The Great Transformation

This chapter describes the dawn of a new “age of particularity” which has changed what citizens expect from politics and fostered the emergence of new democratic institutions. More specifically, the chapter looks at the 1980 collapse of dual legitimacy, upon which democratic institutions had depended up until that point, as well as the social, political, and economic changes that emerged from and also helped to facilitate the aforementioned collapse. In a society of particularity, the whole idea of administration—management on the basis of fixed rules—loses its central role. Its emergence has coincided with a perception that hierarchical, centralized bureaucracies have had to evolve in important ways.