On Human Emancipation: The Archaeology of Discontent

Abstract

European social ideologies, within which modern (and modernist) social science occupies a hallowed and hegemonic space, as evolved in the great ferment of the so-called “Enlightenment,” were conceived within the ruinous premises of an Anthropocentrism that was undoubtedly Judeo-Christian in inspiration (albeit within a significantly corrupted version of the latter). The necessary subordination of “nature” to “man” (this casual androcentrism is far more commonplace in the epistemes of the human world than anthropocentrism, and needs to be carefully distinguished from the latter) within such an episteme had predictably disastrous consequences for the planet, and its luckless denizens.