One way or multiple paths: For a comparative sociology of east european capitalism

American sociology marked the triumphalism of the immediate postwar period with its emblematic "end of ideology " thesis. Class struggle for an alternative socialist order was ruled an anachronism because capitalism and liberal democracy could effectively deliver expanded freedoms and improved living standards. America was as good as it gets while "com-munism " was the despised, totalitarian "other. " Protagonists of the "the end of ideology'-the most famous being Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and Philip Selznick-had themselves started out as unrepentant socialists in the 1930s. Their drift toward complacency, culminating in 1950s "functionalism, " was itself overtaken by the successor radicalism of the 1960s, a radicalism that pointed