[Xmca-l] Re: Retrotopia

[mike cole]

Bauman is always interesting, thanks Larry.
Here is a description of the book that is at the website

mike

--------------
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.





On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 1:18 PM, Lplarry <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Retro spectives and sociality are being considered in another thread, so
> thought this book by Zygmunt Bauman may have some relevance
>
> Retrotopia
>
>
> https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B06XGQMJ6J/ref=pe_
> 184490_244315560_nrn_si_1_im#productDescription_secondary_
> view_div_1499026275919
> Sent from my Windows 10 phone
>
>