Modernity’s own utopian promise of progress helps generate its inversion into unfreedom

Evidence

The promise of modernity, the conviction that scientific, technological, and social progress would make a life of material, social, and political freedom available to all, has not only remained unfulfilled: it is itself among the mechanisms that generated a paradoxical inversion into its opposite. According to Rosa, this process is incomprehensible without grasping the aspirational ideals that were among its driving forces. While it is clear that struggles for justice and political freedom were and are an inextricable aspect of the modernization process, the interlocking dynamic of the economic, social, and cultural motors that unleash the spiral of modern acceleration also bears an ineliminable reference to a historically contingent but fateful “utempian” vision of the good. If this is right, then a critical social theory of the acceleration societies of modernity requires not just the analytical and deontological sword of discourses of justice but also the light shed by the eudaimonistic critique of distorted and self-undermining conceptions of the good. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 49

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘eudaimonistic critique’ as an evaluative mode focused on distorted conceptions of the good life, contrasted with deontological justice discourse.
• XREF: connects to: Advanced industrial society produces a rational, comfortable unfreedom as a token of technical progress. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 105; Modernity’s defining trait was living time as progress toward improvement — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1294