✴✴✴

The history of modernity, insofar as it has been a series of social and political liberations and emancipations from arbitrary and oppressive rule, is indeed in key respects a history of genuine and admirable progress. The history of modernity, insofar as it has been a history of artistic and scientific achievement, from Raphael to Rothko or from Palestrina to Schoenberg, and from Copernicus and Galileo to Feynman and Higgs, is indeed a history of equally genuine and admirable achievement. And nothing that I have said here or elsewhere implies otherwise. Yet it is this same modernity in which new forms of oppressive inequality, new types of material and intellectual impoverishment, and new frustrations and misdirections of desire have been recurrently generated. There are a number of very different stories to be told about modernity, all of them true. But all of these presuppose a distinctive political and economic framework.