discontinuities – can be identified. The first we have already identified – the challenge
to the significance of the state. The second may appear trite: the ‘new ideologies’
are recent in origin. This point can, however, be expressed in a more sophisticated
way: the new ideologies have emerged as a response to fundamental changes in the
social and economic structures of advanced industrial societies. The third difference
relates to the intellectual relationship of the new ideologies to the traditional ones:
the former engage criticallywith the latter.Social and economic change
The four ideologies that we discuss in Part 3 emerged after the Second World War.
While they have intellectual roots predating the war, and indeed the roots go back
centuries – think of Mary Wollstonecraft – consciousnessof each as a relatively
unified system of thoughthas only developed in the last 40 or so years. While it is
crude to date an ideology simply from its first usage in public debate, the
employment of these labels – these isms – in everyday debate is of some significance
and, roughly speaking, the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘ecologism’ (environmentalism,
Green thought) became current in the 1960s, multiculturalism in the 1970s and
fundamentalism (which had been employed in debates within US Protestantism in
the 1920s) began to achieve wider application in the 1970s and 1980s. Without
reducing these new ideologies to social and economic changes we suggest that they
are, in part, the product of certain new socio-economic structures.
We have seen in Parts 1 and 2 that the traditional ideologies themselves changed
in response to the massive social and economic change of the nineteenth cen-
tury: John Stuart Mill’s defence of representative democracy is a response to the
rise of ‘mass society’, as is his concern with the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Mill’s
political world is very different to that of, say, John Locke. Similarly, Mill’s near-
contemporary Karl Marx contrasts his own socialism with that of earlier ‘utopian’
socialists, and conservatism, the ideology that above all others claims to be historical- in the sense of responding to the world as it is, rather than providing a model of
an alternative world – has undergone considerable adaptation from the eighteenth-
century thinkers Hume and Burke to twentieth-century thinker Oakeshott. Given
the extent of social ‘rationalisation’ which Oakeshott so bemoans, his thought has
an elegiac quality when compared with that of earlier conservative thinkers. Fascism
is, of course, a response to specific social and economic conditions, most especially
a perceived mismatch between the development of state and economic structures.
By entitling the first two parts of this book ‘Classical Ideas’ and ‘Classical Ideologies’
we are not suggesting that they are dead: they are continually developing as
ideologies, and indeed some thinkers have argued that we are all liberals now
(Fukuyama, 1992). Rather than seeing the contrast between classical and new
ideologies as a distinction between ‘dead’ and ‘living’, we understand new ideologies
as distinct systems of thought that have emerged out of, and in response to, changing
social and economic structures, and those changes have also affected the classical
ideologies.
What then are these changes? One way of addressing this question is to consider
what might be termed the ‘crisis of Marxism’. The development of this ‘crisis’ can
306 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies