In 1960 – just 65 years ago, which is usually the retirement age – the sociologist Daniel Bell (1919-2011) published a text called The end of ideology. It opened a debate that was, in general, serious, substantial, and long-standing; the communicative context of that time, which we would now consider "elitist," allowed for it (today it would surely translate into a couple of "snobs" on X and two dozen anonymous insults). That debate lasted so long, and drew so many replies, that in 1988 Bell published a second text that referred to the first: Return to the end of ideologyThe fact that it came out just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of real socialism, was considered by some to be a mere coincidence and by others to be a reasoned prediction similar to that made a decade earlier by Emmanuel Todd.