Suchergebnisse

At the end of the Second World War, Arnold Toynbee sat down to complete the last volume of his magnus opus, A Study of History. What was his main conclusion? That the world had just entered the last phase of Western history—the 'post-modern' era, an age that would be marked by anxiety and despair. A Study of History has gone the way of all meta-historical studies. Toynbee himself is now less regarded than Oswald Spengler. But if he is remembered for nothing else, it might be for giving a name—post-modernity—to a concept with which we are still coming to terms.

According to influential theories of identity in postmodernity, as community bonds loosen, individuals have increasing discretion in the construction of their own identity. In this article we argue for seeing modernization as the progressive psychologization of subjectivity. That reveals the mechanisms of what we can call, following Foucault, 'constituent power': a power that turns the psychological subject's conflicts away from external objects and towards an inner world. It is that inner conflict that promotes the modern preoccupation with identity.

In recent years, French folk customs have regained both popular & scientific enthusiasm. The relation of this change to the political consciousness that emerged in May 1968 is explored. France had experienced a series of social problems prior to 1968 that included industrial expansion, new demands for social mobility that the schools could no longer meet, & sectarian quarrels among the Left. After 1968, communalism reappeared, & regionalist movements became important. There is little real basis for such movements, however, as French culture has long been centralized. The myth of popular peasant cultures appeals particularly to U graduates with little place in Ur industrial society, but has little relation to actual peasant ways of life. Regionalists are also far too complacent toward local capitalism. They combine dependence on a fragile economic abundance with hatred of the Ur industrialism that makes it possible. W. H. Stoddard

The transition of the basically local military-political crisis in the Western Eurasia into the real focus of global geopolitical transformations and civilizational confrontation. That has brought to the agenda the issue of degradation of the principles of universalities that were the basis for globalization in both: socio-political and socio-economic spheres thus demonstrating deepening interaction between them. The world is facing the perspective of competition of different models of development and their political and social localization that reflect the specifics of social-economic environment. The fact that global transformations became the result of interaction of the objective and subjective, contextual factors as well as sometimes were brought to reality through the interaction of political leaders brings us to the conclusion that the world is nowadays within the transitional era that contains several points of bifurcation of political nature that in turn drive for different models of socioeconomic development. The sharp nature of ongoing transformations reflects the situation when most of the paradigms and instrumental models that were regarded as axiomatically universal like institutional governance and representative democracy started to lose their relevance as political and socio-political management tools. The same is true about a bulk of global economic tools such as the universal protected nature of economic interdependence and international trade. But all that was the basis for the globalization. The system of global political and economic relations that has resided quite recently in the environment of nearly total universality started to lose synergy and integrity while forming complex localized formats in which political and socio-cultural factors play the leading role ahead of economic basis and socio-economic relationships. The research drives to the conclusion on the possibility of emergence of the two competing models claiming a global status the specifics of interaction between them and the key differences between them.