Globalization, progress, and our freedom
Luis Garagalza Artículo en Revista online 2019 Grupo Consolidado
The Philosophical Salon, a Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) channel
A paradoxical consequence of globalization in the realm of theory is that it has reconfirmed the hollowing out and final exhaustion of the idea of progress. Indeed, this idea had lost its appeal long before the recent history of globalization, notably as soon as it has been uncoupled from the desire for emancipation and from aspirations to equality and fraternity. Emptied of its last shreds of meaning, it is nothing other than a rhetorical resource, deployed mostly by conservatives in politics and by neoliberals in the economic sphere in order to justify their proposals to keep on “advancing,” growing, developing, come what may.