By John Schwarzmantel
After the good revolutions of 1776 in the United States and 1789 in France, glossy international locations started to convey political fight as a clash among Left and correct, a spectrum of ideologies together with socialism, liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, and later, communism and fascism, between others. those dominant ideologies mirrored the topics of business society, robust geographical regions, and the period of sophistication politics.
Today, although, a chain of quick social and political changes have provoked a world-wide main issue of ideologies. New expertise threatens the conventional social constitution of heavy undefined. elevated globalization demanding situations the sovereignty of the countryside, and sophistication divisions seem much less salient. In mild of those alterations, do sleek ideologies have whatever to claim to us as electorate of the realm today?
The Age of Ideology analyzes the modern relevance of the most ideologies which were crucial to political fight during the last centuries. Believing the postmodern critique of ideologies as insufficient for facing society's difficulties, John Schwarzmantel argues convincingly that political ideologies nonetheless offer crucial organizing frameworks for political debate and action.
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Additional info for The Age of Ideology: Political Ideologies from the American Revolution to Postmodern Times
Example text
Any attempt to fashion new principles or frameworks of political action had to take account of this democratic pressure, as the politics of modernity was a politics of democracy and participation. Indeed only legitimation based on popular sovereignty was acceptable in the modern age (Beetham, 1991 ), although this was distorted in various ways by ideologies such as fascism, which sought to justify absolute power by claiming that the leader could represent the masses better than any person who emerged from the divisive process of democratic politics.
How could community be maintained in the new civil society, and could modernity, with all its advantages, be made compatible with a sense of social obligation and reciprocity? Excessive individualism and selfinterest could be as harmful as the violent and rapacious societies of 'rude' nations: To the ancient Greek or the Roman, the individual was nothing, and the public everything. To the modern, in too many nations of Europe, the individual is everything, and the public nothing (Ferguson, 1995, p.
This is part of the meaning that civil society still preserves today, the idea of an informed and active public that does not have to accept what the government tells it, that can act as a source of opposition to the government of the day and articulate a range of perspectives and opinions. The force of 'the public opinion tribunal' was saluted by Jeremy Bentham as one of the ways in which the potentially dangerous power of government could be negated and contained. Anyone, Bentham wrote, who sought to reduce the power and influence of this public opinion tribunal was an enemy of the public and ofliberty, and should be exposed as such (Parekh, 1973, p.