Few discoveries can be more disheartening to scholars of political thought than the discovery that those who are not scholars seldom distinguish between ideological and non-ideological forms of thinking. That is to say, they seldom distinguish between thinking that simplifies and falsifies politics and thinking that seeks to understand politics in all its complexity. This distinction is at the heart of The Persistence of the Ideological Lie. In this book Daniel Mahoney holds up examples of genuine thought and invites his readers to contrast them with examples of ideology. “Then” in the subtitle refers to the period of Communist domination of Eastern Europe that ended with dramatic suddenness in 1989; “now” refers to present-day movements that fall under the heading of progressivism, including Black Lives Matter (in a chapter on “woke despotism”) and the 1619 Project. There are other chapters on “postcolonial ideology” (which includes protests in support of Hamas), Robespierre and the “new Jacobins” who defend him, Marx and Marxism, and Dostoevsky’s portrayal (in the novel Demons) of revolutionary groups in nineteenth-century Russia. For the examples of non-ideological thought that he holds up for imitation, Mahoney is especially indebted to the great dissidents of the two or three decades that preceded the revolutions of 1989—above all Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from whom he borrows the term “Ideological Lie.”

Solzhenitsyn refused to localize evil in any class of people, even the Soviet officials who imprisoned him and forced him into exile. The line between good and evil, he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “cuts through the heart of every human being.” Ideology is a lie because it willfully rejects this truth. Mahoney returns to Solzhenitsyn’s observation again and again; in a note he explains that it “provides the leitmotif” for his book (142). In Mahoney’s own words from the introduction, ideological thinking attempts to “replace the only human condition we know with a utopian ‘Second Reality’ [Eric Voegelin’s phrase] oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation.” This kind of thinking has not only persisted but “taken on renewed virulence” in recent years (1).

Mahoney’s book is intended to be “as much an affirmation of the natural order of things” as a critique of ideology (7). But the main thrust of his argument is critical. The somewhat miscellaneous contents of the chapters may be due in part to how the book was composed; it combines newly written material with previously published essays (9). The chapters read more like a series of discrete articles than the working out of an overall argument. This is unfortunate because it prevents Mahoney from giving a full presentation of the non-ideological alternative. For the most part he is content to refer readers to his sources. Many are writings by figures of acknowledged eminence—works by Vaclav Havel and Pope John Paul II in his chapter “The Lost Promise of 1989,” for example. But Mahoney is writing principally for readers who are not scholars, and not all of them will be in a position to go to those sources themselves.

The Persistence of the Ideological Lie belongs to a genre that deserves to have a large influence in our public life. There is no good name for it. Books in this genre are distinguishable from scholarly commentaries on the one hand and avowedly partisan writings on the other. At their best, such books bring great learning and disinterested judgment to the consideration of timely political questions. But here is the difficulty: their influence depends on avoiding even the appearance of partisanship. Mahoney’s use of the term “Ideological Lie” is problematic in the context of post-Communist politics, because a lie is a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Few will doubt that the leaders of the Soviet Union and their counterparts in Eastern Europe, by the 1960s at any event, knew perfectly well that Marx’s account of the world was false, but they continued to pretend to believe it because they could not retain power otherwise. They knew that the claims on which their leadership was based could not be defended truthfully. But can the same be said of the leaders or members of BLM or pro-Palestinian protest groups? Mahoney is not likely to win them—or their many sympathizers—over to moderation by denouncing them as liars. On the contrary, his language is likely to abet what he rightly calls the “crude and lazy” assumption that “all moral and political judgments are mere assertions that cannot be adjudicated before the tribunal of reason” (6).

A wiser approach would make it clear that he shares the reformers’ professed goal of a more just and decent political order and can show them a better way to achieve it. In doing this he would be taking a lesson from Abraham Lincoln. As a young politician Lincoln was invited to address a meeting of temperance advocates. He used the occasion to point out a mistake that had impeded their success: many denounced the very people they were trying to reach. No wonder, Lincoln commented, that drinkers and sellers of drink “were slow, very slow, to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations, and to join the ranks of their denouncers, in a hue and cry against themselves.”

The Persistence of the Ideological Lie is most valuable as a guide to sources that aim to provide a philosophically grounded understanding of the world to offset the distortions of ideology. For those who can take advantage of them, Mahoney has added “Sources and Suggested Readings” at the end of each chapter and a list of “Ten Essential Books for Understanding and Overcoming the Ideological Lie” at the end of the book. The readings include, as mentioned, the work of writers who were witnesses to the effects of Marxism on their own nations in the period before 1989. But they also include writings by scholars who have swum against the ideological currents of more recent times. The otherwise disheartening lack of awareness among citizens of alternatives to ideology makes it all the more important to draw attention to these writers.