The politics of the market has given us individual freedoms, but inhibited any potent form of collectivity. We cannot return to the regulated social life that enabled a ‘Fordist’ democracy to function. So what now? Neoliberals are terrified of the emerging potential for a dynamic pluralist and democratic society. In this lecture, for the biennial ‘Crossroads in Cultural Studies‘ conference, this potential and its history is explored, along with the possible contribution of cultural studies to such a development.
This was posted on openDemocracy after I gave the talk as a plenary lecture at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2012 conference in Paris.