240.3
The End of Ideologies – Why Did It Not Arrive?
American sociologist Daniel Bell published a book called The End of Ideology in 1960, in which he announced the advent of a period in which traditional ideologies would become obsolete, and ideological thought replaced by science. This paper deals with the question of why this prediction was not fulfilled, and why it is ideology and not science which still dominates our view of the world and its current problems in a number of aspects. For answers to this question, the author looks primarily to Ulrich Beck and Niklas Luhmann, and finds them in tendencies within the evolutionary development of society and science (the hyper-complexity of science), in mechanisms of functional differentiation, in the lack of resources for meta-communication and in the time pressures which ongoing events place on us.