Debating the end of history : the marketplace, utopia, and the fragmentation of intellectual life / David W. Noble ; foreword by David R. Roediger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Noble, David W.

Series:

Critical American studies series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historiography.

United States--Historiography.

United States.

Historiography--Economic aspects.

Environmentalism.

Globalization.

Physical Description:

xiii, 204 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2012]

Summary:

Why do modern people assume that there will be perpetual economic growth? Because, David W. Noble tells us in this provocative study of cultural criticism, such a Utopian conviction is the necessary foundation for bourgeois culture. One can imagine the existence of modern middle classes only as long as the capitalist marketplace is expanding. For Noble, the related-and relevant-question is, how can the middle classes believe that a finite earth is an environment in which infinite growth is possible? The answer, which Noble painstakingly charts, is nothing less than a genealogy of the uses and abuses of knowledge that lie at the heart of so many of our political problems today. Debating the End of History exposes the cost-not academic at all-of the segregation of the physical sciences from the humanities and social sciences, even as it demonstrates the required movement of the humanities toward the ecological vision of a single, interconnected world. Book jacket.

Contents:

Two-world metaphors, from Plato to Alan Greenspan

Historians against history

Economists discover a new New World

Literary critics become cultural critics

Ecologists on why history will never end

When prophecy fails.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780816680580

0816680582

9780816680597

0816680590

OCLC:

788269640