And already it will be clear that it contained two quite opposite ideas: that of truth and that of falsity. Ideology meant a philosophical hygiene revealing truth for the ideologues themselves, and the very falsity which n3eeded to be cleansed for Marx. The problem of apparent contradiction disappears, however, when one realizes that the falsity of those false ideas is guaranteed by the truth of one’s own ideas. Ideology refers, as it were, to the negative and positive poles of the world, and therefore whatever contradicted them must be false – that is, ideological, which meant both false, and false because reflecting the wrong social location. The same ambivalent usage marks anarchist versions of the truth, or those of radical feminists. So long as one grasps this symbiosis, the term ideo... (查看原文)
The essence of modernity lay in the development of this new sentiment of individuality: the disposition increasingly to guide one's life by one's own talents and inclinations rather than to fill the place into which one had been born. (查看原文)
Until the economy and the state have been distinguished, for example, there can be no modern theory of socialism, which is a reflection on the relation between politics and economy. Again, until culture had been distinguished from society, nationalism would have made no sense. Nationalism is the doctrine that every culture ought to be self-determining. This doctrine must be distinguished from the sloppy usage of nationalism to signify the passionate solidarity of established states in their quarrels with others of their kind – a quite different phenomenon. This confusion has yielded the mistaken theory that, since all conflict is caused by nationalism, the way to peace lies through the abandonment of sovereignty in favor of the rule of international authorities. (查看原文)
The basic point, we may suggest, is that socialism may refer either to belief in a fully just society, or to a political tendency to favor egalitarian and redistributive reforms when possible. Whatever it might be like, a fully just society would need no serious politics; it would be one of those projects of perfection which we shall call ideologies and which we shall discuss presently. And this is what the term socialism commonly signifies, especially to its adherents. That is why it has acquired a genuinely political partner, often called social democracy, where the addition of democracy signifies the political commitment which recognizes that the state is an institution that must respond to the current tastes and desires of its members, and therefore that any conception of a finally per... (查看原文)
When we deliberate about something, we assume ourselves to be free and outside any system, but when other people deliberate about us, they take us as having fixed and more or less predictable characteristics within a system of understanding. It is a current philosophical cliché to insist that no one can escape the determining system constituted by race, gender, class, history, or other abstractions, and in one sense this is obviously true. But It would only be an interesting truth if the system constituted by race, gender, class, and history could tell us just how people are going to act. Since it cannot, we are left with a vacuous determinism: we can’t escape – whatever it is that we can’t escape! (查看原文)
In this search, the analysis of modern societies into distinct associations is an invaluable framework of thought – but also one which threatens to destroy political science itself. For if the causes of what happens in politics are to be found in the economy, or social processes, or even culture, then politics is merely a set of effects, and loses its autonomy as a free and self-determining activity. One consequence would be that there is nothing in politics for a science to study. (查看原文)
Above all, the name of politics itself. When concepts are stretched too far, they snap and lose their usefulness. “Politcs” used to refer merely to the actions aof monarchs, parliaments. And ministers, and to the activities of the politically committed who helped or hindered their accession to authority. Everything else was social or private life. With the expansion of the power of governments, nearly everything has come to be described, in one way, or another, as ‘political’. We may mention here just one fo the many reasons for this. Governments wishing to claim credit for all good things, and oppositions wishing to dispense blame for all bad things, have colluded in spreading the idea that all things, good and bad, are caused by political policies. This idea can turn subjects into petiti... (查看原文)
