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- Title
Civilization, Culture and the New Barbarians.
- Authors
Al-azmeh, Aziz
- Abstract
There has been a revival in western thought of romantic ideas of society and history that had, before the Second World War, been associated with conservative and right-wing political movements and ideologies. The emphasis on an unreflected notion of 'culture', postmodernist relativism, scenarios of the wars of civilizations, fundamentalist reclamations of authenticity and multiculturalist celebrations of difference constitute a revival of irrationalist social theories, where culture replaces race as the organizing principle of a theory of predispositions inherent in ethnic, religious and national groups. This repetition of late 19th-century polemics against degeneration and against the Enlightenment gathered force in a context marked by the fall of the socialist bloc, deregulation, structural marginality and the waning of humanism in favour of an anthropological pessimism emphasizing singularity.
- Subjects
SOCIAL theory; MULTICULTURALISM; CULTURAL fusion; ETHNICITY; MINORITIES; ANTHROPOLOGICAL research
- Publication
International Sociology, 2001, Vol 16, Issue 1, p75
- ISSN
0268-5809
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/0268580901016001006