We live in an age of ideologies. This political reality is in a strange way given, even fated. None of us can help or change the epoch any more than a medieval peasant could leap out of the cosmic chain of being. An age of ideologies will surely come to an end, but no one knows when or how. To grasp by what cultural mutation it might be superseded, would already imply the first dawning of that future time. When such a new reality is visible it will already, in some senses, be upon us.

No living person can see beyond an age of ideologies because it consumes the current horizon of the visible. Indeed, as these pages have shown time and again, to believe one can do without ideology is simply to naively extend its domain. Even when individuals disavow ideology, or seem unable to coherently reconstruct their own beliefs, they nonetheless remain encircled by its meanings, which are embodied in institutions, patterns of action and practices. Ideology is never just in our heads, but has built our social reality. Its many maps govern the contours of our world.

As in the ancient Jewish story of the Tower of Babel, ideologies are like spires which humans raise relentlessly towards the sky in an effort to achieve a God's eye view – to loom above history and resolve the anguished problems of human injustice, violence, fighting, oppression and disorder. Those who make the effort to climb the stairs of a particular tradition's Tower of Babel, find not only various weak points in the structure along the way, but also (as in the famous paintings by Pieter Bruegel) the pinnacle unfinished. Every ideological tower reaches a point of inarticulacy where it is permanently in ruins even as it is being built.