Sublime

Make no mistake about it: by the late Clinton-Blair years, both the Right and the mainstream Left had accepted the basic premise adapted from systems theory that the economy was a natural system whose stability depended on the government’s getting out of the way and allowing self-interested people to work toward a dynamic equilibrium. Gone were the

—The Europeans believe that liberty is promoted by depriving the social authority of some of its rights; the Americans, by dividing its exercise—Almost

The preferred and ubiquitous mode of urban development is hostile to both walking and talking. In walking, people become part of their terrain; they meet others; they become custodians of their neighborhoods. In talking, people get to know one another; they find and create their common interests and realize the collective abilities essential to

The Age of Enlightenment swept away the received authority of faith and ushered in the new gods of reason, science, and empiricism—and created the individual as a political unit, the stand-alone rugged individualist.

En 1969, Peter Wiles décrivait l’idée centrale du populisme de la manière suivante : « la vertu réside dans le peuple, qui est majoritaire, et dans ses traditions collectives181 ». On ne saurait donner meilleure définition anticipée de la conception que se fait Christopher Lasch de ce phénomène. Le problème est qu’il identifie le peuple à une

For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

The less our lives are exploited for the sake of profit—i.e., the more we devote our lives to the public goods of the welfare state or to non-profit projects supported by a UBI—the less wealth there is to finance the welfare state and the universal basic income. This practical contradiction in the redistribution of wealth is unavoidable under