When the end of ideology was celebrated – first in the 1950’s and then, more emphatically still, in the 1990’s – no one foresaw that religion, the bane of politics in the first half of the twentieth century, would return to that role with a vengeance. Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron wrote about the end of fascist and communist ideology in the hope that we would enter an age of pragmatism in which politics would be a subject of argument and debate, not belief and total worldviews. Karl Popper’s approach to politics, one of reason and critical discourse, had come to prevail. And when, after the collapse of communism, the end of history seemed near, ideological politics was thought to have vanished forever.
When the end of ideology was celebrated – first in the 1950’s and then, more emphatically still, in the 1990’s – no one foresaw that religion, the bane of politics in the first half of the twentieth century, would return to that role with a vengeance. Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron wrote about the end of fascist and communist ideology in the hope that we would enter an age of pragmatism in which politics would be a subject of argument and debate, not belief and total worldviews. Karl Popper’s approach to politics, one of reason and critical discourse, had come to prevail. And when, after the collapse of communism, the end of history seemed near, ideological politics was thought to have vanished forever.