ABSTRACT

Just as the universe began, according to some cosmologists, with a primal "big bang" which flung the materials of the galaxies out into space, so ideological thinking originated with a big bang in which that primal thing called "the human condition" exploded into a mass of social conditions. The human condition is, according to the best religious sources with which the West is familiar, highly imperfect, and no one with the least contact either with reality or revelation would expect very much from it. Ideologists like Karl Marx and Auguste Comte thus thought of themselves as the elite of the intellectual world, their ideas the standard by which all other endeavor ought to be graded. Ideology is a form of social analysis which discovers that human beings are the victims of an oppressive system, and that the business of life is liberation. Indeed, in its combination of activism and intellectuality, it may well be the dominant idiom of our time.