ABSTRACT
During the period between 1955 and 1965 the new Europe emerging after World War II was often characterized as a society of affluence with a decreasing amount of ideological conflicts. Ideology may be regarded as a system of evaluative principles about the ends of human action, about the means of attaining these ends, and about the nature of social and physical reality. Finnish political history is a curious mixture of class conflicts, other cleavages, and national consensus. The relationship to the Soviet Union is of course one of the most crucial factors influencing the formulation of goals in Finnish politics. In Finland high status crystallization combined with low status is apt to increase the tendency to political radicalism, whereas high status crystallization combined with high status makes for conservatism. Finnish Communism represents in many respects an institutionalized form of radicalism.
