The Global Civil Society Yearbook: Lessons and Insights 2001–2011

Abstract

Tony Judt’s book, Ill Fares the Land (2010), and a pamphlet by Stéphane Hessel entitled Indignez-Vous!, or ‘Time for Outrage’ (see Box 1.2) have been circulating among the European protestors of 2011. Both are passionate pleas for indignation against the overwhelmingly ideology of free markets and greed. Both are appeals to the young from older people close to their end — Judt knew he was dying when he wrote the book and Hessel, a hero of the French Resistance, is in his nineties. And both books are, perhaps not surprisingly, nostalgic, reinforcing Marx’s argument that when people try to change their circumstances they dress up in the clothes of the past; both yearn for a time in the post-war period, when people believed in universal welfare and in the possibility of a benign state guiding a creative market — the Social Democratic vision.

We no longer have political movements. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals — fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalising bankers — are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this. (Judt 2010: 134–5)