The Ungovernable Society

Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched – the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable in the eyes of ruling elites. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live.

To ward off the threat,…