Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T13:44:26.494Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Post-modernity and the end of the Cold War: has war been disinvented?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Christopher Coker
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

At the end of the Second World War, Arnold Toynbee sat down to complete the last volume of his magnus opus, A Study of History. What was his main conclusion? That the world had just entered the last phase of Western history—the ‘post-modern’ era, an age that would be marked by anxiety and despair. A Study of History has gone the way of all meta-historical studies. Toynbee himself is now less regarded than Oswald Spengler. But if he is remembered for nothing else, it might be for giving a name—post-modernity—to a concept with which we are still coming to terms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 189 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Toynbee, Arnold, Civilization on Trial (Oxford, 1948), p. 3Google Scholar.

2 Toynbee, Civilization.

3 See Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Post-Modern Condition (Minneapolis, 1984).Google ScholarRabinow, Paul, The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, 1984);Google ScholarHabermas, Jurgen, Autonomy and Solidarity (London, 1986)Google Scholar. See also Calinescu, M., Five Faces of Modernity (Bloomington, Indiana, 1987)Google Scholar and see Jencks, C., What is Post-Modernism? (New York, 1987), p. 11Google Scholar. It must be added that these anti-modernists disagree profoundly with each other and do not constitute a school. Derrida, for example, is not a post-modern critic of modernity so much as a Heideggerian-inspired philosophical dissident who dissents from the entire Western metaphysical tradition stretching back to the ancient Greeks. Michel Foucault remained a radically ambivalent figure to the end of his life, producing a radically ambivalent corpus of work. Lyotard, though a self-confessed post-modernist, draws mostly on Lacan and psychoanalytical theory.

4 Windsor, Philip, The Twentieth Century as Self-Conscious History, in Windsor, , Hagihara, et al. (eds.), Experiencing the Twentieth Century (Tokyo, 1985), p. 338.Google Scholar

5 Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T., The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1986), p. 3Google Scholar.

6 Inglehart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, New Jersey, 1973)Google Scholar. For Germany, see Betz, Hans G., Post-Modern Politics in Germany: The Politics of Resentment (London, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Bouveresse, Cited J., ‘The Darkness of This Time: Wittgenstein and the Modern World’, in Griffiths, A. Phillips (ed.), Wittgenstein Centenary Essays (Cambridge, 1991), p. 35Google Scholar.

8 Nivat, Georges, ‘Man and the Gulag’, in Windsor, , Hagihara, et al. (eds), Experiencing the Twentieth Century, p. 210.Google Scholar

9 Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, New Jersey, 1974), p. 336Google Scholar.

10 Barbusse, Henri, War Diary: ‘The contract signed by God the Father affirms without question that man must stay in the past … an odd doctrine where making progress lies in marking time’ (Penguin Book of World War One Prose (London, 1989), p. 196)Google Scholar.

11 Cited in White, Alan, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (London, 1990), p. 35Google Scholar.

12 White, Nietzsche's Labyrinth.

13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London, 1961), p. 10Google Scholar.

14 Cited in Peukert, Devlev, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernitv (London, 1991), p. 273Google Scholar.

15 Simmel, Georg, The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York, 1968), p. 15Google Scholar.

16 Cited in Lukacs, John, The Last European War, September 1939/December 1941 (London, 1976), p. 524Google Scholar.

17 Cited in Thorn, Christopher, The Issue of War: State Societies and the Far Eastern Conflict, 1941–5 (London, 1985), p. 326Google Scholar.

18 Frisch, Max, Sketchbook 1946-9 (New York, 1977) p. 276Google Scholar.

19 Mallaparte, Curzio, Kaput (London, 1989), p. 71Google Scholar.

20 Foucault, M., A History of Sexuality (New York, 1980), p. 143Google Scholar.

21 Dobson, Andrew, An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega Y Gasset (Oxford, 1989), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Fukuyama, Francis, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest, (Spring 1990)Google Scholar.

23 Zweig, Paul, The Heresy of Self-love: A Study of Subversive Individualism (Princeton, New Jersey, 1980), p. 263Google Scholar.

24 Cited in Cohen, Paul, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, 1984), p. 63Google Scholar.

25 Hellmann, John, American Myths and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986), p. 76Google Scholar.

26 Stevick, P., ‘Literature’, in Trachtenberg, S. (ed.), The Post-Modem Moment (Westport, 1985), p. 136Google Scholar.