Nigeria, Oct. 15 -- In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the principal fault lines of political struggle ran along the axis of ideology. Humanity divided itself into camps of belief - liberal and conservative, capitalist and socialist, revolutionary and reactionary. The great question of the age was economic: Who controls production, and for whose benefit? Ideology provided both explanation and aspiration; it was the grammar of political life.

But as industrial economies matured and material prosperity spread, the grand economic ideologies lost their mobilising force. Marxism dissolved into memory, capitalism became a default rather than a creed, and the end of the Cold War discredited the idea that human destiny could be captured ...