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Ideology: Public and Private

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Maxime Rodinson

Extract

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Men are living in the midst of a world pervaded by ideas.* Ideas, which provide men with help in their will to act and to think according to rules, which offer them guidance in their lives, are mustered into systems which are called ideologies.

Ideologies are issued by the inclusive society, by special, functional groups inside the society and, beginning with a given stage in the development of human society, by ideological movements which profess to provide men not only with guidance for special tasks or functions, but for life as a whole. So, individual men are faced with various sets of ideologies, more or less in agreement between themselves, more 'or less authoritative for them. They must choose between the suggestions, the rules, the orders given to them. As men are always in search of some degree of consistency in their ways of thinking and acting, they fit together the ideas they choose, unconsciously, into systems, into personal, private, individual ideologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 25 , Issue 97 , June 1977 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

Footnotes

*

Slightly modified text of a lecture given April 25, 1975, at the London School of Economics on the occasion of the author's receipt of the Isaac Deutscher Prize for the English edition, published in 1974, of his Islam et Capitalisme.

References

1 J. Emperaire, Les Nomades de la mer, Paris, Gallimard, 1955 (L'Espèce humaine, 11), p. 255.

2 R. P. H. Trilles, Les Pygmées de la forêt équatoriale, Paris, Bloud et Gay, 1932, p. 410.

3 Lun-Yü, XIII, 6, in E. R. Hughes (ed.), Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, London, J. M. Dent and New York, E. P. Dutton, 1942 (Everyman's Library, 973), p. 25.

4 The Book of Mencius, II A 4, in E. R. Hughes, ibid., p. 108. II, 1: 3, in J. Legge, The Chinese Classic, II, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1895, p. 196.

5 Cicero, De divinatione, II, 24.

6 Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, Divus Vespasianus, XXIII, 4.

7 Suetonius, op. cit., VII, 2; Tacitus, Historiae, IV, 81.

8 According to the translations in J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, New York and London, Ch. Scribner, 1944, p. 172, 174. See too John A. Wilson, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. by J. A. Prit chard, 2nd ed., Princeton N. J., Princeton University Press, 1955, pp. 405-407.

9 Lun-yü, VII, 27 (not XV, 30 !), ap. E. R. Hughes, ibid., p. 29.

10 Mishnah, Aboth, I, 1.