Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life

by Jason Blakely

Overview

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!”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788216630
Publisher:	Agenda Publishing
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	277,016
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jason Blakely is Associate Professor of Political Science at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, Malibu. He is the author of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics and Power (2020) and Interpretive Social Science (2018).

Table of Contents

Introduction: in search of ideology


Part I: Strange roots: early American ideology


1. Liberal by nature: varieties of classical liberalism


2. Other foundings: civic republicanism and white supremacy


Part II: Polarizations: the left and the right


3. Evolving liberalism: progressives versus neoliberals


4. In the name of the past: conservatives and neoconservatives


5. There is no “fascist minimum”: fascistic bundles and hybridizations


6. Is socialism still taboo? From Marxism to Bernie Sanders


Part III: Ideological scrambling: beyond the left and the right


7. Hiding in plain sight: nationalism and multiculturalism


8. There are many feminisms: the advent of sexual politics


9. The meaning of the earth: the challenges of ecological politics


Conclusion: the age of ideologies

Editorial Reviews

Lost in Ideology is an intellectual feast for anyone interested in politics and intellectual history, brilliantly demonstrating the importance of the latter to the former. Whether decisively intervening in today’s fascism debates, or thoughtfully explicating the many forms of environmentalism and feminism, Blakely assuredly guides the reader through leading ideas in today’s political discourse. He thereby joins the ranks of great theorists of ideology, building on an already formidable foundation of contributions to interpretive social science.

Frank Pasquale

Elegant and provocative … Lost in Ideology is a teacher’s book whose greatest lesson is not about the content of major ideologies, but about the place of ideology in a life well-lived. Blakely reminds us that we humans are 'meaning-making animals' who craft stories to make sense of our encounters with others, with ourselves, and with the world.

The Dispatch

A fascinating new book ... Shadi [Hamid] and I loved the book.

Damir Marusic

Citizens are too easily "lost in ideology". In this terrific book, Jason Blakely clarifies the shifting pathways and maps that shape both ideologies and possibilities for moving beyond them.

Craig Calhoun

Makes the case for a more subtle and mind-opening perspective on ideology ... people who regard themselves as immune to ideological contagion would do well to read Blakely’s book.

Inside Higher Ed

People who regard themselves as immune to ideological contagion would do well to read Blakely’s book, where they are likely to find the map they’ve assumed to be the world, adequately comprehended.

Inside Higher Ed. - Scott McLemee

Accessible and rich, detailed and comprehensive, well-argued and well written … it helps us better make sense of this crazy political world in which we live … a book that will necessarily find itself on to the syllabi of almost every course in political philosophy ... At a time when academia is in crisis, and many academics are busily chasing fads, here is a bright light.

National Catholic Reporter

This is a warm, humanist and vital book for our moment which does a tremendous job mapping the ideological terrain of the past 200 years. It manages to do so with both sophistication and a democratic sensibility. One is reminded of the quote attributed to Terence: "Nothing human is foreign to me". How many books can you point to where Michael Oakeshott, Wendy Brown, Marx and Mill, all are taken seriously and put in dialogue with one another?

Matt McManus

Jason Blakely is perhaps our finest critic of misplaced appeals to scientific authority in political life. But what's the alternative? In Lost in Ideology, he both posits and performs one, arguing that we are meaning-making animals, politics is cultural, and we must learn to interpret the ideologies we inevitably hold. Along the way, Blakely offers a brilliant tour d'horizon of modern politics, from fascism to feminism, socialism to sexual politics, and more – modeling a way of thinking and arguing we desperately need more of today: generous, humane, and even hopeful.

Matthew Sitman