The Moral Dualism of Modern Ideologies: The Legacy of Manichean Thought in Marxism, Feminism, and Progressive Movements

The Moral Dualism of Modern Ideologies offers a genealogical and interdisciplinary analysis of how ancient dualist cosmologies—particularly Manichean and Gnostic models of good and evil—have been transformed into the moral architecture of modern political and social ideologies. The book traces how these metaphysical frameworks were secularized and embedded within Marxism, feminism, critical theory, and contemporary progressive movements, where they continue to structure moral judgment, political conflict, and social identity. Rather than treating modern ideologies as purely economic, cultural, or psychological phenomena, this study situates them within a longer history of religious and philosophical inheritance. It demonstrates how the Manichean division between light and darkness reappears in materialist form as the opposition between oppressed and oppressor, virtue and corruption, innocence and guilt. This moral dualism, the book argues, underlies the utopian aspirations, revolutionary violence, and totalizing tendencies characteristic of modern ideological systems. A central analytical concept introduced in this work is moral rapacity, defined as a structurally insatiable drive toward moral righteousness, legitimacy, and justified indignation. The book shows how this dynamic operates across ideological traditions, enabling the moralization of conflict and the justification of increasingly extreme measures in the name of justice, liberation, or historical necessity. The volume also provides an extended case study of antisemitism in left-wing and progressive thought, tracing its deeper roots to dualist heresies in which Jewish identity was associated with law, creation, and the “corrupt” material world. Through a genealogical analysis of inversion, mutation, and secularization, the book explains how these theological structures persist in modern political discourse, where Jews, masculinity, and sovereignty are often symbolically framed as sources of systemic evil. Combining political theory, religious history, philosophy, and cultural analysis, The Moral Dualism of Modern Ideologies offers a structural account of how metaphysical narratives of good and evil continue to shape modern social movements, moral reasoning, and ideological conflict. This volume constitutes an applied genealogical study within the broader framework of Integrative System-Theoretical Realism (ISTR). While earlier works in this research program establish the ontological, epistemological, and structural foundations of ideological analysis, the present book demonstrates their practical application to historical and contemporary ideological formations. By tracing the transformation of metaphysical dualism into modern political and moral systems, this study operationalizes ISTR as a method for diagnosing how symbolic, moral, and institutional structures mutate across time. In this sense, the book functions not only as a critical investigation of modern ideologies, but also as a case-based validation of the ISTR framework as a tool for integrative, interdisciplinary analysis.