What Kind of Society Do We Want to Live in?

• Authors: Böhme Gernot
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The author asks about the conceptual tools which would enable a critique of contem-porary capitalism without falling back to Utopianism and its historically-discredited theses. With the help of paired categories like community–society, human dignity–self-awareness, need–desire, Gernot Böhme portrays the deficiencies of contemporary Western social reality, e.g. the steadily exhausting reserves of the highly-bureaucratised welfare state system, the rapidly mounting differences in income, or the negative moral and psychological effects of unemployment and the so-called precariat. Böhme presents his critique of “aesthetic capitalism,” which does not satisfy human needs in the Marxist sense but rather the aesthetically-refined consumer desires of today’s affluent societies, in reference to the views of contemporary critical theory authorities (A. Honneth's con-cept of three sources of recognition).

Keywords

EN

utopia; community; society; human dignity; self-awareness; need; desire; critical theory; recognition; democracy; aesthetic capitalism; economic growth

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Journal: Dialogue and Universalism
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 11-20

Contributors

author

Böhme Gernot

• Technical University in Darmstadt