ABSTRACT
The thesis of this chapter stands against writers who suggest the disappearance of childhood (Postman, 1982; Sommerville, 1982) in a post-industrial, deindustrial or, perhaps, a post-modern world. It is often claimed that the restructuring of the capitalist economy in Western Europe has brought a radically new capitalism. This new society has many analysts and many descriptions. It has, for example, been termed disorganized capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987; Offe, 1985). The major themes explored in the plethora of writings on the new society (some well-known examples are Gorz, 1982; Lukes, 1984; Hobsbawm, 1989) include the radical reduction in the size of the traditional manufacturing sector, which has, in turn, reduced the size of the traditional male industrial working class; the growth of the service sector and of outwork in smaller factories and of part-time women workers; changes in patterns of ownership and control; the internationalization of production and of mass communication which constrains the autonomy of nation states and heightens the sense of the ‘simultaneity’ of events (the ‘global village’); the modern difficulty of relating social, cultural and political life to traditional class relations which we can see in the emergence of the Women’s Movement, the Green Party, anti-racist groups and so on; the growth of concern with the person, with privatism and with forms of radical individualism which, although they have a potential for anti-authoritarianism, have been effectively woven into the politics of the New Right in Britain since 1979 (see chapter 14 by Brake in this volume).
