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PARTISAN REVIEW
Political mythologies are not ideologies, but they share with ideology
the mobilizing drive by presenting the appearance of a coherent narrative.
Indeed, as they are often described, myths are stories, but they have an
enchanting power, and they tend to favor the emotional elements rather
than the rational ones. Especially in times of dramatic transformations (as
for instance the 1930s, with the Great Depression, or the periods of post–
Cold War and post-Communism), people experience frustration and
uncertainty about the future and the breakdown of well-established pat–
terns of conduct and expectations. New chiliasms emerge and individuals
look for thaumaturgic, shamanistic solutions to their ordeals. In such times
there is the temptation among disparaged, dispossesed, and alienated indi–
viduals to espouse a mythological construct, or an Armaggedon-like
salvationist paradigm, that historian Norman Cohn has described in his
classic book
The Pursuit of the Millennium
(1961) as the central fantasy of
revolutionary eschatology.
Political ideologies claim to offer systematic responses to human ques–
tions about the best organization of societies. This pretense is indeed the
crux of what we may call the ideological hubris: the firm belief that there
is one and only one answer to the social questions, and that the ideologue
is the one who holds it. By projecting a certain model as superior to any
other and predicting that society will eventually move in that direction,
ideologies are often political teleologies. Their arrogance is matched only
by their coercive impetus and exclusive rejection of any competitor.
Ideologies are all-embracing and all-explanatory: they refuse dialogue,
questioning, doubt. In this respect, liberalism is an ideology only in name:
with its incrementalism and skepticism regarding any ultimate solutions to
human problems, it lacks the scteriological, apocalyptic power of radical
visions of change.
In the 1960s, Daniel Bell announced the extinction of the modern
ideological impetus. Industrialism. and consumerism, no less than the gen–
eral disappointment with the disasters provoked by radical universalisms or
radical particularisms, made ideologies obsolete. According to that view,
humanity has ushered in a post-ideological age.
What has happened in reality does not confirm this assessment: ide–
ologies have continued to motivate collective movements of protest, but in
a less coherent and methodic way than in the past. Think of the social
m.ovements in Europe in 1968 and the revolutionary wave of the 1970s in
Latin America. With the breakdown of Leninism, however, a crucial
threshold was crossed. The revol utions of 1989-1991 dealt a mortal blow
to the ideological pretense according to which human life can be struc–
tured in accordance with a scientific design proposed by a general staff of
revolutionary doctrinaires. Some acclaimed these revolutions precisely
