Oakeshott's Concept of Ideology (original) (raw)

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Oakeshott and the impossibility of philosophical politics

2006

Abstract. Oakeshott offers a radical version of the thesis that philosophy cannot evaluate or recommend political ideas. We criticize each stage of his argument that practical life excludes philosophy's desire for ultimate truth and demands a distinctive form of reasoning. Believing that practice is not susceptible to philosophical guidance because it is composed of actions, subject to change and necessarily inconsistent and uncritical of assumptions, he exaggerates its contrast with theory.

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What Is Ideology? An Attempt at Reactualising a Category of Social Critique

For more than thirty years, the concept of ideology virtually disappeared from philosophical and sociological discourse. It is only recently that there have been attempts to reactivate this concept as a central category of political critique – as it was until the 1970s. In this text I start with an attempt to illuminate the reasons why the concept of ideology, which I believe can serve as a central conceptual tool for diagnosing and analysing the pathologies of the political, was forgotten for years. The main part of the text focuses on an attempt at an actualising reconstruction of this category: a reconstruction that should be capable of meeting the standards of conceptual analysis as defined primarily in modern analytic philosophy. This attempt is accompanied by a discussion of concrete examples of actual ideological constructions as well as by an analysis of their political functions and effects. In this discussion I focus on ideological constructions that have had a significant negative impact on the process of establishing liberal democracy in the former communist countries in Eastern Europe, and especially in Bulgaria.

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Oakeshott's Concept of Ideology (original) (raw)

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