Toynbee’s postmodern age begins with the crash of bourgeois complacency in 1914.

Evidence

Toynbee was no particular admirer of the resultant regimes. But he was scathing of the hubristic illusions of the late imperial West. At the close of the nineteenth century, he wrote, ‘an unprecedently prosperous and comfortable Western middle-class was taking it as a matter of course that the end of one age of one civilization’s history was the end of History itself — at least as far as they and their kind were concerned. They were imagining that, for their benefit, a sane, safe, satisfactory Modern Life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present’. Completely awry in the epoch, ‘in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Northern United States the complacency of a post-Modern Western bourgeoisie remained unshaken until the outbreak of the first post-Modern general war in A.D. 1914’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Toynbee’s ‘end of History’ complacency critique points forward, ironically, to Fukuyama’s later ‘end of history’ thesis — a useful foil in the Jameson/periodization debate. — connects to: Toynbee dated the postmodern age from industrialism breaking the bounds of nationality. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12; Postmodernism’s case rests on a radical break dated to 1960 — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 35

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism’s case rests on a radical break dated to 1960 #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 35