In Lieu Of Ideology

Born in Malacca in 1918, Dr Goh Keng Swee reached maturity at a time when European colonialism was breathing its last. By the time this keen-eyed Malayan Became self-governing Singapore's first Minister of Finance in 1959, he had made a name for himself s the colony's foremost social scientist, having carried out groundbreaking surveys on urban poverty and housing. He immediately initiated pioneering projects that laid the ground for the island's economic success. When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, Dr Goh took charge of building an army from scratch.

First published in 1985, The Place of Ideology in Political Life explores the concept of ‘ideology’ in terms of its philosophical and intellectual underpinnings. Ideology is a term much bandied about by politicians and political thinkers with very little precision employed in its use. Despite acknowledgement in the literature of political studies that ideology plays a part in political life, there exist no precise accounts of the nature of that contribution. This book attempts to take a step towards redressing the balance by determining the sense in which ideology constitutes a genuine form of understanding human relationships and the place understanding has in all political activity regardless of whether or not any particular ideology is to be approved or condemned. This concise work will be invaluable to all students of politics, philosophy of action, ethics, and history of political thought.

Presents research on the Indonesian military (TNI) going beyond traditional scholarship on the TNI's dual function or dwifungsi which has been one of the dominating fields of analysis in Indonesian studies since the 1970s.

The challenges posed by globalization for languages, policies and education form the basis of this collection of selected doubly-blind peer-reviewed articles, which have been put together following the 2014 PLIDAM conference on “Policies and Ideologies in Language Teaching: Actors and discourses”. The chapters collected in this volume revolve around the topic of globalization, which we understand to be a blend of ideas covered by at least four meanings: (1) internationalization, in reference to the growing interdependence and transactions between countries; (2) liberalization, which has to do with the forming of an ‘open’ and ‘borderless’ world economy; (3) universalization of certain phenomena around the world; and (4) westernization, with an emphasis on the influence of Western values (gender equality, freedom of speech and other ideas inspired by the West) over the rest of the world. The four broad themes that the chapters are organised into are (I) Policies in Language Teaching and Learning; (II) Language Policy, Ideology and Minority Languages; (III) Language Teaching and Learning across Cultures; (IV) Language Teaching and Learning with Technology. Contributing to the knowledge, discussion and debate about the impact that globalization has had on languages, policies and education in a wide variety of contexts, we hope that this book will be useful and informative to language researchers, policy makers and anyone with an interest in the intersecting field between languages, policies and education.

First published in 1980. Of all the concepts deployed in the study of politics the application of the concept of ideology is by far the least precise. Those who have sought to clarify its meaning have concluded that ideology is not an independent constituent of political life and indispensable to an adequate representation of the form of political association; but, rather, a kind of epiphenomenal, parasitic and irrational thought that misguides the unfortunate, ignorant or confused in the pursuit of the unobtainable. The Form of Ideology attempts to demonstrate that this view is wholly mistaken. It offers students an understanding of ideology free from the conceptual confusion involved in the belief that ideology is in any sense a theory that can be put into practice. In addition, it argues that ideology is not a defective theory of politics, because, properly understood, ideology is not theoretical understanding of the world at all. It is not the product of any kind of investigation yielding information. The Form of Ideology permits beliefs in ideological claims, not proof of ideological assertions. It affords political inspiration and aspirations rather than judgement and knowledge. If the argument in this book succeeds in demonstrating the truth of this conclusion then the study of politics must take a completely new direction. The first three chapters explore the grounds for the methodological break the group has made with previous investigations and offer a critique of some current misconceptions; the remaining three chapters mark out the limits of the intelligibility of ideology within the context of political thought and life following the direction indicated by the previous three. The book’s concern will be of central interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on ideology, the history of political thought, political theory and political movements in departments of political science, sociology, philosophy and history; it is unique in that it offers an account of the form of ideological understanding seen as a mode of thought in its own right.

This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.

Because the Soviet Union loudly proclaimed to be an ideological state, its scholars have rarely scrutinized ideology as a concept. Instead, they have treated it as a self-evident fact and proceeded to deliberate the importance of the Marxist-Leninist creed in social life or political decision-making. In the context of the Cold War, such theoretical neglect was exacerbated by political investments that often outweighed—and deformed—intellectual priorities. This has left us today with a notion that is both worn out and opaque, over-used but under-thought. In What Was Soviet Ideology? Petre Petrov stakes a new theoretical ground beyond prevalent misconceptions, ready-made definitions, and popular stereotypes. Drawing on continental philosophy and critical theory, this book presents ideology as a dynamic form with its own inner dialectic, in which the Soviet ideological regime figures as an original moment, a sui generis phenomenon. Petrov argues that Soviet ideology should be seen not as a member of an existing species but as a qualitative transformation of the species, ideology, and itself.

This book comprehensively collects the thinking - over the last 25 years - of one the most important contemporary scholars in the field of ideology studies. Clearly organised, it expounds on the changing nature of the sub-discipline, its components and methods of investigation. As such, it serves the need for a general, well-informed identification and elaboration of thematic possibilities in current ideology studies and represents the most developed and productive methodological approach to the study of ideologies in the last three decades. Freeden presents ideology studies as an evolving and vibrant field, encountering and surmounting a series of challenges in its successful path towards recognition as a fully legitimate and respected branch of political theory. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of political ideologies, political theory, political philosophy and more broadly to sociology, political science, anthropology, human geography, international studies and the humanities.