The Crisis of Modernity

Abstract

The ideologies that became central to the political life of Western societies after the American and French Revolutions shared a common agenda, the agenda of modernity. They all responded to the common set of problems thrown up by the new society that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, and whose development formed the context in which the ideologies themselves unfolded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That new society of modernity was one in which industrial production and the exploitation of what seemed to be the unlimited resources of the natural world were central features. It was a society in which the nation-state provided the framework for political and cultural identity, as well as economic activity and (later) the impetus for imperial and colonial conquest. Finally, it was a society riven by class conflict arising from the capitalist mode of production, a conflict that socialists and Marxists saw as leading to a different type of society, to socialism or communism, which alone would be able to harness the fruits of modernity.