This mode of thinking, which developed in the second half of the twentieth century, also incorporated a particularly ambiguous critique of modernity, which was generally limited to the cultural and political fields (M. Maffesoli, 1990). The idea of history as something constructed here and now by individual actors, the refusal to acknowledge the existence of structures and the denial of the reality of systems – defined exclusively in vertical terms – as well as the explicit desire not to accept theories in human sciences, has turned this current of thinking into the bastard child of modernism itself, so that people have become depoliticzed. Post-modernism has transmuted itself into an ideology that is pretty convenient for neoliberalism. At a time when capitalism was building the new material basis of its existence as a ‘world-system’, as Immanuel Wallerstein has termed it, the denial of the very existence of systems is most useful for the advocates of the ‘Washington Consensus’.
Francois Houtart,
The Common Origin of the Multiple Crises: The Logic of Capitalism and the People’s Response
The Postmodern Reaction
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