The Political Dimension

Abstract

What have been described here in economics and in philosophy are the symptoms of a loss of direction; the engine has stopped, the boat is drifting. For centuries the West, and particularly the west of the West from which intellectual changes spread, had turned its eyes to the morrow and eagerly embraced change, and by this it marked itself off from earlier and alternative cultures. From Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik through Rimbaud’s cry “Il faut être absolument moderne” and a papal Rerum Novarum the new, the revolutionary, the forward-looking, indeed the future-hailing was the common theme of otherwise quite disparate movements. By the 1890s these were fully fledged; symbolically, Walter Crane’s Hope greeted the rising sun with outstretched arms. By the 1920s they were everywhere triumphing, and not only among the young. The names they had given rise to were affirmative, all-embracing, programmatic; Positivism and Futurism, L’Humanité and Vorwärts, beyond-the-real Surréalisme, Cubism and Vorticism, Modern Dance, Modern Linguistics, Modern Architecture, Free Schools, and free love.