How Did The Cold War Influence on International Relations - Research Paper Example

The fall of the Soviet Union has something important to say about the organization of social life, namely that the combination of some kind of representative democracy is the only effective way of running complex industrial and postindustrial societies. This should not be read as an endorsement of neoliberalism. According to Brown this should not be seen as an endorsement of neoliberalism (which unfortunately, is how the lessons of 1989 have sometimes been misunderstood in parts of East- Central Europe); rather, this combination leaves room for a great deal of variation in types of regime and in the level of planning that accompanies markets, from neoliberal systems, to welfare capitalism, traditional social democracy, the Third Way, and so on.

But it does rule out some possibilities that have been taken very seriously in the past. Since the emergence of industrial society, the most persistent opponents of liberal capitalism from right and left have argued that it is both possible and desirable to replace the impersonal forces of the market by conscious human control. Even those who were repelled by the politics of the Soviet Union and the stupidities of Soviet central planning assumed that a better way of reaching the same goal could be devised.

Part of this process would be the simultaneous replacement of bourgeois democracy with genuine people’s democracy. Recent experiences make it difficult to take either of these ideas seriously. The philosopher Richard Rorty has captured the significance of this when he remarks that: