In the summer of 1996 President Boris Yeltsin ordered a new Russian national ideology. Those who undertook the implementation of the ukaz looked back to philosophers long forgotten and to characteristics of the Russian people one could have thought to have been eliminated from society.

By our times, the liberal-social democratic project of emancipation has been exhausted. The modernisation of male-female relation is under way, although this is now related to teh process of commercialisation. The latter has a differentiated impact on certain groups of women.

Interpreting modernity as consulting practices to cope with the perpetual change deriving from the capitalist imperative to ceaseless accumulation, it is argued that world hegemonic states create exceptional periods of change which stimulate major constructions of modernity. The nature of these modernities is explored through the creative arts where the hegemon's civil society has been a cultural as well as an economic leader.