ABSTRACT
In the late 1950s and early 1960s some observers thought that they had detected an end of ideology. 1 Generally they meant by this observation that the political ideologies fashioned in the nineteenth century had lost their power to elicit zealous belief and that a pragmatic attitude toward politics, stressing piecemeal reform rather than holistic and dramatic solutions, had come to prevail in Western Europe and in North America. In the 1960s, however, both socialism and conservatism showed distinct signs of greatly renewed vigour. The appearance of the “New Left,” especially in the universities, and of an even broader neo-conservatism, certainly suggests that it was wrong, or at least premature, to conclude that a completely non-ideological pragmatism had made these particular persuasions thoroughly obsolete. 2
