Re: Human Nature: Born or Made? (fwd)

        An ideologue, originally, was a follower of the philosophy of
Destutt de Tracy, a late 18th- and early 19th-century French philosopher
who elaborated on the empiricist epistemology of Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac.  But then by a strange twist of etymological fate it came to
mean the sociopolitical beliefs of given classes or other groups in
society with vested interests.  Karl Mannheim regarded an ideology as an
idealized defense of the status quo, by contrast with a "utopia," a vision
with revolutionary power to overturn the status quo.  Today an ideologue
is someone who professes sociopolitical beliefs different from your own.
"I am a social scientist, you are a dreamer, he[she] is an ideologue."

        I prefer the following value-neutral definition of an ideology,
from my Merriam-Webster Unabridged:  "the integrated assertions, theories,
and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program."  Therefore, for my
money, an "ideologue" is someone who professes an ideology.  Forget the
pejorative connotations.  Since I believe that we all profess or should
profess one or another ideology, I think we should all be ideologues.  I
would also prefer that everyone shared my ideology, cosmopolitical
democratic Marxism, but the minute, nay the very second, that we proclaim 
our ideology scientifically correct and grounded in the very nature of
things, we open the door to intellectual tyranny and foreclose freedom of
inquiry.

        Cheers,

        Warren Wagar