Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope

Abstract

As the vast majority of people become detached from public forums that nourish social critique, agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-based choices in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and private solutions become a substitute for systemic change. As the worldly space of criticism is undercut by the absence of public pedagogies and spaces that encourage the exchange of information, opinion and criticism, the horizons of an inclusive and substantive democracy disappear against the growing militarization of public space, the attack on the welfare state, the ongoing commercialization of everyday life, and the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the loss of a politically guaranteed public realm in which autonomy, political participation and engaged citizenship make their appearance. Drawing upon the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Zygmunt Bauman and others the author addresses the current crisis of meaning, political agency and pedagogy, a...