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Imagination in the Late Pagan and Early Christian World: The First Nine Centuries AD

Imagination in the Late Pagan and Early Christian World: The First Nine Centuries AD doi 10.1215/0961754X-2005-009 12:2 © 2006 by Duke University Press Arthur Mitzman, Prometheus Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the Twentyfirst Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 319 pp. 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 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

Imagination in the Late Pagan and Early Christian World: The First Nine Centuries AD

Bynum, Caroline Walker
Common Knowledge , Volume 12 (2) – Apr 1, 2006
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-2005-014
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

doi 10.1215/0961754X-2005-009 12:2 © 2006 by Duke University Press Arthur Mitzman, Prometheus Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the Twentyfirst Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 319 pp. 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

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2006

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