| Summary/Abstract |
By the time of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 it had become increasingly accepted that the modernisation of society effected by Soviet communism had reached its inherent limits and, in particular, that the increased complexity of an industrialised society had exhausted the capacities for change of the centrally managed ‘planned’ economy and the rule of a single party claiming superior scientific knowledge of the management of society. The flexibility of a market economy and the possibility of choice between potential rulers seemed to offer a more appropriate institutional basis for the increased complexity of contemporary society and the relations between societies to be found in an increasingly globalised world.
|