Thirty-five years ago Joseph Gabel pub lished a modern masterpiece,
which in 1975 appeared in English as False Con sciousness: An Essay
on Reificalion . Combining his special knowledge of existential
psychiatry, axiology, Marx ism, and political history, Gabel pro
posed the utterly novel idea that victims of serious mental
disturbances (espe cially paranoia and schizophrenia) re produce
those distorted thought pat terns commonly associated with ideo
logical beliefs at the collective level. Such beliefs initially had
been laid bare in the 1920s by Gabel's intellectual progenitors,
Karl Mannheim and George Lukacs. Gabel's remarkable innovation was
to transfer the private crisis of mental collapse into the analytic
frame work previously reserved for ideological critique, making him
an expert on what was later called "the micro-macro prob lem."
Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought includes Gabel's essays
over the last 40 years, characteristically treating micro and macro
theoretical matters simultaneously. Originally writ ten in French
and German, they have been recast in idiomatic English and
bibliographically updated. Using a unique mode and vocabulary of
analy sis, Gabel offers theoretical investiga tions of McCarthyism
and Stalinism (original and more recent types), as well as
Althusser, Orwell, and Jonathan Swift in his capacity as a
psychiatric theorist. He also explores anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism,
and a fascinating case study of a paranoid who regarded him self as
the pope. In addition this volume includes a range of general
commentar ies on ideological "thought," utopianism, and false
consciousness.This rich feast of social and political analysis and
theory illuminates a range of contemporary concerns - racism,
Utopian fantasy, ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, the interplay of
social struc ture and mental illness, and ideological
transformations of social life - which only Gabel's unique mixture
of the clini cal and the political could achieve. It will be
studied with interest by all theo rists and politically alert
readers in the social sciences, philosophy, and related fields of
study.
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