Introduction of Part IV

Abstract

Since the rise to prominence of identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s and the cultural turn taken by social theorizing, which culminated in postmodern narratives, it has become somewhat unfashionable to speak of emancipation. Emancipatory politics has come to be construed as a “thing” of the past, a political project tied with, and confined to, social conditions marking a bygone era. In the work of Lyotard (1984), for example, the contemporary “incredulity towards meta-narratives” is thought to mark the demise of collective forms of political action uniting individuals behind a shared emancipatory project. Societies have, we are told, become far too complex and pluralized to be able to speak of a political project capable of uniting the differentiated mass of individuals subjected to disenfranchizement, precarization or exploitation. But postmodern thinkers are not alone in highlighting changes in the nature of political action. For example, for a late modernity theorist like Giddens (1991), contemporary forms of political action have come to assume two distinct characteristics: an articulation around post-material issues, which proponents of the new social movements thesis have also emphasized, and the individualization of political action. Political action, in the form of “life politics,” is mainly confined to the sphere of culture and has turned into a matter of individual responsibility. For Giddens, then, the advent of “late modernity” marked the demise of emancipatory politics in the face of issues thought to be too biographical and diverse to call for, or require, collective forms of action.