... power and attempting to exert too great an influence on the economic and political forces which constitute their lived reality, it is also possible to go some way in predicting future paths of reaction the state may pursue in order to circumvent challenges to its legitimacy or interests. If we can expose and understand these basic patterns, we can also learn to subvert them. Here, of course, Antonio Gramsci will be eternally relevant. At base, The Third Way was essentially an effort to deflect a challenge posed to the authority of global capital by seeking to humanise the neo-liberal agenda through a philosophically promiscuous marriage between the values of socialist humanism and the logic of neo-liberal market ideology. Third Way politics can be understood as an ideological legitimation of neo-liberal monetarist policy during a period when populations who had long endured its socially destructive consequences demanded reform. These processes articulate ...

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