Books
Digby Diehl, Playboy, June 1992
With considerable wit and erudition, Saul attacks the apparent success of capitalism and democracy in today's Western societies. He argues that we are actually in "the dotage of the Age of Reason." The bean counters, the lawyers and the technocrats - people who, in Mussolini's phrase, could make the trains run on time - have, according to Saul, bastardized Voltaire's vision of a rational world. In place of individual freedom, we have conformity, and instead of governments embodying morality or common sense, we have power structures bound to even more abstract concepts. Saul dissects the cynical manipulations of our power elites and rails about the disappearance of individual responsibility, moral vision and common decency.
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