Liberalism Disavowed Quotes

“The invisibility of class differences has enabled the PAP government to proclaim that it has achieved its goal of making Singapore a home-owning, middle-class society. The homogeneity of everyday life in the public spaces of the housing estate has veiled but not erased class inequalities. In the privacy of its flat, each family lives with its own material excess or deprivation, surfeit or hunger, happiness or depression, according to its own financial circumstances.”
― Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore

“An authoritarian state with popular support that works is a distressing idea in a world defined by liberal democracy!”
― Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore

“a generalized anxiety about the long-term viability of the social, economic and political foundation of the island-nation has been transformed into a set of ideological justifications for and instrumental practices of tight social and political control, which taken together constitutes the authoritarianism of the regime.”
― Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore

“This “vulnerability” has been ideologically harnessed to generate a string of political consequences: fear of becoming irrelevant to the global market, thus constantly in search of niches of opportunities for economic growth; fear of fragmentation, thus an insistence on tight social control to ensure social cohesion; fear of political polarization by different political parties with different ideologies that might jeopardize national development, thus an emphasis on the administrative advantages of a one-party dominant government.”
― Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore

“One’s freedom is existentially and unavoidably constrained by the network of social obligations and responsibilities that one has to a whole range of intimate and distant others, from family to nation.”
― Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore