This essay introduces two new concepts into the international debate about the theory and practice of creative industries. These concepts are ‘creative modernity’ and the ‘new cultural state’. The new cultural state has a double meaning. It refers to the new cultural condition we find ourselves in, what we call here creative modernity, and the form in which the modern state has governed, or intervened in, culture through law and other means of governance or regulation. In this process, the modern state — as it did in the United Kingdom for a while — sometimes becomes a part of the ‘cultural’ sphere through the project of creative modernity. As we see here in a rethinking of the case of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the British New Labour government, an experiment which is often cited approvingly in the creative industries debates around the world, creative modernity involves the social engineering of a ‘new individualism’ where citizens are remade as creative entrepreneurs. In this essay, it is argued that to move the arguments forward, the debate about creative industries should be re-situated within the wider framework of cosmopolitan sociology's analyses of modernity, the state and culture.
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