1 Do you agree with John Child’s view that the second variant – a radical deconstruction of the meaning of economic institutions – is likely to lead to a ‘war of all against all’ in Hobbesian terms? There are broadly two variants of postmodernism. The first maintains that we have progressed, or should progress, beyond the nineteenth-

century belief that the world is advancing and converging towards some eventual state of modern civilisation, underpinned by a bureaucracy in the Weberian mould that applies the same rules fairly and honestly to all and guarantees an acceptable order in society. While recognising that bureaucracy and the standardisation it represented had some virtues, adherents of this postmodern perspective argue that the modern approach fails to accommodate the huge variety of local cultural and material needs in society and the sheer speed at which these are evolving.