In elaborating this critique, Todd is among the few European intellectuals to echo a diagnosis of technological stagnation similar to those of Americans such as Robert Gordon, Peter Thiel, and Tyler Cowen. The extraordinary development of information technology should have sparked a Promethean sense of agency across society and among elites. Instead, both leaders and people have, each in their own ways, lost faith in the future, with definite optimism giving way to debilitating passivism. Todd suggests that no past technological break­through has induced such complacency as that which has confined technological progress to such a narrow cone as IT…

At the heart of the present predicament is an unraveling of the two primary forms of political legitimation familiar in the postwar world, “input” and “output” legitimacy: the first looks to the processes by which policies are made and takes something like “the consent of the governed” as the basis of legitimacy; the second looks to whether policies, however produced, generate desirable outcomes…

Liberalism, Judge explains, disavows the problem of distributive con­flict. When the postwar growth engine began to slow, finance—which appears to extend distributive shares without requiring taxation or redistribution—promised a way out of the resulting political impasse. Elected officials were not captured or co-opted: they willingly embraced financial solutions to their political problems. Finance, naturally, exacts a price, however: subjecting government to the financial imperative to produce monetary returns has precipitated the transformation of liberal­ism into what is now commonly known as “neoliberalism.” In essence, Judge reverses David Harvey’s dictum: instead of “Neoliberalism entails the financialization of everything,” he arrives at “financialization entails the neoliberalization of everything…

Restoring large-scale, competent manufacturing in the United States will require a higher level of labor-management conflict than the country has seen since the early 1940s. Although it may be surprising to most readers, that’s actually a very good thing, so long as that conflict is about effort and reward in the context of higher productivity…