Alien Powers, or the Pure Theory of Ideology

Antipodean political scientist and professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, Kenneth Minogue, quoted from the above book:

Ideology is a philosophical type of allegiance purporting to transcend the mere particularities of family, religion, or native hearth, and its essence lies in struggle. The world is a battlefield, in which there are two enemies. One is the oppressor, the other consists of fellow ideologists who have generally mistaken the conditions of liberation. Communists, anarchists, fascists, and nationalists battled for allegiance throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. Within communism, as within all other ideologies, competing opinions—revisionist and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Stalinist, to mention only the larger battalions—have battled it out, and violent conflict on tactics can be traced down to the lowest levels. Yet for all their differences, ideologists can be specified in terms of a shared hostility to modernity: to liberalism in politics, individualism in moral practice, and the market in economics. All such practices represent the triumph of the anarchic particularism which is, in ideological terms, the soil of oppression. Left to themselves, the people of the actual world we live in will generate, ideologists all believe, nothing but structures of domination.

Minogue gives a lecture at Oxford shortly after the publication of his latest book,  How Political Idealism Threatens Our Civilization.

Kenneth Minogue -'How Political Idealism Threatens Our Civilization' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.