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The End of Ideology Revisited (Part I*)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Daniel Bell
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Extract

THERE ARE SOME BOOKS THAT ARE BETTER KNOWN FOR their titles than their contents. Mine is one of them. Various critics, usually from the Left, pointed to the upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s as disproof of the book's thesis. Others saw the work as an ‘ideological’ defence of ‘technocratic’ thinking, or of the ‘status quo’. A few, even more ludicrously, believed that the book attacked the role of ideals in politics. It was none of these.

The frame of the book was set by its sub-title, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Yet the last section looked ahead. After observing young left-wing intellectuals express repeated yearnings for ideology, I said that new inspirations, new ideologies, and new identifications would come from the Third World.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1988 , pp. 131 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1988

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References

1 The charade continues. Professor Quentin Skinner, in his introduction to a 1985 volume on ‘Grand Theory’, writes of the ‘notorious title of Daniel Bell’s’, the claim that ‘“the end of ideology” had been reached’, which Skinner equates with the belief that political philosophy is finished and that one should ‘get on … with the purportedly value-neutral task of constructing … “empirical” theories of social behaviour …’ Skinner, Quentin (ed.), The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

2 Camus, Albert, ‘Ni Victimes, Ni Bourreaux’, in Actuelles; Chroniques 1944—1948, Paris, 1950 Google Scholar. The essay first appeared in the newspaper Combat in November 1946, and was reprinted in Politics, July-August, 1947, translated by Dwight Macdonald, under the title ‘Neither Victims, Nor Executioners’. The essay was republished as a brochure by Continuum Books, New York, 1980, with an introduction by Robert Pickus. The quotations here are from p. 39 and p. 36 of that edition.

3 This mode of analysis underlies my two books of the 1970s, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. And it is most strongly exemplified in the discussion of ‘secularization’ in my Hobhouse lecture, ‘The Return of the Sacred’. There I argued that the term ‘secularization’, which most sociological commentators use to describe the modern Western world, confuses changes in two different realms: in the institutional realm, where there is a shrinking role of ecclesiastical authority, and changes on the level of beliefs. But the rise and fall of belief systems in religion do not derive from the change in the institutions. Thus I divide my analysis, using the terms sacred and secular to deal with institutions, and holy and profane for the character of beliefs. The lecture is reprinted in my book of essays, The Winding Passage (1980).

4 These ideas were first expressed in an essay in 1944 and noticed by my friend Richard Hofstadter, who later wrote:

‘It is characteristic of the indulgence which Populism has received on this count that Carey McWilliams in his A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston, 1948) deals with early American anti-Semitism simply as an upper-class phenomenon. In his historical account of the rise of anti-Semitism he does not mention the Greenback-Populist tradition. Bell, Daniel: “The Grass Roots of American Jew Hatred”, Jewish Frontier, Vol. XI, 06 1944, pp. 15—20Google Scholar, is one of the few writers who has perceived that there is any relation between latter-day anti-Semites and the earlier Populist tradition.’ ( Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform, New York, Knopf, 1955, n. 3, pp. 80–81.Google Scholar)

5 The last pages of Weber’s essay had always seemed to me to be a ‘hidden dialogue’ with a younger man who was taking the political step of ‘ultimate ends’ that Weber disapproved of In my essay ‘First Love and Early Sorrow’, Partisan Review, No. 4, 1981, I have told of the unravelling of this ‘moral detective story’, and the uncovering ofthat hidden face — Georg Lukács.

6 The Yale speech is in: Kennedy, John F., Public Papers of the Presidents of the US, US Government Printing Office, 1963. No. 234 Commencement Address at Yale University, 11 06, 1962, pp. 470–475.Google Scholar

7 Two books published toward the end of the decade collected some of the major essays and exchanges. These were: Waxman, Chaim L. (ed.), The End of Ideology Debate, New York, 1968 Google Scholar and Rejai, M. (ed.), Decline of Ideology?, Chicago, 1971 Google Scholar. The Waxman book collected the major polemical exchanges; the Rejai volume, somewhat sympathetic to the thesis, brought together essays from Finland, the Netherlands, Japan and Europe, to provide some empirical evidence, as well as some critiques.

The book, and my work in general, have prompted a large number of Ph.D. theses, particularly in recent years, and a fair number have been published. These include: JobDittberner, L., The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, Ann Arbor, Michigan, UMI Research Press, 1970;Google Scholar Kleinberg, Benjamin S., American Society in the Post-Industrial Age: Technocracy, Power and the End of Ideology, Columbus, Ohio, Charles E. Merrill Publishing, 1973;Google Scholar Bloom, Alexander, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals, Oxford University Press, 1986;Google Scholar Liebowitz, Nathan, Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism, Greenwood Press, 1986;Google Scholar and Brick, Howard, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.Google Scholar

The particular thesis I advanced about the fate of socialism in the US, in the Princeton monograph, and in chapter twelve of this volume, has itself provoked a large scholarly literature. A major collection of these essays is in the volume, Failure of a Dream? Essays in History of American Socialism, edited by Laslett, John H.M. and Lipset, Seymour M., Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York, 1974.Google Scholar See, in particular, my essay ‘The Problem of Ideological Rigidity’, a reprise of the essay in this volume, plus the subsequent exchange between Laslett and myself. Laslett acknowledges that ‘Bell’s major argument … is probably the most influential attempt to explain the failure of American socialism to appear in the last twenty years …, (ibid. p. 112).

S.M. Lipset has written voluminously on the theme of the end of ideology. Many of these essays are collected in the expanded and updated edition of Political Man, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1981, especially Ch. 13 and Ch. 15, ‘A Concept and its History: The End of Ideology’.

8 In 1925, in his book Whither England, Trotsky predicted that the next, and perhaps final, war of capitalist society would be between the United States and Great Britain, for these were the last two major capitalist countries in the world, and since the US was undermining British financial supremacy the two would come into deeper conflict as a result.

9 In this book, I wrote:

‘There is now more than ever some need for Utopia, in the sense that men need — as they have always needed — some vision of their potential, some manner of fusing passion with intelligence….The ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a “faith ladder”, but an empirical one; a Utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for, the determination of who is to pay.’ (See p. 405.)

10 Aiken’s essay, ‘The Revolt Against Ideology’, appeared in the April 1964 issue of Commentary and was followed by an exchange in October 1964. These are reprinted in the Waxman volume, op. cit.

11 This simplistic doctrine ‘moral equivalence’ is particularly meretricious, especially about the 1950s. In the Soviet Union, Stalin had renewed the crackdown on dissent and Andrei Zhdanov had reinstated the orthodoxy of ‘socialist realism’, denouncing, for example, the great poet Anna Akhmatova, whose poems about Leningrad had helped inspire the defence of the city, as ‘half-nun, half-whore’. After the war, the Jewish artists Feffer and Michoels, who had organized the anti-Fascist resistance, were executed, along with Bergelson, Markish and other noted Jewish writers. And we know that Stalin was preparing a ‘show trial’ of sixteen Jewish doctors from the Kremlin hospital, with plans for public executions, a new campaign of anti-semitism and mass deportation of Jews from major cities, a grisly plan aborted by Stalin’s death in 1953.

Throughout Eastern Europe there were new purges and show trials. In Czechoslovakia, following the takeover of the country and the defenestration of Jan Masaryk in 1948, the Czech and Slovak party leaders, Rudolf Slansky and Vlada Clementis, along with a dozen others, ‘confessed’ to being Zionist agents in league with R.H. Crossman and Koni Zilliacus, left-wing leaders of the British Labour Party, and were hanged. (The episodes are related in the book by Artur London, one of the survivors, and dramatized in the film of Costas Garvas, L’Aveu, The Confession.) Similar trials were held in Hungary and Bulgaria, resulting in the execution of Laszlo Rajk and Nikola Petkov, the agrarian leader.

The full history of those events still has not been told. This was an aspect of the Cold War not discussed by Mills, nor by most of those in the New Left, even though many resigned from the Communist Parties after 1956.

l2 Mills’s ‘Letter’ is reprinted in Waxman, op. cit., pp 126–140. I replied in Encounter, December 1960, under the title ‘From Vulgar Marxism to Vulgar Sociology’. It is reprinted in my book of essays, The Winding Passage, New York, Basic Books, 1980. There is a critical account of Mills by Irving Louis Horowitz, (C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian, The Free Press, 1983), who had been one of his literary executors. That book contains a discussion of my early friendship and relation with Mills, whom I first published in The New Leader, in 1942.

13 The irony—again, for irony is the hallmark of this period — is that Newton and Cleaver were both employed on a US government community agency project, while fashioning their ideas and spreading their propaganda. Stalin had to rob banks to gain funds for the revolution, but he lived under a reactionary Tsar; Newton and Cleaver were more fortunate in living under advanced capitalism. White liberals on Park Avenue rushed to throw fund-raising parties for the Black Panthers, a phenomenon savaged in Tom Wolfe’s memorable essay ‘Radical Chic’.

14 The administration, in order to reduce opposition, initiated a system of rotation so that no individual served longer than 18 months in Vietnam. The effect, however, was to widen the pool of eligible persons who could be called up and to diminish the motivations of those in Vietnam as they neared the end of their tour of duty.

15 As I wrote in 1969:

The SDS will be destroyed by its style. It lives on turbulence, but is incapable of transforming its chaotic impulses into the systematic responsible behavior that is necessary to effect broad societal change. In fact, its very style denies the desirability of such conduct, for like many chiliastic sects its ideological antinomianism carries over into a similar psychological temper, or rather distemper. It is impelled not to innovation, but to destruction. (From ‘Columbia and The New Left’, The Public Interest, Fall, 1968, reprinted in Bell, Daniel and Kristol, Irving, Confrontations: The Universities, New York, Basic Books, 1969, p. 106.)Google Scholar

16 As Raymond Aron wrote, reflecting on these debates:

‘No one has refuted the diagnosis — that there is no ideological system extant to replace Marxist-Leninism if and when it dies out. What events have contradicted is the apparent if not explicit confusion among doctrinal systematization of ideology, fanaticism and chiliasm. At the same time, themes of social protest forgotten during the cold war overshadowed by the economic success of the West have acquired new currency. Thus, the weakening of the last great ideological system did not promote a pragmatic approach to politics but, quite to the contrary, encouraged wide-spread social protest …’ ( Aron, Raymond, ‘On the Proper Use of Ideologies’, in Culture and its Creators, Essays in Honor oj Edward Shih, edited by Ben-David, Joseph and Clark, Terry Nichols, University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 3).Google Scholar