© Columbia University Press
The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis is Really Telling Us
July, 2010
Cloth, 216 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4035-5
Edinburgh University Press
$35.00
Stuart Sim diagnoses the global financial crisis and the global environmental crisis as symptoms of the end of modernity, a cultural system that has prevailed in the West since the time of the Enlightenment. The modern world's insatiable need for technologically driven progress is unsustainable, he claims, not to mention destructive to the planet and its socioeconomic systems. Sim calls for a radical alteration of our worldview, asking that we jettison the free market, rein in conspicuous consumption, reinvigorate public service, and develop talents that will reconstruct society in a satisfactory way.