In the long view of our global political and intellectual history, the last quarter of the twentieth century will remain as the period when the whole set of beliefs that were dominant in that century's third quarter, in the wake of the Second World War, started to crumble along with the political–social– economic regimes that underpinned them.

Hitherto dominant beliefs consisted, in short, of three variants of the faith in a future guided by rationality reigning supreme, in direct filiation from the eighteenth century's Age of Enlightenment through the universalist positivism and the democratic emancipatory aspirations of the nineteenth century, and in sharp reaction to the massive and extremely tragic backlash against those values that peaked with the rise of totalitarianism during the first half of the twentieth century.

One of the three post-war variants emerged in the Soviet Union after Stalin and was shared by the worldwide mass of Moscow's partisans and admirers: it was a belief in a socialist future rid of the worst features of Stalinism and predicated upon successful economic competition with the capitalist West. The second was the Western response to the first: the belief in the uninterrupted development of a form of capitalism that benefits all spheres of society. The third was constituted by imitations of the first two variants in the Global South, consisting, in essence, of two types of developmentalism: one based on private-sector participation and the other on state monopolisation.

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw this tripartite ideological configuration come under attack and start unravelling, or even collapse altogether in the case of the Communist component. A neoliberal social-Darwinist ideological onslaught prevailed over all three ideological beliefs, buttressed by the discardment of the idea of collective universal emancipation. There was nonetheless a short-lived attempt to provide a neoliberal version of the emancipatory ambition of past epochs. Heralding the “end of history” and trying to reconcile the idea of welfare with an enterprise that consisted fundamentally in the dismantlement of actual welfare progresses achieved during the previous decades, that attempt ended in ridicule.

The reactionary onslaught was accompanied in its early stage by the postmodernist deconstruction of the very idea of progress.