The End of Ideology Revisited—Part II

In the twenty-five years since The End of Ideology was published, the concept of ideology has unravelled completely. What is not considered an ideology today? Ideas, ideals, beliefs, creeds, passions, values, Weltanschauungen , religions, political philosophies, moral systems, linguistic discourses — all have been pressed into service. One hears about ‘communism and capitalism as competing ideologies’, and ‘the failure of the United States [before Reagan] to develop an ideology’. In an essay in the Partisan Review , ideology is defined as ‘fantasy cast in the form of assertion’, a loose and associative form of thought, ‘sharing qualities with pornography …’. A front-page essay in the Times Literary Supplement on pre-Christian religious thought talks of the effects of ‘hostile ideologies (i.e. early Epicureanism) on Christian apologists’. And a book on military strategy is entitled The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disaster of 1914 .