The Ruling Ideas: Bourgeois Political Concepts by Amy E. Wendling [Book Review]

Abstract

In his 1908 book Orthodoxy, English author G. K. Chesterton expresses a yearning to write a romance “about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas,” a mistake which allowed him the privilege of viewing his homeland with the eyes of a stranger, finding wonders where previously he had but experienced the doldrums of everyday life, experiencing everything anew. Chesterton imagined such a romance to reflect his own attempt to create for his reader a “romance of faith,” reinvigorating a Christian belief so commonplace in England with a sense of the fantastic and exotic. Philosopher Amy Wendling, in The Ruling Ideas: Bourgeois Political Concepts, executes a similar scheme of rendering the familiar strange, though her fundamental goal is not to instill an ancient religion with a new aesthetic but rather to denature anti-emancipatory concepts common to our everyday lives, to break people from the ruling class frame of reference—that is, to offer “a more immediate form of salvation than the garden variety,” as folk singer Utah Phillips once put it.