Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1995, Vol 40(5), 443-446. Three recent books, vastly different and none by psychologists, suggest the usefulness of a "script" approach to ideology. Historian Lynn Hunt's The Family Romance of the French Revolution (see record 1994-97930-000) examines the rhetoric and imagery of fraternity during the revolutionary erRejecting the Freudian view that revolutions recapitulate oedipal dramas, she nonetheless contends that revolutionary events took on important intrapsychic meanings that structured their cultural representation and public comprehension. The strength of her analysis derives from the detail and care with which she traces familial themes through newspapers and polemical tracts, legislative debates and speeches, popular literature and plays, visual art and public spectacles. She outlines an intriguing model that draws on Weber and Durkheim to hypothesize that every political system must be animated by charisma or sacredness. Hamid Dabashi's Authority in Islam draws even more explicitly on Weber to analyze cultural representations of political authority. The strength of this work also lies largely in the author's detailed analyses of historical events and texts, which he argues show not simply the Weberian typology of authority (traditional, charismatic, rational) in Arab-Muslim form but a parallel, indigenous set of "paradigmatic" (p. xii) responses to the problem of perpetuating the Prophet's charismTed Goertzel's Turncoats and True Believers (see record 1992-98875-000) sets out to develop an explicitly psychological theory of ideologies as "life scripts" (p. 38), drawing on Silvan Tomkins's notion of script and Erik Erikson's scheme of developmental stages. Erikson emphasizes that identity consolidates around commitment to a social ideology (though not usually political activism), and political scientists like Hunt and Dabashi increasingly emphasize that ideologies respond to crises of identity and provide individuals with integrative life-scripts. Unfortunately, Goertzel's synthesis creates as many problems as it solves, as it consists primarily of a typology of ideological scripts that correspond in but "a very general way" to the outcomes of five of Erikson's eight stages.