Afterword

Abstract

This afterword reflects on the afterlife of neo-idealism and clarifies the author's stance on questions of social justice, utilitarian ethics, and the nearly universal repudiation of statism. The author's argument has been focused on the degree to which the collective consciousness that formed a staple of the New Social Movements — perhaps its key catalyst — gives way in seventies culture to a profound displacement onto subjectivity. But it would be a mistake to see this as a perversion of sixties thinking. The appeal to subjectivity was always the latent grounding of social change among important movements of that earlier decade; hence the coming to dominance of identity politics in the generation after the sixties. It is no surprise that the effort to reclaim consciousness's underappreciated power in sixties discourses should give rise to celebrations of unfettered power in seventies thinking. The afterword examines how the market became the megastructure for a wide array of antistatist impulses.