Daniel Bell's (2000) The End of Ideology stands as an iconic marker of views surrounding the dismissal of that concept's analytical utility in the late 20th and early 21st century. Of all the books written about ideology, its appearance is indicative of the ebbs and flows of the recent Western liberal imagination. Originally published in 1960, ‘in an era of unprecedented economic growth and material prosperity where more people have more faith in the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank than in the president of the United States’ (Gomes 2000, xvi), The End of Ideology was reprinted by Harvard University Press in 1988 and 2000. In each of these eras, it was common to hear pundits and professors proclaim that markets would unleash prosperity, creating a fulfilling society ripe with public goods. Yet, shortly following the cresting of liberal confidence about a consolidating order through the convergence of norms based upon industrial needs and technical delimitations gaining wide acceptance (with attendant proclamations that the ‘era of ideology contest is over’ in the high politics of social thought), counterparts are dramatically reasserting themselves to reject the ideological narrowness of the liberal order. As such, Bell's book signifies a kind of anticipatory confidence about the potential of rational market logic-driven decision making to bring peace if particularizing values were set to one side; an attitude that has very much reappeared through the celebratory codification of social life by the emerging nexus of artificial intelligence and neurology.

Following the Obama administration, the high point of US liberalism to date in the 21st century, a fascistic backlash swept the country. While proponents of liberal democracy like to argue that their polity is unquestionably superior to the alternatives, liberals are faced with the conundrum of how to account for the ‘authoritarian turn’; that is, the rapid, fragmented de-democratization currently being experienced worldwide. This process is so acute that Larry Diamond (2015) has called this a global ‘democratic recession’. Currently, some liberal theorists, like Jennifer Welsh (2016), are at pains to reassert that their commitments are correct. Part of this exercise involves re-evaluating the concept of ideology, presuming that faulty or mistaken beliefs are central drivers to the recession. Yet, there is little introspection by liberals about the ideological components of this recession.