1 What is striking is that certain words, by their lexical fluency, quickly achieve a linguistic universality, so one finds, with minor orthographic variation, the words ideology, ideologie, Ideologie, ideologia permeating virtually all European languages. Can one imagine what would have been the fate of the idea if Marx had used the term ideationalism as the counterpart to material practice?

For a recent effort to establish some typologies for these diverse usages, see the papers of Dearthé, Bachelar and von Leyden, at the colloquium in Florence of the European University Institute, Ideology and Politics, edited by Maurice Cranston and Peter Mair, and published in 1980 by four publishers: Sijthoff (Alphen aan den Rijn), Klett Cotta (Stuttgart), Bruylant (Brussels) and Le Monnier (Florence).

2 See, Nichols, Bill, Ideology and the Image, Bioomington, University of Indiana Press, 1981, p. 1 Google Scholar, and Rudé, George, Ideology and Popular Protest, New York, Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

3 See, Larrain, Jorge, Marxism and Ideology, London, Macmillan, 1983, especially pp. 170–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Corbett, Patrick, Ideology, London, Hutchinson, 1965, p. 12.Google Scholar

5 Bendix, Reinhard, ‘The Age of Ideology: Persistent and Changing’, in Apter, David (ed.), Ideology and Discontent, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964, p. 295.Google Scholar

6 The theme of ‘crossover’, and the alternative responses to the break up of religious beliefs in the 18th and 19th centuries, is taken up in my Hobhouse lecture (1977), ‘The Return of the Sacred’, and reprinted in my book The Winding Passage, New York, Basic Books, 1980, ch. 17, pp. 324—54. The English edition (Heinemann Educational Books) is called, simply, Sociological Essays and Journeys: 1960 1980.

In this view of ideology, I would demur, too, from the influential formulation of Clifford Geertz. While Mr Geertz is right, I believe, in emphasizing the primary cultural and symbolic nature of ideology, rather than seeing it as a ‘reflection’ of social structure, he expands the term to encompass any set of world views that provide orientations and meanings for its adherents, but in doing so neglects the specific political dimension that has given ideology its emotional and mobilizing force. See, Clifford Geertz, ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books, 1973, ch. 8.

7 Perhaps the neatest illustration of the situation in dystopia is the Polish story of General Jaruzelski going to Lenin in his tomb, in the dead of night, to plead for advice. ‘Comrade Lenin’, he said, ‘we are facing a counter revolution’. ‘A counter revolution?’ Lenin replied, ‘Our answer is always clear: Arm the working class!’

8 The phrase occurs in Engels’s Anti Diihring (1877) where Engels, citing the huge advances in wealth in the Western capitalist societies, remarks that the possibilities of socialism are now here. (Italics in the original.)

9 See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1984. It is an instructive lesson in how technology and modernist aesthetics can be harnessed to reactionary causes. See also my essay ‘The Revolt Against Modernity’ in The Public Interest, Twentieth Anniversary issue, No. 81, Fall 1985.

10 Havel, Vaclav, et al., The Power of the Powerless, London., Hutchinson, 1985. Google Scholar I am grateful to the review by Alan Montefiore in Government and Opposition, vol. 22, no 2, Spring 1987, pp. 233 ^1, for bringing the book to our attention.

11 One of the most instructive books, in this respect, is the neglected and fascinating memoir, Nightfrost in Prague, by Zdenek Mlynar, New York, Karz Publishers, 1980. Mlynar, a Czech, was trained in law and philosophy in Moscow, and after the Second World War returned to become a high party official and the theoretician in the Central Committee. Over the years, in alliance with Dubcek, he began to argue that Communism could not work not only because of its rigidities but because it was betraying its original idealism. Mlynar drafted the plans for the ‘democratization’ of the party and accompanied Dubcek to Moscow when the Czech leaders were summoned there to answer Brezhnev’s charges of heresy. Mlynar’s book is not only an important account of the unfolding of Czech revisionist thought, but also one of the few first hand accounts of the way the Russian leaders sought to cajole or bully the Czechs, and finally to send in the tanks to end the Prague Spring.

12 Engels, Friedrich, Anti Dühring, Chicago, C., Kerr, H. & Co., 1935; original publication in German, 1877, pp. 93–4.Google Scholar

13 ‘Ketten Denker Einem, der viel gedacht hat, erscheint jeder neue Gedanke, den er hort oder liest, so fort in Gestalt einer Kette.’ Aphorism no. 376, in Menschliches Allzumen schliches (Human, All Too Human), in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, vol. II, edited by Karl Schlechta, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich/Vienna, 1980, p. 864. ’Chain Thinker — One who, so full of thoughts, places each new idea that he hears or reads within the form of a chain.’ (I owe the initial reference to Meivin J. Lasky.)