Since the first oil crisis of the 1970s, the entire world has been swept up in an enormous economic and technological paradigm shift, resulting in a frayed social safety net, job insecurity, and a shrinking middle class. Deregulation at various levels, instigated by the policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, favored the trend toward a capitalism marked by big finance and an all-powerful stock market, all of which has given way to what has come to be called globalization.

Everyone recalls Regis Debray's famous line regarding May ’68: ‘Fallait-il se rêver maoïste pour devenir américain?’ Debray has been a remarkable analyst of both the ‘langue de vent’ of the May ’68 phenomenon and the shifting reality of French society, of which May ’68 was but symptomatic. ‘Parole flottante, sans ancrage dans la matérialité sensible ou historique; syntaxe sans sémantique où les signes jouent entre eux, en l'air,’ but also everything that followed in the wake of that syntax without semantics: ‘En France, tous les Colomb de la modernité crurent, derrière Godard, découvrir la Chine à Paris, quand ils abordaient en Californie. C'est le vent d'ouest qui gonflait les voiles, mais ils se guidaient sur le petit livre rouge qui disait le contraire, comme les découvreurs sur la Géographie de Ptolémée.’

Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello undertook an analysis of the new ideological configurations that currently hold sway, attempting to come to grips with this world of ideological confusion. No alternative to former critical schema was able to pass the torch of revolutionary, reformist, or even Keynesian discourse. Capitalism, on the other hand, managed to transform itself—not without major upheaval— by reforming, adopting, and adapting the discourse of certain of its adversaries. It was able to endorse the ‘artistic critique’ that, throughout the world, was calling for a complete change in people's lives, advocating qualitative rather than quantitative transformations, and promoting autonomy and creativity. It saw how it stood to benefit from the trend toward segmentation, fragmentation, and individualization. The new spirit of capitalism drew on critiques that denounced the mechanization of the world. It endorsed the demand for authenticity, the rejection of mass production and standardization, of anything not wholly genuine.