How, then, are we to answer today's predominant consensus according to which the age of ideologies--of grand ideological projects like Socialism or Liberalism--is over, since we have entered the post-ideological era of rational negotiation and decision-making, based upon the neutral insight into economic, ecological, etc. necessities? This consensus can assume different guises, from the neoconservative or Socialist refusal to accept it and consummate the loss of grand ideological projects by means of a proper 'work of mourning' (different attempts to resuscitate global ideological projects) up to the neoliberal opinion according to which the passage from the age of ideologies to the post-ideological era is part of the sad but none the less inexorable process of the maturation of humanity--just as a young man has to learn to accept the loss of grand enthusiastic adolescent plans and enter the everyday adult life of realistic compromises, the collective subject has to learn to accept a withering-away of global utopian ideological projects and the entry into the post-utopian realist era....
The first thing to note about this neoliberal cliche is that the neutral reference to the necessities of the market economy, usually invoked in order to categorize grand ideological projects as unrealistic utopias, is itself to be inserted into the series of great modern utopian projects. That is to say--as Fredric Jameson has pointed out--what characterizes utopia is not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature, or some similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some global mechanism which, applied to the whole of society, will automatically bring about the balanced state of progress and happiness one is longing for--and, in this precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism, which, properly applied, will bring about the optimal state of society? So, again, the first answer of the Left to those--Leftists themselves--who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in our societies should be that this impetus is alive and well--not only in the Rightist 'fundamentalist' populism which advocates a return to grass-roots democracy, but above all among the advocates of the market economy themselves. The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who 'realistically' devalue every global project of social transformation as 'utopian', that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring 'totalitarian' potential--today's predominant form of ideological 'closure' takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly 'realistic' and 'mature' attitude.
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