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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
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About This Book
Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of "sustainable decadence," a civilizational malaise that could endure for longer than we think..
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Reviews
"Douthat's elegy on the death of progress is unsparing and often pessimistic, but never alarmist ..."
"clever and stimulating ..."
"And he repays our consideration with a glittering stream of associations and distinctions, resonances and rhymes that reinflect the world we thought we knew in fascinating ways ..."
"Or as Brecht put it, 'because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.'"
"A journalist...delivers an impassioned but not entirely convincing critique of American and European society ..."
"But they have the unfortunate effect of making Douthat's treatment of culture look silly."
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