The End Of Utopia

Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy

Contributors

By Russell Jacoby

Formats and Prices

Price

$19.99

Price

$25.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 19, 2000. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

We are facing the end of politics altogether, Russell Jacoby argues in The End of Utopia. Political contestation is premised on people's capacity for offering competing visions of the future, but in a world that has run out of political ideas and no longer harbors any utopian visions, real political opposition is no longer possible. In particular, Jacoby traces the demise of liberal and leftist politics. Leftist intellectuals and critics no longer envision a different society, only a modified one. The left once dismissed the market as exploitative, but now honors it as rational and humane. The left used to disdain mass culture, but now celebrates it as rebellious. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial, but now resurrects pluralist ideas in the guise of multiculturalism.Ranging across a wide terrain of cultural and political phenomena—the end of the Cold War, the rise of multiculturalism, the acceptance of mass culture, the eclipse of independent intellectuals—Jacoby documents and laments a widespread retreat from the utopian spirit that has always been the engine for social and political change.
Request Desk/Exam Copy

Genre:

On Sale
May 19, 2000
Page Count
252 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465020010