Crisis and the social desire for history

Abstract

Global restructuring of the market economies has been accompanied by the present crisis in the social welfare system and the exhaustion of the traditional managing role the state occupied in Western Europe, The wide political contest which had been created in European politics, in support of what was taken to be the state's principal responsibility to direct a heavily institutionalised welfare system, is now severely weakened and apparently unsustainable. As a consequence, rapid and erratic changes in society are amplifying unemployment, intensifying varying types of poverty and family instability, leading to the breakdown of customary forms of social solidarity and diffusing a sense of individualist disorientation and anomie. Correspondingly, attempts to legitimise this disintegration of the state's social assistance system in mainstream cultural discourse has largely, though not exclusively, been represented by endist postmodernist arguments, mainly by the end-of-history thesis (Fukayama, 1992). Initially, this seemed capable of damaging history as an academic discipline crucial to the cultural discourse of modernity, before it received an exhaustive critique as exemplified by Jacques Derrida's scathing deconstruction of Fukayama's claim, that 'the triumph of market liberalism' has brought and 'end of history', as a pure ideological hoax (Derrida, 1993). Nonetheless, notions from endist though are still hovering within the main flows of communication, fashioning an ambiguous language that portrays the idea of history as totally insignificant to the contemporary mode of existence. Prima facie it seems that the individual has been cleansed from a sense of history.