{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020758483033932136, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004391217564870259, 'mean_word_length': 5.218362282878412, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World

Having read Voltaire’s Bastards a few years back, and now The Collapse of Globalism, I am left with the dominant impression that John Ralston Saul deserves recognition throughout the world as a precious cultural treasure – a remarkably learned maverick who is addressing the malaise of the age in a creative and illuminating manner. According to the dictionary a maverick is not only a wayward cow, but, more relevantly, an independent thinker, a person who does not conform to the norm. What makes Saul’s extended essays on major contemporary concerns so valuable, aside from their refreshing readability, is the comprehensiveness of his approach, drawing seamlessly on economics, history, literature and philosophy to develop his argument. What is Saul’s argument? Expressed as simply as possible, it is that politicians with the support of mainstream economists in the West have provided the world of business and finance with a dogmatic ideology, neoliberalism, that has encouraged a market-driven set of policies designed to make capital as profitable as possible, resting on the illusion that trade and gross domestic product (GDP) growth are automatically beneficial for society. This ideology extended its dominion over global economic policy by stages, flourishing in the latter decades of the Cold War, and gaining unchallengeable control over the political imagination in the decade of the 1990s. Saul is particularly critical of the atmosphere of ‘inevitability’ created by this neoliberal orthodoxy (what the former Brazilian leader Henrique Fernando Cardoso famously called ‘the only game in town’) that made governments and citizens feel helpless, even irrelevant, in this new climate where the market reigned by divine right. Saul is completely convincing when he argues that this ideological spin given to ‘globalisation’ was a brilliant mind game that led to bad results, which we are just now beginning to experience in the early stage of the unravelling of the world economy. Of course, persons on the left were critical all along of the social impacts of a neoliberal approach to globalisation, but most of us did not realise until recently how unsustainable it was to insist on minimising the regulation of the transnational economic behaviour while maximising the privatisation of activities formerly treated as public goods to be provided by governments. Saul, to his New Political Economy, Vol. 13, No. 3, September 2008