Reclaiming the Future for Humanity: Perspectives on Progress

Reclaiming the Future for Humanity focuses on the notion of progress - its past, present, and future. Examining its modern origins in the European Enlightenment, it explores the present multidimensional crisis of the idea of progress, especially as applied to human development in an interrelated, globalised world, and the relevance of progress to contemporary theories of social change and the potential for the transformation of human beings.

The onward progress of humanity, driven by scientific development, rationality, political modernity, and the forces of ‘civilisation’, was seriously undermined by the brutal history of colonialism and war in the twentieth century, and of systems of rule based on racial and religious genocide. The very idea of ‘Enlightenment’ has been increasingly exposed as fundamentally flawed from its origins. Moreover, the ‘Western’ intellectual monopoly on the definition and evaluation of progress has been challenged from various perspectives.

This important and challenging new book examines the theory of human progress in the light of its historical origins and present-day mutations in a diverse, threatened and reconfigured globalised world. It confronts the challenges facing humankind and the new thinking that is being developed in a variety of contexts in response. It draws largely on the field of Francophone studies, but adds a broader and comparative perspective, ranging across various areas and disciplines. It will be of interest to students and researchers in political philosophy, contemporary French theory, international politics, race theory, gender theory, international cultural studies, and any reader with an in interest in current political ideas, and what underpins them.