The Twilight of Ideologies

In this classic study, now available in English for the first time, the late Spanish philosopher Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora reconsiders the antithesis of pathos and logos in the political realm. In real life, he postulates, ideology has mostly undesirable effects: social tension, extremism, pugnacity, and the substitution of myths for facts. Consistent with this observation, political life in the second half of the twentieth century was ruthlessly rationalized. Opposing political programs seemed to be converging. Religion seemed to be becoming less important. Nationalism was yielding to cosmopolitanism. From a conceptual perspective, this book evaluates prevalent ideologies as members of the same class of degraded intellectual substance, debased specifically for the consumption of the masses with little or no regard for the consequences. While not all societies have regulated ideological mindsets, current events show that the causal link between ideology and social degradation is as true now as it was when Fernandez de la Mora first wrote about it and will remain so in the future.