Ideology Without End?

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Endism

The resilience of ideology

Questions for discussion

Further reading

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P olitical ideology has been an essential component of world history
for over 200 years. Ideology sprang out of the upheavals –
economic, social and political – through which the modern world took
shape, and has been intimately involved in the continuing process of
social transformation and political development. Although ideology
emerged first in the industrializing West, it has subsequently appeared
throughout the globe, creating a worldwide language of political
discourse. However, opinion has been deeply divided about the role that
ideology has played in human history. Has ideology served the cause of
truth, progress and justice, or has it generated distorted and blinkered
world-views, resulting in intolerance and oppression?
This debate has often been carried out in negative terms, highlighting
criticisms of ideology, often by predicting its imminent demise. However,
what is remarkable is how many and how varied the obituaries for
political ideology have been. The various obituaries have been viewed as
different forms of ‘endism’. The idea of the ‘end of ideology’ became
fashionable in the 1950s and early 1960s, and suggested that politics
was no longer concerned with larger normative issues, as technical
questions about how to deliver affluence had come to dominate political
debate. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism, so-called ‘end of
history’ theorists argued that ideological disagreement had ended in the
final victory of western liberal democracy. Alternative forms of endism
have highlighted the alleged redundancy of the left/right divide, on which
the ‘classical’ ideological traditions depended, and held that the triumph
of rationalism and modern technology has fatally undermined the
ideological style of thought. Ideological politics, however, remains
stubbornly resistant to being disinvented. Indeed, as the principal source
of meaning and idealism in politics, ideology is destined to be a
continuing and unending process.

Endism
End of ideology?
The idea of the ‘end of ideology’ became fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s.
The most influential statement of this position was advanced by Daniel Bell
(1960). Bell (see p. 329) 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 of them 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.
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 of more radical New Left ideas, reflected in a revival of
interest in Marxist and anarchist thought and the growth of modern 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
post-war 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.

End of history?
A broader perspective was adopted by Francis Fukuyama (see p. 329) 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 one particular set of ideas, western liberalism,
had triumphed over all its rivals. Fascism had been defeated in 1945, and
Fukuyama clearly believed that the collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe
in 1989 marked the passing of Marxism-Leninism as an ideology of world
significance. By the ‘end of history’, Fukuyama meant that the history of ideas
had ended, and with it, fundamental ideological debate. Throughout the world
there was, he argued, an emerging agreement about the desirability of liberal
democracy (see p. 40), in the form of a market or capitalist economy and an
open, competitive political system.

PERSPECTIVES ON...
HISTORY
LIBERALS see history as progress, brought about as each generation
advances further than the last through the accumulation of knowledge
and understanding. Liberals generally believe that this will happen
through gradual or incremental reform, not through revolution.

CONSERVATIVES understand history in terms of tradition and

continuity, allowing little scope for progress. The lessons of the past
provide guidance for present and future conduct. Reactionary
conservatives believe that history is marked by decline, and wish to
return to an earlier and preferred time.

SOCIALISTS are committed to a progressive view of history, which

places heavy emphasis on the scope for social and personal
development. Marxists believe that class conflict is the motor of history
and that a classless, communist society is history’s determinant end-
point.

FASCISTS generally view history as a process of degeneration and

decay, a decline from a past ‘golden age’. They nevertheless subscribe to
a cyclical theory of history that holds out the possibility of national rebirth
and regeneration, usually through violent struggle and war.

ISLAMISTS have an ambivalent attitude towards history. Although they

are strongly inclined to see the present as morally and spiritually corrupt
in comparison with an idealized past, they conceive of social
regeneration in modernist terms, thus rejecting conservative
traditionalism.

Without doubt, the eastern European revolutions of 1989–91 and the dramatic
reform of surviving communist regimes such as China profoundly altered the
worldwide balance of ideological debate. However, it is far less certain that this
process amounted to the ‘end of history’. One difficulty with the ‘end of history’
thesis is that no sooner had it been proclaimed than new ideological forces rose
to the surface. While liberal democracy may have made impressive progress
during the twentieth century, as the century drew to a close there was undoubted
evidence of the revival of very different ideologies, notably Islamism, whose
influence has come to extend from the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa into
the former Soviet Union and the industrialized West. It is possible, for example,
that the ‘death of communism’ in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe prepared
the way for the revival of nationalism, racism (see p. 210) or religious
fundamentalism (see p. 188), rather than led to the final victory of liberal
democracy.
Underlying Fukuyama’s thesis was the optimistic belief, inherited from
classical liberalism, that industrial capitalism offers all members of society the
prospect of social mobility and material security, encouraging every citizen to
regard it as reasonable and attractive. In other words, it is possible for a broad,
even universal, agreement to be achieved about the nature of the ‘good society’.
This can nevertheless only be achieved if a society can be constructed that is
capable both of satisfying the interests of all major social groups and of fulfilling
the aspirations of at least a substantial majority of individual citizens. Despite
the undoubted vigour and efficiency that the capitalist market has demonstrated,
it certainly cannot be said that capitalism has treated all social classes or all
individuals alike. Ideological conflict and debate are thus unlikely to have ended
in the late twentieth century with the ultimate worldwide triumph of liberalism,
any more than they did with the ‘inevitable’ victory of socialism so widely
predicted at the end of the nineteenth century.

Beyond left and right?

Yet another form of ‘endism’ is the belief that, as the established features of
modern society have crumbled, the political creeds and doctrines it threw up
have been rendered irrelevant. This notion is usually advanced through the idea
of postmodernity. Not only have the major ideologies, both left-wing and right-
wing, been adapted to the ‘postmodern condition’, giving rise to ‘post-isms’ such
as postliberalism, post-Marxism and postfeminism, but, according to postmodern
theorists, our way of understanding and interpreting the world has changed, or
needs to change. This reflects a shift from modernism to postmodernism (see p.
59). Modernism stemmed largely from Enlightenment ideas and theories, and
was expressed politically in ideological traditions that offer rival conceptions of
the good life. The clearest examples are liberalism and Marxism. Modernist
thought is characterized by foundationalism. In contrast, postmodernism is anti-
foundationalist; the central theme of postmodernism was summed up by Jean-
François Lyotard (1984) as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, meta-
narratives being universal theories of history that view society as a coherent
totality.
However, such tendencies also provide evidence of the decline of the left/right
divide (see pp. 15–17), which marks an important transition in ideological
politics. The left/right divide helped to structure ideological debate in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in that, to a large extent, competing
ideological positions and arguments offered different solutions to essentially the
same problem. The problem was the destiny of industrial society, and the various
solutions offered ranged from free-market capitalism, on the one hand, to central
planning and state collectivization on the other. Ideological debate, then, tended
to focus on the desirable balance between the market and the state. Since the
1960s, however, politics has certainly not become less ideological, but
ideological developments have become increasingly fragmented. The ‘new’
ideologies – feminism, green ideology, religious fundamentalism and
multiculturalism – have each, in their different ways, opened up new directions
for ideological thinking. However, because each, in a sense, has thrown up its
own ideological discourse (based on gender, nature, religion, culture and so on),
they are not part of a larger discourse, as applied in the case of the clash between
capitalism and socialism.

FOUNDATIONALISM
The belief that it is possible to establish objective truths and universal values, usually associated with a
strong faith in progress.

Nevertheless, various explanations have been offered for the declining

salience of the left/right divide. Samuel Huntington’s (see p. 329) vision of a
‘clash of civilizations’ (see p. 310) linked it to changes in global politics that
have occurred because of the end of the Cold War. A world divided along
ideological lines, with the USA and the Soviet Union respectively representing
the forces of capitalism and communism, had faded and eventually disappeared,
leaving politics to be structured by issues of identity and, in particular, culture. In
this view, developments such as the growth of Islamism and the rise of China
and India constitute ‘civilizational’, rather than an ideological, threats to the
West.
Anthony Giddens (1994), in contrast, linked the exhaustion of both left-wing
and right-wing ideological traditions to sociological developments associated
with the emergence of so-called ‘high modernity’. Giddens (see p. 329) placed a
particular emphasis on the impact of globalization (see p. 20) and the tendency
for peoples’ lives to be shaped increasingly by developments that occur, and
events that happen, at a great distance from them. This, together with the
emergence of a ‘post-traditional’ social order and the expansion of social
reflexivity, has created societies that are so fluid and complex that they have,
effectively, outgrown the major ideological traditions. Politics, therefore, has
gone beyond left and right, a development that has been particularly evident in
the ‘hollowing out’ of parliamentary socialism since the 1990s. In an alternative
analysis of the implications of an interconnected or interdependent world, Sil
and Katzenstein (2010) have argued that it is necessary to go ‘beyond’
paradigms, including academic disciplines as well as theoretical or ideological
systems, in order to understand political realities that are increasingly
multifaceted and multidimen-sional. In this view, no paradigm, ideological or
otherwise, is capable, on its own, of fully explaining the almost infinitely
complex realities it purports to disclose.

SOCIAL REFLEXIVITY
Interaction between people who enjoy a high level of autonomy within a context of reciprocity and
interdependence.

Triumph of reason?
The debate about the replacement of ideology by rationalism (see p. 31) goes
back to the nineteenth century and the firm distinction that Marx (see p. 124)
drew between ‘ideology’ and ‘science’. For Marx, ideology was intrinsically
false because it serves as a vehicle for advancing class interests. In contrast, he
portrayed his own ideas as a form of ‘scientific’ socialism. Science, in this view,
provides an objective and value-free method of advancing human knowledge, so
releasing humanity from enslavement to irrational beliefs, which includes
superstitions, prejudices and, in this case, political ideologies. This, indeed, has
proved to be one of the enduring myths of modern times. It has recurred, for
instance, in relation to the cultural and intellectual implications of globalization,
one of the chief features of the emerging global age being an acceptance of a
western model of rationality, reflected, most obviously, in the value placed on
technology and technological development. In this sense, ideology may be in the
process of being displaced by scientism.

KEY FIGURES IN... ENDISM

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.

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) A US academic and

political commentator, Huntington’s most widely discussed work,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996),
advanced the controversial thesis that, in the twenty-first century,
conflict between the world’s major civilizations would lead to warfare
and international disorder. In Who Are We? (2004), Huntington
discussed the challenges posed to the USA’s national identity by
large-scale Latino immigration and the unwillingness of Latino
communities to assimilate into the language and culture of majority
societies.
 Anthony Giddens (born 1938) A UK social theorist, Giddens
was an adviser to Tony Blair in the early years of ‘new’ Labour. His
theory of ‘structuration’ reinvigorated social theory by setting out to
transcend the conventional dualism of structure and agency. In
works including Beyond Left and Right (1994), The Third Way
(1998) and The Runaway World (1999), Giddens sought to remodel
social democracy in the light of the advent of late modernity, taking
into account developments such as globalization, de-
traditionalization and increased social reflexivity.

Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) A US social analyst and

political commentator, Fukuyama’s essay, ‘The End of History?’
(1989), argued that the eastern European revolutions indicated that
the history of ideas had ended with the recognition of liberal
democracy as the ‘final form of human government’. In Trust (1996)
and The Great Disruption (1999), he discussed the relationship
between economic development and social cohesion, highlighting
contrasting forms of capitalist development. In After the Neocons
(2006), Fukuyama developed a post-9/11 critique of US foreign
policy.

SCIENCE
A method of acquiring knowledge through a process of careful observation and the testing of hypotheses
by reproducible experiments.

However, science is not the antithesis of ideology, but can perhaps be seen as
an ideology in its own right. For example, science has been linked to powerful
social forces, in particular those represented by industry and technology.
Scientism could therefore be viewed as the ideology of the technocratic elite, its
main beneficiary being the transnational corporations that are increasingly
responsible for funding scientific and technological developments. Moreover,
significant ideological controversy has surrounded the advance of science. This
can be seen in the case of some ecologists, who view science and technology as
the source of the environmental crisis. Multiculturalists and religious
fundamentalists, for their part, have sometimes interpreted rationalism as a form
of cultural imperialism, on the grounds that it undermines faith-based belief
systems and helps to strengthen western and often materialist modes of
understanding.

The resilience of ideology

However, each of these versions of endism has one thing in common: they are
conducted within an ongoing framework of ideological thinking. In different
ways, each of them heralds the demise of ideology by highlighting the triumph
of a particular ideological tradition, be it welfare capitalism, liberal democracy,
postmodernism or scientism. Rather than demonstrating the weakened grasp of
ideology, endism in fact shows its remarkable resilience and robustness. Once
invented, ideological politics has proved stubbornly resistant to being
disinvented.
What, nevertheless, is the source of ideology’s survival and success? The first
answer to this question is undoubtedly its flexibility, the fact that ideological
traditions and forms go through a seemingly endless process of redefinition and
renewal, and, if necessary, new ideologies emerge as old ones fade or fail. The
world of ideologies thus does not stand still, but changes in response to changing
social and historical circumstances. The second and deeper explanation is that,
as the principal source of meaning and idealism in politics, ideology touches
those aspects of politics that other political form cannot reach. In effect, ideology
gives people a reason to believe in something larger than themselves, because
people’s personal narratives only make sense when they are situated within a
broader historical narrative. A post-ideological age would therefore be an age
without hope, without vision. This is evident in modern, ‘de-ideologized’ party
politics, in which, as parties of both left and right become detached from their
ideological roots, they lose their sense of purpose and direction, failing to
provide members and supporters alike with a basis for emotional attachment. As
parties come to sell ‘products’ (leaders or policies) rather than hopes or dreams,
party membership and voter turnout both fall, and politicians become
increasingly desperate to re-engage with the ‘vision thing’. By creating an
appetite for the resurgence of ideology, post-ideological politics contains the
seeds of its own undoing, a tendency that helps to explain, for instance, the rise
of both right- and left-wing populism (see p. 85) in the period since the 2007–9
global financial crisis. For this, if for no other reason, political ideology is
destined to be a continuing and unending process.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

What were the flaws of the ‘end of ideology’ thesis?

Why have ‘end of history’ theorists viewed liberal democracy as the
final solution to the problem of governance?
Could history ever come to an end?
Can intellectuals rise above ideology?
Why have postmodernists proclaimed the death of ‘metanarratives’?
Is the left/right divide now redundant?
Can science be thought of as an ideological tradition?
To what extent has ideology created a worldwide language of political
discourse?
Is ideology a help or a hindrance to a political party?
Can politics exist without ideology?
Does ideology enlighten or delude?

FURTHER READING
Freeden, M., Reassessing Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent (2001). A volume of essays that
consider and reassess the major ideological traditions in a so-called ‘post-ideological’ age.

Gamble, A., Politics and Fate (2000). A defence of politics and the political that reflects the source of
disenchantment with politics and the endless discourses on ‘endism’.

Gray, J., Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (1997). A fascinating and insightful
discussion of the condition of the major ideological traditions as they confront the collapse of the
‘Enlightenment project’.
Shtromas, A. (ed.), The End of ‘isms’? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism’s
Collapse (1994). A collection of considered and carefully argued essays on the state of and future
prospects for the politics of ideology after the collapse of communism.