Ideology, Openness and Freedom

Abstract

In the 1950s and the early 1960s it was believed that political theory in a learned sense was dead and that the practical influence of political ideas was dying. This was the time of Daniel Bell’s book, The End of Ideology, of which it is fair to say that the title was more influential than the contents. It was widely believed that ideological motivations in politics were happily on the wane, that “new technocrats” had come to positions of political power, not merely in the Western world, and that political philosophy had become purely academic and historical. But this has proved an illusion, or rather it always all depended on what one meant by “ideology.” Certainly there was a decline in ideology of the total and comprehensive kind typical of social thought as influenced by Hegel and Marx and typical of the actual politics of the 1930s. But ideology in that sense has not been replaced by purely technological, empirical or pragmatic thought — if such things could ever have been said to exist in purity.