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Robert Heilbroner's Morality Play

Examining the myths by which we might have a future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

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Robert Heilbroner's Human Prospect would change everything. Suddenly and radically our future is transformed. Only yesterday morning science and technology—aided by expanding industrialism—painted for us a future resonant with promise. Now we knew how to know; and in knowing all, we could control all. Thus the future was to be a realm of unlimited freedom; freedom over the forces that formerly bound us in necessity, even, said some, freedom over evolution, freedom from the limits of space and time, from want, from labor, possibly from disease, from genetic faults and from social maladjustments. Only yesterday afternoon gospels of political, social and theological liberation painted a future of self-realization, a future where the chains of oppression and exploitation are broken. Here too the future is a realm of hope, the realm where, as futurist theologians have told us, God's rule will be fully manifest.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1974

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References

page 51 note * Published as The Human Prospect” in the New York Review of Books, Heilbroner's work is now available in hard cover as An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect (Norton; 150 pp.; $5.95).

page 51 note ** For example, the theologies of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jiirgen Moltmann and Johannes Metz in Germany; Rubem Alves and Gustavo Gutierrez in South America; and Carl Braaten in this country.

page 54 note * For example, Ernst Bloch in A Philosophy of the Future, and Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man.