After The Crisis 

by Alain Touraine 

(Polity, £14.99) 

SINCE the 2008 economic crisis, financial speculation has become the most lucrative source of wealth for top-tier managers. The result of this enrichment of irresponsible financial adventurers with immense wealth moving from the hands of creators and inventors into those of speculators has been financial collapse, inequalities, deprivation and society on the brink of breakdown. 

Between the “golden boys” and those with little or no job security there is so little common ground that the two can never come into direct conflict. 

The fall-out from this rupture in the relationship between the financial economy and all other sectors of society is the subject of this sociological analysis. 

Touraine is not a critic of capitalism per se, rather of today’s “contaminated” form of capitalism, responsible for the growing weakness of socio-economic actors and the interventionist state. It is this globalisation of economic activity and the excessive pursuit of profit which is destroying both social and political life and the best economic opinion suggests we would not survive another financial crisis. 

Sociologists take the view that we are in the throes of more than a global economic crisis and that links have to be re-established between the economic and non-economic elements if we are to avoid a social conflagration. 

The demise in the late 1960s of the post-war managed economy led to the rapid world-wide spread of neoliberal capitalism, a system in which the intervention of non-capitalist elements, be they unions or governments, continued to decline while the number of crises increased. 

Yet Touraine is not pessimistic. The current political silence cannot last. 

After a quarter of a century of admiration for the neoliberal model US citizens are waking up and the opposition to the violence of governments and the inhuman logic of the global economic order by those not in pursuit of personal interests, such as environmentalists, are positive signs. 

So too are the desire of nations and regions to protect their languages, culture and collective memories against globalisation. 

Education, Touraine argues, has become a means of social selection, favouring minds more intent on obeying rules than innovation, which suggests that change is not beyond the realms of possibility. 

Gwyn Griffiths