The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant “other” a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the “peasantry,” the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas. Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author’s main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text. Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model “peasant writer,” tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928—) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four “generations” examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956—), Han Shaogong (1952—), and Wang Anyi (1954—) as examples of “root-searching” fiction from the mid-1980’s. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself. Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is present—as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant “other” providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.

"This book examines the diversification of political writings and literature. It covers various disciplines, including political literature, gender politics, identity politics, minority politics, ideologized writing, censorship, the rhetoric and aestheticism of politics, and gendered literature"--

‘His thought is redneck, yours is doctrinal and mine is deliciously supple.’ Ideology has never been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as a concept as it is today. From the left it can often be seen as the exclusive property of ruling classes, and from the right as an arid and totalizing exception to their own common sense. For some, the concept now seems too ubiquitous to be meaningful; for others, too cohesive for a world of infinite difference. Here, in a book written for both newcomers to the topic and those already familiar with the debate, Terry Eagleton unravels the many different definitions of ideology, and explores the concept’s tortuous history from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Ideology provides lucid interpretations of the thought of key Marxist thinkers and of others such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and the various poststructuralists. As well as clarifying a notoriously confused topic, this new work by one of our most important contemporary critics is a controversial political intervention into current theoretical debates. It will be essential reading for students and teachers of literature and politics.

Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China explores ancient Chinese political thought during the centuries surrounding the formation of the empire in 221 BCE. The individual chapters examine the ideology and practices of legitimation, views of rulership, conceptualizations of ruler-minister relations, economic thought, and the bureaucratic administration of commoners. The contributors analyze the formation of power relations from various angles, ranging from artistic expression to religious ideas, political rhetoric, and administrative action. They demonstrate the interrelatedness of historiography and political ideology and show how the same text served both to strengthen the ruler’s authority and moderate his excesses. Together, the chapters highlight the immense complexity of ancient Chinese political thought, and the deep tensions running within it. Contributors include Scott Cook, Joachim Gentz, Paul R. Goldin, Romain Graziani, Martin Kern, Liu Zehua, Luo Xinhui, Yuri Pines, Roel Sterckx, and Charles Sanft.

This book starts from the premise that methodology has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory.

How do leaders perceive threat levels in world politics, and what effects do those perceptions have on policy choices? Mark L. Haas focuses on how ideology shapes perception. He does not delineate the content of particular ideologies, but rather the degree of difference among them. Degree of ideological difference is, he believes, the crucial factor as leaders decide which nations threaten and which bolster their state's security and their own domestic power. These threat perceptions will in turn impel leaders to make particular foreign-policy choices. Haas examines great-power relations in five periods: the 1790s in Europe, the Concert of Europe (1815–1848), the 1930s in Europe, Sino-Soviet relations from 1949 to 1960, and the end of the Cold War. In each case he finds a clear relationship between the degree of ideological differences that divided state leaders and those leaders' perceptions of threat level (and so of appropriate foreign-policy choices). These relationships held in most cases, regardless of the nature of the ideologies in question, the offense-defense balance, and changes in the international distribution of power.

This groundbreaking book presents a new understanding of ideological change. It shows how and why America's political parties have evolved.

The term "ideology" can cover almost any set of ideas, but its power to bewitch political activists results from its strange logic: part philosophy, part science, part spiritual revelation, all tied together in leading to a remarkable paradox--that the modern Western world, beneath its liberal appearance, is actually the most systematically oppressive system of despotism the world has ever seen. Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology takes this complex intellectual construction apart, analyzing its logical, rhetorical, and psychological devices and thus opening it up to critical analysis. Ideologists assert that our lives are governed by a hidden system. Minogue traces this notion to Karl Marx who taught intellectuals the philosophical, scientific, moral, and religious moves of the ideological game. The believer would find in these ideas an endless source of new liberating discoveries about the meaning of life, and also the grand satisfaction of struggling to overcome oppression. Minogue notes that while the patterns of ideological thought were consistent, there was little agreement on who the oppressor actually was. Marx said it was the bourgeoisie, but others found the oppressor to be males, governments, imperialists, the white race, or the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Ideological excitement created turmoil in the twentieth century, but the defeat of the more violent and vicious ideologies--Nazism after 1945 and Communism after 1989--left the passion for social perfection as vibrant as ever. Activist intellectuals still seek to "see through" the life we lead. The positive goals of utopia may for the moment have faded, but the ideological hatred of modernity has remained, and much of our intellectual life has degenerated into a muddled and dogmatic skepticism. For Minogue, the complex task of "demystifying" the "demystifiers" requires that we should discover how ideology works. It must join together each of its complex strands of thought in order to understand the remarkable power of the whole.

Since the Roman Empire, leaders have used ideology to organize the masses and instil amongst them a common consciousness, and equally to conquer, assimilate, or repel alternative ideologies. Ideology has been used to help create, safeguard, expand, or tear down political communities, states, empires, and regional or world systems. This book explores the multiple effects that competing ideologies have had on the world system for the past 1,700 years: the author examines the nature and content of Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Protestantism, secularism, balance-of-power doctrine, nationalism, imperialism, anti-imperialist nationalism, liberalism, communism, fascism, Nazism, ethno-nationalism, and transnational radical Islamism; alongside the effects their originators sought to craft and the consequences they generated. This book argues that for centuries world actors have aspired to propagate through the world arena a structure of meaning that reflected their own system of beliefs, values and ideas: this would effectively promote and protect their material interests, and - believing their system to be superior to all others – they felt morally obliged to spread it. Radical transnational Islamism, Hybel argues, is driven by the same set of goals. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international politics, international relations theory, history and political philosophy.