a long time Mitterrand had been dismissed as a permanent loser, partly because
of his association with the Fourth Republic, but he was eventually able to
frame the French left in at least a semi-permanent way. As president he,
inevitably, disappointed much of the left, being at most a reformer rather than a
radical or revolutionary, and because he, unlike many socialists, did not want to
reduce the power of the presidency as an office. In foreign policy he largely
continued the Gaullist policy of French autonomy, and the effort to be the
dominant power in theEuropean Union. In economic policy the world
recessions of the 1980s forced France, as much as any country, into the
economic orthodoxy of the period—monetarism. Constitutionally Mitter-
rand succumbed to the attractions of a powerful office, and has ended up being
seen as just as autocratic as his predecessors. Nevertheless, he did break the
right-wing hold on effective power in France that had lasted, with few
exceptions, for most of the Third and Fourth Republics and all of the Fifth
Republic. It maybe that the office of the French Presidency forces on its
incumbents certain characteristics, because Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques
Chirac, though from a right-wing party, has been criticized in much the same
way as both Mitterrand and his predecessor Giscard d’Estaing.
Modernity
So much is made of ‘post’ modernity, and with phrases like ‘the crisis of
modernity’ abounding; it seems necessary to have some sense of what is
actually meant by modernity or the modern age itself. In its most trivial sense,
of course, the modern is simply the new or the recent. Alternatively, in phrases
like ‘Modern European history’, the reference is relatively arbitrary, and ‘the
modern’ turns out to have started rather a long time ago. The question is
whether there are characteristics of the social life, consciousness and structure
of contemporary societies which still usefully distinguish the early 21st century
and, for instance, the 17th century from what went before. Whether the 17th
century is the relevant marker-point does not really matter—modernity
appears to have begun at some stage during or after the concatenation of the
Enlightenment, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation—different
analysts will chose their favourite point to make their detailed explication.
Furthermore, whenever it started, modernity clearly accelerated in the 19th
century with the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization of Western
society. Modernity is also clearly a Western concept both because it is Western
societies that are seen as the originator of things modern, and also in as much as
they seem to value modernity very much more.
Part of the test of whether one has a truly modern consciousness seems to be
whether the idea of progress itself is highly valued. If the recent is more or less
automatically to be preferred to the past, in ideas, fashion and cultural habit,
Modernity