THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS?

In my own relatively short lifetime at least two so-called ‘Ends’ have been widely canvassed – the End of Politics (in the 1950s) and the End of History (in the late 1980s) – not to mention several ‘post's (postmodernism, -structuralism, etc.). Is politics really ending, though – or is it rather evolving, possibly out of all recognition? Does the fact (if it is a fact) that hierarchy, certainty, bureaucracy, homogeneity, class affiliation, centralisation and the State are giving way, to some degree, in developed Western polities to market egalitarianism (so-called), uncertainty, diversity, heterogeneity, multiple identity, decentralisation and globalised confusion mean or imply a terminus of politics? Or, rather, does it mean the opposite – that is, more individualism, more democracy (however defined precisely), in the service of a genuinely consensual and free-willed politics? Advances in an undoubtedly democratic sense can most obviously be detected in the politics of, say, Germany, Japan and Italy, especially as compared to their dictatorships or authoritarian regimes of the 1930s.