In this compact work of political criticism, John Ralston Saul argues that modern Western societies have mistaken managerial competence for democracy.

Public institutions, universities and governments increasingly speak the language of markets, efficiency and specialised expertise, while citizens are reduced to consumers and political choices are presented as technical necessities. Corporatism, in Saul’s account, is not simply the rule of large companies but a broader habit of organising society through closed professional groups that defend their own authority.

Originally delivered as the 1995 Massey Lectures, the book belongs to the late twentieth-century critique of neoliberalism, but its attention to institutional language, administrative conformity and the retreat of public judgment has aged rather better than much period polemic. Saul can be sweeping, and his defence of humanism sometimes relies on an idealised picture of civic life, yet the central question remains sharp: what happens when democratic societies lose the vocabulary required to recognise their own political choices? For readers of political theory, institutional criticism and the history of market ideology.

Penguin Books Australia, 1997; later printing of the Australian paperback edition. Light cover and edge wear; pages mildly age-toned.