The Politics Of Time (original) (raw)

The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at present. * For all the enthusiasm for change manifest in the debates about postmodernism, there is probably currently less of a sense that 'things might proceed otherwise' in Western capitalist societies than at any time since the early 1950s. At a theoretical level, this situation has been depicted in a number of ways: from the 'realisation of nihilism' of Fukuyama' send of hi story , via the 'realisation of positivism' of J ameson' s postmodernism, to a series of more diffuse analyses of the end of politics and the crisis of the future. 1 One thing which is distinctive about all these scenarios is their fulsome embrace of that hitherto discredited nineteenth century genre, the philosophy of history; albeit, more often than not, in negative or inverted forms.2 Indeed, the mere fact that Fukuyama crafts his argument at this level has...