The Government of Differences: Daniel Bell, Great Society and «Bourgeois Populism»

Abstract

The essay aims at reading in the works of Daniel Bell the path of neoconservatism since its very beginning against the background of the Great Society and the rise of the black movement, the crisis of the Welfare State and the renewed centrality of the market in the global scenario of the 1970s. The objective is to show that neoconservatism is basically a politics of the limits of liberalism in front of the «continuity» of the «cultural tradition» of society: an effort in many ways shared by rising neoliberalism to reestablish the order embedded in the “history” of the social fabric and in its power relations.