ABSTRACT
The crisis of industrial civilization which gained prominence after the short period of challenge created by the increase in oil prices raised a new-old list of lamentations on the present ills and the hopes of the future. During the nineteenth century the dispute between "utopian" and "scientific" solutions also created profound divisions among the first universal critics of the industrial revolution, based on the exploitation of man by man. The richness of social situations derived from the coexistence of different forms of production, reorganized by neocolonialism, succeeded in liquidating the traditional agrarian basis of many countries of black Africa, without substituting for it an urban-industrial or urban-mercantile economy able to survive without colonialist ties. The children of the rich reflect the stigma of being masters of a civilization which denies communality, which creates in fact the situation of the homo homini lupus that the thinkers of the eighteenth century tried to avoid through politics.
