ABSTRACT
My task in this essay is threefold: first to trace the transition between the Golden Age of the post-War period within the First World to the crisis years of the late 1960s onwards. This is a shift from modernity to late modernity, from a world whose accent was on assimilation and incorporation to one which separates and excludes. It is a world where, I will argue, the market forces which transformed the spheres of production and consumption, relentlessly challenged our notions of material certainty and uncontested values, replacing them with a world of risk and uncertainty, of individual choice and pluralism, and of a deep-seated precariousness both economic and ontological. And it is a world where the steady increment of justice unfolding began to falter: the march of progress seemed to halt. But is a society propelled not merely by rising uncertainty but also by rising demand. For the same market forces which have made our identity precarious and our future unsure have generated a constant rise in our expectations of citizenship and, most importantly, have engendered a widespread sense of demands frustrated and desires unmet.
