John Higley, Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin
Research School of Social Sciences Visiting Fellow, The Australian National Unversity

Larry Saha Room, HA2175 Haydon Allen Building (22), The Australian National University

Abstract:

During the 1950s and 1960s the utterances of western leaders and elites conveyed a highly optimistic appraisal of the West's prospects. Leaders and elites seemed to believe that western countries had in hand the material resources, technology and managerial skills with which to solve most, or at least many, domestic and international problems at bearable costs and in accord with liberal principles. But the world turned out to be more unmanageable than they blithely expected. Policies growing out of their optimistic expectations proved relatively ineffective in providing an assured western dominance of the world and an assured continuance of high economic productivity. The key precipitants of this change were twofold, and together they constituted a major shift in the basis of western power and made potential disasters visible in several directions. The first precipitant was dissolution of the West's colonial empires and the political emergence of a great many "developing" countries. The second precipitant, not so easily datable or initially definable, manifested itself in fragmentary form. It consisted of various indications of future energy scarcities and environmental constraints, both in large measure the consequence of the West's productive efficiency. This seminar discusses the threatening world in which the West now finds itself.