Zach Carter: Review of “Slouching Towards Utopia” for “Dissent"

Fall 2022

Zach Carter: Review of Slouching for Dissent: ‘Slouching Towards Utopia<bit.ly/3pP3Krk> is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall. There is a masterpiece in J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia, and a very interesting muddle…. In the “long twentieth century”—the period between 1870 and 2010—an almost miraculous transformation took place…. Humans did not find utopia, DeLong argues, but we stumbled in its general direction…. His narrative is fundamentally hopeful: people can accomplish amazing things on a colossal scale. Not that long ago, we did so all the time. This perspective is refreshing precisely because everyone, DeLong included, knows that something has gone terribly wrong…