At the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting asks what will come in the wake of the free market, and whether religion is our only hope:

“It’s the end of the era of market triumphalism,” declared the American political philosopher Michael Sandel in his recent Reith Lectures. The certainties that have dominated the last quarter of a century—that the market knew best, achieved efficiency and produced wealth—have collapsed. Few would disagree with him, but the clarity of that conclusion is matched by the confusion about what comes next. In his last Reith lecture, on Tuesday, Sandel will call for a remoralisation of politics—that we must correct a generation of abdication to the market of all measures of value. Most political questions are at their core moral or spiritual, Sandel declares, they are about our vision of the common good; bring religion and other value systems back into the public sphere for a civic renewal. His audience will probably wince with horror.

She discusses a new theatrical work by the documentarian Adam Curtis:

He argues that we need to interrogate much more closely what he describes as the current “moment of stagnation”, our incapacity to bring about political change. What is paralysing the collective will? His new work opens the Manchester International Festival on Thursday. What continues to fascinate Curtis—as aficionados of his television series such as The Century of the Self and The Trap will recognise—is the dominance of individualism. How it came about and what it means for how power is exercised.

“What we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It’s enchanting, it’s liberating, but ultimately it’s disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change,” explains Curtis.

Read more at the Guardian.