“History Without Ideology”: Daniel Zamora Vargas on Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer’s *Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours*

In a passage of the manuscripts of The German Ideology (1846) Marx argued that ideology had “no history”. It’s their social being, as he famously wrote, that determines man’s consciousness and not the other way around. In other words, it would be impossible to write a history of ideology on its own terms as its truth always lies outside it. That, as Engels himself had anticipated, meant that in a classless society ideology could end as there would be no need for false consciousness. One question remained however opened; if ideology could end, could History unfold without ideology? Could we envision the end of ideology without the end of History?

To such a question, the sociologist Daniel Bell (1919-2011), arguably one of the most influential intellectuals of his time, offered a quite original answer. In a 2000 foreword to his famous The End of Ideology (1960) he argued that, “though the two would seem to be similar they are, in fact, apart”[1]. Contrary to Fukuyama’s thesis Bell added, we were living “the resumption of history” while ideology had “run its course”[2]. Conceived in a narrower sense than for Marx, ideology emerged for Bell in the wake of the breakup of religion after the French Revolution, as a great cross over between culture and politics. It was politics played out “in religious terms” or, alternatively, religion played out “in secular terms”.[3] Therefore, if great historical turning points were far from over, they would no longer be shaped by totalizing systems and eschatological beliefs. In such a world, the politics of passion that was characteristic of the industrial age would give place to a very different kind of decision making. Instead of irrational impulses, society could finally transcend ideological barriers and open a space for reasoned public debate[4]. Such a view, along with his earlier involvement with the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the fifties, would rapidly shape the Harvard sociologist reputation as a technocrat and a conservative. A proponent of “political complacency” aimed to “acquiesce in or to justify the status quo” as C. Wright Mills notoriously argued in his Letter to the New Left[5].

But twelve years after he passed away at the age of ninety-one, and forty-six years after he published his last major intellectual contribution The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), what remains of Bell’s intellectual legacy? This question is the object of the recently edited Defining the Age. Daniel Bell, his Time and Ours (2022), by the sociologist Paul Starr and historian Julian E. Zelizer. Published in the aftermath of a conference organized for the one-hundredth anniversary of Bell’s birth, the contributions of the volume offer an enlightening exploration of his ideas in their historical context and an original attempt to revisit his insights for our time. Divided in four parts organized thematically (biographical, on politics and ideology, on the post-industrial society and on capitalism and culture), the volume invites us to revisit Bell’s career, depicting a far more complex figure than a straightforward “neoconservative” or “cold war liberal”. Spanning from his early years as a socialist activist to his strong rejection of the late sixties’ counterculture, the collection succeeds in capturing the rich intellectual journey of Bell’s incredibly wide range of interests.

The two opening chapters are particularly useful for grasping what Bell meant when he famously characterized himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture”–the first, a recollection of souvenirs written by his son, David A. Bell, beautifully illustrates Bell’s ideas throughout his life. A mix of orthodox Jewish education and New York Yiddish radicalism, his politics were never a settled thing. In fact, the early socialist always cohabited with the moderate liberal. As Starr convincingly argues in his enlightening chapter, Bell never regretted his early encounter with Marx, as a member of the youth movement of the Socialist Party in the thirties. Marx, he thought, was “the most profound social analyst he had ever encountered” (43). And while he shared with early neoconservatives a radical distaste for popular culture, the Great Society programs and the radicalism of the sixties – that he qualified, in a distinctively Aronian tone, as “a longing for the lost gratifications of an idealized childhood” – he never rejected his social democratic anchorage.

But as the contribution of Stephen Eich interestingly shows, Bell’s views on social policy definitely moved towards a more market friendly framework by that period. In line with market socialists such as Abba P. Lerner or modernized Keynesians like Paul A. Samuelson, it seemed obvious to Bell that we could reconcile the price mechanism with the increase of welfare. Already in 1963, in an introduction he wrote to Vleben’s The Engineers and the Price System, Bell had made it clear that socialists had to reconciled themselves with the superior allocative efficiency of the price system over classical socialist planning. “It is (…) evident that any complex planning mechanism seeking to distribute resources efficiently” he argued in an almost Hayekian tone, “can do so best, as even the socialist economies have discovered, only through a price system”[6]. In that sense, if Starr rightly points out that Bell’s idea of the post-industrial society wasn’t neoliberal, he definitely moved outside of the traditional socialist framework and his social democracy was definitely of neoclassical bent. “One can use” Bell noted, “the use of the market principle – the price mechanism-for social purposes”. Instead of the service-based approach of the great society, Bell thought that one can give “people money and [let] them buy the services they need in accordance with their diverse needs”[7], offering a perfect third way between, as Eich noted, “liberal calls for state action and conservative pleas for free enterprise” (303). Like many neoclassical economists of that period, Bell tended to argue that only the market could respond to the diversity of individual preferences contrary to what Anthony Downs termed the “eye of uniformity” that characterized government goods. Along a broader strand of modernized social democrats, he advocated a path where competition, price signals and market incentives could become forces for the common good, radically narrowing the field of social policy.

Of course, as the book convincingly argues, Bell didn’t envision any kind of post-political era or a plea for technocratic rule. Even if society was free from what he called secular religions, political decisions would still be necessary. As he noted “no matter how technical social processes may be, the crucial turning points in a society occur in political form. It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power, but the politician”. However, as Jenny Anderson argues in her fascinating chapter, Bell’s idea of forecasting was in a sense conceived as a solution to Arrow’s impossibility problem: to evaluate ex-ante the cost and benefits of different policy options and allow for reasoned public policy. His vision of social expertise was therefore designed to “mediate between competing social claims” and “solve the problem of social choice” by turning the “value-laden of social analysis into a problem of rational scrutiny” (257). But in order to do so, it necessarily implies that competing social aims could somehow be translated into a rational “calculus” helping politicians to base their decisions on science rather than passion. A society where politics is confined to adjusting the rules of the economic game rather than, as socialists had once dreamt of, contesting the grip of the market itself over society.

And this is perhaps the true aim of Bell’s ideas about ideology. If, as Perry Anderson once noted, Fukuyama’s end of History meant, above all, the end of socialism[8], Bell’s the end of ideology meant essentially, the end of Marxism. As he argued himself, his book was “a statement which was saying that Marxism, as an ideological fact, was by large exhausted”[9]. It is therefore no accident that his narrow definition of ideology, shaped at a time where fascism was by large discredited, conveniently excluded liberalism. In that sense, and in the context of the Cold War, it is important to note that Bell’s work never was just descriptive. His interventions had often, as Starr himself noted in the book, “both a descriptive and normative sense” (72). It was therefore both as a “historical fact”, normative and analytic framework that Marxism was, to him, exhausted. It had become, Bell argued, “simply a notation in the archives of history”[10]. The very idea of the post-industrial society was, as Andersson astutely noted, about a society where “the key form of social struggle is no longer labor-capital conflict” (259).

In fact, Bell’s most important interventions by the second half of the 20^th century could easily be conceived as an ongoing debate with Marxism, as a way to analyze his times outside a Marxist framework. And is in such dialogue that we can understand both Bell’s most original insights but also his blind spots. While the book discusses the fact that Bell had little to say about race at a period where the civils rights movement and decolonization were radically transforming the world, and provides an astute reading by Fred Turner about how counter culture was invested by “a new management ethos” (277) it gives us little to understand his failure to anticipate some of the most urging issues of our times: the brutal outcome of deindustrialization, the staggering rise of inequality, the corruption of the public sphere by private interests or the decline of state capacity. Here, his strong sense that we lived in “post-marxist” times, might have played an important role. Status politics had replaced class struggle, exploitation was displaced by the locus of decision as the point of conflict and private property played “a declining role” in America politics. In other words, if Bell didn’t rejected Marxism to explain the industrial century, he nevertheless thought it was no longer relevant his century. In fact, the nineties rather than our time, are perhaps the most faithful rendition of Bell’s history without ideology. And even if today, the most successful populist movements, as Jan Werner Muller noted, haven’t articulated a real ideology in the sense of Bell (146-47), the era of triumphant liberal democracy and Third-Wayism seems behind us. But whether a coherent ideology can emerge again as a serious contender, remains to be seen.

[1] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology. On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii.

[2] Ibid., xxviii.

[3] Ibid., 436-437.

[4] On a contextual history of the end of ideology thesis see in particular: Howard Brick, “The End of Ideology Thesis”, in: Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013); Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, and ‘The Third World’: An Alternative History of the End of Ideology Debate” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, vol. 12, n°3, Winter 2021, 241-264.

[5] C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left”, New Left Review, n° 5, September-October 1960.

[6] Daniel Bell, « Introduction », in : Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2017), 30.

[7] Daniel Bell, “The Future World Disorder: The Structural Context of Crises”, Foreign Policy, n°27 (Summer, 1977), 135.

[8] Perry Anderson, “The Ends of History”, in: A Zone of Engagement, (London, Verso, 1992), 358.

[9] C-Span interview with Daniel Bell, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”, March 6, 2000, https://www.c-span.org/video/?156416-1/the-coming-post-industrial-society

[10] Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996), 193.