ABSTRACT
The word ‘post-modern’ is only one of a number of words, they include ‘post-industrial’ and even ‘post-history’, that have the prefix ‘post’ attached to them. Like the others, the word ‘post-modern’, much in use, implies uncertainty as how ‘to place’ recent history in relation to past and future, but it sometimes goes further than this and seems to suggest that it is not worth trying so to place it. The adjective ‘modern’ and the noun ‘modernity’, examined in Chapter 5, were often used vaguely although they had complex histories behind them. The adjective ‘post-modern’ is even vaguer, and it too has behind it a complex history which post-modernists usually disdain to consider, let alone to chart. Like Chapter 5, this chapter bears no dates, but it passes beyond the millennium, which generated a huge literature of its own, and like Chapter 12 ends, as a history book should, with questions rather than with answers.
