The Servile Mind

by Minogue, Kenneth

• ISBN13: 9781594033810
• ISBN10: 1594033811
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-03
• Publisher: Encounter Books

Summary

One of the grimmer comedies of the twentieth century was the fate of miserable victims of communist regimes who climbed walls, swam rivers, dodged bullets and found other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West. Simultaneously, intellectuals in the West sentimentally proclaimed that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is being played out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from third world nations pour into Western states, the same ivory tower intellectuals explain that Western life is a nightmare of inequality and oppression. In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia's love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind analyzes how Western morality has evolved into mere "politico-moral" posturing about admired ethical causes - from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one's essential decency by having the correct opinions has became a substitute for individual moral actions. Instead, Minogue posits, we ask that our government carry the burden of solving our social and especially moral problems for us. The sad and frightening irony is that as we allow the state to determine our moral order and inner convictions, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think.

Author Biography

Kenneth Minogue is Emeritus Professor of political science at the London School of Economics. He has written books on liberalism, nationalism, the idea of a university, the logic of ideology, and more recently, on democracy and the moral life. He has reviewed in many places, and has been a columnist for The Times, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and for other outlets. His most recent books have been Politics: A Very Short Introduction for the Oxford University Press, and an edited volume Essays in Conservative Realism. In 1986, he presented a six-part television series about libertarian economics called The New Enlightenment on Channel Four. It was repeated in 1988. He was Chairman of the Bruges Group 1991 – 1993, and is on the Board of the think tank Civitas. He was born in New Zealand and educated in Australia.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Democratic Ambiguities	p. 17
Democracy as a Process of Continuing Change	p. 17
How to Analyze Democracy	p. 21
Some Basic Conditions of Democracy	p. 26
Illusion and Paradox	p. 32
Democracy as Process and Ideal	p. 37
Democracy as Collective Social Salvation	p. 43
The Project of Equalizing the World	p. 51
Democracy Versus the Deference World	p. 51
Forms of Instrumentalism in Democracy	p. 59
Rights and the Sources of Democratic Legitimacy	p. 66
Culture and the Democratic World: Women and Politics	p. 73
The Logic of Anti-Discrimination	p. 78
Discrimination as a Category	p. 79
Who Are the ôMinoritiesö?	p. 84
The Vocabulary of Anti-Discrimination	p. 90
Sentimentalism and Anti-Discrimination	p. 95
The Positive Entailments of Anti-Discrimination Negations	p. 100
The Civilizational Significance of the Democratic Telos	p. 104
Democratic Discontents	p. 108
The Moral Life and its Conditions	p. 119
Morals and Politics	p. 119
What is the Moral Life?	p. 130
A Context of the Moral life	p. 146
A Structure of the Moral Life	p. 152
Individualism and the Modern World	p. 158
Some Individualist Legends	p. 166
Elements of Individualism	p. 172
Conflict Balance, and the West	p. 179
Servility and the Moral Life	p. 184
The Politico-Moral World	p. 199
The Defects of Western Civilization	p. 199
The Politico-Moral World and its Ethical Claims	p. 209
The Emergence of the Politico-Moral	p. 215
Aspect of the Politico-Moral	p. 221
Fallacies of the ôSocialö	p. 221
The Concept of ôRepresentativenessö	p. 226
The Appeasement Tendency	p. 231
The Stick and Carrot Problem	p. 234
From Desire to Impulse	p. 240
The Politico-Moral Image of a Modern Society	p. 248
Is There a Theology of the Politico-Moral?	p. 262
Ambivalence and Western Civilization	p. 271
Mapping Politics	p. 271
On Perfectionisms and Systematic	p. 277
Piecemeal Perfectionism	p. 280
Overthrowing Anciens Régimes	p. 282
Ignorance, Poverty, and War	p. 287
Oppressions and Liberations	p. 291
The Politico Moral Form of Association	p. 298
Culture Versus Ideals of Transformation	p. 307
Perfection and the Ambivalence World	p. 317
What Kind of Thing is the Politico-Moral?	p. 325
The Moral Life as the Pursuit of Ideals	p. 328
Endnotes	p. 347
Index	p. 351
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Rewards Program

Currently unavailable