ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution was a product in part of the invention of a new technology – one that changed fundamentally the way human beings related to nature. But it also was the product of a cultural shift that inclined the inhabitants of the societies where it occurred to have a different approach to life than the one their predecessors had had. So the new technology was utilized in ways that previously would have been highly unlikely, and in the process people’s lives were altered so profoundly that the developments they were experiencing came to be known as a great turning point in the history of the modern world. Or, as Karl Polanyi was famously to characterize these events, they amounted to nothing less than a “Great Transformation.” Is something similar happening today? Are we living through another technological revolution? And if so, are we also living through a cultural revolution comparable to the one that occurred at the time of the Industrial Revolution? Ever since our societies began using information technology for non-military purposes, that question has been on the agenda of serious social analysts, and many of the better-known discussions of it have been the work of postist thinkers, who have been intent on showing that it is in fact appropriate to conclude that some such thing is taking place in our time. This chapter is meant to challenge that view, and it does so by criticizing, largely on empirical grounds, the claims of two of the better-known proponents of the idea that our societies are now undergoing an epochal shift from “materialist” to “post-materialist” values. The argument it makes is that before the rise of neoliberalism the idea of another “Great Transformation” had some plausibility, but that ceased to be the case once our societies turned in the neoliberal direction.
