Abstract

In this article, I suggest that post‐modernism is in essence a return, under radically different circumstances and with a cultural inheritance from the modernist era (especially the ‘modernist’ principle of freedom of the individual), to a kind of (post‐modernist) medievalism. The view that the ‘trend of our times’ is towards a ‘post‐modern medievalism’ is based mainly upon a consideration of the decline of the nation‐state, the replacement of ‘absolute’ with a kind of ‘moderated’ national sovereignty and the fact that the nations and regional assemblies of Europe are beginning to look increasingly like the duchies and baronies of feudal Europe.