Big Ends or Little Ends?
David Marquand cautions against too pat a 'winners and losers' interpretation of recent history, while asserting that a role remains for theory as opposed to narrow empiricism.
If history has any lessons, one of them is that 'endism' is usually dangerous and often fatal. In a BBC talk in November 1945, A.J.P. Taylor declared that those who believed in private enterprise were 'a defeated party which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688'. He made his forecast on the eve of the longest boom in the history of capitalism. In the late-1950s, Daniel Bell proclaimed the end of ideology. In the 1960s, ideological passions rose higher than at any time since the 1950s. In the last eighteen months, the wave of popular revolution which swept through Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 has been variously interpreted as signifying the end of Marxism, the end of socialism, the end of an illusory 'third way' between socialism and capitalism and even the end of history. Some, or even all, of these interpretations may be right. Before endorsing any of them, however, it would be as well to remember that we have been here before. G.K. Chesterton long ago pointed out that one of mankind's favourite games is 'Cheat the Prophet'. Nothing has happened since to prove him wrong.
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