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T
he closing decades of the
20th century were notable
for accelerating advances
in technology and the subsequent
improvement in communications
of all kinds. The increasing power
of the mass media, especially
television, since the end of World
War II had fuelled a rise in popular
culture with its associated
antiestablishment ideals, and this
in turn was prompting political and
social change. From the 1960s
onward, the old order was being
questioned in Europe and the US,
and dissent gathered momentum
in Eastern Europe.
By the 1980s, relations between
the East and West were thawing,
and the Cold War was coming to a
close; the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989 offered hope for the new
decade. But the 1990s was a periodof ethnic and religious unrest,
culminating in the US declaring
a “War on Terror” at the start of the
new millennium.Elitist philosophies
Culture in the West went through
similarly significant changes. The
gap between popular and “high”
culture widened after the 1960s, as
the intellectual avant-garde often
decided to disregard public taste.
Philosophy followed a similarly
elitist path, particularly after the
death of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose
Marxist existentialism—beloved of
1960s intellectuals—now had less
of an audience.
Continental philosophy was
dominated in the 1970s and 80s
by structuralism, a movement
that grew from literature-based
French philosophy. Central tothis movement was the notion
of “deconstructing” texts and
revealing them to be inherently
unstable, with many contradictory
meanings. The theory’s principal
proponents—French theorists Louis
Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and
Michel Foucault—linked their
textual analyses with left-wing
politics, while the analyst Jacques
Lacan gave structuralism a
psychoanalytic perspective. Their
ideas were soon taken up by a
generation of writers and artists
working under the banner of
“postmodernism”, which rejected
all possibility of a single, objective
truth, viewpoint, or narrative.
Structuralism’s contribution to
philosophy was not enthusiastically
received by philosophers in the
English-speaking world, who
viewed the work at best withINTRODUCTION
1952
1953
1962
1964
1955 1966
1961 1967
Thomas Kuhn
publishes The
Structure of Scientific
Revolutions.Simone de Beauvoir
publishes her
groundbreaking
feminist work,
The Second Sex.The Vietnam War begins.
The USSR and China
support communist North
Vietnam, while the US
supports South Vietnam.China’s Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
“purges” China of everything
Western, capitalist,
traditionalist, or religious.The Berlin Wall is
constructed, dividing
East and West Germany
until its fall in 1989.Jacques Derrida,
the founder of
deconstruction,
publishes Writing
and Difference.Frantz Fanon
publishes Black
Skin, White Masks.
The Civil Rights Act
1964 becomes law in
the US, prohibiting
discrimination by race.