A fourth way?
Jonathan Rutherford, left, (professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University), writing in the Guardian, thinks politics in the UK is changing. Can your students find evidence to support or contradict his thesis?The politics of relationships
"We are on the cusp of a paradigmatic political change. The era of economic restructuring with its blind faith in the free market, hyper-consumerism and winner takes all, is drawing to its close. Selfish individualism has been dealt a fatal blow by casino capitalism and unprecedented levels of personal debt. The politics of Thatcherism and New Labour is now defunct. Gordon Brown's tragic fate is to be the undertaker of his own endeavour.
"Interdependency will be the new political virtue. Individual market choice will no longer command policymaking. Instead relationships will be the priority...
"The new Conservatives understand this changed paradigm. David Cameron has said 'the greatest challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival'...
"This is the language that once belonged to the left..."
Labels: political culture, politics, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:24 AM
1 Comments:
Some of you on this list may know about the idea of "spiral dynamics" that argues that individuals and social groups, including societies and polities, oscillate between individualism and collectivism. Perhaps it time now for comparativists to check out spiral dynamics to find out if there is really substance in this approach to understanding and predicting the evolution of political organizations and institutions (parties, states and so on).
What Rutherford is stating in his Guardian dispatch appears to follow the predictions made by those who use spiral dynamics as a methodology.
Start with:
www.spiraldynamics.org (Cowan)
and
www.spiraldynamics.net (Beck)
Cowan and Beck, the people who developed Spiral Dynamics in the USA, used to collaborate and have since parted ways. They claim to have been consultants to the de Klerk Government prior to the the regime change in 1994, helping that government facilitate the transition post-apartheid RSA.
Post a Comment
<< Home