ABSTRACT
If one accepts, as the previous analyses showed, that evaluating and casting judgment on civil society and narcissistic tendencies without due considering of the social institutions and their organizational culture, which provide a critical context for how democracy is practiced, a partial understanding will prevail. It is equally clear that the fetish of growth and its associated faculties of critical thought driven solely by market imperatives also contribute to a diminishing of the democratic experience. Few would take issue with the rather safe conclusion that despite all the steps forward on notions of sustainability and equality we are still led predominantly by market obsessions and economic fundamentalism. This obsession or what I prefer as a term ‘a pathology of modernity’ is couched in the widespread acceptance of economics as the primary language of politics. To this end, I am not interested in furthering debates on economics itself. Rather, I wish to focus on the abstractions of thought, and of the ways we frame our understanding and interpretive boundaries of markets and their alignment with political judgment. I want to explore what I regard as part of a deeper malaise relating to the methodologies of the social sciences and to interrogate the ‘disciplined technologies of governmentality’ that inform what Foucault has coined ‘a paradigm’. Before this however attention will be given to ‘technocratic governmentalities’ and the fashioning of a new politics that may indeed shape the nature of conflict within liberal democratic societies into the future.
