End of Ideology debate. (UPSC CSE Mains 2019 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1).
- The concept of ‘end of ideology’ debate implies that at the advanced stage of industrial growth, a country’s social-economic organisation is determined by the level of its development, and not by any political ideology. Edward Shils reported it as ‘The End of Ideology’.’ This has been argued on two occasions. The first occasion was in the 1950s when an argument was put forward as the ‘end-of-ideology’ thesis. The second occasion has produced the ‘end-of-history’ thesis which first appeared in 1989, and is still the subject of fierce debate.
- The best-known proponents of ‘end-of-ideology’ thesis are: Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-) (Political Man, 1959) and Daniel Bell (The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, i960) For the first time, Lipset offered the version of ‘end-of-ideology’ thesis that was later espoused by Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and Raymond Aron.
- For Lipset, post-war societies in the West eliminate the functional need for ideologies since they have solved the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution that generated these ideologies. Daniel Bell pointed out that in the Western World ‘there is today rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralised power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism. In that sense to the ideological age has ended.’ Ralph Dahrendorf found that formerly capitalist societies have become ‘post-capitalist societies’.
- In these societies conflicts are confined within the borders of their proper realm, and do not influence politics and other spheres of social life. Daniel Bell postulated that the older humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exhausted, and that new parochial ideologies would arise. He argues that with the end of communism, we are seeing a resumption of history, a lifting of the heavy ideological blanket and the return of traditional ethnic and religious conflicts in the many regions of the former socialist states and elsewhere.
- In his Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) Seymour M. Lipset observed that ‘democracy is not only 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’. Intellectuals now realise that they no longer need ideologies or Utopias to motivate them to political action.
- W. Rostow, in his The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960) built a unidimensional model of economic growth which was applicable to all countries irrespective of their political ideologies. J.K. Galbraith, in his The New Industrial State (1967), identified certain characteristics of advanced industrial societies which corresponded to the thesis of end of ideology
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