Sara’s Reviews > First World War: Still No End in Sight > Status Update

"‘Politics without adversary’ represented the constitution of a form of technocratic politics where social conflict would be mediated through the deliberations of an oligarchy of policy-makers and experts."

"The absence of any significant cultural affirmation for neo-liberalism is demonstrated by the near total absence of voices who describe themselves as one." - ie as neoliberal. This is only proof that neoliberalism is simply 'economics', which is the triumph of cultural affirmation.

"In the long run capitalist efficiency and calculation does not provide a sufficient basis for order" - wishful thinking. "Order" is what capitalism is all about - as opposed to democracy.

Fukuyama: "‘Beyond establishing rules for mutual self- preservation, liberal societies do not attempt to define any positive goals for their citizens or promote a particular way of life as superior or desirable to another’ - timeo Fukuyama. The project whereby society should only reproduce itself, without any other transcendent goal, is a powerful and value-charged one, with dramatic implications for those 'outside'.

"The new anti-modernist outlook of the 1970s represented a synthesis of traditional right-wing conservative themes with radical counter-cultural ideals. "

"The concept of overload, which was introduced by the Trilateral Report, sought to give expression to elite anxieties about delegitimation and ungovernability".

"In the 1970s – and especially after the oil crisis of 1973 – there was a ‘virtual reversal of battle-lines’. The left ‘became “value conservatives”, using the value concept of the “quality of life” to defend the status quo against the dangers of material progress’,

"Although expressed through a radical rhetoric of liberation and empowerment, the shift towards identity politics tended to reflect a conservative sensibility that celebrated the particular and regarded the aspiration for universal values with suspicion. The politics of identity focused on the consciousness of the self and on how the self was perceived. It was and continues to be the politics of ‘it’s all about me’

"For Schumpeter the tendency of capitalism to destroy the normative foundation on which it was built represented a constant challenge to maintenance of order".

"The problem of cultivating a normative foundation for capitalism was a constant subject of discussion among social theorists during the decades leading up to World War One".