Hegel and ‘The End of History’

Extract

Now I have already indicated that the picture I have painted of what I believe to be post-1945 socio-economic reality corresponds after a fashion to the picture of the cultural and intellectual world to be found in the works of writers who concern themselves with what since 1975 has been called ‘postmodernism’. I should like as the next stage in my argument just briefly to survey the correspondences.

Firstly there is the question of politics, which seems to me intimately linked with the term ‘postmodern’ itself. I regard ‘postmodern’ as corresponding to what I have today called ‘post-1945’, for I believe that post-modernism is inseparable from the development of the global market. This is not an obvious point, for there has been much discussion among those who have taken up the term on whether ‘postmodern’ is a chronological term at all. Most have taken the view that it is not, that what they mean by postmodernism is something that runs in parallel with modernism or is even a permanent possibility of the human spirit — it is suggested that Montaigne, in the 16th century, is postmodern, but the brothers Schlegel, in 1800, are only modem. (It is of course a Frenchman who makes the suggestion.) As it is part of a postmodernist approach to deny — at any rate from time to time — the significance of chronology this is an understandable ploy. Indeed the term ‘postmodernist’ is a good one precisely because ‘modernism’ in all the arts depended on the belief in an opposition between the present and the past. To be modern was to do things differently.