Sublime

Liberal democracy predates the industrial world and is now struggling to survive it. It must shake off many of the forms and the rhetoric of the past 150 years in the manner of a snake shaking off its skin, and for the same reason: in order to grow.

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of

design, as it was imagined for nearly a century, is over. “The transition from agrarian economies to metropolitan ones brought with it choice,”

En 1985, dans un livre intitulé En sortir ou pas, Jacques Delors entonnait l’hymne de la « bataille économique joyeuse et sauvage ». Il y condamnait le système de protection sociale, jugé « rigide et démesuré ». Il exaltait « des réalités aussi souveraines et immuables que des étoiles dans la nuit » : la compétition, l’entreprise et le marché. Il

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

money is the operating system of our society.

Constraining that freedom was both unjust and stupid, as it would destroy the entrepreneurial drive that liberates us all from poverty and need.

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