Bell's End of Ideology remains important in its own right (as the Harvard University Press recognized by reprinting it two years ago), as a statement of the postwar liberal mood. An exploration of Bell's thought then and since offers significant insight into the dwindling fortunes of liberalism.
The End of Ideology reflected and summarized in its title the dominant strain of though among postwar political intellectuals. These were the men and women of the non-Communist Left, resolutely anti-Stalinist, many of them chastened by their dabbling during the Thirties and Forties with the god that failed. Newly converted to a political sensibility rooted in "complexity, irony, ambiguity, and paradox," they swore never again to make of their politics a substitute for religious faith, and they declared "an end to chiliastic hope. Bell defined ideology as "a set of beliefs, infused with passion [that] seeks to transform the whole of a way of life." Bell, Daniel., 1960
Bell's work described and celebrated a new mood of American exceptionalism and of intellectual "consensus" on a mildly social-democratic mix of the welfare state, decentralized power, a mixed economy, and political pluralism.
Social and intellectual context in the USA in the 1950s
The United States played the principal role in reconstituting a viable international order in the years following World War II. No posture of geopolitical detachment was sustainable in the face of the Soviet led communist challenge taking shape at a time when the traditional great powers of Europe were on the defensive. Once again the juridical view of order was quickly superseded by geopolitical exigencies. The United Nations became a partisan arena in which majorities could be routinely mobilized in support of American political goals.
In American, the need to contain communist power took priority over legalistic considerations and idealistic hopes, especially after.....
