Abstract

One of the common grounds of neo-conservatism and an increasingly important current in leftist thought has been their shared doubts about the ideologies of progress and modernization These doubts have recently taken the form of a defense of tradition against the total insemination of the spirit of capitalism. In the face of the insatiable lust of modernization, one turns not to the self-conscious, playful impotence of modernists and post-modernists, but rather to the powerful “grip of the past” on communities and families. The forms in which the past is preserved over time should show us the sacred limits that bourgeois capitalism and state socialism are out to mystify with the opiate of development