by Grégoire Chamayou

A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism

If you are looking for a documented and referenced analysis (with an impressive array of notes) of the maneuvers and strategies of capitalism to maintain and reinforce its ideological dominance at the global level since the 1970s, then “La société ingouvernable de Grégoire Chamayou” is indispensable.

Because in the 70s, now a distant era for many, the shameless profit class was very afraid, seeing itself threatened by widespread protests and multiple denunciations of the profoundly harmful effects of its actions on the common interest. Here, therefore, we find a fairly comprehensive picture of how the predator class regained the upper hand by stepping up its various interventions and manipulations in defiance of the general interest and the planet’s populations. This is not a conspiracy theory but a set of facts whose deadly consequences for our world we are increasingly measuring, and no doubt with some dismay. All the more so as it is the same people who remain in place everywhere and even claim to want to save us. But save us from what exactly?

In addition to in-depth analyses, this book contains more general considerations that are not without relevance. Here is a brief selection:

“If we want to grasp the true meaning of the contemporary ‘ecological crisis’, we need to put it back in that history, the history of an economic system whose expansion had the destructive appropriation of nature as a consubstantial condition, and to place it in the continuity of colonial predation and primitive accumulation of capital.”

“In the eyes of those in power, the only legitimate opposition is that which is incapable of threatening them. This is the secret of ‘legitimacy’ as seen by the masters: only those who have renounced their strength are recognized as legitimate. ‘Legitimacy’ is the cheap medal they are awarded in exchange for disarmament.”

“If we now sing the praises of a democracy that was abhorred until recently, it is of course on the strict implicit condition that we only celebrate under this name what some today refer to as ‘post-democracy’, an empty residue, a form without substance.”

“The generations born after 1973, those who grew up in the era of perpetual ‘crisis’, have internalized, one after the other, the idea that each generation will generally live less well than the previous one. They have relearned to be afraid. A historical turnaround that could also be read as a kind of group psychotherapy, a mass re-education in “tolerance to frustration”.

La société ingouvernable (The Ungovernable Society) by Grégoire Chamayou, published by Polity Press