Ideology

“ Certainly in the civilizations with which we are most familiar, political and economic forces, the principles of necessity and availability have led to the formulation of an ideology that would justify and promote the interests of the social group which was controlling and directing the community or communities in which the civilization was maturing. ”

“ Men were raised tame, and what tamed them was an ideology—a unified, coherent body of ideas—which related the knowledge of the world to the sphere of morals, which was applied by the intellectually dominant classes as a means of control, and which secured for the controlling classes hegemony over all groups in society. ”

“ The more rigid the social order, the more stubborn its resistance to change. By the same token, more fluid societies lend themselves more readily to changes in practice and in theory.
It is not possible to discuss ideology without some reference to the closely related problems of means and ends. ”

“ It is the people who, in the long run, without theories, by their spontaneous creations, modify, reform, absorb the policy projects and philosophical doctrines, and who, incessantly creating a new reality, incessantly change the basis of politics and philosophy. ”

“ Having created an ideally perfect state, the philosopher proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce revolutions, of the moral effects of various forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the deductive method and to proceed from a priori psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the apparent chaos of political life. ”

“ Whatever goes by the different names of the revolutionary, the radical, the democratic, the liberal, the free-thinking, the sceptical, or the negative and critical school or party in religion, politics, or philosophy, all passes with him under the designation of metaphysical, and whatever he has to say about it forms part of his description of the metaphysical school of social science. ”

“ It is, to illustrate, physical, mental, and spiritual, or more elaborately, it is athletic, industrial, political, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, and religious, and in its social life has developed institutions answering to these different phases of itself. It is, again, lawful and lawless, old and young, conservative and radical, sympathetic and selfish. But whatever the mode of analysis or division or dichotomy, the unity of experience embraces all the elements, aspects, or relations that are discovered. ”

“ Could I wish humanity different Could I wish the people made of wood and stone, or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
There is danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more advanced than the intellectual, and moral qualities which alone can secure the success of a revolt. These intellectual and moral qualities—the skill to organize, the wisdom to control large undertakings, are not natural gifts but the results of experience. They are evolutionary products. ”

“ When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. ”

“ In gathering up the threads of history in the last century, and weaving its facts and philosophy together, one can trace the liberal social ideas, growing out of the political and religious revolutions in France, Germany, Italy, and America; and their tendency to substitute for the divine right of kings, priests, and orders of nobility, the higher and broader one of individual conscience and judgment in all matters pertaining to this life and that which is to come. ”

“ Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day,—orthodoxy, skepticism, missions, popular education, temperance, anti-masonry, anti-slavery; see how each of these abstractions has embodied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community ”

“ But we can ask all men—artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists—to be citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. ”

“ He would urge us onward in our merely intellectual career, unmindful of the lesson, which the pages of history logically teach, which the principles we have pointed out unerringly confirm, that intellectual development, religious liberty, civil freedom, social equality, unbalanced and unregulated by the centralization, consolidation, moral force, religious responsibility, and the tendencies which belong to the principle of unity, push irresistibly toward disintegration, and end inevitably in political revolution, national disruption, and social anarchy. ”

“ After two years' reflection, experience, intercourse, reading of the graduated writings and information, you will necessarily have formed the idea that the final aim of our Society is nothing less than to win power and riches, to undermine secular or religious government, and to obtain the mastery of the world, and so on. ”

“ Thus what is extremism in general thought and philosophy is idealism in art and literature; is transcendentalism and mysticism in religion; assumes the form of Socialism, a desire for equality and creation of opportunities for the fullest development of all in socio-economic matters ”

“ Those who have lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency, the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest. ”

“ To analyze the secret springs that have effected the progressive changes in society; to trace the origin of the various modes of government, the consequent improvements in science, in morality, or the national tincture that marks the manners of the people under despotic or more liberal forms, is a bold and adventurous work.
The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. ”

“ What is stimulating those few, who are worth talking about and who still remain within the religious pale, is either the intellectual exercise of the new critical and historical methods, or else the democratic and socialistic aspects of the Founder's early teaching, both of them brought into being by modern and secular movements from without. Culture and Socialism are transmuting everything, but, for Heaven's sake, let us have them at first hand. ”

“ This accounts for the whole humane movement of modern times toward democracy, toward the breaking of caste and the leveling of class divisions, toward emancipations and enfranchisements, toward equity in institutions and laws, toward common education and toward public and private charities of every kind.
It is not the fact, however, that every man acquires entirely for himself these larger and more intelligent perceptions, which broaden and clarify his notions of right. ”

“ One must understand the sense of events, one must tear off the masquerade clothing, one must wash off the paint and judge not by words, but by deeds, not by intentions, but by results. One must understand the objective meaning of the revolution. ”

“ Besides the organized institutions—visible as tools of industry or politics, or invisible in literature, science, settled and admitted principles of private morality or of public law,—which represent the history and achievements of mankind, they brought also ideas not organized in either form of institution, and sentiments not then translated into conscious thought. ”

“ My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of evolution. Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a snake sloughing off its outworn skin. I was part of that process. Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and demanded [246] something else. I wondered that morning whether after all there weren't more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a whole life of preaching and moralizing. ”

“ The particular expectations of literacy confirm values associated with its characteristics. Politics and the ideals embodied in the Enlightenment-it carried into action political aspirations originating in religion-and the Industrial Revolution cannot be separated. Expectations of permanency, universality, reason, democracy, and stability were all embodied in the political experience. ”

“ On the other hand, during the era in which the principle of individuality predominated, we should be prepared to see a preponderating manifestation of all those elements which tend to freedom, change, disintegration of interests, antagonistic or competitive effort, diversity in political and religious belief, intellectual activity; of all those drifts, in short, which relate to the individualizing of social power and interests, and to progress by antagonism; with corresponding absence of the elements active in the preceding epoch. ”

“ All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated [72] into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. ”

“ Whatever may now dwell within him,—or, more strictly speaking, whatever he might have acquired in the course of his progressive culture,—he is unable to explain clearly either to himself or others, or to make it the deliberate rule of his actions and thus realize it in the world. He wants the two necessary elements of the true life of the Idea,—clearness and freedom. ”

“ We thus see how theoretical humanism—a philosophy and a religion—led easily over into the two important articles of practical humanism, a democratic transformation of the State and a communistic transformation of society. ”

“ Every political party based upon real principles (rather than upon a desire for spoils) , is organized as the result of the radiation of those principles held in the self-reliant hearts of a few men. Every school of thought, in philosophy, theology, medicine, law, ethics, or political economy, is based upon the radiation of ideas from self-reliant men. ”

“ The things themselves still exist as faculties of government, but the names, as expressions of theories or doctrines, have been discarded for Internationalism, Proletariat, the World State, and other glorified denominations that are intended first to dress out human nature in a garb of common mediocrity, and then gradually to reduce man to the condition of the ants and the bees. ”

“ And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society: the man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. ”

“ How far is occupation, rather than association, responsible for the mental attitude and moral predilections? Do men in the same profession or trade, but representing different nationalities and different cultural groups, hold characteristic and identical opinions? To what extent is the social or political creed, that is, socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, etc., determined by occupation? by temperament? To what extent have social doctrine and social idealism superseded and taken the place of religious faith in the different occupations, and why? ”

“ The book, with its deep reading of human nature, its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side. ”

“ And let us interpret ideas, according to the etymology of the word, to mean those things which the mind sees, and the conscience accepts and recognizes and knows, to be just elements, or principles, of civilization. For it is only such ideas that call forth a response from the mighty instincts of the masses. The common conscience of mankind tests the ideas always, as the apostle teaches us to try the spirits, 'whether they are of God.'
I. THE IDEA OF POLITICAL EQUALITY.
It will hardly be disputed that the great idea of the age is the democratic idea, or the idea of political equality. ”

“ Nay, this Kingdom begins to be seen not only in religious ecstasy, in moral vision, but in the light of common sense, and the human understanding. Social science begins to verify the prophecy of poetry. ”

“ These last-mentioned institutions have seldom been radically altered in any country by any process short of revolution, however persuasive the voice of right, of reason, and of utility, in favor of change. ”

“ It gives habits of analyzing the aims and motives of men, and the means they employ to attain their ends, i.e., it gives insight into character and hence makes social adjustment easier.
(b) It develops tolerance for the opinions, convictions, and ideals of others, and tends to prevent hard, dogmatic, and uncompromising judgments and attitudes.
(c) It gives appreciation of the civic and political institutions of to-day—their origin, development, and purposes—and hence teaches the rights and obligations that are inherent in citizenship. ”