The master signifier was not ‘empire’ (politically inadmissible except, chiefly, as a designation for the Soviet Union) but ‘security’.
Most Americans had, to be sure, a shallow grasp of foreign realities and were prone to a fearful anti-communism—a case of Durkheimian ideological excess, perhaps.
The initial polarity here is between ideology along Durkheimian lines as a power-enhancing means of solidarity and cohesion in social formations, and ideology as Weberian value-rationality, where there can be no adjudication between ultimate values.
‘Revolutions are rarely a good idea’, as he typically puts it in bluff style. They tend to comport lots of ideology, in a bad sense.
confused about the use of this word here
If the golden age is gone, its larger historical framework nevertheless remains, albeit precariously. This is the structure that has marked, unevenly, the leading edge of collective power ever since the Middle Ages, for which Mann’s infelicitous term is a ‘multipower actor civilization,’ decentrali…
