Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Perry Anderson
Never fear the Social Europe Think Tank ,and its minion Colin Crouch, defends the tattered remains of Neo-Liberalism, presented as a set of arguments for and against, yet there is this glaring apologetic :
…Colin Crouch recognises some of its positive contributions but also notes conflicts within the neoliberal camp – particularly those between ‘market’ and ‘corporate’ forms of the strategy. Finally, he considers to what extent those behind the great experiment are now capable of accepting its reform.
The Great Experiment ? that was, and is, an economic/political catastrophe. Here is a chart from ‘The Paper of Record’, the New York Times, titled ‘Our Broken Economy’ by
Neo-Liberalism was/is, in equal measure, a frontal assault on the republican tradition of over two thousand years of the history of the evolution of Western Political Institutions:
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10861.html
There is also Wendy Brown’s essential critique of the utterly pernicious Market Mythology, titled Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos
Here is a collection of essays, that is an unsparing inquiry into the thought/propaganda of one of the intellectual culprits that led the way to that catastrophe:
http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html
The engaged and curious reader should also consult R.A. ‘s surprisingly balanced review of Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ at The Economist web site . The first part of this very valuable contribution to the debate on inequality begins here:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/book-clubs
Almost Marx
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