There have been many reactions and responses to changes taking place in last few years, and most have been concerned with political adjustments to a drastically changed global power structure. By and large, intellectuals have yet to come to grips with nature of recent transitions and transformations, how these can be related to trends established during of 1980s (called the lost decade by some and celebrated as the end of history by others), and what that signifies for larger flow of human history. Not believing in any doctrine of historical determinism, I do not think that what happened during 1980s was inevitable or inherent in basic design of modern world. But, then, I have always had a greater interest in discontinuities than in continuities. As I see it, although human race has achieved remarkable feats of success within scientific paradigms of modernity, it has undermined its own achievements and eroded processes and institutions that it had once put in place. In this article, I wish to address discontinuity in historical process and accompanying erosion of structures and institutions. I intend to do this by examining implications of historical events from point of view of realm of ideas from point of view of one intellectual's perception of changes that, like it or not, have overtaken him.
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Rajni Kothari (1993) studied this question.