The Unconscious Civilization

John Ralston Saul argues that while Fascism was defeated in World War II, its "corporatist" doctrines powerfully influence our own society today. Saul explores how these corporatist priorities have now become so woven into our social fabric that they threaten the practice of Western democracy. Our civic order, Saul argues, has been remade to serve the needs of business managers and technocrats. In turn, other parts of society have come to mimic this arrangement as they themselves fracture into competing interest groups and ethnic blocs, virtually eliminating the role of the citizen. This largely unseen social order has deep and vexing roots in Western thought. Saul examines how this structure is bolstered today by political and intellectual charlatans who misleadingly describe it as a "common sense" arrangement, rather than what it is: an insidious war of attrition against the individual as citizen and the delicate system of open dialogue and doubt that alone guarantees the future of democracy.

From the author of Voltaire's Bastards comes a philosophical examination of how corporatism has become so deeply ingrained into our society, how it's destroying democracy, and how we can fight against it. In this intellectual tour de force John Ralston Saul argues that our society is only superficially based on the individual and democracy, and the West now toils unconsciously in the grip of a stifling “corporatist” structure that serves the needs of business managers and technocrats as it promotes the segmentation of society into competing interest groups and ethnic blocks.

With a new Introduction by the author, this “erudite and brilliantly readable book” (The Observer, London) expertly dissects the political, economic, and social origins of Western civilization to reveal a culture cripplingly enslaved to crude notions of rationality and expertise. With a new introduction by the author, this “erudite and brilliantly readable book” (The Observer, London) astutely dissects the political, economic and social origins of Western civilization to reveal a culture cripplingly enslaved to crude notions of rationality and expertise. The Western world is full of paradoxes. We talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet we’ve never been under more pressure to conform. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about invasive government, yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are deteriorating. All these problems, John Ralston Saul argues, are largely the result of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the past 400 years, our “rational elites” have turned the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts—“Voltaire’s bastards”—whose cult of scientific management is empty of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertain­ment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose ordinary citizens are increasingly excluded from the decision-making process. In this wide-ranging anatomy of modern society and its origins—whose “pages explode with insight, style and intellectual rigor” (Camille Paglia, The Washington Post)—Saul presents a shattering critique of the political, economic and cultural estab­lishments of the West.

(Dover thrift editions).

This international bestseller and “intellectual tour de force” (The Montreal Gazette) is both an attack on our weakness for ideologies and a manual for humanist action.

Originally published in 1951, the implications of this book were thought to be far wider and deeper than its title suggests. 'Hair-activities are chosen merely as a sample of uncritically accepted human behaviour. The author then proceeds to examine them very carefully in the light of dreams, anthropology, folklore, symptoms and perversions. He shows them to be an expression of instinct-driven tensions and conflicts. The popular illusion that they are determined by reason or adaption to reality is exploded. The corollary is inescapable; if in this innocent particular our thoughts and behaviour are symptomatic expressions of an unconscious conflict or complex, how much more psychopathic would our more significant ideas, beliefs, institutions, customs and laws prove to be on similar detailed investigation! Is, therefore, our self-expression in life and civilization nothing more than a symptom, identical in its source and mechanism with the symptoms of nervous and mental illness? The book is really a psychiatric criticism of normality based upon a chosen item of typically normal behaviour. It is, however, written in a way that will be easily understood by every intelligent reader.' This book is a re-issue originally published in 1951. The language used is a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

Essays bearing on the contemporary scene and on the relation of the individual to society, including papers written during the 1920s and 1930s focusing on the upheaval in Germany, and two major works of Jung's last years, The Undiscovered Self and Flying Saucers. ?

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.