Philosophy, politics and society

The introduction to each of the three previous volumes of Philosophy, Politics and Society has included a more or less anxious report on the health of theoretical reflection about social and political issues. The patient was at first taken for dead, and even though this announcement later came to seem a trifle premature, the introductions to both the suc ceeding volumes continued to voice considerable doubts about the prospect of any complete recovery.
The main lesson might perhaps be summarized as the need for greater self-awareness about the difficulty of giving any uncontentious and value-neutral statement of 'the facts' about moral and political issues. The end-of-ideology theorists took themselves simply to be examining and commenting on the most striking facts about the political structures of Western democracies at the time: their combination of a high degree of governmental stability with a high degree of popular apathy. Their equation of these undoubted facts, however, with 'the end of ideology' compromised their status as neutral observers in at least two ways. First, they failed to allow for the possibility (or rather the fact, as it has turned out) that the correct interpretation of the fact of widespread political apathy was that a number of minority groups could not see how to schedule their wants within the given political systems, rather than that they felt any very deep with these systems themselves. Secondly, they failed to recognize the extent to which their own allegedly neutral reflections about the value of political stability and consensus were themselves the expression of a particular ideological commitment. As their shrewdest critics (such as Partridge)¹ noticed even at the time, it was the very fact of consensus amongst the pundits to the effect that (as Lipset notoriously put it) 'the good society itself had already been achieved which gave them the comforting illusion that ideological debate was at an end, while allowing them at the same time, under the guise of offering value-free political analysis, to insist on the overriding value of a set of conservative political prin ciples. In short, it is doubtful if ideology could end, and it certainly never did.