489 



Space-Age Europe 203 



from the free-market ideal that flourished in the merely industrial age 

 of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Western intellectuals always 

 assumed that the postcapitalist age would usher in socialism and in- 

 tegration. Instead, it ushered in Gaullism with its rejection of capital- 

 ism and communism, its enforced unity at home and Darwinist strug- 

 gle abroad. The space age is an age of neomercantilism, or competing 

 national socialisms, and for the first time Americans can neither retreat 

 from the world nor hope to make it over. How will they adapt to life in a 

 technocratic world they helped to make but do not like, cannot change, 

 and cannot escape? 



