Prometheus Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the Twenty-first Century (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Prometheus Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the Twenty-first Century
In this important book, Mitzman draws on alternate features of the European past to support a future vision of democratic societies, social justice, the reasonable and humane use of technology, and the protection of the planet's resources. Prometheus has been taken as the patron saint of technological domination of nature, capitalist achievement and globalization, and rampant individualism. Mitzman shows that there is another Prometheus, associated with the Romantic tradition and found in Shelley's 1818–19 poem Prometheus Unbound. Here Prometheus is a resister of tyranny and denouncer of social injustice; Shelley makes him a symbol of harmony between humankind and nature, between reason and mystical feeling, through his marriage to Asia. The Prometheus born of the revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had several faces. Mitzman traces them in modern nationalism, socialism, and consumer capitalism. If the first two began as reactions to the selfish individualism of capitalism, they failed to defeat it and succumbed, themselves, to the cult of power. Consumer capitalism, claiming to be a panacea, is a final degradation of the Promethean ideal, an expression of avarice and egoism.
A world in which the Romantic Promethean ideal is fully expressed might emerge, Mitzman hopes, from the global movement against corporate capitalism, whose European manifestations he explores; and from this movement could develop an "extrapolation of a radically evolved Social Europe on a world scale." Required for this development is a view of human nature that, unlike Freud's, does not presuppose self-centeredness, the centrality of self-gratification, or the instrumentality of consumer-capitalist modernity. In an especially valuable chapter, Mitzman draws on the Frankfurt analyst Ernst Schachtel's concepts of the autocentric and allocentric sides of human personality—both already present in the infant: the former focused on the use of the world for the self and the sense of one's embeddedness, the latter actively seeking to discover and finding pleasure in understanding others. Mitzman sees here a way of thinking about human needs and actions that can fit with a future in which humankind and nature are reconciled and in which exists a "global culture that combines sustainability, freedom, and solidarity."
Infused with deep knowledge of European cultural history and political and social movements, Prometheus Revisited makes the case for the relevance of Europe for thinking creatively about the future of many societies. Even better would be connecting European ways of thinking and acting with analogous ones elsewhere—say, in India. A "radically evolved Social Europe" may have something to learn from others as well.
Natalie Zemon Davis's books include The Return of Martin Guerre, Fiction in the Archives, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Women on the Margins, Slaves on Screen, and, most recently, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. She is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emerita of History at Princeton University and adjunct professor of history, anthropology, and medieval studies at the University of Toronto, where she is also a senior fellow in the Center for Comparative Literature.
