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The term "ideology" can cover almost any set of ideas, but its power to bewitch political activists results from its strange logic. It is part philosophy, part science, and part spiritual revelation, all tied together in leading to a remarkable paradox—that the modern Western world, beneath its liberal appearance, is actually the most systematically oppressive system of despotism the world has ever seen. In Alien Powers, Kenneth Minogue takes this complex intellectual construction apart, analyzing its logical, rhetorical, and psychological devices, and thus opening it up to critical analysis.
This new, ISI Books’ Background edition of Alien Powers includes a new introduction to the text by Martyn P. Thompson and critical essays on the text by political theorist Paul Gottfried and philosopher Stephen A. Erickson.
“[Minogue] combines antipodean boisterousness and good humor with metropolitan sophistication, and his hostility to all forms of fanaticism is patently as much temperamental as intellectual.”— Alan Ryan Times Literary Supplement
“Professor Minogue is a first-rate guide [to ideology], appallingly fit and indefatigable. . . .”— Ferdinand Mound The Spectator