identity politics is the latest chapter in the long story of the West from the Reformation to today. It began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment escape from particular identities to a universal humanism. This led to the nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment in the form of nationalism, racism and Marxism. In the 1960s an escape began from group identities into individualism, and since the 1980s there has been a counter-reaction in the form, first of multiculturalism, then of identity politics.
