Raptures and Ruptures: Ideology in Late 20th, Early 21st Century Western Liberalism

Abstract

Proponents of liberal democracy like to argue that their polity is unquestionable superior to alternatives. However, faced with evidence of what Larry Diamond has called a global ‘democratic recession,’ liberals in the early 21st century are at pains to re-assert that their commitments are correct. Part of this exercise involves re-evaluating the concept of ideology, presuming that faulty or mistaken beliefs are central drivers to the aforementioned recession. Yet, there is little introspection by liberals about the ideological components of the social of structure a procedural republic, the bureaucracy of evidence based public policy, principles like the equality of opportunity, or the analysis of history. In this paper, I survey these fields to show the faults in the conceptual stance of contemporary Western liberal social theory.