American Politics and the End of Ideology

Abstract

tN A COLLECTION of essays written over a ten-year period, | Daniel Belll hails the end of ideology. In a similar volume of Spreviously published essays, Seymour Martin Lipset2 joins Bell in the apotheosis of a non-committed scientism, or what amounts to pragmatism leached of all its passion for meaningful social reform. This growing litany in the United States, on the European Continent, and in England, in praise of the status quo continues to remain, in its own image, inherently liberal. It is convinced that democracy today has solved all the major problems of industrial society, and that those which do remain are of a second order magnitude involving merely technical adjustments within a now prevailing consensus gentium. If modern liberalism has thus been recast into a less critical mould, it is because of its conviction that modern democracy is the good society. Lipset makes this very clear in the epilogue to his book. 'Democracy', he writes, 'is not only or even primarily a means through which different groups can attain their ends or seek the good society; it is the good society itself in operation.' 3 More explicitly, we are told by Lipset that within the Western democracies 'serious intellectual conflicts among groups representing different values have declined sharply'; that 'the ideological issues dividing left and right [have] been reduced to a little more or a little less government ownership and economic planning'; and that it really makes little difference 'which political party controls the domestic policies of individual nations'. All this, according to Lipset, 'reflects the fact that the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved: the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship; the conservatives have accepted the welfare state; and the democratic left has recognized that an increase in over-all state power carries with it more dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems'.4 In this milieu intellectuals functioning as critics of society have become disaffected, according to Lipset, because 'domestic politics, even 347