In this book, Manfred Steger offers an ambitious survey of political ideologies with the aim of presenting a picture of what he calls (p. ix) the “changing ideological landscape” of the contemporary political age. The originality of his approach lies in his use of the concept of “social imaginaries” to provide a framework for the analysis of political ideologies. While he does not go into great detail in explaining the concept of a “social imaginary,” he is clear enough in defining it as “a deep-seated mode of understanding [that] provides the most general parameters within which people imagine their communal existence” (p. 6). This approach of linking the concept of ideology with that of a social imaginary is then applied by Steger through a two-part distinction between what he calls the “national imaginary” and the “global imaginary.” His argument sees the “grand ideologies” of modernity, namely liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, as attempts at articulation of the national imaginary, in other words, as ways in which to elaborate concepts of the nation, or in his own words, to “express the overarching national imaginary in compressed and explicit form as competing political doctrines” (p. 49).

Such an analysis rests on two assumptions. The first is that nationalism is not an ideology in itself, but rather a framework of analysis that makes the nation the central political association, and thus provides what Steger calls “the communal frame of the political” (p. 9), which the various grand ideologies of modernity tried to translate into political doctrines in their different ways. The second assumption is that the national frame of reference was indeed the central theme of the different ideologies of modernity, and that they all operated within the conceptual space of the national imaginary. This makes for a distinct reading of these ideologies, but one that seems somewhat skewed, at least with reference to socialism and liberalism. While one cannot deny that both of these ideologies had something, indeed quite a lot, to say about the nation and the power of nationalism, it seems rather one-sided to interpret them, as Steger does, as primarily concerned with articulating the national imaginary.

Take, for example, the case of (Marxist) socialism. Steger gives considerable importance to Ferdinand Lassalle, the German socialist who did indeed stress the importance of the nation as the framework for socialist action. And clearly, the experience of 1914 and the failure of international socialism give weight to Steger's assertion that “[i]nternational socialism had morphed back into a Lassallean national socialism” (p. 82). But to use that as evidence that socialism as an ideology is best understood as an attempt to articulate the national imaginary is to neglect other themes in socialism that go well beyond the framework of the nation, whatever may have been the difficulty of these alternative articulations in practice. When the author claims, with respect to Marx and Engels' text The German Ideology, that “[d]espite its celebration of the coming abolition of classes and nations, The German Ideology took shape from within the bowels of the rising national imaginary” (p. 43), the reader wonders not only how an “imaginary,” national or otherwise, could have “bowels” but also how useful it is to employ this idea of the national imaginary as the key concept for understanding the grand ideologies of modernity.

Similarly with liberalism: Steger analyzes John Stuart Mill and his defense of the principle of nationality. While this is certainly an important aspect of Mill's thought, liberalism could equally well be analyzed as a doctrine of universal rights that seeks to transcend the framework of the nation and aim at ideas of self-development and autonomy, irrespective of the claims of the nation and of national affiliations. It could be argued that Steger's mode of interpreting these ideologies of conservatism, socialism, and liberalism is rather a partial one, and risks confusing one aspect of these ideologies (their concern with the unit of the nation) with their overriding concern, and thus offering too one-sided an interpretation of these ideological configurations.

The more interesting and illuminating theme of the book, however, is an analysis of what Steger calls the “rising global imaginary” and the coming into being of new ideologies, which are in their turn articulations of this new imaginary. Here, the book really breaks new ground by an imaginative categorization of the way in which this global imaginary has transformed the ideological scene. The author is surely right to suggest that both the national and the global “formations” will “continue to coexist uneasily for the next decades” (p. 194). Yet his analysis of the ways in which the ideological landscape has been transformed by the rising global imaginary is genuinely original and insightful. He offers a picture of competing ways in which the phenomenon of globalization has been translated into political ideologies.

One such ideological representation of globalization is what Steger labels as “market globalism,” which he illustrates through the work of the journalist Thomas Friedman. In this articulation of the global imaginary, globalization is presented as an unavoidable process leading to “the inexorable global integration of leaderless markets” (p. 195). He analyzes how this idea of a neoliberal world of global markets where, in Friedman's own words, “[n]o one is in charge” (p. 189), sits uneasily with recognition of the dominant role of the United States in promoting a world of free markets and global exchanges. He shows how after 9/11, the “market globalism” of the “Roaring Nineties” developed into what he calls “imperial globalism,” involving a combination of free markets backed up by the military power of the United States, so that America became the bearer of what were claimed to be universal values of free markets and liberal democracy. The ideologues of such global imperialism are writers like Robert Kaplan and Thomas Barnett, with the latter writing of a “military-market nexus,” where American power was needed to secure a world in which globalization and liberal democracy could develop further.

Steger's analysis expounds alternative and oppositional articulations of the global imaginary, in the first instance what he labels as “justice globalism,” as expressed in theoretical terms by writers such as Susan George and in practical, political terms by the alternative globalization movement and assemblies like the World Social Forum. A very different discourse that articulates the rising global imaginary is what Steger calls “jihadist globalism,” represented by the late Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. This leads the author to conclude by questioning whether the secular ideologies of modernity are being replaced with religious articulations of the global imaginary, whether in the form of jihadist globalism or the Christian undertones (or even overtones) of the global war on terror, as theorized by the Christian radical Right. Steger is surely right to claim that we need to “capture the contours of a profoundly altered ideological landscape” (p. 248), and his book provides an indispensable guide to fulfill that aim. While the early part of the book can be criticized for trying too rigidly to squeeze modern ideologies into the framework of the national imaginary, his analysis of the global imaginary provides an exciting “way in” to an understanding of the novelty of the current ideological scene and the concepts needed to grasp it.