"Upgrading" Market Legitimation: Revisiting Habermas's 'Technology as Ideology' in Neoliberal Times

Four causes have been suggested to underlie these dynamics: economic, political, social and technological. Economically, the disembedding of markets from society, and their increased disorganization can be seen as responses to the internal constraints of the Fordist mode of accumulation, and the need of capitalism to be restructured Politically, these dynamics had been accompanied by a transition from a political ideology of national embedded liberalism (or social democracy, Keynesianism, welfarism,) to that of global neoliberalism (or market fundamentalism) Socially, these processes are seen as the result of a new balance of power between capital, labor, and state, with capital gaining a newfound autonomy from labor, and hence with the state diminishing in its legitimacy Technologically, these dynamics had been facilitated by the emergence of new information and communication technology, allowing space-time compression, acceleration, and the transition to a social dynamics of networks