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A thrilling new route to a better society A toxic ideology of extreme competition and individualism has come to dominate our world. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better future. George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how we can build on these findings to create a new politics: a “politics of belonging.” Both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganized from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society. Urgent and passionate, Out of the Wreckage provides the hope and clarity required to change the world.


The Wreckage of Intentions The Wreckage of Intentions

Автор: David Alff

Год издания: 

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain saw the proposal of so many endeavors called «projects»—a catchphrase for the daring, sometimes dangerous practice of shaping the future—that Daniel Defoe dubbed his era a «Projecting Age.» These ideas spanned a wide variety of scientific, technological, and intellectual interventions intended for the betterment of England. But for all the fanfare surrounding them, few such schemes actually materialized, leaving scores of defunct visions, from Defoe's own attempt to farm cats for perfume, to Mary Astell's proposal to charter a college for women, to countless ventures for improving land, streamlining government, and inventing new consumer goods. Taken together, these failed plans form a compelling alternative history of a Britain that might have been. The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive and critical account of projects, exploring the historical memory surrounding these concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. Using methods of literary analysis, David Alff shows how projects began as written proposals, circulated as print objects, spurred physical undertakings, and provoked responses in the realms of poetry, fiction, and drama. Mapping this process discloses the ways in which eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals and, in so doing, devised new ways of seeing the world through its future potential. Approaching old projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas they left behind, Alff contends this vision was, and remains, vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.