The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties is a collection of essays published in 1960 (New York, 2nd ed.

He argues that political ideology has become irrelevant among "sensible" people and that the polity of the future would be driven by piecemeal technological adjustments of the extant system.

[1] With the rise of affluent welfare states and institutionalized bargaining between different groups, Bell maintains, revolutionary movements which aim to overthrow liberal democracy will no longer be able to attract the working classes.

Although much of this was conjoined with conservative arguments about the "revolt of the masses," there was also a current that looked to pragmatic problem solving where Fascism (and increasingly Communism) could be resisted or contained.

Daniel Bell belonged to the next generation, when ideas about the institutionalisation of intelligence in ordinary democratic political processes became more sophisticated, as in the work of "pluralist" political theorists like David Truman, Robert Dahl and Daniel Bell.