Age of ideology Political thought 1750 to the present.

Our modern age is preeminently an Age
of Ideology. It is true that, in one sense of the
term, ideology has always been and always will
be with us. There has never been a time when human behavior,
including political behavior, has not
been largely affected by the mental images,
or stereotypes, through which men have grown accustomed
to perceive and judge the world around them. One of the
books in this series, Lane and Sears,
Public Opinion, is devoted to that very basic
problem. But the ideologies with which
we are here concerned are quite
a different matter. These ideologies are the broad and comprehensive
doctrines, like liberalism, communism, or fascism, which have emerged in
the past two hundred years as a peculiar and often decisive factor in con-
temporary politics. In ways that were never true before, our modern wars
are ideological wars, our party conflicts ideological conflicts. Without some
understanding of the nature and effects of these ideologies, no study of
modern politics, foreign or domestic, could possibly make sense. To provide
an introductory basis for coming to grips with this problem is the purpose
of this book.
As contrasted with the various methods used in other volumes of this
series, the method we shall be following here is essentially historical. The
need for such an approach is implicit in the nature of the material. Al-
though our main concern, as political scientists, is to show how ideologies,
here and now, are capable of influencing political behavior, we cannot
hope to do so without looking to the past. Beginning with the liberalism
which played so great a part in the American and French Revolutions,
each ideology has arisen in response to the hopes and needs of a particular
time, and has been modified or replaced by others in the light of sub-
sequent experience. The only possible way of understanding why they are
as they are today is to begin at the beginning, and trace them through
their successive stages of development down to the present time. Only
thus can we hope to explain the nature and extent of their influence in
the world in which we live.
The subject is too vast to be covered at all fully in a book as short as
this. We shall therefore be considering the Age of Ideology in terms of a
very
limited number of writers taken as representative of their respective
schools of thought. Any such selection is bound to be somewhat arbitrary,
and runs the risk of doing less than justice to the material. The best it can
hope to do is to lay down some preliminary guidelines which may prove
useful as a basis for further study. From the author's standpoint, the
most satisfactory reader of this book will be the one who finds it inade-
quate, and goes in search of more.