Sublime

Democratic corporatism, underpinned by a pluralism that focuses on the dignity of the person, can help chart a new settlement: a politics and an economics of the common good.

The more rounded person morphed into the increasingly entitled individual as top-down paternalism replaced communal reciprocity. With the rise of Benthamite utilitarian technocracy and Rawlsian liberal legalism, the conception of citizens as ethical actors with obligations towards others was gradually abandoned in favour of the new notion of mere

In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

Similarly, Lasch’s richer conception of obligation means that power implies care for others. Just as property rights are neither absolute nor free from duties, so too political authority requires popular consent and compassion for the most vulnerable. In functioning democracies, power received from the people has to be returned to them by promoting

But opponents of state intervention didn’t lay down their arms. Fueled by ideological fervor, the fear of communism, and in-depth works by prominent economists, the ideological warfare against state intervention began again right after World War II in the form of neoliberalism[381]. It gained steam because of major societal changes. The rising

Both threats strike at the heart of democracy, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously highlighted in Democracy in America, depends on deep and diverse, non-market, decentralized social and civil connections to thrive