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Postmodernity's Unexpected Arrival: 1968 as Breakdown in Geoculture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2019

Abstract

The year 1968 marked the apogee of High Modernity as expressed in the Old Left programs of either social-democratic reform or communist revolution. The New Left critics, in both east and west, demanded more of the same: a more “humane” socialism or less bureaucratic capitalism. Their demands, however, exceeded the limits of redistribution under each political system. Both western and eastern European power elites eventually found escape from state confines in globalization and neoliberalism. The exhaustion of modernity projects caused lasting fragmentation in the fields of ideology, culture, and politics previously structured by powerful national states and large political movements. This condition can be called “post-modern” in the simplest sense of following the breakdown of modernity without any new quality. The ex-Soviet countries serve as richly-nuanced examples of historical transformation from 1968 to 1989 and into the present morass.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: 1968
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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