Introduction

Abstract

Social thinkers in the 20th century devoted their attention primarily to issues of economic class. The great experiments of this century with communism and welfare state liberalism were intended to rationally manage the problems associated with class inequalities, either by softening the inequities created by capitalism or by attempting to eliminate class altogether. In this focus, the more primordial bonds of racial, ethnic, and nationalist loyalties and identities were often regarded as irrational anachronisms that would either be submerged under the imposed orthodoxy of communism or, more benignly, dissolved within the liberal frameworks of constitutional democracies. Yet, today, communism is nearly dead, liberalism is on the wane, and the older ethno-racial tribalisms, as well as some newly invented ones, have seemingly everywhere broken through our illusions of a rationally manageable world to find expression in chauvinistic nationalisms, “multiculturalist” ideologies, vicious civil wars, “ethnic cleansing” of whole regions, intensified racial and ethnic strife, a resurgence of racism, prejudice, scapegoating, hate groups, and nativism in almost all societies, and new group-based challenges to the individualistic focus of Western liberalism. It appears increasingly likely that as the 20th century draws to a close it will bequeath an urgent preoccupation with these new tribalisms to its successor.