ABSTRACT
A survey of the literature which deals with the theme of the decline of ideology reveals two main features. The word "ideology" is used in a variety of ways, and sometimes in more than one way in the same work. Sometimes ideology is used to signify a millennial political theory, of which Marxism is held to be the purest current variety. Sometimes it is used to signify only a confidence in socialist institutions, which are not exactly accorded millennial virtues but which are held in such high symbolic esteem that they tend to be equated with the good consequences presumed to follow from them. The absence of neutrality in France has left the anti-ideologists open to the criticism that they are ideologists, that whatever it is that is expressed by their anti-ideological position is itself an ideology, although the argument depends to some extent on whether the anti-ideologist and his critic understand the meaning of ideology in the same way.
