The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
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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.
Introduction 1I. Democratic Ambiguities 171 Democracy as a Process of Continuing Change 172 How to Analyze Democracy 213 Some Basic Conditions of Democracy 264 Illusion and Paradox 325 Democracy as Process and Ideal 376 Democracy as Collective Social Salvation 43II. The Project Of Equalizing The World 511 Democracy Versus the Deference World 512 Forms of Instrumentalism in Democracy 593 Rights and the Sources of Democratic Legitimacy 664 Culture and the Democratic World: Women and Politics 735 The Logic of Anti-Discrimination 78a Discrimination as a Category 79b Who Are the "Minorities"? 84c The Vocabulary of Anti-Discrimination 90d Sentimentalism and Anti-Discrimination 95e The Positive Entailments of Anti-Discrimination Negations 1006 The Civilizational Significance of the Democratic Telos 1047 Democratic Discontents 108III. The Moral Life And Its Conditions 1191 Morals and Politics 1192 What is the Moral Life? 1303 A Context of the Moral Life 1464 A Structure of the Moral Life 1525 Individualism and the Modern World 1586 Some Individualist Legends 1667 Elements of Individualism 1728 Conflict, Balance, and the West 1799 Servility and the Moral Life 184IV. The Politico-Moral World 1991 The Defects of Western Civilization 1992 The Politico-Moral World and its Ethical Claims 2093 The Emergence of the Politico-Moral 2154 Aspects of the Politico-Moral 221a Fallacies of the "Social" 221b The Concept of "Representativeness" 226c The Appeasement Tendency 231d The Stick and Carrot Problem 2345 From Desire to Impulse 2406 The Politico-Moral Image of a Modern Society 2487 Is There a Theology of the Politico-Moral? 262V. Ambivalence And Western Civilization 2711 Mapping Politics 2712 On Perfectionisms, Piecemeal and Systematic 277a Piecemeal Perfectionism 280b Overthrowing Anciens R b1 sgimes 282c Ignorance, Poverty, and War 2873 Oppressions and Liberations 2914 The Politico-Moral Form of Association 2985 Culture Versus Ideals of Transformation 3076 Perfection and the Ambivalence World 3177 What Kind of Thing is the Politico-Moral? 3258 The Moral Life as the Pursuit of Ideals 328Endnotes 347Index 351
