Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-305) and index.

Introduction: Political Ideologies and Social Imaginaries --
Pt. 1. The National Imaginary.
Ch. 1. Ideology and Revolution: From Superscience to False Consciousness.
Ch. 2. The Grand Ideologies of the Nineteenth Century: British Liberalism, French Conservatism, German Socialism.
Ch. 3. Twentieth-Century Totalitarianisms: Russian Communism and German Nazism --
Pt. 2. The Global Imaginary.
Ch. 4. Third World Liberationisms and other Cold War Isms: No End to Ideology.
Ch. 5. Market Globalism and Justice Globalism in the Roaring Ninetie.
Ch. 6. Jihadist Globalism versus Imperial Globalism: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century?

Combining political history, philosophical interpretation, and good old-fashioned story-telling, Manfred B. Steger traces ideology's remarkable journey from Count Destutt de Tracy's Enlightenment "science of ideas" to President George W. Bush's "imperial globalism." Rejecting futile attempts to "update" modern political belief systems by adorning them with prefixes, the author offers instead a highly original explanation for their novelty--their increasing ability to articulate deep-seated understandings of community in global rather than national terms. This growing awareness of globality fuels the visions of social elites who reside in the privileged spaces of our global cities. It erupts in the hopes and demands of migrants who traverse national boundaries in search of their piece of the global promise. Stoked by cross-cultural encounters, technological change, and scientific innovation, the rising global imaginary has destabilized the grand political ideologies codified during the national age.