Of England – without prejudice and without affection
NOVANEWS
What is “post-industrial society”?
Champions of “civil society” in Russia keep talking that they would love to build a “post-industrial” society in their country. They ordinarily omit to decode just what kind of society they are talking about, but as an example, they often point to countries of “the golden billion.” Curiously enough, in those very countries the expression in question is used extremely rarely, and then usually in some kind of critical context. For example, Stanley Hoffmann, an American scholar of international relations, wrote once: whenever you don’t know what to call some phenomenon, you use the word “post”, for example post-Cold-War World, post-liberalism or “post-industrial society.”
To Russian ideologues, this expression is a find, since it allows them to avo...