In Search of the Good Society: Love, Hope and Art as Political Economy

Compelling reading, this book both reinforces and elevates the role of art in the exploration and analysis of the concepts of democracy, globalization and capitalism. In the book, the author describes a post-human world, a state we have already entered. But how should we think about it, given we have already been co-opted? Can we articulate the future outside the false discipline that the market often dictates, beyond the clutches of a few social media companies, and maintain our rich diversities while holding on to those things that make life possible and worthwhile: love, hope and art?

Running throughout the book is the central theme of uncertainty and divergence. It is uncompromising in asking the question about the need for a new global creation story, which has at its core not the certainties of one defined creation myth but the need to feel comfortable with the uncertainty principle both in physics and the political economy. It is up to artists, scientists and philosophers to articulate this wonder and to help us write a new global creation story based on art (the arts), uncertainty, diversity, risk and wonder - and of course knowledge. This book has the capacity to both clarify and re-shape your thinking.

MALCOLM MCINTOSH is former Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at Griffith University. He is Founding Editor of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and was Special Adviser to the UN Global Compact.