John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.: Ideology and the American Experience: Essays on Theory and Practice in the United States. Washington: Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, 1988.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, April 27, 1988.
Easy to compile but hard to design, anthologies and collections usually don’t work. This one is no exception. Exhibiting several of the ‘collection’ genre’s characteristic weaknesses, it amounts to a sort of ‘how-not-to’ manual for any future editor. The editors commit two basic errors, out of which others flow.
Lack of focus is the first one. The topic “ideology and American experience” invites platitudinous meandering on whatever may interest the contributors at the moment of writing. The blah-blah-blah syndrome affects several of the writers here, notably Morton A. Kaplan and co-editor John K. Roth, whose articles unfortunately come last in the volume, causing it to stop instead of concluding. Kaplan runs on about a few issues-of-the-day, to no avail. Roth more spectacularly calls for a “public philosophy” consisting of pieces from Whitman, Santayana, Niebuhr, and Dewey—an artifact that supposedly would animate the “cooperative independence of pluralistic selves.” Don’t be alarmed; it didn’t make sense to me, either.
The key term, “ideology,” receives no consistent treatment. Several contributors invoke the shade of the eighteenth-century French intellectual, Destutt de Tracy, who coined the word and meant it literally: “ideology” meant the science of ideas, in just the same way as biology is the science of life. An empiricist, Destutt de Tracy believed ideas could be studied with near-mathematical rigor, and he did not much think about the epistemological problem: How one can study ideas without generating ideas-about-ideas in infinite regress. This weakness led to subjectivism (most immediately Romanticism) on one extreme, historicism (particularly Marxism) on the other.
Other contributors use the definition current today, ideology as a structure of ideas which may or may not correspond to some reality. This inconsistency makes comparison of one essay to another, one argument to another, almost impossible. The collection becomes a concatenation of monologues, not a dialogue. It’s up to the editors to define terms and make contributors either stick to those definitions or directly challenge them. These editors didn’t do that.
Their second error derives from departing too readily from editing and descending into writing. Unless firmly convinced that they have an indispensable contribution to make, editors of collections of essays should restrain themselves when tempted to throw their own articles into the hopper. Professor Roth’s effort has been noted. Professor Whittemore leads off the volume with a Quixotic attempt to revive interest in the deservedly forgotten writings of Frank Lester Ward, author of “the most important philosophical synthesis yet produced by an American”—faint praise indeed, but alas not intentionally so. Ward’s ‘evolutionary’ democratic socialism, aiming at a regime he called “sociocracy”) amounts to little more than a variant of the materialist progressivism fashionable during the 1870s, when Ward was active. Bizarrely, Whittemore calls Marxism “an outworn and simplistic materialism allied to a naïve epistemological realism.” True enough, but where does that leave the likes of Ward?
The best article here is Douglas R. Rasmussen’s “Ideology, Objectivity, and Political Theory.” “Belief in an objective moral order does not pervade today’s intellectual scene,” Professor Rasmussen politely notes, “and any attempt to treat the claims of the Declaration of Independence as normative truths would almost certainly regarded by many as naïve.” Modern philosophy cannot provide a firm basis for these truths, but Aristotle does, because he does not assume that the way human beings know determines what they know (subjectivism) or that knowledge is mere sense-perception (materialism). Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” need Aristotelian epistemology for their discovery.
There is also a good discussion of Adam Smith by Douglas J. Den Uyl, challenging the popular caricature of Smith as an apostle of greed. Den Uyl does criticize Smith for adopting David Hume’s dualism, the radical distinction between what is (a matter of science) and what ought to be (a matter of sentiment). Den Uyl does not consider that Smith’s exceptionally strong emphasis on economic liberty from political authority may depend upon this dualism.
Another worthwhile contribution comes from Tibor R. Machan, one of the few undoctrinaire libertarians, who offers some commonsense remarks about responsibility as the concomitant of liberty. Gordon C. Bjork argues convincingly that ideas determine economic systems, not vice-versa—and he is an economist, of all things.
These patches of intelligence don’t add up to a rich harvest. Although the papers resulted from a two-year series of conferences sponsored by the publisher, the book betrays insufficient sustained effort by the editors to make the authors speak to one another. The articles themselves are of too-uneven quality. A good collection of essays on ideology in American might be produced. This isn’t it.
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