The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

by Kenneth Minogue

Overview

One of the grim 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 at the same time as 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 assert 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 looks at 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594033810
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	08/03/2010
Series:	Encounter Broadsides
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

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 other outlets.

Table of Contents

Preface: How Free Can a Just State Be? ix

Introduction 1

I Democratic Ambiguities 17

1 Democracy as a Process of Continuing Change 17

2 How to Analyze Democracy 21

3 Some Basic Conditions of Democracy 26

4 Illusion and Paradox 32

5 Democracy as Process and Ideal 37

6 Democracy as Collective Social Salvation 43

II The Project of Equalizing the World 51

1 Democracy Versus the Deference World 51

2 Forms of Instrumentalism in Democracy 59

3 Rights and the Sources of Democratic Legitimacy 66

4 Culture and the Democratic World: Women and Politics 73

5 The Logic of Anti-Disaimination 78

a Discrimination as a Category 79

b Who Are the "Minorities"? 84

c The Vocabulary of Anti-Discrimination 90

d Sentimentalism and Anti-Discrimination 95

e The Positive Entailments of Anti-Discrimination Negations 100

6 The Civilizational Significance of the Democratic Telos 104

7 Democratic Discontents 108

III The Moral Life and its Conditions 119

1 Morals and Politics 119

2 What is the Moral Life? 130

3 A Context of the Moral Life 146

4 A Structure of the Moral Life 152

5 Individualism and the Modern World 158

6 Some Individualist Legends 166

7 Elements of Individualism 172

8 Conflict, Balance, and the West 179

9 Servility and the Moral Life 184

IV The Politico-Moral World 199

1 The Defects of Western Civilization 199

2 The Politico-Moral World and its Ethical Claims 209

3 The Emergence of the Politico-Moral 215

4 Aspects of the Politico-Moral 221

a Fallacies of the "Social" 221

b The Concept of "Representativeness" 227

c The Appeasement Tendency 231

d The Stick and Carrot Problem 234

5 From Desire to Impulse 240

6 The Politico-Moral Image of a Modern Society 248

7 Is There a Theology of the Politico-Moral? 262

V Ambivalence and Western Civilization 271

1 Mapping Politics 271

2 On Perfectionisms, Piecemeal and Systematic 277

a Piecemeal Perfectionism 280

b Overthrowing Anciens Régimes 282

c Ignorance, Poverty, and War 287

3 Oppressions and Liberations 291

4 The Politico-Moral Form of Association 298

5 Culture Versus Ideals of Transformation 307

6 Perfection and the Ambivalence World 317

7 What Kind of Tiling is the Politico-Moral? 325

8 The Moral Life as the Pursuit of Ideals 328

Endnotes 347

Index 351