After reading Dolack's review I think that the main significance of this book, together with other critiques of the status quo by many intellectuals (for example, Henry Giroux), is that they are seriously questioning the existing system and are now beginning to consider the need to radically change it.
Dolack explains that Taylor's book focuses on the culture of capitalism and how it creates feelings of cynicism, apathy, and passive fatalism among its citizens thereby preventing any significant opposition to form which might contest the rule of capitalists.
Feelings of hopelessness must be engendered. Although such injections can be, and often are, spread via propagandistic techniques — Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” being a prime example — an absorption into the bones of a society must be accomplished through multiple channels. Continual cultural reinforcement is critical to maintain a system such as neoliberal capitalism and the austerity that is imposed in ever more harsh forms.
A bleak cynicism — a deep pessimism that, bad though things are, there really is no alternative — keeps a populace in check better than bullets can.
