4,615 words

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

When liberalism is said to be the dominant ideology of our time, there are always those who protest by citing, for example, the amount of public expenditures or the level of taxation in our country. But this is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. A liberal society is not exactly the same thing as a liberal economy. On the other hand, it is a society dominated by the primacy of the individual, the ideology of progress, rights-of-man ideology, an obsession with growth, a disproportionate emphasis on mercantile value, the subjection of the symbolic imagination to the axioms of self-interest, and so on.