564
H. STUART HUGHES
END OF AN EPOCH
THE END OF IDEO LOGY. By Daniel Bell. The Free Press. $7.50.
The central thesis of Mr. Bell's book
is
stated only at
its very end:
Today ... ideologies are exhausted. The events behind this
important sociological change are complex and varied. Such
calamities as the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the con–
centration camps, the suppression of the Hungarian workers, form
one chain ; such social changes as the modification of capitalism,
the rise of the Welfare State, another.
In
philosophy, one can
trace the decline of simplistic, rationalistic beliefs and the emer–
gence of new stoic-theological images of man, e.g. Freud, Tillich,
Jaspers, etc.... Out of all this history, one simple fact emerges:
for the radical intelligentsia, the old ideologies have lost their
"truth" and their power to persuade. . ..
In
the Western world
there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political
issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of de–
centralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political
pluralism.
By the time he gets to the explicit statement of this theme,
Mr. Bell has already pursued it through more than three hundred
pages of fascinating fact and argument. His book is obviously the
product of a restless, inquiring, and informed mind-a mind char–
acterized by alienation without sorrow, and detachment without
isolation. The only trouble is that it is not always clear what Mr.
Bell is after: his book reads like something half-finished, and
while he has discussed a number of very importarlt things along
the way, his main thesis is far from proved when we reach the end.
In
collecting into book form his essays on a wide variety of
topics, an author faces a difficult choice: he can either reissue them
without apology as a miscellany of thoughts, or he can rework
them from start to finish to form a consecutive argument. Mr. Bell
has chosen to do neither: he has tried to reach a compromise
solution
by
revising his essays in part, by organizing them in a
logical order, and by appending to them a new essay explaining
what his purpose was all along. The difficulty in this solution is
that some of the essays fit only lamely into the framework the
