Lexington The end of ideology

摘要

Forty-five years ago one of America's great public intellectuals, Daniel Bell, published a big, fat book with a big, bold title: "The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties" argued that the great ideologies that had dominated intellectual life since the Victorian era-Marxism, liberalism and conservatism-had all lost their power to grip people's minds and stir their emotions. Few liberals any longer believed in huge social engineering projects; and few conservatives believed that the welfare state was the second-to-last stop on "the road to serfdom". The future lay with technocrats rather than ideologies, with pragmatists who prefer itty-bitty ideas to bold blueprints.