Product details
- ISBN 9781509567621
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 3 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2025
- Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The idea of progress, one of the animating ideas of Western civilization, has now gone global. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s mutant identity politics, it offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things will get better and that history is on our side. However, in doing this it creates a form of authority that is simultaneously imaginary and dishonest, resting on confidence in a future that is really contingent and unknowable.
In The Progress Trap, Ben Cobley looks at this progressive mindset as a form of power, conferring a right to act and control others. ‘Change’, ‘transformation’ and the ‘new’ are the superior values, meaning destruction of the old: people, cultures and nature. It is a trap into which nearly all of us fall at times, so attractive are its stories and familiar its techniques.
Hard-hitting but thoughtful, the book is a meditation on the sinister consequences of the progressive way of being: for ourselves, for our democracy, for our art and for the pursuit of real knowledge.
