Description
What can we do in this period of historic, global turbulence? Mainstream narratives have no plausible account of how to stop exacerbating the multiple, overlapping challenges; much less begin to address them meaningfully. The only thing everyone agrees is innovation will be needed.
But what is innovation? Usually, it is understood as new technologies that will ‘solve’ specific ‘problems’ – and, it is hoped, return life to a ‘business as usual’ of progress in individual freedom and wealth. But innovation is a thoroughly social process with profound implications for the arrangement of power in a society, hence shaping the emergence of new social systems. Exploring evidence from the key arenas of low-carbon innovation, including in the pivotal location of a rising China, this book describes the global systemic crisis of a neoliberal world order and the embryonic emergence of an alternative global power regime of a ‘liberalism 2.0’. This augurs both a web 2.0-based revitalization of the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century and new Dickensian inequalities and injustices. Against hopes that the present is a ‘revolutionary’ moment, therefore, political engagement with this emerging power regime is thus presented as the most productive strategy for a progressive twenty-first century politics.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Section 1 – The Problem: The Global System Crisis of Neoliberalism
Chapter 1 Neoliberalism, Knowledge and the Global System
Chapter 2 Four Great Challenges
Chapter 3 The Geneaology of the Emerging Capitalist Present
Section 2 – Where Are We?: Innovation in China
Chapter 4 Will China Rule the World? The Emergence of Chinese Capitalism
Chapter 5 The Supply Side: Debates and Paradoxes regarding Chinese Innovation Upgrade
Chapter 6 The Unexpected Innovation Hegemon
Chapter 7 The Demand Side: The Emergence of Risk-Innovation-Class in China
Chapter 8 The Emerging Historic Bloc – China’s Middle Risk-Innovation-Class
Section 3 – Where Are We Going?: Sharing and Haggling the Long Complex Journey to Green Urban Mobility Systems Transition in China
Chapter 9 Electric Vehicle Innovation-as-Politics in China
Chapter 10 Towards Mobility-as-a-Service
Section 4 – What Can Be Done?: Conclusion
Chapter 11 Liberalism 2.0 and Beyond
