The Institutional Crisis of the Corporate‐Welfare State

The initial response to the crisis of the corporate‐welfare state is nativistic: “Give us that old time religion”. In almost every democratic industrial society, retrenchment has become the primary motive of social economic policy. In the name of nineteenth‐century economic wisdom, the inter‐war and post‐war commitment to human development, collective goals, and social justice is being abandoned. In this article I examine the current institutional crisis in an attempt to show that it is rooted in the holdover of an outmoded ideology and culture that has as its concomitant result a profound ideological lacuna. The implication of my argument is that it is not the last half‐century's social economic goals that should be abandoned but rather the nineteenth century folkways and folklore that frustrate their achievement and advocate their abandonment.