In this post at public opinion I wrote:

For the Greenhouse mafia the effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. For them a crisis of democracy can occur when the populace becomes too well-informed about the true goals and motivations of its politicians, government and corporations. Participatory democracy and active citizenship are to be resisted because limits need to be placed on popular sovereignty in order to remove people from decision-making.

The first trend is the growing power of particular state agencies because of corporate economic globalisation: the treasury, the federal reserve, the office of the trade representative, and other agencies in the case of the US. These and equivalent institutions in other countries played a major role in building this global corporate economy - it was not just an achievement of "the free market". Their growing power in turn empowered the executive branch.

on the one hand remove various oversight functions from legislatures, and on the other actually add power to the executive branch. This power gain happens through the establishment of specialised commissions for finance, telecommunications, trade policy, and the other key building-blocks of the new economy. In other words, the oversight functions lost by congress reappear as specialised commissions, mostly staffed by people from the concerned industries in the private sector.

The participation by the state in the implementation of a worldwide economic system has engendered a range of new types of cross-border collaborations among specialised government agencies; these focus on the globalisation of capital markets, international standards of all sorts, competition policy, guarantees of contract for global firms, and the new trade order.

As the global corporate economy began to grow from the 1980s, these global regulators (pre-existing, or emerging) gained enormous power. This too was a dynamic and self-reinforcing process. By around 2006, when corporate globalisation had been more or less completed, their power was beginning to wane. But the institutional changes that had consolidated the executive branch were in place - and most (such as the specialised commissions referred to above) are there still.

Guy Rundle at Crikey argues that the social conservative/economic liberal mix that has dominated politics is now coming apart. He says that until the late 1960s, no "mix" was needed -- as both political parties were socially conservative. The rise of the boomer generation, the spread of media and expanded education made left-liberal progressivism the dominant social philosophy for a generation -- dominant of the political class in anyway, less solidly so in whole areas of social life.The left-liberal progressive social policies is that they fit both economic liberalism (as freedom for the individual in all spheres) and social democracy (as the spread of equality, both economic and social).he adds:

But for Labor, rank-and-file support for -- or at least benign indifference to -- social progressivism was contingent on continued support for social democracy. When inequality began to rise under the Hawke government, and when Keating combined market-oriented policies with an elitist vision of History and Culture (represented as the "real" essence of the Australian people), Labor had achieved that miraculous thing -- the exact opposite of the correct formula.For John Howard and a few shadowy consiglieres like Peter Coleman and Tony Abbott, this classic mistake created a gap whereby a new version of the social-economic mix could be sold to people. Howard's argument -- a mangled and essentially reversed version of social theorists such as Christopher Lasch -- economic liberalism demanded state-enforced social conservatism. Howard was smart enough to realise -- as he noted in one or two vaguely theoretical writings -- that globalisation, neoliberalism etc pulls communities and life-worlds apart, renders people alienated and dispirited, ungrounds life.

Everyone adopted this. In the UK Major, Blair and Brown piled on the CCTVs, anti-social behaviour orders, pre-criminal targeting, binge drinking etc etc. In the US, 911 gave the opportunity for an end-run around the Constitution and eschewed the coercive public health campaigns for the simple expedient of jailing everyone. In Australia, it was more symbolic than real, but provided scope for an endless war against shadowy "multiculturalism", "postmodernist English teachers", "relativist history" etc etc. In France, which came late to this, Sarkozy is doing it with an attack on the burqa -- a substitute for his failure to reform France's sclerotic economy, because he's too scared to take on the unions.

Telos appears to have gone behind a subscription wall. So we are left with the blog. One entry by Russell Berman (from Telos 146) spells out the history of Critical Theory, which he says, developed in response to the specific historical developments of twentieth-century Europe: war and revolution, the transformation of Communism into Stalinism, and the rise of Nazi Germany. Combining the legacy of German philosophical idealism with the tradition of critics of idealism—Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche—Critical Theory also built on the emergent social theory, especially Weber's analysis of modernity and his one overriding theme, bureaucratization.

For Weber, creative innovations that transform social life and that take shape especially through religious genius as charismatic prophecy succumb to the dead weight of the world: however animating the idea, however compelling the vision, its spirit flags, worn down by the inertia of life. This decline transpires, tragically, as a consequence of the efforts to implement the ideals: first comes the prophecy, then comes its management, which finally snuffs it out. This deadly logic of bureaucratization marks the fate of both capitalism and socialism; it is the institutional form of rationalization. Indeed, modernity faces two alternative threats: the stultifying embrace of bureaucratic rationalization and its opposite, the seductive irrationalism that promises fulfillment but only makes matters worse. The pessimism stereotypically associated with Adorno derives significantly from Weber's bleak vision, the choice between charismatic dictators and anemic bureaucrats, while reserving a very small and unstable position for an objective thoughtfulness—where reason and values might momentarily coincide.

In A Place To Think? Some Reflections on the Idea of the University in the Age of the Knowledge Economy in New Formations Phil Cohen explores the implications of the neo-liberal modernizing the university. He says the roots of modernization lay in the 1960s student movement objections to the role of the liberal university:

in promoting an elitist version of the national culture as a civilising mission while advocating norms of scientific rationality that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a thinly disguised imperialist agenda. The organisation of these elements into an administered system of knowledge that was at once hierarchical and bureaucratic, ruled over as it was by the infamous ‘pedagogic gerontocracy’ was a special source of outrage. Yet in fact, saving the oedipal idioms of youth culture, the main thrust of the critique lay quite elsewhere. It turned on the ways the liberal university was being transformed into a modern corporate enterprise, sacrificing its intellectual autonomy to the research needs of the military industrial complex. So what was being attacked at one moment - the persistence of ‘Ivory Tower’ attitudes - was at another being implicitly supported as a defence against surrender to market forces.

According to this dispensation the top ranked ‘research universities’ (that is to say, where there were existing major inhouse research facilities supported by a critical mass of internationally rated
scholars) will continue to educate the future governing elites of the network society according to the latest inter-disciplinary protocols; meanwhile the task of the less well endowed institutions is to train up routine ‘knowledge workers’ by means of a thoroughly vocationalised curriculum while undertaking some applied research or as it is now called ‘ knowledge transfer activity’ to help balance the budget.

The history of the Australian welfare system, like that of the British, has always been one of grudging, paternalistic and sometimes punitive forms of social protection. In New Labour, the market state, and the end of welfare in New Formations Jonathan Rutherford argues that welfare reform under Blairite New Labour in the UK meant the transformation of the old style nation state into a new kind of 'enabling' market state.

Instead of providing social protection, the market state offers 'opportunities' and 'choice' to 'customers', who in return must shoulder a greater degree of responsibility for their individual predicament. Rutherford says that:

The system is not in crisis, and this is not the motivation for the proposed changes. New Labour's politics of welfare reform has subordinated concern for the sick and disabled to the creation of a new kind of market state: claimants will become customers exercising their free rational choice, government services will be outsourced to the private sector, and the welfare system will become a new source of revenue, profitability and economic growth.