Define ideology. Critically examine the “End of Ideology”. Debate (2001)
Ideology has no settled definition because the word does two jobs: it unmasks (the critical sense) and it classifies (the neutral sense). Whether ideology can “end” depends on which sense is meant, and the End of Ideology thesis drew its force from quietly moving between them.
Defining Ideology
- Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined idéologie in 1796 for a rational science of ideas; Napoleon’s sneer at the “ideologues” gave it its pejorative edge.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (The German Ideology, 1845–46) made it a critical concept: the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, and reality appears inverted as in a camera obscura. False consciousness is Engels’s later term.
- Karl Mannheim (Ideology and Utopia, 1929) generalised this: all thought is situationally determined. Ideology stabilises the existing order, while utopia seeks to transcend it.
- Louis Althusser (1970) made it structural: ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, reproduced by ideological state apparatuses such as the school.
- Martin Seliger (Ideology and Politics, 1976) gave the inclusive definition: a set of ideas by which people posit, explain and justify the ends and means of organised social action, whether to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild an order.
Working definition: an action-oriented belief system with an account of the present, a picture of the good society and a theory of how to get there.
The Thesis at Its Strongest
- Daniel Bell (The End of Ideology, 1960) claimed less than his title. Total ideologies, all-explaining secular religions, had lost their hold on Western intellectuals after fascism, Stalinism and post-war affluence. Politics had narrowed to questions of degree within a welfare-state consensus.
- Seymour Martin Lipset (Political Man, 1960) and the convergence theorists added that industrialism imposes common technocratic structures whatever the creed.
- Much of it held. No major party in a developed democracy now proposes comprehensive public ownership, and independent central banks, regulators and courts have removed large areas of policy from partisan contest.
Critique
- Itself an ideology. Alasdair MacIntyre (1971) saw the thesis as an expression of the ideology of its time and place. Marxists added that declaring an argument over is the surest way to win it.
- A settlement mistaken for a terminus. The consensus rested on high growth and full employment; when they ended, the New Left and then the New Right of Thatcher and Reagan revived programmatic conflict.
- Parochial. Nationalism and planning organised the decolonising world. India’s quarrel continues in its Constitution: the Supreme Court in Dr Balram Singh v Union of India (November 2024) upheld the words “socialist” and “secular” added to the Preamble in 1976.
- A contest confused with the category. Only the argument over ownership quietened. On Michael Freeden‘s account ideology is unavoidable, since using political concepts means fixing their contested meanings. It migrated to identity, religion and ecology, and Cas Mudde now reads populism as a thin-centred ideology.
Conclusion
The thesis is right as a description of one decade, wrong as a prophecy and ideological as a self-image. Ideology in Seliger’s inclusive sense cannot end while politics lasts; it has changed form, becoming thinner and organised around identity rather than economic design.