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The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History.

・ISBN 978-1-5095-6762-1 hard US$ 29.95

[在庫] ¥6,226.- (税込) *

著者・編者 Cobley, Ben,
出版社 (Polity Pr., UK)
出版年 2025
ページ数 224 pp.
ニュース番号 <745-607>

The idea of progress, one of the animating ideas of Western civilization, has now gone global. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today's mutant identity politics, it offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things will get better and that history is on our side. However, in doing this it creates a form of authority that is simultaneously imaginary and dishonest, resting on confidence in a future that is really contingent and unknowable.

In The Progress Trap, Ben Cobley looks at this progressive mindset as a form of power, conferring a right to act and control others. 'Change', 'transformation' and the 'new' are the superior values, meaning destruction of the old: people, cultures and nature. It is a trap into which nearly all of us fall at times, so attractive are its stories and familiar its techniques.

Hard-hitting but thoughtful, the book is a meditation on the sinister consequences of the progressive way of being: for ourselves, for our democracy, for our art and for the pursuit of real knowledge.