World War II’s outcome destroyed modernism’s spurring historical forces

Evidence

The caesura came with the Second World War, whose outcome smashed the old agrarian elites and their way of life across most of the Continent, installed stable capitalist democracy and standardized consumer-durables in the West, and gutted the ideals of revolution in the East. With all the forces that had historically spurred it gone, the élan of modernism gave out. It had lived from the non-synchronous — what was past or future in the present — and died with the arrival of the purely contemporaneous: the monotone steady-state of the post-war Atlantic order. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 218

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Lived from the non-synchronous — what was past or future in the present — and died with the arrival of the purely contemporaneous’ is a paradigm-grade formulation of the death of modernism.
• XREF: connects to: Modernism emerged from a specific industrial-capitalist conjuncture that postwar capitalism destroyed — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 562; Postwar Western art lost its fire while Third World culture reproduces Modernism’s conditions — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 588; Stalin’s and Hitler’s victories destroyed the interwar revolutionary avant-gardes — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 216 (+4 more)