Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Slaboch, Matthew W.
Titre(s) : A road to nowhere [Texte imprimé] : the idea of progress and its critics / Matthew W. Slaboch
Publication : Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania press, copyright 2018
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (194 p.) ; 24 cm
Note(s) : Notes bibliogr. et bibliogr. p. [121]-192. Index
Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics,
secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture. The belief
that humans are capable of making lasting improvements--intellectual, scientific,
material, moral, and cultural--continues to be a commonplace of our age. However,
events of the preceding century, including but not limited to two world wars, conflicts
in Korea and Vietnam, the spread of communism across Eastern Europe and parts of Asia,
violent nationalism in the Balkans, and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, have called
into question this faith in the continued advancement of humankind. Matthew W. Slaboch
argues that political theorists should entertain the possibility that long-term, continued
progress may be more fiction than reality. He examines the work of German philosophers
Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch--rare skeptics
of the idea of progress who have much to engage political theory, a field dominated
by historical optimists. Looking at the figures of Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Adams,
Slaboch considers the ways in which they defined progress and their reasons for doubting
that their cultures, or the world, were progressing. He compares Germany, Russia,
and the United States to illustrate how these nineteenth-century critics of the idea
of progress contributed to or helped forestall the emergence of forms of government
that came to be associated with each country
Sujet(s) : Progrès
Évolution (philosophie)
Modernité
Indice(s) Dewey :
320.01 (23e éd.) = Science politique - Philosophie et théorie
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780812249804. - ISBN 0812249801
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb46644507x
Notice n° :
FRBNF46644507
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : Introduction ; "The same, but otherwise": Arthur Schopenhauer as a critic of "progress"
; The autocrat and the anarchist: Nicholas I, Leo Tolstoy, and the problem of "progress"
; "The path to hell": Henry (and Brooks) Adams on history and politics ; Critics
of the idea of progress in an age of extremes: three twentieth-century voices ; Conclusion.
