There has been a revival in western thought of romantic ideas of society and history that had, before the Second World War, been associated with conservative 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 irrationalist social theories, where culture replaces race as the organizing principle of a theory of predispositions inherent in ethnic, religious and national groups. This repetition of late 19th-century polemics against degeneration and against the Enlightenment gathered force in a context marked by the fall of the socialist bloc, deregulation, structural marginality and the waning of humanism in favour of an anthropological pessimism emphasizing singularity.
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