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Modern political life is a confusing and disorientating terrain of competing ideologies. Jason Blakely offers readers a lively, fresh and insightful guide through the labyrinth of conflicting and competing ideas in order to better understand why ideology in the modern era can be so divisive. Lost in Ideology sets out from the conviction that the current disorientation engulfing the world's liberal democracies is in no small part ideological in origin. People feel confused because there are multiple ideological maps, so to speak, each marked by dramatically different points of interest, rivers, summits, roads, and total topographies. Ideology in the modern era has the paradoxical effect of orienting millions even as it disorients millions. This leads us to the present-day predicament in which individuals of every imaginable political stripe confidently declare: “I have a theory – but you? You have an ideology!”

En plus des inégalités sociales, nous voici maintenant confrontés à la menace d'un effondrement de l'humanité. Or, tous les gouvernements de gauche échouent ne serait-ce qu'à changer la donne. Tandis que le mouvement social s'imagine que de la lutte naîtra une autre société. Face à l'impasse, il est urgent de révolutionner la gauche. Délaissant les mythologies libérale ou progressiste, il nous faut renouer avec l'intention de faire société. Et s'il nous faut certes prendre le pouvoir… c'est sur nos vies bien avant celui des institutions. C'est en effet à la relation entre les êtres qu'il s'agit de redonner corps, loin de l'ego-roi ou de l'asservissement salarié et consumériste. Liberté, Égalité, Commun pourrait devenir l'ambition d'une nouvelle utopie.

The chapters in this volume clarify the notion of political identity by focusing on the metaphysics of polities. By analysing the notion of political identity, they provide the conceptual resources for a deeper understanding of the theoretical and practical debates on populism, the crisis of sovereignty, the feasibility of a world government, and ethical, religious, and cultural pluralism.What is a political community? Any answer to this question lies at the intersection between three fields: metaphysics, philosophy of action, and political philosophy. The question concerns how and why a plurality of individuals becomes a political unity, what principles or forces keep that unity together, and what threats that unity can encounter. In this volume, the contributors investigate how different metanormative views affect the possible answers to this metaphysical question. They explore the role that the individual identities of agents play in grounding common practices that underpin political life. They investigate the individual identities of agents as the result of the interplay between natural and cultural factors. Finally, they observe the ways in which a political community, as a collection of individuals who hang together in an attempt to reach common purposes, demonstrate a certain metaphysical solidity.Political Identity and the Metaphysics of Polities will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in metaphysics, political philosophy, political theory, and philosophy of action.

Violence and Nonviolence descriptively analyzes numerous examples of theorists'definitions and characterizations of varying types of violence, arguing that a commonsense view of violence and nonviolence is based on paradigm cases that most people generally agree consider as kinds of violence and nonviolence. Beyond these cases, however, McCreery argues that collectives of individuals form into politicized groups that share visions of these types of violence and nonviolence, particularly in terms of what they believe to be legitimate kinds of violence and nonviolence in contrast to illegitimate kinds. An understanding of violence and nonviolence requires a perspectival, relational approach that situates the vulnerable human body as primary. Furthermore, if nonviolence is to succeed as an effective political strategy, then it must work as a kind of violence, at least from the perspective of the adversary.

On the Southern border of the United States in 2018, the decision was made to implement a separation policy among refugees and migrant families arriving at the border – and so a group of government employees left their homes, bidding farewell to their families as they went to work, and began to separate hundreds of children from their families, forcefully taking them to holding centres. Developing Hannah Arendt's analysis of the banality of evil, The Path to Mass Evil demonstrates how the most educated, sophisticated and advanced societies in human history have the potential to descend into profound inhumanity and in the extreme can turn into enormous killing machines, implementing mass murder on a vast scale.Suitable for undergraduates and graduates in philosophy, sociology, psychology and religion, Michael Hardiman reveals how traditional understandings of morality fail to grasp how ordinary citizens become collaborators and engage in a range of levels of evildoing. He also highlights the necessity of confronting this evil in the increasingly divided and antagonistic world in which we find ourselves today.

Wie erklärt man, dass der Neoliberalismus auch von Klassen und Gruppen unterstützt wird, die er mit seiner anti-sozialen Politik schwächt und verarmt? Wie gelingt es einem Backlash-Konservatismus, an den Ressentiments der Subalternen gegen'die da oben'anzuknüpfen und sie zugleich gegen Linke, Gewerkschaften und Marginalisierte zu mobilisieren? Der Begriff der Ideologietheorie steht für eine Neufundierung historisch-materialistischer Ideologieforschung, die sich sowohl gegen die Reduktion von Ideologien aufs Ökonomische als auch gegen bloße Ideologiekritik eines'verkehrten Bewusstseins'abgrenzt. Ideologietheorie fragt nach den gesellschaftlichen Konstitutionsbedingungen und zumeist unbewussten Funktions- und Wirkungsweisen des Ideologischen, das sie in seiner'Materialität'untersucht, als Ensemble von Apparaten, Intellektuellen, Ritualen und Praxisformen. Jan Rehmann rekonstruiert unterschiedliche Stränge der Ideologietheorie – von Marx zu Adorno/Horkheimer, von Gramsci zu Stuart Hall, von Althusser zu Foucault, von Bourdieu zu W.F. Haug – und prüft ihre Tauglichkeit für die Analyse gegenwärtiger Ideologien.

This posthumously published work by Lawrence Krader surveys the study of myths from ancient times (in classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, China), in the Biblical traditions, of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and from Northeastern and Central Asia. It also covers the various approaches to the study of myth in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century; it discusses evolutionist, structuralist, hermeneutic, and linguistic approaches. The book covers on the one hand the treatment of myth from the inside, that is from the experience of those committed to the myth, and on the other the perspective of those ethnologists, philosophers and other students of myth who are outsiders. Krader takes up the theme of esoteric and exoteric myths as he rejects some of the assumptions and approaches to the study of myth from the past while singling out others for approval and inclusion in his general theory of myth. The book includes a discussion of myth in science and in infinitesimal mathematics. It also considers the relationship between myth and ideology in the twentieth century in relation to politics and power. It both incorporates and broadens Krader's theory of nature as a manifold consisting of different orders of space-time which he developed in his magnum opus Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing.

This book is concerned with the problem of how men actually think. The aim of these studies is to investigate not how thinking appears in textbooks on logic, but how it really functions in public life and in politics as an instrument of collective action.Philosophers have too long concerned themselves with their own thinking. When they wrote of thought, they had in mind primarily their own history, the history of philosophy, or quite special fields of knowledge such as mathematics or physics. This type of thinking is applicable only under quite special circumstances, and what can be learned by analysing it is not directly transferable to other spheres of life. Even when it is applicable, it refers only to a specific dimension of existence which does not suffice for living human beings who are seeking to comprehend and to mould their world.Meanwhile, acting men have, for better or for worse, proceeded to develop a variety of methods for the experiential and intellectual penetration of the world in which they live, which have never been analysed with the same precision as the so-called exact modes of knowing. When, however, any human activity continues over a long period without being subjected to intellectual control or criticism, it tends to get out of hand.

In these crooked times of chaotic and contradictory discourses in every social sphere, from politics to food production,'ideology'has become the buzzword to represent some solid structure on which to cling or under which to recoil, in an effort to understand reality. But how this structure is built and what it ultimately upholds – this is a primary focus of the Human Sciences. In this book, the author argues that in the Human Sciences, from its founders to contemporaries, a common premise is apparent: the fundamental property of all human-social reality is its character as something constructed. Through a vast set of analyses and reflections of his own, and by philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and linguists, the author shows how this premise, applied, which he coins as critical constructionist theory, constitutes the fundamental theory of the Human Sciences. The book also traces how the main development of this theory gave rise to critical deconstructionism – philosophical, sociological, and anthropological – as an analytical procedure in contemporary studies and research, valid in discussions on culture, ethics, human rights, gender, sexuality and ethnicities. Understanding the role ideology plays in this construction, then, is key to liberation from oppressive conceptual structures of reality. This book exposes that role.

Der vorliegende Band eröffnet die zweite Abteilung der Gesamtausgabe, die dem geisteswissenschaftlichen Wirken von Peter Gerdsen gewidmet ist und unter dem Leitmotiv ›Mensch und Transzendenz‹ steht. Inhalt des Bandes sind die beiden Monographien ›Blockiertes Deutschland – Von den geistigen Auseinandersetzungen unserer Zeit‹ aus dem Jahre 2004, das eine wesentlich erweiterte und vertiefte Fassung der bereits 2000 erschienenen Schrift ›Im Zeichen des zweischneidigen Schwertes – Analyse und Deutung des deutschen Zeitgeistes‹ darstellt, und ›Deutschland in den Fesseln der Ideologien – Ursachen, Hintergründe, Wege zur Befreiung‹ aus dem Jahre 2005. Diese Monographien markieren den Beginn des geisteswissenschaftlichen Wirkens in Form einer intensiven Auseinandersetzung mit der geistigen Situation seiner Zeit.

Ensayos que reúnen temas y preocupaciones constantes en el autor, aunque enfocados desde los distintos ángulos de una amplia comprensión y revisión de los mismos. En cada ensayo está latente la intención alerta del maestro y el pensador activo:'La actividad filosófica auténtica, la que no se limita a reiterar pensamientos establecidos, no puede menos que ejercerse en libertad'.

By situating objectivity at the level of ideology, while placing it within a dynamic, experimental and, at times, unorthodox interplay with Hegelian and Lacanian philosophy, The Night of the World offers a unique and radical re-thinking of objectivity. Encompassing a constellational array of wide-ranging subjects, from popular culture, politics, history, science, and philosophy, while deploying an engaging prose that is both incisive and seamlessly tangential, Smecker is both an ally with, and emerging voice in, the field of Zizekian dialectics. Incorporating Zizek's philosophy, Smecker speculates over both objectivity and ideology, evoking methods of thought not so prevalent since German Idealism was all the rage. In the spirit of Kierkegaard, The Night of the World is the result of an imaginative hypothesis. And that is only the half of it. Written in a style that will undoubtedly leave the reader itching to read it again once finished, The Night of the World is an ongoing engagement with an abundance of additional postulations, whose sole purpose is to produce more products of thought.,

This book addresses a central theme in social and political theory: what is the motivation behind the theory of ideology, and can such a theory be defended?

Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991) was one of the most important Italian philosophers to emerge after World War II and stands shoulder to shoulder with fellow hermeneutic thinkers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. The product of a well-developed theory of interpretation that stretches back to the late 1940s, his 1971 masterpiece Truth and Interpretation provides the historical impetus and theoretical framework for the questions of existence, art, and politics that would motivate his most famous students, Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo. In a time when the meaning of truth as an interpretation is challenged by the chaotic din of media on the one side and the violent force of absolute claims from science, religion, and political economy on the other, Pareyson's meditation on the value of thinking that is shaped by the traditions of philosophy and yet responds to contemporary demands remains timely and pressing more than forty years after its initial publication.

'Ideologie - das ist doch Schnee von gestern': Die Geringschätzung ist unberechtigt. Ausgehend von der gängigen Begriffsverwendung werden Ideologien in dreifacher Weise betrachtet: erkenntniskritisch als Formen bedürfnisgeleiteten Denkens, weltanschaulich als Weltbildannahmen und Wertüberzeugungen sowie programmatisch als soziopolitische Leitvorstellungen. Die Grundelemente der condition humaine werden mit den Prinzipien empirisch-rationalen Denkens konfrontiert. Menschen sind für bedürfnisgeleitetes Denken anfällig - aber sie können etwas dagegen tun.

Understanding Ideology enables the reader to recognize public expressions of an ideology,thereby avoiding gullibility and the consequences of ignorance. Of Karl Mannheim's classic dual conception of ideology, a Marxist-Freudian orientation is adopted. Supporting this is a critical conception of social alienation with aggressivity, narcissism, and socialization providing the psychological foundation for establishing any ideology. Operative in ideology are the same psychically defensive mechanisms Freud found in wishful dreams, neurotic repression, paranoia and mythology. Various forms of fallacious reasoning and propaganda sustain ideology. Finally dealt with is the possibility of escaping ideology as well as its difference from science.

De manière audacieuse, ce livre réalise une synthèse sociologique et philosophique érudite des grands auteurs qui ont configuré l'Occident philosophique. Ces pages font appel à l'anthropologie et à l'ethnographie pour réaliser le portrait de la pensée symbolique de l'Occident.

Interpreting the work of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt rereads Arendt's political philosophy in light of newly gained insights into the historico-cultural background of her work. Arguing against the standard interpretation of Hannah Arendt as an anti-modernist lover of the Greek polis, author Seyla Benhabib contends that Arendt's thought emerges out of a double legacy: German Existenz philosophy, particularly the thought of Martin Heidegger, and her experiences as a German-Jewess in the age of totalitarianism. This important volume reconsiders Arendt's theory of modernity, her concept of the public sphere, her distinction between the social and the political, her theory of totalitarianism, and her critique of the modern nation state, including her life long involvement with Jewish and Israeli politics.

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a lucid and accessible introduction to a major twentieth-century thinker those ideas have influenced fields as diverse as literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, politics and anthropology. Stephen Bygrave explores the content of Burke's vast output of work, focusing especially on his preoccupation with the relation between language, ideology and action. By considering Burke as a reader and writer of narratives and systems, Bygrave examines the inadequacies of earlier readings of Burke and unfolds his thought within current debates in Anglo-American cultural theory. This is an excellent re-evaluation of Burke's thought and valuble introduction to the impressive range of his ideas.