The End of Ideology?  The “end of ideology” was declared by social scientists in the aftermath of World War II.  They argued that ordinary citizens’ political attitudes lack the kind of stability, consistency, and constraint that ideology requires.  The end of ideology was declared more than a generation ago by sociologists and political scientists who—after the titanic struggle between the ideological extremes of fascism and communism in the middle of the 20th century—were more than glad to see it go.

 The general thesis of these authors was that in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War, both the right and the left had been equally discredited and that “a kind of exhaustion of political ideas” had taken place in the West.  Ideological distinctions, it was suggested, were devoid of social and psychological significance for most people, especially in the United States.  There were 4 related claims that led to the end of ideology conclusion.

 The first claim has arguably had the greatest impact within psychology, and it grew out of Converse’s (1964) famous argument that ordinary citizens’ political attitudes lack the kind of logical consistency and internal coherence that would be expected if they were neatly organized according to ideological schemata.  A second and related claim is that most people are unmoved by ideological appeals and that abstract credos associated with liberalism and conservatism lack motivational potency and behavioral significance.  The third claim is that there are really no substantive differences in terms of philosophical or ideological content between liberal and conservative points of view.

 A fourth claim, which first emerged as a criticism of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, is that there are no fundamental psychological differences between proponents of left-wing and right-wing ideologies.  An ideology is an organization of beliefs and attitudes— religious, political, or philosophical in nature—that is more or less institutionalized or shared with others, deriving from external authority.  Ideologies are broad and general, pervade wide areas of belief and behavior, and give core meaning to many issues of human concern.  They unify thought and action.

 A major claim advanced by the end-of-ideologists was that ideology had lost its capacity to inspire collective action.  In 1960 the American sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology.  Almost immediately the book produced an outcry and sparked a debate (that is still on-going) about the future of ideology.  Bell argued that ideological disputation had been replaced by ‘limited technocratic disputes over problem-solving in industrial societies’.  Bell draws an important distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideologies.

 He describes the ‘old ideologies’ as those that emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century: they were ‘universalistic, humanistic and fashioned by intellectuals’.  Their ‘driving force’ was social equality, and the goal was freedom.  These were ideologies characterized by ideas of revolution, of action and of social transformation.  When Bell talks about the end of ideology, then, he means the end of these nineteenth-century ideologies that have informed politics in the West.  But which ones were they? These were the ideologies of the left, or rather, of Marxism in particular.

The End of History or We’re all Liberals Now!  Fukuyama’s book is titled, «The End of History and the Last Man» (1992).  For Fukuyama, the end of history is not the end of political events; it is the triumph of liberalism over other competing ideologies in the march of history towards its goal: fascism and Nazism were defeated after the Second World War; communism in the Eastern bloc was disintegrating; the fortunes of communist and socialist parties throughout Europe were waning; liberal capitalism was spreading throughout Asia, with some notable successes in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan; and the Chinese economy was becoming increasingly commercialized.

 Socialism, once a viable global alternative to liberalism, had been discredited.  Those ideologies that persisted, such as nationalism and (religious/Islamic) fundamentalism, were merely local phenomena without the capacity for universalization that would establish them as serious contenders to liberalism.  The liberal state and capitalist economics had prevailed.  As Fukuyama himself avers, the ‘notion of an end of history is not an original one’.  Although its most famous proponent is Marx, it derives from the work of G. W. F. Hegel.

 According to Hegel, history is an evolutionary process moving towards a final culmination.  In contrast to Marx, who focuses attention on material production and class conflict, Hegel’s theory is idealist, that is, it focuses on developments in the realm of consciousness or what Hegel terms Geist, meaning ‘mind’ or ‘Spirit’.  History is thus the progress of Geist along a logically necessary path leading to the goal of freedom.  Francis Fukuyama, in his book, argues that there are 2 factors leading to the cessation of history and to the attainment of liberalism.

 The first is natural science and the second, the human struggle for recognition.  It is, in particular, the connection between natural science and the development of technology that is crucial.  This guarantees human progression towards liberal democracy.  How? First, nations possessed of technology are militarily superior to those without it.  It guarantees their independence and thus their security.  Secondly, technological advance has beneficial effects on economic development.

 Technology allows the continued accumulation of wealth and the satisfaction of continually expanding material desires.  What is more, this process leads to the homogenization of societies; that is, all economically modernized societies, despite national and cultural variation, resemble one another.  The logic of scientific or technological development pushes all states towards a universal consumer culture – guaranteed by the globalization of markets.  Thus, it is that societies will all eventually become capitalist.

 The second factor as Hegel argues the essence of man is the desire to be recognized as fully human by others.  As Fukuyama puts it, liberal society is a ‘reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other’; liberalism is the ‘pursuit of rational recognition’.  Liberalism is the only ideology that can guarantee the universal recognition of humanity.  The spread of capitalism and of liberal democracy around the globe indicates to Fukuyama the necessary logic of historical development as more and more countries move towards the End of History.

 The spread may be uneven (some states remain in History while others are post-historical) but in the West history has ended.  There are no ideologies remaining that can compete with liberalism.  Fukuyama’s intervention generated considerable interest, but not all of it favorable.  Charges of inconsistency were levelled at his argument critics contended that Fukuyama was simply defending the ideological status quo whilst others challenged the idea that the demise of communism meant the end of socialism as such.

 Two sets of criticism are of particular interest, though.  Fukuyama, as we have seen, yokes together capitalism and liberalism in his account of historical development.  There is, however, a question mark hanging over the potential for continued economic expansion across the globe that challenges Fukuyama’s claim that people’s material desires can be endlessly sated.  As many environmentalists and ecologists have pointed out, present levels of capitalist development are just not sustainable.  They threaten the very existence of humanity.

 The American political scientist Samuel Huntington accuses Fukuyama of failing to realize that developments in the West are not ‘universal’ developments that the rest of the world will inevitably follow.  Counter posing the triumph of liberalism against the decline of communism merely perpetuates Cold War thinking and ignores what is happening elsewhere in the world, where religion, in particular, is ‘a, or perhaps the, central force that motivates and mobilizes people’.  For Huntington future conflicts will be based around ‘cultural’ factors, that is, clashes between different civilizations over questions of ethnicity, religion, and so on.  The wars in the Gulf and in Bosnia seem to confirm this.

 Significantly, for Huntington, the clash of civilizations also includes the rejection by many non-Western nations of Western values (including those of capitalism and democracy).  This is a position Huntington regards as typified by Islam.  In the light of September 11 this is a prescient observation.  Recall that Al Qaeda not only ‘bombed’ the ‘liberal’ United States but by targeting the World Trade Center, it also attacked capitalism, symbolically at least.

 Bell operates with a conception of ideology as a method of assessing ‘conflicting claims about the reality of social structures’, by comparison, Fukuyama treats ideologies as competing sets of values and ideas about how one ought to live one’s life.  When each talks about the end of ideology, they talk therefore about different things.