Page 66 - Culture Society and the Media

56 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
values were—their content and structure—or how they were produced, or how,
in a highly differentiated and dynamic modern industrial capitalist society, an
inclusive consensus on ‘the core value system’ had spontaneously arisen, were
questions that were not and could not be explained. Value consensus, however,
was assumed. Culturally, Edward Shils (a collaborator of Parsons) argued, this
broad band of values was so widely shared as to have accreted to itself the power
of the sacred (Shils, 1961a, p. 117). If some groups were, unaccountably, not yet
fully paid-up members of the consensus club, they were well on the way to
integration within it. The core would gradually absorb the more ‘brutal’ cultures
of the periphery (Shils, 1961b). Thus the democratic enfranchisement of all
citizens within political society, and the economic enfranchisement of all
consumers within the freeenterprise economy, would rapidly be paralleled by the
cultural absorption of all groups into the culture of the centre. Pluralism rested on
these three mutually reinforcing supports. In its purest form, pluralism assured that
no structural barriers or limits of class would obstruct this process of cultural
absorption: for, as we all ‘knew’, America was no longer a class society. Nothing
prevented the long day’s journey of the American masses to the centre. This
must have been very good news to blacks, Hispanics, Chicanos, American
Injuns, New York Italians, Boston Irish, Mexican wetbacks, California Japanese,
blue-collar workers, hard-hats, Bowery bums, Southern poor-whites and other
recalcitrant elements still simmering in the American melting pot. What is more
(a comforting thought in the depths of the Cold War) all other societies were
well on their way along the ‘modernizing’ continuum. Pluralism thus became, not
just a way of defining American particularism, but the model of society as such,
written into social science. Despite the theoretical form in which this ramshackle
construction was advanced, and the refined methodologies by which its progress
was empirically confirmed, there is no mistaking the political and ideological
settlement which underpinned it. Daniel Bell assured us, in The End of Ideology
(1960), that the classical problem of ‘ideology’ had at last been superseded.
There would be a range of pluralistic conflicts of interest and value. But they could
all be resolved within the framework of the pluralistic consensus and its ‘rules of
the game’. This was essentially because, as another apologist, Seymour Lipset,
forcefully put the matter:

the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been
solved: the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship; the
conservatives have accepted the welfare state; and the democratic left has
recognized that an increase in overall state power carried with it more
dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems. (Lipset, 1963,
p. 406)

The installation of pluralism as the model of modern industrial social order
represented a moment of profound theoretical and political closure. It was not,
however, destined to survive the testing times of the ghetto rebellions, campus