The Politics of Postmodernity

Cambridge University Press, 7/23/1998
EAN 9780521461627, ISBN10: 0521461626

Hardcover, 244 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English

In his study Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contrasts the hopes and expectations of the modernising world of the nineteenth century with the real outcomes of the twentieth century, where the very conditions of modernity have led to the mass destruction of humanity and of those early hopes for the betterment of humankind. This volume explores the possibilities left to those once modernising societies, not only in terms of the worlds they have constructed but also in discerning the novel conditions which the closure of modernity entails. That closure, in part the completion of industrialisation and the social order that went with it, and in part the dislocation of the kinds of social knowledge used to understand it, has raised profound and disturbing questions about the character of this brave new world and the ways in which its governance and the goal of the good society can be understood. This volume explores some of the current vicissitudes of modernity, especially in relation to the crises of the political, and the political consequences of new technologies.

Acknowledgements
Notes on contributors
1. Introduction
postmodernity and the political James Good and Irving Velody
Part I. Modernity and Vicissitudes
2. Parvenu and pariah
heroes and victims of modernity Zygmunt Bauman
3. Private and public in 'late modern' democracy Geoffrey Hawthorn and Camilla Lund
4. Modernity and disenchantment
some reflections on Charles Taylor's diagnosis Quentin Skinner
5. Postmodernism and 'the end of philosophy' David Cooper
Part II. The Critique of Modernist Political Thought
6. Antinomies of modernist political thought
reasoning, context and community Raymond Plant
7. Master narratives and feminist subversions Diana Coole
8. In different voices
deliberative democracy and aestheticist politics Judith Squires
Part III. Technology and the Politics of Culture
9. Technology, modernity, politics Herminio Martins
10. Surrogates and substitutes
new practices for old? Marilyn Strathern
11. Postmodernism, the sublime and ethics Roy Boyne.