Charting Human Welfare: Need-Satisfaction in the Three Worlds

Abstract

Beliefs about the benign or malign effects of modernisation on human welfare seem to go in swings. The nineteenth-century trust in social progress was severely undermined by First World War, the interwar crisis of capitalism, the emergence of fascism and Stalinism and the horror of Auschwitz. Yet for a period after the Second World War the belief in a rational path of progress revived, as both welfare capitalism and state socialism held out the promise of directing society to improve human well-being. In the 1970s and 1980s pessimism came to the fore again with internationalists pointing to the immiseration of the Third World, still dominated and exploited by neo-imperialist relationships, and the environmental and green movements giving dire warnings of unsustainability and eco-crisis. These sources of ‘rational pessimism’ are themselves challenged and undermined by the post-modernist contention that no single path of progress can be conceived of, let alone charted.