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Affluence, poverty and the idea of a post-scarcity society
Giddens, Anthony
Giddens, Anthony
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Abstract
"My starting point in this discussion is a world that has taken us by surprise. By “us” I mean not only intellectuals and practical policy makers, but the ordinary individual too. In the West, at least, we are all the legatees of certain strands of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment was a complex affair. Various different perspectives of thought were bound up with it and the works of the leading Enlightenment philosophers were often complex and subtle. Yet in general the philosophers of Enlightenment set themselves against tradition, against prejudice, and against obscurantism. For them the rise of science, both natural and social, would disclose the reality of things. Understanding was always itself understood as an unfinished and partial affair — the expansion of knowledge is at the same time an awareness of ignorance, of everything that is not and perhaps will not be known. Nevertheless, knowledge was presumed to be cumulative and presumed also to yield a progressive mastery of the surrounding world. The more we are able to understand ourselves, our own history, and the domain of nature, the more we will be able to master them for our own purposes and in our own interests. The underlying theorem, stripped bare, was extremely plausible. The progress of well-founded knowledge is more or less the same as the progressive expansion of human dominion. Marx brought this view its clearest expression, integrating it with an interpretation of the overall thrust of history itself. In Marx’s celebrated aphorism, “human beings only set themselves such problems as they can resolve”. Understanding our history is the very means of shaping our destiny in the future. Even those thinkers who took a much less optimistic view than Marx of the likely future for humanity accepted the theorem of increasing human control of our life circumstances. Consider, for example, the writings of Max Weber. Weber certainly did not see history as leading to human emancipation in the manner envisaged by Marx. For Weber, the likely future was one of “uncontrolled bureaucratic domination” — we are all destined to live in a “steel-hard cage” of rationality, expressing the combined influence of bureaucratic organization and machine technology. We are all due to be tiny cogs in a vast and well-oiled system of rational human power. Each of these visions of the imminent future attracted many adherents. Marxism, of course, shaped the very form of human society for many. Others, perhaps critical of Marxist thought, recoiled before the sombre vision offered by Weber, Kafka and many others. Marxism, as we all know now, has lost most of its potency as a theoretical perspective on history and change. But Weber’s more sombre vision has also lost its hold over us. It does not correspond to the world in which, at the end of the twentieth century, we in fact find ourselves. We do not live in a world which feels increasingly under human control but, rather to the contrary, one which seems to run out of control — in the words of Edmund Leach, a “runaway world”. Moreover, this sensation of living in a world spinning out of our control can no longer be said to be simply the result of lack of accumulated knowledge. Instead, its erratic runaway character is somehow bound up with the very accumulation of that knowledge. The uncertainties which we face do not result, as the thinkers of Enlightenment tended to believe, from our ignorance. They come in some substantial part from our own interventions into history and into the surrounding physical world."(pg 1)
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1995-05
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With permission of the license/copyright holder