Capitalism and the Cultural Process I will try to sketch very briefly what I believe has happened in the relation between politics and culture in the period after Nehru; and in the third part, if I have some time, I will try to make some remarks about how the left has responded to this relation between state and culture. All capitalist systems have a kind of flag which flutters on it: the flag of the complete rationality of the system. I think in European social theory about capitalism we have two radically different approaches which pose the same question: which is known, 62 technically, as the question of the 'end of history/ This phrase, the end of history appears in Hegel, it also appears in different aliases in Weber, and it comes up in Marx. I would understand it like this: you have, in all these theories the expectation that history is a story of human beings rising to self-consciousness, and therefore getting some kind of increasing control over their collective destiny. This is very strong in Hegel, but I would take up two other forms of this: in Weber and in Marx. I think that Weber also has a theory of the end of history in this sense that he believes that earlier s Journal of Arts <&• Ideas