ABSTRACT
The story told in this book is one of surprising twists and turns, of unexpected alliances and bifurcations, as a single idea spawned movements that became antagonistic to each other while other ideas, seemingly at odds, shared common interests or origins. The ultra-Leftists of the 1960s and 70s, animated by the growing demand for freedom, adopted positions previously associated with the artistic critique of society. They wreaked havoc on the ethics, ideals and institutions that industrial society had established by criticizing Fordism, by defying authority and by assaulting standardization and bureaucracy. In parallel, structuralist philosophy gravely injured the tradition of humanism by disposing of the human agency in its analysis of society, while Foucault’s dark descriptions of omnipotent power systems left no hope for the human subject. The destruction caused to industrial society’s ethical fabric, to humanist and Enlightenment traditions, paved the road for the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
