Contemporaneous contexts

Ideologies, like political philosophies, share assumptions, whether they confront each other in the same epoch or are separated by time and country. Let us begin with some examples of the sharing of ideas between contemporaneous ideologies.

Ideologies are far less divided than they are made out to be over the perception of phenomena, the interpretation of the causal nexus between them and the evaluation of their significance. There are no great differences in ideologies of the Right, Centre and Left, for instance, in respect of the emergence of industrial society, the ways in which it operates and its structural characteristics. Or, differences of opinion in these matters divide ideologies as they divide historians and sociologists irrespective of their ideological persuasion. The main controversial question for both ideology and social science is whether in the long run the market economy (or some part of it) can promise, and which kind of socio-economic structure can contribute to, both maximal production and an allocation of benefits morally acceptable to the majority and favourable to their well-being. To accept or reject certain criteria for answering this question is the ideologically controversial issue, not the inquiry into the degree of their realization in the past, whereas to pronounce on the possibility of their applicability in the more distant future is likely to be again, though not necessarily, more a matter of ideological controversy.