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Slouching Toward Utopia
Literary Nonfiction. Politics. SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA is George Scialabba's fifth collection from Pressed Wafer, following WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS GOOD FOR? (2009), THE MODERN PREDICAMENT (2011), FOR THE REPUBLIC (2013), and LOW DISHONEST DECADES (2016). Like the others, SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA features trenchant commentary on contemporary politics and culture, couched in graceful and limpid prose. In addition to reviews of Samuel Huntington, Ivan Illich, Alexander Cockburn, and Mark Lilla, along with a dozen others, there is a symposium contribution on identity politics, two long interviews about intellectuals and American politics, and the title essay, a lecture offering an original meditation on how to get past the conventional wisdom about political morality and begin to at least stumble toward utopia.
Samuel Moyn has called George Scialabba "a national treasure of long standing" and "our preeminent chronicler of American public intellectuals," and says that "this new collection of his inimitable essays and reviews is one every serious reader needs." Art Goldhammer calls SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA "a collection of elegant, erudite, eminently humane meditations...that illuminate these dark days of the Republic with admirable intellectual rigor. [Scialabba's] is a quiet voice that needs to be heard above the raucous cacophony that dominates our public space." In his Foreword to SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA, Jedediah Purdy praises Scialabba for writing "lucidly about benightedness, vividly about purblindness, so that his essays and reviews show thought as a thing possible in a world that can seem a conspiracy against sense and reason."
George worked for 35 years in building management at Harvard University in order to support his book-reviewing habit. When he retired in 2015, the city of Cambridge declared a "George Scialabba Day," and Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and others gathered to celebrate.
Samuel Moyn has called George Scialabba "a national treasure of long standing" and "our preeminent chronicler of American public intellectuals," and says that "this new collection of his inimitable essays and reviews is one every serious reader needs." Art Goldhammer calls SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA "a collection of elegant, erudite, eminently humane meditations...that illuminate these dark days of the Republic with admirable intellectual rigor. [Scialabba's] is a quiet voice that needs to be heard above the raucous cacophony that dominates our public space." In his Foreword to SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA, Jedediah Purdy praises Scialabba for writing "lucidly about benightedness, vividly about purblindness, so that his essays and reviews show thought as a thing possible in a world that can seem a conspiracy against sense and reason."
George worked for 35 years in building management at Harvard University in order to support his book-reviewing habit. When he retired in 2015, the city of Cambridge declared a "George Scialabba Day," and Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and others gathered to celebrate.
224 pages, Paperback
Published August 16, 2018
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 20, 2023
Good overview of the long 20th century and the progress we've made as humans.
Did an excellent explanation of human history and why the last long century from the late 1800s to the 1970s was such an anamoly.
His perspective is an economic one basically that corporations, research labs, and globalization led to an unprecedented amount of innovation that finnlay allowed humans to produce more than they could consume "The Malthusian Trap".
He goes into great details for multiple themes during this long century including political systems like socialism, Nazism, unrestrained capitalism. He eventually strongly implies that social democracy and its corresponding economic system is the best for ensuring prosperity by balancing individuals concerns for hyper-concentrated economies that lead to things like Nazism and socialism with capitalism's efficiency.
Then he highlights how neoliberalism and hyperglobalism put the brakes on this growth and have started seeing backlashes. He argues that the social democracy should return.
This book is very detailed and informative about growth, inventions, social, political, and economic systems and more. However, I would say the attempt to explain this all as an economic consequence resorts in twisted logic and ignores other factors at play.
All in all an excellent historical book about one of the most important events in human history even if he claims it is only an economic historical book.
Did an excellent explanation of human history and why the last long century from the late 1800s to the 1970s was such an anamoly.
His perspective is an economic one basically that corporations, research labs, and globalization led to an unprecedented amount of innovation that finnlay allowed humans to produce more than they could consume "The Malthusian Trap".
He goes into great details for multiple themes during this long century including political systems like socialism, Nazism, unrestrained capitalism. He eventually strongly implies that social democracy and its corresponding economic system is the best for ensuring prosperity by balancing individuals concerns for hyper-concentrated economies that lead to things like Nazism and socialism with capitalism's efficiency.
Then he highlights how neoliberalism and hyperglobalism put the brakes on this growth and have started seeing backlashes. He argues that the social democracy should return.
This book is very detailed and informative about growth, inventions, social, political, and economic systems and more. However, I would say the attempt to explain this all as an economic consequence resorts in twisted logic and ignores other factors at play.
All in all an excellent historical book about one of the most important events in human history even if he claims it is only an economic historical book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review