In the 1950s, scholars in Europe and the United States announced the end of political ideology in the West. With the rise of affluent welfare states, they argued, ideological movements which sought to overthrow prevailing liberal democracy would disappear. While these arguments were questioned in the 1960s, similar ideas were presented after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scholars now claimed that the end of the Cold War meant the end of mankind’s “ideological development,” that globalization would undermine the left/right distinction and that politics would be shaped by cultural affiliations rather than ideological alignments. The purpose of No alternatives is to compare the end of ideology discussion of the 1950s with some of the post-Cold War theories launched at the time of, or in the years following, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Juxtaposing monographs, essays and papers between 1950 and 2000, the dissertation focuses on three aspects of these theories. First, it analyzes their concepts of history, demonstrating that they tended to portray the existing society as an order which had resolved the conflicts and antagonisms of earlier history. Second, the investigation scrutinizes the processes of post-politicization at work in these theories, showing how they sought to transcend, contain or externalize social conflict, and at times dismiss politics altogether. Third, it demonstrates how the theories can be understood as legitimizing or mobilizing narratives which aimed to defend Western liberal democracy and to rally its citizens against internal threats and external enemies. As the title of the dissertation implies, the end of ideology discussion of the 1950s and the post-Cold War theories of the 1990s sought to highlight the historical or political impossibility of any alternatives to the present society.

Raymond Aron is widely recognised as France's greatest twentieth-century liberal, but the specifically liberal quality of his thought has not received the detailed historical analysis that it deserves. His work appears to fit so well within widely accepted understandings of post-war European liberalism, which has been defined primarily in terms of its anti-totalitarian, Cold War orientation, that its liberal status has been somewhat taken for granted. This has been exacerbated by an especially strong perception of a correlation between liberalism and anti-totalitarianism in France, whose late twentieth-century renaissance in liberal political thought is viewed as the product of an 'anti-totalitarian turn' in the late 1970s. While the moral authority accumulated through decades of opposition to National Socialism and Soviet communism made Aron into an anti-totalitarian icon, his early contribution to the rediscovery of France's liberal tradition established his reputation as a leader of the renaissance in the study of liberal political thought. Aron's prominence within this wider renaissance suggests that an historical treatment of his thought is overdue, but while the assumptions underpinning his reputation are not baseless, they do need to be critically scrutinised if such a treatment is to be credible. In pursuit of this end, two main arguments are developed in the present thesis. These are, first, that Aron's liberalism was more a product of the inter-war crisis of European liberalism than of the Cold War and, second, that his relationship with the French liberal tradition was primarily active and instrumental rather than passive and receptive. The first argument indicates that Aron's liberalism developed through a dialogue with and partial integration of important strands of anti-liberal crisis thought during these inter-war years; the second that earlier liberals with whose work he is frequently associated - notably Montesquieu and Tocqueville - had no substantial formative influence on his political thought. These contentions are interrelated in that Aron's post-war interpretation of his chosen liberal forebears was driven by a need to address specific problems arising from the liberal political epistemology that he formulated before the Second World War. It is by establishing in detail the link between Aron's reading of Montesquieu and Tocqueville and these earlier writings that the thesis makes its principal contribution to the existing literature on Aron, but several other original interpretations of his work are offered across its four thematic chapters on 'Political Epistemology', 'Anti-totalitarianism', 'The End of Ideology' and 'Instrumentalizing the French Liberal Tradition'. Regarding Aron's relationship with the wider late twentieth-century recovery of liberal political thought in France, it contends that the specific liberal renaissance to which he contributed most substantially emerged not as part of the anti-totalitarian turn, but in hostile reaction to the events of May 1968. This informs a broader argument that French liberal renaissance of these years was considerably more heterogeneous than is often assumed.