Disenchanting the western mainstream

The changing global social ontology entails an inevitable transformation of the normative model for self-description of modern society in social sciences. As diverse limits to growth are reached (capacity of global markets, demography, ecology, mass employment, etc.), the search for and legitimation of alternative social hierarchies and principles of resource distribution is actualised complicated by the stagnant humanity’s resource base and the appropriation of intellectual rents and infrastructural (technological, military, economic) advantages by an increasingly insignificant minority. These background tendencies lead to a) an inevitable transformation of dominant perceptions of what constitutes social, economic, political norms and b) an increasingly critical reception of normative self-descriptions of Western societies, which previously, due to the unconditional dominance of the West, were offered as the ideal of social organisation for all others. The alternative to the Western mainstream is increasingly centered around notions and concepts that describe a future beyond the ideologically loaded and increasingly irrelevant models of liberal democracies and self-regulated markets, which have been controversially and very limitedly realized in the historical practice of Western societies. The global debate on universal social norms is driven by a renewed socio-political and economic context that universally registers for most citizens the inequalities and injustices of the de facto oligopoly markets and elitist democracies that encompass all modern societies. The disenchantment (M. Weber) of the narrative of liberal-market democracies is confirmed by the global rise of nationalisms, protectionism, populism, the widespread contraction of the welfare state and the uprisings of various minorities, including in Western countries, revealing an increasing divergence between social theory, ideology and ontology at the base of the end of history, which turned out only to be its new, post-Western turn.