coercive and violent tactics, given the presence of a liberal democratic
state with opportunities for peaceful and constitutional change; and
rejecting as unfair, unregulated capitalist economics. The range
of opinions within these parameters has been, and remains, a very
large one.
Communitarianism and the ‘third way’
It will be apparent to most readers that the predominant political style
in modern European and North American democracies is what we
have called pragmatic rather than radical. Democratic politicians in
general seem slow to relate their policy stands to explicit general
principles and appear to be content to manage existing societies rather
than to try to fundamentally change them. Few contemporary presi-
dents or prime ministers would be happy to be labelled as Marxists,
fascists or as radical feminists or ecologists but tend to cling to the
electorally safe centre ground of politics.
Such tendencies have been described as ‘The End of Ideology’ (Bell,
1960), but this may be a somewhat confusing description. One
should distinguish between the somewhat cavalier approach to ideas,
which is typical of most practical politicians, and the absence of any
ideas. Similarly a period of international confrontation between
Marxist–Leninist and liberal democratic/capitalist systems may have
drawn to an end, but this does not mean that new ‘ideological’ con-
frontations (for instance on religion, gender and ecology) may not
occur.
The possibility of a consolidation of the centre streams of thought
also seems very likely to the authors; the differences between
revisionist democratic socialism, social liberalism, Christian democ-
racy and pragmatic conservatism are surely small compared with the
gulf which separates them from some of their unconstitutional radical
and authoritarian alternatives.
An illustration of the possibility of such a convergence is the
tendency of politicians of a wide variety of formal party backgrounds
to endorse the language of ‘communitarianism’. Thus Etzioni (1995:
ix), suggests that several key Labour, Conservative and Liberal
Democratic figures in the UK (including Tony Blair), Democrats and
Republicans in the USA (including Bill Clinton) as well as Christian
and Social Democrats in Germany have all endorsed such ideas.
IDEOLOGIES 99