Daniel Bell's Ideological Triplicity

Perhaps the best known quote from the leading American “end of ideology” thinker of the 1950s and 60s, Daniel Bell, who argued that the major 19th century political ideologies were “exhausted”, is in fact one in which he professes faith in all of them – albeit combined in a manner that must of necessity mutually adjust their definitions. He was, he explained, “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture”.

I will not comment here on Bell’s respective definitions of these ideological terms, how he conceived of their compatibility and adjustment, and his own trajectory from general consensus non-classical liberalism in the 1950s, similar to Herbert Tingsten’s in Sweden, to – as I understand it – something more like neoconservatism from the late 1970s. I will say a little only about what is wrong and what is right in the kind of position indicated in the quote as such.

The limitation of each of the ideologies to one specific sphere that is normally covered by all of them makes clear to a degree sufficient for my purpose the redefinitions involved – the redefinitions that may account for the statement’s consonance with the general view of the obsolescence (or, perhaps more precisely, the subtitle of Bell’s book The End of Ideology from 1960, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties suggests the irrelevance) of the 19th-century ideologies as integral historical wholes.

The untenability that primarily needs to be emphasized is the view of liberalism and politics in relation both to socialism and economics and to conservatism and culture.

The formal, representative parliamentarianism that is central to "liberal democracy" is a historical product that is inextricably bound up with liberal economics, part and parcel of the evolving system of capitalism. The political forms of liberalism as it has historically existed are primarily part of the forms of capitalist governance, of capitalist subordination and control of the state, of a system that is normally able to easily manipulate and mobilize voter majorities for its purposes. This not only makes them incompatible with socialist politics and economics, but makes their relation to cultural conservatism tenuous at best, and indeed the coexistence impossible in the case of a more principled conservatism of that kind, a conservatism of supraordinate values. This has become glaringly and painfully obvious in the course of the neoliberal era.

But what is also important to point out, as indeed classical liberals themselves often do, is that socialism and conservatism are compatible and even structurally similar in important respects.

They are so, as the liberals are aware, even without being confined to economics and culture respectively. But if we keep to Bell’s particular compartmentalization, it is indeed especially the case that socialism in economics and conservatism in culture can be eminently congruent, as long as the former is not defined in accordance with a thoroughgoing, reductionist historical materialism, and the latter is understood in terms of a sufficiently creative traditionalism.

Affirming the possibility of a synthesis of only two parts of Bell's triplicity of course does not imply a blanket dismissal of the whole of liberalism in a broader sense, of all of the various historical transformations brought about by or connected with it. Still, the affirmation inevitably follows from the realization of liberalism's specific historical relativity and the impossibility of reducing it to a sphere of politics that, in turn, is conceived as distinguishable from economics and culture in the way Bell's statement seems to presuppose. History has conclusively shown that its "freedom" is not what it claims to be. And in his other classic work, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Bell himself had important things to say about the problematic nature of the liberalism in economics and culture that he did not believe in.