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Idées-Forces
What weight should be given to the role of ideas in moments of radical change, as opposed to that of material interests and forces? From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, rise of Marxism and hegemony of neoliberalism, lessons for a system-changing left.
For such thinkers, in Meinecke’s words: ‘Ideas, carried and transformed by living personalities, constitute the canvas of historical life.’ But we can find other major figures of the Right who attack rationalist delusions in the importance of artificial doctrines, upholding against them the far more enduring significance of traditional customs or biological instincts. Since then, we have seen the compassionate conservatism of Bush’s ‘no child left behind’, the intrepidity of Obama’s ‘audacity of hope’, the sobriety of Merkel’s ‘debt brake’ and Hollande’s ‘pact of responsibility’, the dynamism of Abe’s ‘three arrows’, Biden’s ‘inflation reduction’ and Macron’s ‘contract with the nation’, or simplest and emptiest of all as a watchword for its opposite, Starmer’s ‘change’ ( plus ça). The social-democratic regimes of Scandinavia, for example, which once had a reputation for a certain independence in foreign policy, regularly acting as jackals loping alongside the larger Western predators—Norway helping to seal Israeli dominion in Palestine, Finland brokering the bombardment of Yugoslavia, Sweden assisting renditions in the War on Terror, all four joining the pack in Ukraine.
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