The Institutional Crisis of the Corporate-Welfare State

The initial response to the crisis of the corporate-welfare state is nativistic: ‘Give us that old time religion.’ In almost every democratic industrial society, retrenchment has become the primary motive of social economic policy. In the name of nineteenth-century economic wisdom, the inter-war and postwar commitment to human development, collective goals, and social justice is being abandoned. In this chapter I examine the current institutional crisis in an attempt to show that it is rooted in the holdover of an outmoded ideology and culture that has as its concomitant result a profound ideological lacuna. The implication is that it is not the last half-century’s social economic goals that should be abandoned but rather the nineteenth-century folkways and folklore that frustrate their achievement and advocate their abandonment.