The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis is Really Telling Us Hardcover - 2010

ENDORSEMENT BEING SOUGHT FROM READER'S REPORT The End of Modernity Stuart Sim Global financial crisis, global environmental crisis - what connects them? Stuart Sim claims they are both symptoms of the end of modernity, the cultural system that has prevailed in the West from the Enlightenment onwards. In this provocative book, Sim argues that the modern world's insatiable need for technologically-driven economic progress is unsustainable, and potentially destructive of the planet and its socio-economic systems. The new landscape this creates - socially, politically, economically, intellectually - is explored through an interdisciplinary approach, providing a wide-ranging assessment of the collapse of modernity and the challenges it poses us. Sim calls for a radical alteration in our world view and for purposeful changes both to our economic and intellectual life: we need to jettison the free market, rein in conspicuous consumption, reinvigorate public service, and develop talents other than the entrepreneurial if we are to reconstruct our society satisfactorily. Stuart Sim is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University. His books include The Carbon Footprint Wars; A Manifesto for Silence; and Empires of Belief, all published by Edinburgh University Press.