Introductory Note
Mostafa Rejai
Roy Pierce (p. 287 below) identifies Albert Camus as the first person to have used the expression “end of ideology” and analyzes Camus’ thoughts in some detail. Seymour Martin Lipset (p. 108 below) refers to two European writers, T. H. Marshall and Herbert Tingsten, who “enunciated the basic thesis without using the term in the late 40’s and early 50’s.”
“The end of political ideology” is a theme also developed by H. Stuart Hughes in a 1951 article surveying the European political scene.1 Hughes identifies a “process of ideological dissolution” and a “wreckage of political faiths” in which radical ideologies have lost their sway. He approvingly quotes Isaiah Berlin to the effect that “disagreements about political principles” have been replaced by “disagreements, ultimately technical, about method.”
Raymond Aron elaborates upon the theme of ideological decline. In a book published in 1955, he emphasizes the passing of fanaticism in political belief and the erosion of ideologies that were at one time sharp, distinct, and explicit.2 He writes of an increasing awareness that “the political categories of the last century—Left and Right, liberal and socialist, traditionalist and revolutionary—have lost their relevance.” Having surveyed the ideological scene in Western and non-Western countries, he concludes that “In most Western societies, ideological controversy is dying down because experience has shown that divergent demands can be reconciled.”3
The most significant impetus to the spread and acceptance of the decline thesis was provided by a conference on “The Future of Freedom,” sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom in September 1955.4 Held in Milan, the conference was attended by some 150 intellectuals, scholars, politicians, and journalists from numerous countries. After five days of discussion and debate, there emerged among the Western representatives a clear consensus along the following lines: (1) total or extremist ideologies appeared to be in a state of decline; (2) this decline was due largely to the increasing economic affluence in western countries; and (3) this decline was crystallized in the fact that “over the past thirty years the extremes of ‘right’ and ‘left’ had disclosed identities which were more impressive than their differences.”5 By contrast, representatives from the non-Western countries found it necessary to insist on the continued relevance of radical ideologies.
Following the Milan conference, some of the American participants (who included Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Sidney Hook, George F. Kennan, Seymour Martin Lipset, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Edward Shils) became centrally involved in further exploration and elaboration of the decline hypothesis. In the two selections reproduced below, Bell and Lipset develop the theme in some detail. Bell addresses himself to the “exhaustion” of total ideologies in the 1950s and notes the coalescence on certain issues of traditionally antagonistic ideologies. Lipset specifically relates the theme of ideological decline to economic development (among other variables) and develops a hypothesis capable of empirical testing and verification.
Notes
1 The Passing of Fanaticism
Daniel Bell
Men commit the error of not knowing when to limit their hopes—Machiavelli
There have been few periods in history when man felt his world to be durable, suspended surely, as in Christian allegory, between chaos and heaven. In an Egyptian papyrus of more than four thousand years ago, one finds: “… impudence is rife … the country is spinning round and round like a potter’s wheel … the masses are like timid sheep without a shepherd … one who yesterday was indigent is now wealthy and the sometime rich overwhelm him with adulation.” The Hellenistic period as described by Gilbert Murray was one of a “failure of nerve”; there was “the rise of pessimism, a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort.” And the old scoundrel Talleyrand claimed that only those who lived before 1789 could have tasted life in all its sweetness.1
This age, too, can add appropriate citations—made all the more wry and bitter by the long period of bright hope that preceded it—for the two decades between 1930 and 1950 have an intensity peculiar in written history: world-wide economic depression and sharp class struggles; the rise of fascism and racial imperialism in a country that had stood at an advanced stage of human culture; the tragic self-immolation of a revolutionary generation that had proclaimed the finer ideals of man; destructive war of a breadth and scale hitherto unknown; the bureaucratized murder of millions in concentration camps and death chambers.
For the radical intellectual who had articulated the revolutionary impulses of the past century and a half, all this has meant an end to chiliastic hopes, to millenarianism, to apocalyptic thinking—and to ideology. For ideology, which once was a road to action, has come to be a dead end.
Whatever its origins among the French philosophes, ideology as a way of translating ideas into action was given its sharpest phrasing by the left Hegelians, by Feuerbach and by Marx. For them, the function of philosophy was to be critical, to rid the present of the past. (“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” wrote Marx.) Feuerbach, the most radical of all the left Hegelians, called himself Luther II. Man would be free, he said, if we could demythologize religion. The history of all thought was a history of progressive disenchantment, and if finally, in Christianity, God had been transformed from a parochial deity to a universal abstraction, the function of criticism—using the radical tool of alienation, or self-estrangement—was to replace theology by anthropology, to substitute Man for God. Philosophy was to be directed at life, man was to be liberated from the “specter of abstractions” and extricated from the bind of the supernatural. Religion was capable only of creating “false consciousness.” Philosophy would reveal “true consciousness.” And by placing Man, rather than God, at the center of consciousness, Feuerbach sought to bring the “infinite into the finite.”2
If Feuerbach “descended into the world,” Marx sought to transform it. And where Feuerbach proclaimed anthropology, Marx, reclaiming a root insight of Hegel, emphasized History and historical contexts. The world was not generic Man, but men; and of men, classes of men. Men differed because of their class position. And truths were class truths. All truths, thus, were masks, or partial truths, but the real truth was the revolutionary truth. And this real truth was rational.
Thus a dynamic was introduced into the analysis of ideology, and into the creation of a new ideology. By demythologizing religion, one recovered (from God and sin) the potential in man. By the unfolding of history, rationality was revealed. In the struggle of classes, true consciousness, rather than false consciousness, could be achieved. But if truth lay in action, one must act. The left Hegelians, said Marx, were only littérateurs. (For them a magazine was “practice.”) For Marx, the only real action was in politics. But action, revolutionary action as Marx conceived it, was not mere social change. It was, in its way, the resumption of all the old millenarian, chiliastic ideas of the Anabaptists. It was, in its new vision, a new ideology.
Ideology is the conversion of ideas into social levers. Without irony, Max Lerner once entitled a book “Ideas Are Weapons.” This is the language of ideology. It is more. It is the commitment to the consequences of ideas. When Vissarion Belinsky, the father of Russian criticism, first read Hegel and became convinced of the philosophical correctness of the formula “what is, is what ought to be,” he became a supporter of the Russian autocracy. But when it was shown to him that Hegel’s thought contained the contrary tendency, that dialectically the “is” evolves into a different form, he became a revolutionary overnight. “Belinsky’s conversion,” comments Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., “illustrates an attitude toward ideas which is both passionate and myopic, which responds to them on the basis of their immediate relevances alone, and inevitably reduces them to tools.”3
What gives ideology its force is its passion. Abstract philosophical inquiry has always sought to eliminate passion, and the person, to rationalize all ideas. For the ideologue, truth arises in action, and meaning is given to experience by the “transforming moment.” He comes alive not in contemplation, but in “the deed.” One might say, in fact, that the most important, latent, function of ideology is to tap emotion. Other than religion (and war and nationalism), there have been few forms of channelizing emotional energy. Religion symbolized, drained away, dispersed emotional energy from the world onto the litany, the liturgy, the sacraments, the edifices, the arts. Ideology fuses these energies and channels them into politics.
But religion, at its most effective, was more. It was a way for people to cope with the problem of death. The fear of death—forceful and inevitable—and more, the fear of violent death, shatters the glittering, imposing, momentary dream of man’s power. The fear of death, as Hobbes pointed out, is the source of conscience; the effort to avoid violent death is the source of law. When it was possible for people to believe, really believe, in heaven and hell, then some of the fear of death could be tempered or controlled; without such belief, there is only the total annihilation of the self.4
It may well be that with the decline in religious faith in the last century and more, this fear of death as total annihilation, unconsciously expressed, has probably increased. One may hypothesize, in fact, that here is a cause of the breakthrough of the irrational, which is such a marked feature of the changed moral temper of our time. Fanaticism, violence, and cruelty are not, of course, unique in human history. But there was a time when such frenzies and mass emotions could be displaced, symbolized, drained away, and dispersed through religious devotion and practice. Now there is only this life, and the assertion of self becomes possible—for some even necessary—in the domination over others.* One can challenge death by emphasizing the omnipotence of a movement (as in the “inevitable” victory of communism), or overcome death (as did the “immortality” of Captain Ahab) by bending others to one’s will. Both paths are taken, but politics, because it can institutionalize power, in the way that religion once did, becomes the ready avenue for domination. The modern effort to transform the world chiefly or solely through politics (as contrasted with the religious transformation of the self) has meant that all other institutional ways of mobilizing emotional energy would necessarily atrophy. In effect, sect and church became party and social movement.
A social movement can rouse people when it can do three things: simplify ideas, establish a claim to truth, and, in the union of the two, demand a commitment to action. Thus, not only does ideology transform ideas, it transforms people as well. The nineteenth-century ideologies, by emphasizing inevitability and by infusing passion into their followers, could compete with religion. By identifying inevitability with progress, they linked up with the positive values of science. But more important, these ideologies were linked, too, with the rising class of intellectuals, which was seeking to assert a place in society.
The differences between the intellectual and the scholar, without being invidious, are important to understand. The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his “self.” The intellectual begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities. Since his own status is of high value, his judgments of the society reflect the treatment accorded him. In a business civilization, the intellectual felt that the wrong values were being honored, and rejected the society. Thus there was a “built-in” compulsion for the free-floating intellectual to become political. The ideologies, therefore, which emerged from the nineteenth century had the force of the intellectuals behind them. They embarked upon what William James called “the faith ladder,” which in its vision of the future cannot distinguish possibilities from probabilities, and converts the latter into certainties.
Today, these ideologies are exhausted. The events behind this important sociological change are complex and varied. Such calamities as the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the concentration camps, the suppression of the Hungarian workers, form one chain; such social changes as the modification of capitalism, the rise of the Welfare State, another. In philosophy, one can trace the decline of simplistic, rationalistic beliefs and the emergence of new stoic-theological images of man, e.g. Freud, Tillich, Jaspers, etc. This is not to say that such ideologies as communism in France and Italy do not have a political weight, or a driving momentum from other sources. But out of all this history, one simple fact emerges: for the radical intelligentsia, the old ideologies have lost their “truth” and their power to persuade.
Few serious minds believe any longer tha...
