Dan Shanahan Waiting for Something That Never Arrived

Annotation

Contemporary political discourse in America-and in other industrial democracies-has operated on the basis of an unexamined assumption about the nature of "prosperity", one that springs from a sense of triumph over poverty and struggle. But little is said about where, now that it has achieved a kind of material "lift -off ", democracy should be taking us. Nor does it ask what the real relationship should be between the small proportion of humankind who enjoy prosperity and the majority who do not. Waiting for Something that Never Arrived starts from a few exchanges between the author and the late Tony Judt and proceeds to build a philosophical foundation for progressive thinking and sober political discourse.