While I like Berman's book very much and think that there is a rather traditionalist view of modernism built into Perry Anderson's response, I still agree with Anderson rather than Berman on the central argument about periodization. I don't think that what Berman is describing is a new epoch but rather the accentuation of certain important tendencies in the culture of the overdeveloped 'West' which, if we understand the complex histories of modernism properly, have been in play in a highly uneven way since modernism emerged. On Foucault . While I have learned a great deal from Foucault in this sense about the relation between knowledge and power, I don't see how you can retain the notion of 'resistance', as he does, without facing questions about the constitution of dominance in ideology. Foucault's evasion of the question is at the heart of his proto-anarchist position precisely because his resistance must be summoned up from nowhere.
Nobody knows where it comes from.
On Lyotard and Habermas . Let me consider the specific question of the debate between Habermas and Lyotard. Briefly, I don't really agree with either of them. But I think Lyotard, and Baudrillard in his celebratory mode, really have gone right through the sound barrier. They are involved, not simply in identifying new trends or tendencies, new cultural configurations, but in learning to love them.