To the Reader: Page 3

logy of Freud, to say nothing of the subjectivist theory of economic value of the Austrian School and such economists as Ludwig von Mies and the triumphant neoliberalism of von Hayek and his unexpected disciple, Margaret Thatcher.
     A formidable array. And who on the other side has fought for the power of reason, with its universalist assumptions, to solve human prob-lems? This is where the argument becomes inter-esting: there are in fact several, all of which had enormous social and economic impact, but only one of which had an equally enormous political one. Science, the particularist, empiricist, nonra-tionalist approach par excellence, subverted into a universalist rationalism by its concubine math-ematics, and aided and abetted by its Franken-stein monster with the heart of gold, technology - and Marxism. And only one of these attempt-ed, if with questionable success, to apply the


lessons of reason to the human polity as a whole, and that was Marxism.
     And we know - or rather, we think we know - what happened to that.
     Result: we have been left, East and West, with an irrational politics, culture, and economy and a rationalist-with-a-vengeance science and tech-nology to, together, dominate our lives. There, the ayatollah with the cell phone, the mujaheddin on the Internet, and the suicide bomber on the camcorder; here, the corporation pauperizing its employees to fatten its share price, the neocon bleeding the government to binge the super-rich, the hacker attacking the Web with ever-more-cunning cybervermin, the federal fanatic bent on world domination and describing how he means to do it on his website: scrupulously rational methods with momentously irrational ends.