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
Mann challenges world-systems theorists on the issue of decline: the recession of the 1970s, it turns out, was an opportunity for the US to delay the crisis for several decades, permitting it to profit extensively from its seigneurial position
