ABSTRACT
A few decades hence perhaps historians will characterise the last three centuries as the era of struggle between political philosophies, each of which promised a utopian vision of the future. Certainly in the century and a half to 1989 world history was in large measure the story of the contest between the opposing forces of capitalism and socialism, with fascism interceding for two decades in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, climate disruption will increasingly push all utopian visions and ideological disputes into the background. Abandoning the pursuit of utopias, including the last great utopian vision of endless growth, our task will be to avoid a dystopia. The triumph of liberal capitalism, which was hailed prematurely as the ‘end of history’, coincided precisely with the dawning realisation that industrial progress has been transforming the physical environment in a way that threatens the demise of the world that liberal capitalism promised to create. Distracted by the triumphalism of the ‘end of history’ there crept up on us the end of progress, so that now we are staring at a century and more of regress, an
unwinding of the revolution that began three centuries ago with the liberation of the forces of science, technology and economic expansion. We can now see that, like a teenage boy who suddenly acquires the strength of a man, humans proved insufficiently mature to be entrusted with the powers they unleashed.
