The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (213 page)

 
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Any of the new nation-states that emerged out of the process of decolonization in the post-Second World War period. Also called the ‘developmental state’. The post-colonial state has exhibited many features of the colonial state in its political formation. The British parliamentary model, for example, has been adopted by many ex-British colonies like India.
The post-colonial state has been characterized in two different ways—in terms of its political and economic agenda, and in terms of its capacity to rule. Most post-colonial states have started from an interventionist standpoint. However, the capacity of these states to implement their programmes has been affected crucially by the political system that has evolved in these states. The post-colonial state has been characterized as ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ on the basis of its capacity to implement political decisions—whether the political infrastructure is in place and functioning well or not. This would distinguish a ‘strong’ state from a merely ‘despotic’ one. State capacity is, of course, linked to the economic resources available to the state but also to the evolving relations between the political executive and the bureaucracy on the one hand and state and civil society on the other. The ‘embeddedness’ of the state in society has been regarded by some as a feature of a ‘strong’ state in the context of co-operation of important state and societal interest groups, and by others as characterizing a ‘weak’ state where the state is penetrated by
civil society
and interest groups that are too strong for it to control. The weak capacity of the post-colonial state is also linked to levels of political violence, in that the governability of a society is dependent upon the political infrastructure of the state, in the absence of which the state increasingly relies upon the use of violence and sets up a pattern of counter-violence in societies. Governability is thus a continuing and growing concern for post-colonial states.
SR 

 
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See
fordism
;
industrial society
.

 
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See
industrial society
.

 
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Concept due to the survey research of R. Inglehart in the 1970s, who argued that his results showed that younger and more affluent people in Western democracies were moving away from material concerns for income and security to post-material concerns such as a concern for civil liberties or for the environment. This has been weakly confirmed by subsequent research.

 
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A school of thought which rejects what is called modernism. Post-modernism is a broad term originating in literary studies, used by and of those thinkers who seek to respond in various ways to ‘modernism’. Perhaps the most straightforward way to understand modernism is in terms of an historical epoch—
modernity
. This period begins sometime in the seventeenth century and ends sometime between 1945 and the present. It is characterized by the ascendancy of science and reason as means for both understanding and explaining the world. The success of the rational application of science to nature and the progress that ensued in this field, led to a belief that rational and scientific approaches to economics, politics, society, and morality would ensure progress in these fields too. Science and reason would be capable of providing firm, objective, and universal foundations with which to underpin social and moral reforms. It is in this sense that thinkers as diverse as
Hobbes
,
Bentham
, and
Marx
may be described as ‘modern’.
Against this background, many writers who see themselves, or are seen by others, as post-modernist respond initially to what they perceive to be the twin failures of science and reason to deliver progress. (
Adorno
, for example, remarked that no one can seriously believe in the idea of progress after the Holocaust.) The ‘failure’ of science and reason and the objective and universal claims made in their name undermines the possibility of ever producing ‘totalizing’ theories again—theories (‘Grand Narratives’) that seek to explain and predict individual behaviour and/or social formations on the basis of a set of incontrovertible, rationally derived propositions. Examples of such theories would be Marxism,
utilitarianism
, and Freudianism.
On this basis, some post-modernists argue that knowledge claims can only ever be partial and local.
Foucault
, for example, suggests that power is not a unified and uniform phenomenon centred on, say, the ‘state’ (as Marxists might take it to be). Resistance to power, therefore, must itself be ‘decentred’ or localized. Post-modernism in these terms is open to the charges both of relativism and conservatism. Relativism, because, if all that we have access to are local knowledges, practices, and so on, we can have no justifiable reason to judge other localities and their practices. Conservatism, because if we cannot judge even our own localities (institutions, practices, societies, etc.) in the light of standards or principles external to them, it is unclear what justification we could ever have for changing them. On the other hand, if one associates modernity with the rise and globalization of capitalism, and accepts that this phenomenon is itself a form of cultural and economic imperialism, then post-modernism can be represented as having radical potential in the attempt to formulate a defence of difference.
AA