Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book still in great condition. Cover has some wear and creasing but pages are free from notes and in great condition. See images. A great book.

About the book >.>.> Hardly more than a quarter-century after Henry Luce pro- claimed “the American century” American confidence has fallen to a low ebb. Those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York. Defeat in Vietnam economic stagnation and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders. The same crisis of confidence grips other capitalist countries as well. In Europe the growing strength of communist parties the revival of fascist movements and a wave of terrorism all testify in different ways to the weakness of established r?gimes and to the exhaustion of established tradition. Even Can- ada long a bastion of stolid bourgeois dependability now faces in the separatist movement in Quebec a threat to its very existence as a nation. The international dimensions of the current malaise indicate that it cannot be attributed to an American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The politi- cal crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well. The sciences it has fostered once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the ages no longer provide satis factory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. (LL)