The Dead Knower Paradox and the Logic of Ideological Thought

The concept of ‘ideology’ is reconstructed as a disease affecting the use of logic in politics. The first section presents the paradox of the dead knower (the man who believed he was dead) as a paradigmatic case of ideological thought. In the second section, the focus is on Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarian ideologies (in Origins of Totalitarianism), which confirms what is suggested in the first section and gives a philosophical explanation of how ‘ideological logic’ works. The last section briefly considers the role of ideologies (in Arendt's sense) in infocratic-digitalized democracies.