ABSTRACT
This chapter examines approaches in social and political thought. In recent decades, there has been a convergence in social and political thought around the assumption that modernity is undergoing major structural change or that it is, at the very least, in some form of crisis. New social movement (NSM) theorists emphasize two structural changes in modernity: the shift to an economy centered around the production and control of information and knowledge and the increasing legitimization crisis of the modern state. The workers' movement was rooted in class identity and was hierarchically organized, statist in orientation, and aimed at socioeconomic transformation. New times theorists, particularly postmodernists, have been charged with failing to acknowledge feminist trailblazers and with absorbing their insights without proper acknowledgment or recognition of their full implications. Variants of postmarxism and postmodernism are likely to yield very different conclusions about the changing nature of movements and democracy.
