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Retrotopia (Hardcover)
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Retrotopia (Hardcover)
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We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings
could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state a state
that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a
fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and
benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of
all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling
has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused
not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created
but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia.
The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf
between power and politics that is a defining feature of our
contemporary liquid-modern world the gulf between the ability to
get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to
be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign
state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to
deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread
disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human
condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make
this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its
stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human
condition though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten
potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or
putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map
to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an
alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand
ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the
contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp
dissection of our contemporary romance with the past.
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