The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties is a book by Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor emeritus at Harvard University, best known for his seminal contributions to the study of post-industrialism...

, first published in 1960, in which he suggests that the older grand humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are exhausted, and that new more parochial ideologies will soon arise.

• ISBN 0-674-00426-4

Daniel Bell once described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." In this collection of essays, he argued that political ideology has become irrelevant among "sensible" people, and that the polity of the future would be driven by piecemeal technological adjustments of the extant system.

At the time, Bell was attacked by political critics, left-wing and otherwise. Broadly speaking, hostile criticism of The End of Ideology boiled down to five general concerns:

• It was a defense of the post-1945 status quo.
• It was downplaying genuine political debate in favor of 'technocratic guidance' from social and cultural elites.
• It was substituting consensus for moral discourse.
• Its intellectual honesty was compromised by its author's outspoken anti-Stalinism. [He had been a social democrat in his youth.]
• It was disproven by the return of radical discontentment in politics, marked by the 1960s and 1970s youth agitations in the West and the rise of extremist politics in the Third World. (Actually, Bell anticipated this in his book. He did, however, fail to anticipate the resurgence of "free market" ideology in the 1970s.)

Theory

A variety of theories have emerged, even before Daniel Bell's work. Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

, influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...

, stated that once a state progressed from capitalism, a classless society would emerge, rendering ideology irrelevant. Daniel Bell, in the 1950s, is often seen as the standard-bearer for the theory. James Burnham

James Burnham

James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...

, a journalist for the National Review, proffered a similar thesis that foresaw the advent of a state of technocrats, all capable of finding the best answers to political and social problems, making ideology extinct.

See also

• The End of History and the Last Man
  The End of History and the Last Man
  The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay "The End of History?", published in the international affairs journal The National Interest...
  
  
• Francis Fukuyama
  Francis Fukuyama
  Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of...
  
  
• Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...