The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History - Hardcover

Cobley, Ben

 
9781509567621: The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1509567623 ISBN 13: 9781509567621
Verlag: Polity, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Cobley is a journalist and former Labour Party activist. He is the author of The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity.

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Verlag
Polity
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1509567623
ISBN 13 
9781509567621
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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