Civilization, culture and the new barbarians

There has been a revival in western thought of romantic ideas of society an d history that had, before the Second World War, been associated with conse rvative 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 irratio nalist social theories, where culture replaces race as the organizing princ iple of a theory of predispositions inherent in ethnic, religious and natio nal groups. This repetition of late 19th-century polemics against degenerat ion and against the Enlightenment gathered force in a context marked by the fall of the socialist bloc, deregulation, structural marginality and the w aning of humanism in favour of an anthropological pessimism emphasizing sin gularity.