The Twilight of Ideologies (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781680534108)

In this classic study, now available for the first time in English, the late Spanish philosopher Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora reconsiders the antithesis between pathos and logos in the political realm. In real life, he argues, ideology has mostly undesirable effects: social tension, extremism, pugnacity, and the substitution of myths for facts. Consistent with this observation, political life in the second half of the twentieth century was substantially rationalized. Opposing political programs seemed to be converging. Religion appeared to be increasingly interiorized. Nationalism was yielding to cosmopolitanism. From a conceptual perspective, this book evaluates all ideologies as members of the same class of degraded intellectual substance, debased specifically for the consumption of the masses, with little or no regard for the consequences. While not all societies have moderated ideological mindsets, current events show that the causal link between ideology and social degradation is as true now as it was when Fernandez de la Mora first wrote about it, and will remain so in the future.