inevitabilism
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
inevitable + -ism
Noun[edit]
inevitabilism (uncountable)
- The belief that certain developments are impossible to avoid; determinism.
- 1998, S. H. Rigby, Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction, Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 61:
- Gramsci identified such inevitabilism and mechanical determinism as a form of consolation during a time of defeat: ‘I have been defeated for the moment but the tide of history is working for me in the long term’.
- 2016, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Bruce Lerro, Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present, Routledge, →ISBN, page 10:
- Another unscientific characterization of historical processes is inevitabilism, or the idea that history is the result of an unfolding process in which stages follow one from another in a necessary order, like the pages of a book.
- 2019, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Hachette, →ISBN:
- Inevitabilism enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes. We know that there can be alternative paths to a robust information capitalism that produces genuine solutions for a third modernity.
- 2022, China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto[1], Head of Zeus, →ISBN:
- ‘It is’, A. J. P. Taylor writes in his lauded introduction to the Manifesto, ‘a grave upset to the Marxist system that the proletariat has not become the ruling class in the community and shows no sign of doing so.’ And it's true that the Manifesto repeatedly expresses certainty about particular outcomes. Such ‘inevitabilism’ is misplaced. As we've seen, the Manifesto’s argument for the ineluctable impoverishment of the working class under capitalism, for example, has not been borne out.