Abstract

After the collapse of Eastern totalitarianism, American neo-liberalism of social markets and free enterprise is triumphing everywhere, as if it is the only legitimate way to live. It seems that it is claiming for itself the name “globalization”. This triumph derives directly from the fact that American democracy is founded on freedom and equality of the social partners. Finally in the twentieth century Alexis de Tocqueville, and more recently Louis Hartz, recognized “The big advantage of the Americans is that they could reach the state of democracy without having to make a democratic revolution: they are born equal, they don’t need to become equal” (Rajchman J, West C (ed) Post-analytic philosophy. Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 17). To cross the Atlantic Ocean would have enabled them to realize here, on earth, the Christian concept of producing and sharing salvation without having to cast aside the social structures inherited from feudalism. Furthermore social and democratic consensus would allow everybody today to survive economic and cultural crises as well as the antagonisms caused by their private interests or by the interests of whole groups, thereby avoiding the systemic use of violence. Thanks to neoliberalism, the bowing of our economic democracies to social consensus and to its social benefits would become the law of social and economic progress. As a form of life, it would finally enable individuals to integrate this social and economic progress into their personal lives. In this way neoliberalism would complete the process of rationalization of humankind and of the world. It would lead humanity to its philosophical destination.