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Debating the End of History - The Marketplace, Utopia, and the Fragmentation of Intellectual Life (Paperback)
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Debating the End of History - The Marketplace, Utopia, and the Fragmentation of Intellectual Life (Paperback)
Series: Critical American Studies
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Why do modern people assume that there will be perpetual economic
growth? Because, David W. Noble tells us in this provocative study
of cultural criticism, such a utopian conviction is the necessary
foundation for bourgeois culture. One can imagine the existence of
modern middle classes only as long as the capitalist marketplace is
expanding. For Noble, the related-and relevant-question is, how can
the middle classes believe that a finite earth is an environment in
which infinite growth is possible? The answer, which Noble so
painstakingly charts, is nothing less than a genealogy of the uses
and abuses of knowledge that lie at the heart of so many of our
political problems today. As far back as Plato and as recently as
Alan Greenspan, Noble finds proponents of the idea of a world of
independent, rational individuals living in timeless simplicity,
escaping from an old world of interdependence and generations. Such
notions, although in sync with Newtonian science, have come up
against the subsequent conclusions of geology, biology, and the
physics of Einstein. In a survey of the responses to this quandary
of historians, economists, literary critics, and ecologists, Noble
reveals how this confrontation, and its implications for a single
global marketplace, has forced certain academic disciplines into
unnatural-and untenable-positions. David Noble's work exposes the
cost-not academic at all-of the segregation of the physical
sciences from the humanities and social sciences, even as it
demonstrates the required movement of the humanities toward the
ecological vision of a single, interconnected world.
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