Modernity and its Futures Past

“Nishad Patnaik’s fine book shows us that, despite their stark surface disagreement, political theorists who repudiate modernity and those who embrace it complacently, share a common outlook: they ‘reify’ modernity. By contrast, he provides a sustained and powerful argument against such a reification. Invoking a wide range of ideas, he undertakes a deeply thoughtful critical engagement with prominent contemporary thinkers on the Left, and offers a fresh and attractive conception of modernity, given to an inner dynamism, and possessed of resources for its own radical transformation from an era defined by an entrenched capitalist economic formation to an unalienated society and humanity.” —Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Professor, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University, NY, USA “This is an urgent and vital work exploring the possibility of an unalienated and sustainable post-capitalist world order. In a book of deep patience, generosity, and engagement that demonstrates a remarkable command over a wide set of sources, Nishad Patnaik explores the political and economic origins and structures that have created our broken modernity, and that, in their continuance, are responsible for the crises that now score every portion of the living earth. If the tradition of Hegelian-Marxism, the very idea of a ‘universal in perpetual becoming,’ is to matter to our future, it will begin here. A must read for radical theory.” —Jay Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, NY, USA The work reimagines emancipatory possibilities in the face of reified capitalist modernity. The enlightenment resulted in a ‘disenchanted’ world, stripped of ‘anthropomorphised’ meaning and purpose. This world, in its capitalistic figuration, alienates us from others, and from nature. To rearticulate emancipatory possibilities requires a non-alienated relation to society and nature. Yet, modernist disenchantment cannot be undone by returning to pre-modern ‘enchantment’. Rather, such rearticulation calls for the recovery of ‘unalienated life’ from within non-reified modernity, by renewing its universalist dimension. Nishad Patnaik is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India.