One of my friends defines chutzpah using the example of the parricide who claims the mercy of the court on the basis that he's an orphan.
I thought of that when reading 'History Is Still Over' [here] by Francis Fukuyama - a dash of Spengler, a dose of Thomas Friedman, a splash of Ayn Rand - in Newsweek. It's an explanation of "how capitalism survived the crisis", reassuring presumably for devotees of the idea that history ended some time in the 1980s. That idea - as silly as many of 'new economy' dogmas that legitimised the dot com bubble - was expounded so much more eloquently by Sellar & Yeatman at the end of 1066 and All That A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.
"In the fourth quarter of 2008, global growth abruptly went into reverse, and the enormous edifice of globalization itself seemed to teeter." Business as usual, say many historians, which would account for "What is striking is how little about the pre-crisis world has changed".
