ABSTRACT
In 1960 Seymour Martin Upset and Daniel Bell announced the end of ideology in America. Their claim that American politics had outgrown ideology obscured commitments to the static, anticommunist ideology of the cold war. The putative end of ideology failed to recognize the social groups and parts of the self excluded from a society in which, according to Lipset, “the fundamental political problems … have been solved.” It discredited larger purposes around which alternative commitments might be organized. These former Old Leftists who repudiated ideology claimed to be embracing the pragmatic, problem-solving character of American politics. Their end of ideology in fact justified the instrumentalist thinking by which a new, bureaucratic middle class served the dominant structures of power in American life.
