At a 1997 conference organized in Prague by President Václav Havel of the Czech Republic and the writer Elie Wiesel, Mr. Castoriadis described capitalism's "expectation of an unlimited expansion of material so-called well-being" as "obviously the most absurd of all Utopias ever formulated by the most sanguine Utopians." He also urged the adoption of a "new type of human life ... a frugal life, as the only means to avoid ecological catastrophe and a definitive zombification of human beings, endlessly masturbating in front of their television screens."
Also this:
Castoriadis takes little joy from the sight of a population that "plunges into privatization, abandoning the public domain to bureaucratic, managerial, and financial oligarchies," succumbing at last to the "generalized conformism ... pompously labeled postmodernism."... And there is more than a hint of Spenglerian gloom in Castoriadis's argument that "the process of competitive decadence" between the old Soviet regime and its Western counterparts yielded not a revolutionary upsurge but a pseudo-paradise of consumerist passivity.
"generalized conformism ... pompously labeled postmodernism."
Brilliant.
I think you've amply proved your point, talos. Mine, more generally, is that D C-B's use of "political liberalism" is specious - little more than a figleaf for economic liberalism.
One of Castoriadis's many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understood in terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through the social imaginary without determinations, but in order to be socially recognized must be instituted as revolution. Any knowledge of society and social change "can exist only by referring to, or by positing singular entities ... which figure and presentify social imaginary significations."
Concerning his political views, autonomy appears as a key theme in his early postwar writings... He defined an Autonomous society in contrast to a Heteronomous one. While all societies make their own imaginaries (institutions, laws, traditions, beliefs and behaviors), autonomous societies are those that their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (αυτο-νομούνται). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (i.e. God, ancestors, historical necessity).
It his interesting to notice that "historical necessity", once part of the marxist vulgate, is now at the heart of the narrative conveyed by the proponents of what I would call the "disembedded economy". "Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
