Hardly more than a quarter-century after Henry Luce proclaimed “the American century”, American confidence has fallen to low ebb. Those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York. Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders. The same crisis of confidence grips other capitalist countries as well. In Europe, the growing strength of communist parties, the revival of fascist movements, and a wave of terrorism all testify, in different ways, to the weakness of established regimes and to the exhaustion of established tradition. Even Canada, long a bastion of stolid bourgeois dependability, now faces in the separatist movement in Quebec a threat to its very existence as a nation. The international dimensions of the current malaise indicate that it can not be attributed to an American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeois, long ago lost the capacity to explain the events in the world of welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has 25年前亨利露西就声称美国时代到来，时至今日，美国人的信心早已跌落谷底。 曾几何时，有人大作主宰世界的美国梦，如今对控制纽约都一筹莫展了。越战惨遭失败，经济每况愈下，自然资源枯竭在即，这一些使得上层社会孕育着悲观情绪。 其他的资本主义国家也在劫难逃。 在欧洲，共产党力量与日俱增，法西斯运动死灰复燃，恐怖主义此起彼伏，这些都用不同的形式证明政权软弱无能，传统也即将消耗殆尽。 加拿大一直是资本主义社会的可靠堡垒，现如今面临魁北克的分裂运动，将会直接威胁到国家的生死存亡。 国际社会缺乏信心，但这一切不能归咎于美国勇气的缺失。 世界各地的资本主义社会已经江郎才尽，再也拿不出建设性的意见。 他既没有能力也没有意愿来面对这来势汹汹的重重困难。 资本主义的政治危机折射出西方文化的总体危机，这种总体危机表示人们普遍对现代历史进程的茫然无知，同时也无法走向理性的方向。 自由主义曾经是上升资本主义的政治理论，而如今在这个福利国家和跨国公司里，早已失去了解释这个世界的能力。又没有其他理论取而代之。 taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well. The sciences it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the Ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. Neoclassical economic theory can not explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempts to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Fraud into the measurement of trivia. The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offers no miracle cures for social problems. 自由主义不仅在政治上宣告破产，在思想上也宣告破产。 自由主义孕育了科学，这些科学信心十足，有能力驱走中世纪的黑暗，而现在他们宣称的各种现象，再也无法提供满意的答复。 新古典主义经济理论再也无法解释失业和通货膨胀并存的现象， 社会学企图为现代社会勾画整体蓝图，如今也打了退堂鼓， 传统心理学究再也无法面对费洛伊德的挑战，而去玩弄一些心理学上的细枝末节，自然科学曾夸夸其谈，如今也匆忙宣布已无法为社会问题提供灵丹妙药。 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/8b2ec64759cfa1c7aa00b52acfc789eb172d9ec8.html