shopkeeper, as the normal man. In our own time, however, the ideology of neoliberalism a market-centric hybrid of Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century utilitarianism has achieved near total domination in the economic and political realm alike.The success of this universal creed can be attested by many innovations of recent decades that now look perfectly natural. The rational market is expected to ensure the supply of valuable products and services, while the task of governments is to ensure fair competition, which produces winners and losers. The broad intellectual revolution in which an all-knowing market judges failure and success has even more forcefully insisted on the rationality of the individual.Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individuals failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.Us v Them: the birth of populism Read moreBut this abstract conception has no room for the emotional situation of real, flesh-and-blood people and how they might act within concrete social and historical settings.One of the first people to notice the disturbing complex of emotions we now see among self-seeking individuals around the world was Alexis de Tocqueville who was already worried in the 1830s that the American promise of meritocracy, its uniformity of culture and manners, and equality of conditions would make for immoderate ambition, corrosive envy and chronic dissatisfaction. The passion for equality, he warned, could swell to the height of fury and lead many to acquiesce in a curtailment of their liberties, and to long for the rule of a strongman.As De Tocqueville pointed out, people liberated from old hierarchies want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.We witness a universal frenzy of fear and loathing today because the democratic revolution De Tocqueville witnessed has spread from its American centre to the remotest corners of the world. The rage for equality is conjoined with the pursuit of prosperity mandated by the global consumer economy, aggravating tensions and contradictions in inner lives that are then played out in the public sphere.To live in freedom, De Tocqueville warned, one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger. This kind of life is barren of stability, security, identity and honour, even when it overflows with material goods. Nevertheless, it is now commonplace among people around the world that rational considerations of utility and profit the needs of supply chains and the imperatives of quarterly shareholder returns uproot, humiliate and render obsolete.The widespread experience of the maelstrom of modernity has only heightened the lure of ressentiment. Many new individuals now live in freedom, in De Tocquevilles words, even as they are enslaved by finely integrated political, economic and cultural powers: the opaque workings of finance capital, the harsh machinery of social security, juridical and penal systems, and the unrelenting ideological influence