Abstract
In the concluding chapter, the authors argue that the West, and especially the Anglosphere as its global avant-garde, is in need of a new enlightenment through a gradual change of public discourse and a policy reform, away from the dogmatic rule of economic rationality. The authors suggest deliberative, dialogical democracy is a path back to a rational society: economic rationality, bolstered by globalisation, has to be tempered by serious considerations of the social and environmental cost of the neo-liberal capitalist version of progress. Some past and current visions of the moral foundations of the ‘good society’ and some practical attempts to achieve it are discussed. The chapter reviews ideas about social groups that can be leading forces of social change.
[…] The mind is not satisfied with merely tracing the laws of the movement; it cannot but ask the further question, to what goal? Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress?
J. S. Mill (1970/1848, 111)
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. […]
O. Wilde (1912, 43)
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- 1.
Although the average gap between rich and poor countries has decreased, this is not the whole story. At the extremes, the gap between the richest and poorest countries has in fact increased (Hickel 2016).
- 2.
In the first week of his presidency, Donald Trump attempted to ban immigration to the US from seven Muslim-majority countries but ran up against objections from the judiciary that this represented a ‘ban on Muslim immigration’ (that Trump had promised during the election campaign) and thus violated the constitutional right of freedom of religion.
- 3.
John Keane (2017) has argued that even despotic regimes, where authoritarian governments are based on plutocracy and rule without civil society monitoring (e.g., Russia and other post-Soviet states and a one-party system such as. China ), manage to be perceived by their constituencies as democratic.
- 4.
John Forbes Nash (1928–2015) made fundamental contributions to several fields of mathematics including game theory, a branch of mathematics dealing with strategic decision making in conflict situations and widely used in economics and social science. For much of his life, Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia but his condition improved with age. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.
- 5.
There is an abundance of literature on game theory. For a good non-technical introduction, see Poundstone (1992).
- 6.
By September 2009, to make up for lost time, the consensus predicted 54 of the 49 recessions that occurred in that year (Ahir and Loungani 2014)!
- 7.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German polymath who contributed to the fields of philosophy, politics, physics and philology (and that is just the ‘p-s’). He developed the mathematical technique of calculus at the same time as, but independently of, Isaac Newton .
- 8.
A video is available on YouTube.
- 9.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. He became a leading public intellectual in France in the 1990s, fiercely critical of neo-liberalism .
- 10.
To take one example, the Three Capes Track on the south coast of Tasmania , completed in late 2015, cost $25 million and took 17,000 helicopter flights to construct. The privilege of enjoying its delights will set walkers back $500 (ABC 2015). Ironically, Wild Magazine, while being critical of the commercialisation of the track, also features advertisements for the walk (Wild 2015).
- 11.
The world’s first national level party to campaign predominately on environmental issues was the Values Party in New Zealand , also formed in 1972. The Finnish Green party was the first to become part of a national cabinet in 1995.
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Colic-Peisker, V., Flitney, A. (2018). Into a Bright (Post-capitalist) Future?. In: The Age of Post-Rationality. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6259-9_8
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