Sublime

social engagement to sustain democracy, people’s shared exercise of power. All of these essentials of social life are jeopardized by contemporary cultural trends which damage communication and prioritize self-interest.

An environmentalist such as Vandana Shiva directs her critique and ire less at national governments than at the idea of the global itself.

the neoliberal attempt to subordinate every form of life and knowledge to the logic of the market has heightened our awareness of the danger of living in a world in which we no longer have access to seas, trees, animals, and our fellow beings except through the cash-nexus.

Rawls explicitly stated that “welfare state capitalism” could never fully achieve his principles of justice.[71] Rather, we need to reimagine our economic model in a more fundamental way—embracing a more universal approach to meeting basic needs, developing a comprehensive agenda to increase earnings and share society’s wealth, and putting

Modern universalisms seek to justify their vision as non-particularistic as well as non-transcendent. Let us start by assessing whether this ambition can be sustained and if so whether their effectiveness can be retained.

Harvey argues that ‘[t]he present economic difficulties in both the US and Britain, as well as throughout Europe, are essentially being deepened for a political reason rather than out of economic necessity. That political reason is the desire to have done with capital’s responsibility to cover costs of social reproduction’ (ibid., p. 269),

Determined to unshackle market forces from the heavy hand of the state and the millstone of “tax and spend,” the classes that led this bloc aimed to liberalize and globalize the capitalist economy. What that meant, in reality, was financialization: dismantling barriers to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; deregulating banking and