Markets and other monsters : LEADING ARTICLE

WE should be dancing in the streets. The two great monsters of the century, Fascism and Communism, are vanquished. Market liberalism is everywhere triumphant; democracy has no serious challenger as an ideal of how we should be governed. Yet the sense that something has gone terribly wrong pervades both Britain and America. Even Francis Fukuyama, the American writer who first celebrated the historic triumph of liberal capitalism, arguing that no rival theory need ever bother us again, is having a few doubts. In a recent article, he laments "the unravelling moral cohesion of societies that were once bound by the habits of religion, community or family". He adds: "When all that is left of the rich texture of society is a contract between individuals, then America will be in real trouble. Undeniably, that is where we seem headed." Fukuyama expresses a widespread unease about a world where, increasingly, people feel no loyalty except to their own enrichment. Words such as commitment, duty, obligation are pushed to the margins of debate. Self-realisation, self-expression, self-discovery - these are the important words for late 20th-century men and women. This is why the "communitarian" movement, with its calls for a greater sense of responsibility, attracts many politicians.

The totalitarian state, as portrayed by Orwell, Koestler and others, allowed no commitments except to the ruling state ideology. Religion was discouraged, voluntary associations banned, schools, universities, press and broadcasting organisations controlled. When children might be called on to denounce their parents for subversive thought, even the family was undermined. The totalitarian state demanded not just outward obedience but inward commitment.

Now, we are beginning to understand that unbridled liberal capitalism, in a quite different way, may eventually have some of the same effects as the totalitarian state. The Soviet system made it almost impossible for anybody to develop the habit of individual enterprise, even on a small scale; the Western market system makes it hard to think in any other terms. The Civil Service, teaching, medicine, public broadcasting - all must now model themselves on market principles. Even trade unions have become competing "service" agencies, offering various forms of insurance, legal assistance and shopping concessions. And the family, as the communitarians recognise, is endangered most of all because commitments to children may be a distraction from the imperatives of market success. As the American historian Christopher Lasch puts it in his The Revolt of the Elites, just published in America: "The market notoriously tends to universalise itself . . . It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity tojustify itself in the only terms it recognises: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line."

Lasch's argument is that social stability is now endangered not by the masses but by the elites. They look to the global market for employment, entertainment, consumption, even for marriage and friendship. They have no ties to a nation, let alone to a neighbourhood. They are opting out of many public services. The masses were once considered unfit to vote because, lacking property or money, they had no "stake" in the country; now it is the elites, the aristocrats of the market, whose fortunes are so detached from locality and nation that their only interest is in minimising government. They have become the supreme individualists.

Thus, argues Lasch, democracy is in danger. But something more radical may be needed than communitarian exhortations that everybody must be more responsible. For more than 15 years, governments of both left and right have regarded it as axiomatic that they must organise their economies and societies to make them competitive in the global market, to create lands fit for heroic entrepreneurs. In the next 15 years, they might think it wiser to consider how they can control the global market, to find ways of minimising the social wreckage it inflicts. Otherwise, it may come to resemble the hooded figure of death during the great plagues, roaming the world and striking communities at random, unknowable and unbeatable, and set above us all.