ABSTRACT
After the First World War, Fordism became the dominant regime of socio-economic control in the United States and Europe. It formed the basis of the model of consumer capitalism that become hegemonic under the influence of culture and programming industries. The evolution of this regime is essentially related to the conflicts between liberal capitalism and the fascist and communist regimes that animated European history in the mid-twentieth century. In order to understand the emergence of the ‘post-war consensus’ in Western capitalism therefore, it is necessary to recognize the place of Fordist techniques in the development of the neoliberal world picture. It is through the practical deployment of a scientific regime of enhanced individual performance that Fordism became essential to the post-war liberal refutation of Nazism, fascism, and Soviet-style communism. The aesthetic forms in which the Fordist regime was presented in the United States and Western Europe (stereotypical masculinity, beauty, heroism, love) were the basis of a homogenized individualism that sought to integrate every form of human difference into networks of rationalized production and consumption. This is the origin of the post-war economic hegemony of the United States and the global dominance of the neoliberal world picture.
