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German Ideology, by Louis Dumont. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 250 pp. $32.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-16952-9.
CHARLES TURNER University of Warwick
Though beset with familiar pitfalls, the theme of collective national identity has always been a seductive one. Today, the topic is more respectable than ever: a terrain where sappers have long been at work and on which the investigator may tread with a measure of certainty. For postwar Western Europeans, and especially Britons of my generation, no country has exerted a fascination to compare with that of Germany; none has seemed more suited to test the limits of our historical imagination. It is thus with some hope that we greet a text on Germanness by one of the world's most respected anthropologists. Sadly, it is with despair that we peruse its contents. Louis Dumont here displays the certainty of step of an army on the march, trampling down the flowers. Quite what it will do for Franco-German relations is hard to say.
The book purports to be a contribution to comparative anthropology--Germany is to be compared with France--and is part of an ongoing study of "ideology" that includes the earlier Essays on Individualism and from Mandeville to Marx. Dumont notes the topic's "current underestimation" (p. 22) among scholars, though the bibliography is notable for the absence of many key works in this area.
With a vagueness that stalks every page, ideology is defined initially as "the set of ideas...