late modernity
late modernityA term used by writers who do not accept that there has been a transition to a new societal stage of post-modernity, but who do wish to acknowledge that there has been a radical intensification of some of the tendencies of modernity. Emphases differ but the general position is associated most prominently with the works of Anthony Giddens, Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, and Jürgen Habermas. Whereas postmodernists tend to emphasize fragmentation and centrifugal forces at the cultural level, these theorists focus on the heightening and extension of a range of institutional features that are said to underlie these cultural changes. They also emphasize the continued significance both of centripetal, ordering, forces, and of the possibility for emancipatory politics. For Harvey and Jameson, the fluidities, disjunctions, simulations and forms of nihilism that...
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