The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis is Really Telling Us

Abstract

Global financial crisis, global environmental crisis - what connects them? Stuart Sim claims they are both symptoms of the end of modernity, the cultural system that has prevailed in the West from the Enlightenment onwards. In this provocative book, Sim argues that the modern world's insatiable need for technologically-driven economic progress is unsustainable, and potentially destructive of the planet and its socio-economic systems. The new landscape this creates - socially, politically, economically, intellectually - is explored through an interdisciplinary approach, providing a wide-ranging assessment of the collapse of modernity and the challenges it poses us. Sim calls for a radical alteration in our world view and for purposeful changes both to our economic and intellectual life: we need to jettison the free market, rein in conspicuous consumption, reinvigorate public service, and develop talents other than the entrepreneurial if we are to reconstruct our society satisfactorily. Key Features • Brings out the broader cultural dimensions of the global financial crisis • Reveals the contradictions at the heart of modernity and its cult of progress • Offers a thought-provoking interdisciplinary analysis of late modernity and its aftermath • Provides a detailed reassessment of the value of postmodern thought in the new cultural situation • Outlines the ideological adjustments we shall have to make in a post-progress world.