6. The Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and the Post-‘New Left’

Abstract

The process of rationalisation is typically associated with certain intellectual or cultural patterns that go back to the Enlightenment: rationalism and an obsession with rational planning, a fondness for 'totalising' views of the world, the standardisation of knowledge, universalism and a belief in linear progress, especially of reason and freedom. They belong to a social form that is not just a transitional point on the way to capitalism, but an alternative route out of feudalism. Some accounts emphasise cultural changes ('postmodernism'), while others focus more on economic transformations, changes in production and marketing, or in corporate and financial organization. The chapter considers what is involved in periodising history of capitalism into modernity and postmodernity. Postmodernity corresponds to 'late capitalism' or a new multinational, 'informational', and 'consumerist' phase of capitalism. As Raymond Williams tells us the younger New Left did, of underestimating everything that has not changed in the capitalist system. Keywords:capitalism; economic transformations; enlightenment; France; new left; postmodernism; universalism