Thank heavens that cloud of fashionable cynicism threatening the Economic Summit has passed over. Now we can get back to the party.

It's always fun to watch the waves and counterwaves of received wisdom ripple through the press. For months, journalists around the world had been penning withering little essays on the emptiness and fraud of summitry. As the event approached, however, many lost their nerve: editorials and columns began popping up decrying such arid pessimism, and asserting the enduring value of dialogue, consensus, and face-to-face encounters. Reporters at the summit have in turn solemnly relayed each collective ''breakthrough'' or individual ''triumph'' of the Seven.

Perhaps the fourth estate felt some sense of shame at the thought of trashing the proceedings in the conference room while downing vast amounts of the free food and liquor laid on for them in the press tent. Personally I have no such qualms. If ever demonstration were needed of the utter impotence of consensus, this week's spectacle would surely serve.

The leaders' declarations fall neatly into three piles. There are the studiously vague, such as the commitments to Do Something about apartheid, the ozone layer, and Afghan refugees; the hopelessly brave, such as the latest ''war on drugs''; and the transparently unreal, such as the opposition to trading with terrorists for hostages, signed by at least two nations, France and the U.S., that lately have been striking exactly that sort of bargain.

The issues of real contention, chiefly agricultural subsidies, remain mired in endless negotiation. On this, the best that U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker could claim was that the bickering summiteers had not actually made things worse; GATT director Arthur Dunkel considered it important progress that the leaders even recognized there is a problem.

The one achievement that summit apologists can point to, the ''menu of options'' approach to African debt relief, amounts to a solemn and binding commitment on the part of the signatories to do whatever they feel like. Unable to agree on the merits of concessional interest rates vs writeoffs on principal vs lengthened maturities, the Seven left it to each nation to decide for itself. For this we need a summit?

It isn't really a matter of the bloated numbers of the delegations or the flabby agendas that have grown up since the first summit in 1975 - the Topsy syndrome to which blame is conventionally attached for the failures of summits since. For all the hopes riding on Chairman Mulroney's attempts to rationalize operations - one TV reporter gushed that the major achievement of this year's summit was the reduction in the size of the conference table - the results were largely the same. Many summit critics seize on this nevertheless, because it offers absolution to the process of negotiation itself. The ideal of consensus still commands broad devotion among the chattering classes, not just in international affairs, but in all spheres. The same people who place great stock in G-7 or the GATT are those who emphasize ''co-operative federalism,'' tripartite (business, labor and government) industrial policy, and bipartisan politics.

The mystery of this is that the great international movements that have swept the world economy in the last decade - tax reform, privatization, deregulation - have been the result not of multilateral agreement, but of unilateral action by individual nations. Advances in social policy in Canada and the U.S. have as often as not come about through province or state initiatives, or ''competitive federalism,'' in Professor Albert Breton's phrase.

Progress is better effected by competing jurisdictions and successful example than by negotiated uniformity. Imagine, for example, if tax reform had been conducted by international agreement. They'd still be talking. Each nation would protest against any reduction in the tax rates of its fellows, for fear of losing capital and labor to lower-rate regimes. Each would use the intransigence of the other to justify its own. Taxes today would be no lower than before.

The problem in negotiating change is that failure defaults to the status quo. While talks go on, nothing is done; if talks collapse, ditto. The adversarial cast lent the issues by negotiation offers political rewards to the obstinate.

DISASTROUS EFFORTS

But then, as I have argued before, the greater threat lies in those areas where the leaders are able to agree, as in the disastrous efforts at macroeconomic policy co-ordination.

There are few areas, if any, in which the interest of one nation, properly understood, is in true conflict with that of its neighbors. Co-operation is thus either redundant, if it does not change the course of policy from that dictated by self-interest, or harmful, if it does. The Seven take great pride in the record of co- operation in the aftermath of last October's crash; they fail to mention that it was co-operation, through the strangling of the U.S. money supply, that precipitated the crash.

The search for consensus, then, can either retard progress, if it fails, or pervert it, if it succeeds. Whichever, it hardly seems worth it, even to keep journalists fat and happy.