experience has been central to the last century and more.

My concern, however, is not with this lived experience but with what I identify as its central idea. The idea is so abstract that it is less a doctrine than a machine for generating doctrines, and its simplest formulation is that all evils are caused by an oppressive system. One of its more important corollaries is that truth is a weapon. This is the pure theory of ideology, and my aim is to explore its logical and rhetorical character.

Ideology is difficult to study because its actuality is a variety of different roles, and they are not easily disentangled. Like sand at a picnic, it gets in everything. As a doctrine about the systematic basis of the world’s evils, it has a logic of its own, a logic so powerful as to generate a mass of theories of the human world which now have an established place in university studies. Yet it has always taken an ambiguous attitude towards the academic world. It is also an inspirational message calling upon people to take up the struggle for liberation. As such, it has a rhetoric of its own. Historians and political scientists study specific ideologies. More generally, ideology is the propensity to construct structural explanations of the human world, and is thus a kind of free creative play of the intellect probing the world. An uneducated black convict in the United States [3] is no less likely to construct an ideological explanation of his world than a British historian seeking to dramatize the dangers of competition in weapons of destruction. [4] At a trivial level, ideology may be seen in temporary verbal habits, such as talk of “critiques” and “problematic,” or affectations like the use of intimate abbreviations of Christian names in public life.

Ideology shares all the opportunism of any political use of language. Its thread of argument is quite capable of slithering from one connotation to another, leaving a trail of mangled denotations in its wake. Sometimes the twists and turns of theory and the accidents of history leave words facing in every direction, and the very term “ideology” itself is a well-known example of this process. Coined during the French Revolution to describe a long-standing project of cognitive hygiene, [5] it soon degenerated into a term of abuse meaning precisely what that project was designed to remedy. [6] In this abusive form, it was taken up by Marx and Engels in the 1840s as a term for denigrating the competing thoughts of their fellow intellectuals. Marx the scientific student of society criticized as ideology the mystificatory universalism he believed himself to have found in the ruling ideas of the time, but also believed that his science expressed the rising consciousness of the working class. Generalizing from this point, revolutionaries by the end of the century were using the word “ideology” to mean any elaborated class point of view, all such viewpoints being partial and distorted except for that of the rising revolutionary class. On this basis, one might distinguish bourgeois and proletarian ideology. At this point in the word’s adventures, Marxism, as the science of society, might be found criticizing science, especially empirical social science and bourgeois economics, as the distorted thought of the bourgeoisie. In these contradictions, ideology meant both sub-scientific and super-scientific thought. In its ultimate vulgarization, “ideology” came to be a rather pretentious word for any doctrine.