To the Editor:
I can’t help wincing a little at the following sentence in Russell Kirk’s letter in your November issue: “Mr. Handlin is an ideologist; Mr. Lippmann is not.” I used this ticklish word “ideology” myself in your pages recently, and I doubt if my use of it was much more legitimate than Mr. Kirk’s. Like “rhetoric” and “democracy,” it seems to be entering the no man’s land of sloganeering, and it might be well to take a leaf from Mr. Kirk’s cherished Schoolmen. Isn’t an ideology, strictly speaking, what happens to a political vision, a philosophy, a program, when it enters the realm of tactical maneuvering? The dictionary is vague about this, but I feel sure that a good Thomist would take a more neutral view of ideology than Mr. Kirk does, and would call it, perhaps, a tactical instrument of the practical order. Any set of ideas can become an ideology in certain circumstances, and I imagine that every professional thinker is by turn an ideologist. The word can best be compared with “rhetoric,” which in its classical scholastic sense merely means that aspect of formal discourse intended to move or persuade. All discourse, I think, has a rhetorical dimension just as all discourse has an ideological dimension. It’s too bad to let the word degenerate into a mere expletive.
R. W. Flint
Cambridge, Mass.
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Correction
In George Lichtheim’s “Changing Alignments in the Middle East” (October), passages are cited from Col. Halford Hoskins’ The Middle East (Macmillan), and from another volume also entitled The Middle East, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. The text gave the impression that reference was made to one work only, thus incorrectly crediting Col. Hoskins with statements made by the author of the introduction to the Royal Institute publication. The second of the three quotations was taken from the latter work.
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