For most of the twentieth century the progressive vision of the future in many parts of the world revolved around the socialist theory – namely, that equality and democracy could best be achieved by a system in which ownership of society’s wealth (the means of production) is vested in a structure beholden to, and controlled by, society. This system theory has now collapsed. However, the crisis of mainstream materialism (or social democracy) leads to a closely related problem: What happens if socialism’s distant cousin – the welfare state – also loses its capacity to achieve the fundamental value goals its core theory affirms? A less commonly recognized question concerns the implications when the fundamental basis of the conservative theory of liberty falters. The author argues that all these three issues point to a shared regime problem: the disintegration of traditional articulations of the relationship between values and systems.
