It's not pretty …

… In search of the zeitgeist | spiked review of books. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

The book speaks to our post-political times. Heitmann does not see the political zeitgeist in terms of a struggle between left and right. Party politics are meaningless in a world that rejects change and makes the state the auditor of human agency. For Heitmann, the zeitgeist is a consensus, a worldview that rejects freedom in favour of security – with deleterious effects. The sense that people are incapable of making the right decisions for themselves paves the way for the undermining of democracy. ‘The idea of democracy’, Heitmann writes, ‘is built on the fundamental belief in the intelligence of the democratic individual, the belief that every individual is capable of winning the struggle against his self-incurred immaturity’. Without that belief in the ‘democratic individual’, the way is clear for the tyranny of the regulative state.