Ideological Change and Neoliberalism

Abstract

The characteristic of the ideological crisis of our time is not the indication of the twilight of ideologies as much as the emphasizing of the profound need for a new ideological reference for social action. The situation is particularly interesting: (1) for the emphasis on some important aspects of ideological change, such as the weakening of the old ideologies; (2) for the attempts of new groups to present themselves as interpreters of new needs and to reconstruct new forms of consensus; (3) for the complex forms of what is called the "crisis of the modernity," as a crisis of the model of rationality of our epoch, which is no longer active, but can indefinitely produce the paralysis of social and political presentation. Faced with this situation, neoliberalism seems to represent the great new possibility for social cohesion, particularly by reviving the revolutionary and liberating spirit of the first liberalism.