Lost in Ideology
Interpreting Modern Political Life
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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!"
About this 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).
Reviews
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A fascinating new book ... Shadi [Hamid] and I loved the book.
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.
Quite simply the best guide to today's dominant ideologies ... Blakely is concise, sympathetic, insightful, critical and fair.
Excellent survey of the major ideological alternatives in the West ... rigorous but digestible.
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