The Politics of Postmodernity

by Edited by James M. M. Good , Irving Velody

• ISBN13: 9780521461627
• ISBN10: 0521461626
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-07-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 new 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii	(1)
Notes on contributors	viii
1 Introduction: postmodernity and the Political	1	(18)
JAMES GOOD
IRVING VELODY
Part I Modernity and its vicissitudes	19	(54)
2 Parvenu and pariah: heroes and victims of modernity	23	(13)
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
3 Private and public in `late-modern' democracy	36	(13)
GEOFFREY HAWTHORN
CAMILLA LUND
4 Modernity and disenchantment: some reflections on Charles Taylor's diagnosis	49	(12)
QUENTIN SKINNER
5 Postmodernism and `the end of philosophy'	61	(12)
DAVID E. COOPER
Part II The critique of modernist political thought	73	(74)
6 Antinomies of modernist political thought: reasoning, context and community	76	(31)
RAYMOND PLANT
7 Master narratives and feminist subversions	107	(19)
DIANA COOLE
8 In different voices: deliberative democracy and aestheticist politics	126	(21)
JUDITH SQUIRES
Part III Technology and the politics of culture	147	(80)
9 Technology, modernity, politics	150	(32)
HERMINIO MARTINS
10 Surrogates and substitutes: new practices for old?	182	(28)
MARILYN STRATHERN
11 Postmodernism, the sublime and ethics	210	(17)
ROY BOYNE
Index	227