ABSTRACT
This chapter examines changing historical-structural conditions that no longer support the peasant concept. The modernist construction of the peasantry in both its bourgeois and Leninist versions began to come into crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. This crisis was provoked by the end of developmentalism, which conditioned the elaboration of renewed romantic sensibilities among peasantists who are so disposed. The chapter explores how the conceptual underpinnings of this dualist image of the West and the rest are undergoing an autodeconstruction. It discusses autodeconstruction is a sociocultural current characteristic of contemporary history that is rising into consciousness as new forms of popular and global culture that dissolve distinctions between modern and traditional identities. Right-wing ideas about rural society tend to be backward-looking reactions against contemporary society, which has undermined the old order. Much deeper reconceptualization was carried forward by a broad left-of-center intellectual current that emerged in the 1960s as a critique of both right- and left-wing modernist theories of development.
