Book Reviews : Lester W. Milbrath, Envisioning a Sustainable Society: Learning Our Way Out. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1989. Pp. 403, $57.50 (original) (raw)

1993, Philosophy of the Social Sciences

The central concern of this book is to transform the way its readers think about the world, how it works, about themselves, and how they ought to relate to the world. In other words, it addresses three issues, two of which may be said to belong to social philosophy as traditionally conceived. These are &dquo;What sort of person ought one to be?&dquo; and &dquo;How ought one to behave to others?&dquo; But the third, which traditional social philosophy tends to ignore, is &dquo;What sort of a world is it that human beings occupy and are a part of? How ought human beings behave toward it given that there are other species also occupying it and the complex ways in which it operates?&dquo; Roughly from the late seventeenth century onward when Western Europe began to usher in the period of modernity, its thinkers, by and large, have simply assumed that (1) the natural world is at man's disposal and for his exploitation, (2) the exploitation is to be carried out in terms of his new science and technology, (3) the philosophy of linear mechanism is not only appropriate for understanding physical phenomena (as studied by Newtonian physics) but also for all other natural phenomena, and (4) the technology spawned by such a science underpinned by such a philosophy has been and still is co-opted by an economic order that is fundamentally competitive and zerosum, with exponential growth built into its basic design. These assumptions have, after nearly four centuries, led to the degradation and despoliation of the natural world to such an extent that there is a very real danger that human beings may be imperiling not only the existence of