Table Of ContentI D E O L O G I E S
A N D T H E
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d e o l o g i e s
A N D T H E
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Jo s e p h G abel
EDITED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION BY
Alan Sica
First published 1997 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 96-49045
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gabel, Joseph.
Ideologies and the corruption of thought / Joseph Gabel ; edited
and with an introduction by Alan Sica and an epilogue by David F.
Allen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56000-287-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Ideology. 2. Alienation (Social psychology) I. Sica, Alan,
1949- . II. Title.
HM24.G253 1997
302.5’44—dc21 96-49045
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-287-1 (hbk)
Contents
Editorial Note vii
Introduction: Bridging Pathologies of the Individual
and the Collective: Gabel's Contribution to
Contemporary Analysis 1
Alan Sica
1. Utopian Consciousness and False Consciousness 61
2. Political Delusion of a Paranoid Patient 71
3. Axiology and Dialectics 89
4. Durkheimianism and Political Alienation:
Durkheim and Marx 101
5. Jonathan Swift as Forerunner of the Theory of "Morbid
Geometrism" 111
6. Althusser and Orwell 117
7. Political Ideologies 129
8. Stalinism as Ideology 145
9. McCarthyism: An American Form of Political False
Consciousness 157
10. Eugene Minkowski and the Problem of Alienation 165
11. Effet Pervers and False Consciousness 175
12. Racist Consciousness as a Form of False Consciousness 185
13. Anti-Zionism as Ideology 191
vi Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought
14. The Psychology of De-Stalinization and the
Problem of Political Alienation 199
Epilogue: From Schizophrenia to False Consciousness:
Joseph Gabel and Theories of Psychopathology 211
David F. Allen
Name Index 221
Subject Index 225
Editorial Note
Several years ago Joseph Gabel sent me from Paris a large
collection of his essays, a few published in the 1950s, but most
written during the last two decades. They treated an array of
topics, from the clinically specific and minute to the boldly
macropolitical and general. He asked that I select those which
might interest today's Anglophone audience the most, which
might best cohere as a book, and which were composed in such
a way that they could be rewritten more or less into today's
academic idiom. Through all this he hoped that his ideas could
be presented as useful to contemporary theoretical concerns, yet
with minimal distortion. Over time the book came together, but
only through the efforts of many hands. A number of transla
tors, working independently of each other over the last twenty
years or so, did first drafts of the essays—all of which I have
heavily edited—and my own immediate colleagues have also
helped in various ways, specifically Samar Farage, Claire Amick,
Michael Sauder, and Anne Sica. Samar Farage carried on lengthy
transatlantic phone consultations with Joseph Gabel in French,
clarifying the project as it developed. She also oversaw the con
version of rough typescripts into more managable word-pro-
cessed manuscripts. David F. Allen served as intermediary from
Paris, assisting Gabel at every turn, and helping considerably in
supplying me with the raw materials from which the finished
product was fashioned. Claire Amick word-processed one chap
ter on short notice with her usual skill. As always, Anne Sica
efficiently copyedited and proofread, and at very reasonable
vii
viii Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought
rates. My colleague Allan Stoekl meticulously checked some
thorny problems in French; errors that remain in that depart
ment are solely mine.
It is a tribute to the quality of Joseph Gabel's thinking, as well
as his personality, that so many harried intellectual laborers
have turned their collective goodwill in his direction. One hopes
the final result justifies their struggles to get it right.
Introduction
Bridging Pathologies of the Individual
and the Collective: Gabel's Contribution
to Contemporary Analysis
Alan Sica
"I dedicate this book, which is written to
oppose fanaticism of all kinds, to the
memory of my mother who disappeared
at Auschwitz in 1945 and my father who
died unconsoled in New York in 1968."
In 1975 Joseph Gabel wrote this chilling epigraph for the En
glish language version of his masterpiece, False Consciousness.
His dialectical joining of the searingly personal with the baldly
public has, over the last fifty years, distinguished Gabel's theo
retical position from all others within the "Hungaro-Marxist"
camp—as he himself named an eclectic group of polymathic
scholars. To recall thirty years after the fact that one's mother
"disappeared" in Auschwitz—that memory/place about which
"everyone" now "knows," and the history of which, as Adorno
desperately observed, would invalidate the future's authentic
claims to humor or good cheer; further, to record for an anony
mous audience that one's father not only died alone in a foreign
place twenty years thereafter, but within the harrowing region
of "the unconsoled," demands a sort of intellectual character
that today's bureaucratization of theoretical imagination makes
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