ABSTRACT
An ideological wave always has its first followers among the young. The doctrine itself is often formulated by an elder thinker who stands in the relation of a ‘master-intellectual’, or ‘youth-master’, or ‘father-figure’ to the young. But it is young intellectuals who feel the need for ideology, for its assignment to them of a historic mission, for its charter of an opportunity to define themselves and their own ideas in rupture with the old. When Engels defined ‘ideology’, he said it was a mode of thought in which the impelling motives remained unknown to the thinker; these unconscious, im pelling motives, he claimed, were in the last analysis, economic; hence, he said, ideology was a type of ‘false consciousness’. 1 To which we might reply: that ideological thinking arises primarily not from an economic unconscious but a generational unconscious. Its underlying aim is to provide the dramatic outline, the myth, (the ‘scenario’ it is now called), 2 for its dethronement of the elders, (now Establishment figures), and for the coming to power of the new generation as an intellectual elite; the more reluctant the ideologists are to avow their latent goal, namely, the hegemony of the younger generational intellectuals the more do they stress their manifest goal, the historic mission of the class, race, or nation; and a variety of philosophical tenets, contemporaneously fashionable or coming to be so, are used to provide the metaphysical basis for the deduction’ of the ideological conclusions. Immanuel Kant had an 70elaborate stage-machinery for a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the categories of the understanding; every ideologist today has what might be called an ‘ideological deduction’ of the ‘mission’ of his generational elite and their appointed carrier class.
