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CHAPTER 1
THE END OF IDEOLOGY? Is it possible to envisage ideology coming to an end? Or, for better or for worse, has ideology become a permanent feature of politics? The notion of the ‘end of ideology’ was particularly fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s. The most influential statement of this position was advanced by Daniel Bell. Bell (1960) was impressed by the fact that, after World War II, politics in the West was characterized by broad agreement among major political parties and the absence of ideological division or debate. Fascism and communism had both lost their appeal, while the remaining parties disagreed only about which ideologies could best be relied on to deliver economic growth and material prosperity. In effect, economics had triumphed over politics. Politics had been reduced to technical questions about ‘how’ to deliver affluence, and had ceased to address moral or philosophical questions about the nature of the ‘good society’. To all intents and purposes, ideology had become an irrelevance.
KEY FIGURE
DANIEL BELL (1919–2011) A US academic and essayist, Bell drew attention, in The End of Ideology (1960), to the exhaustion of rationalist approaches to social and political issues, also warning, in the afterword to the 1988 edition, against the tyranny of utopian end-states. He helped to popularize the idea of ‘post-industrialism’, highlighting the emergence of ‘information societies’ dominated by a new ‘knowledge class’. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Bell analysed the tension between capitalism’s productivist and consumerist values and tendencies.
Jane Reed/ Harvard University News Office
However, the process to which Bell drew attention was not the ‘end of ideology’ so much as the emergence of a broad ideological consensus among major parties, and therefore the suspension of ideological debate. In the immediate postwar period, representatives of the three major Western ideologies – liberalism, socialism and conservatism – came to accept the common goal of managed capitalism. This goal, however, was itself ideological – for example, it reflected an enduring faith in market economics, private property and material incentives, tempered by a belief in social welfare and economic intervention. In effect, an ideology of ‘welfare capitalism’ or ‘social democracy’ had triumphed over its rivals, although this triumph proved to be only temporary. The 1960s witnessed the rise ofmore radical NewLeft ideas, reflected in a revival of interest in Marxist and anarchist thought and the growth of ‘new’ ideologies such as feminism and ecologism. The onset of economic recession in the 1970s provoked renewed interest in long-neglected, free-market doctrines and stimulated the development of New Right theories, which also challenged the postwar consensus. Finally, the ‘end of ideology’ thesis focused attention exclusively on developments in the industrialized West and ignored the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s communism remained firmly entrenched in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere, and that revolutionary political movements were operating in Asia, Africa and parts of Latin America. A broader perspective was adopted by Francis Fukuyama (see p. 17) in his essay ‘The End of History’ (1989), later developed into The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Unlike Bell, Fukuyama did not suggest that political ideas had become irrelevant, but that
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