We are awakening from a period that Immanuel Kant would have

called one of dogmatic slumber. But as opposed to the dogmatic
slumbers of previous centuries governed by metaphysical and religious beliefs that Kant dismantled in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the last decades will probably go into history as the age of mindless fantasies of omnipotence and of thoughtless free market dogmatism.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the proponents of unfettered free markets, who had taken the reigns of the economy during the years of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, went into a triumphalist mood: the demise of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence were taken to be proof that the gospel of the free mar-

ket was now the only world religion of universal validity.