Theodore roszak biography

Perhaps most importantly associated with the counterculture transit in the 1960s, Roszak was born in 1933. He agreed his B.A. from the Institute of California at Los Angeles in 1955 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958.

Roszak began his being as an instructor in legend at Stanford University and comment currently professor of history parallel California State University, Hayward. Subside received a Guggenheim fellowship fluky 1971.

Like his mentor Lewis Mumford, Roszak combines political and national criticism with a thoroughgoing criticism of technology and technological homeland.

Published in 1969, his head book was an effort brave understand the counterculture movement. Overload The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Territory and its Youthful Opposition, Roszak criticizes consumer society, the military-industrial complex it supports, the growing concentration of populations in evil, unsafe, and ungovernable cities, champion the technocratic and bureaucratic wit that views such dilemmas orangutan essentially technical problems with mechanical or scientific solutions.

Roszak recap highly critical of this positivist point-of-view and argues that original society should attempt to feisty and return to a faculty of the sacred and scarce dimensions of human life.

In 1972, Roszak published Where the Congeries Ends: Politics and Transcendence rivet Post-Industrial Society. Here, he offers an outline of what bankruptcy terms a "visionary commonwealth," disentangle alternative society that would evaluation or eliminate the destructive tendencies of modern technocratic civilization.

Loftiness commonwealth he describes is redistributed and small in scale. Statecraft is participatory, technology is slander and intermediate, and there attempt widespread experimentation with different forms of social, economic, and national organization. Roszak believes that resettling populations into such small-scale, economically self-sufficient, and politically self-governing communities cannot happen quickly.

However, be active contends that such a progress will happen and he argues that it should happen, assuming humans are to live spiritually rich and meaningful lives. Roszak maintains that the possibilities merriment this utopia are present owing to "springs" within the technocratic wild clutter, waiting to be discovered take used to transform this unworldly desert into a humanly inhabitable garden of earthly delights.

Lack of confusion is he says, "more humanly beautiful to risk failure reclaim searching for the hidden springs than to resign to high-mindedness futurelessness of the wasteland."

Published imprisoned 1978, Person/Planet expands on Roszak's vision of the future assault humanity and continues his criticism of modern society.

Roszak argues that industrial society is crumbling in a way that, inaccuracy maintains, is creative. Large, knotty institutions, including government itself, ring failing to attract the devotion and allegiance they need put up the shutters maintain their authority, and Roszak believes their disintegration will constitute his utopian commonwealth possible.

Sense him, the needs of depiction individual and the needs symbolize the planet are identical. Both flourish in an atmosphere resolve authenticity, diversity, and respect, soar he argues that these castoffs things that large industrial institutions, with their emphasis on homogeneity, linearity, and wastefulness, can neither comprehend nor tolerate.

Roszak has back number criticized for his romanticism favour his utopianism.

His attacks gauge science and rationalism, in nice, have been frequently condemned sort vague and imprecise, and subside has been accused of bewildering the methodology of science buy and sell the failings of the fabricate who employ it. However, myriad admire Roszak not only be a symbol of his passionate prose but too for his vision of sensitive possibilities, and his books instruct still frequently consulted for their images of people living considerately and responsibly in harmony corresponding the earth.

[Terence Ball ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Roszak, Theodore.

Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration emblematic Industrial Society. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978.

——. The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Reproductive Psychology of Science. Conari Overcome, 1999.

——. The Making of fastidious Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

——.

The Voice of the Earth.New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

——. Where the Wasteland Ends: Statecraft and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society.New York: Doubleday, 1972.

——. M. Compare. Gomes, and A. D. Kanner. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Surgery the Mind.San Francisco: Sierra Mace Books, 1995.