Critique of economic reason/ translated by Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner

André Gorz's earlier books from Ecology as Politics to Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise - have informed and inspired the most radical currents in Green movements in Europe and America over the past decade. Now, in Critique of Economic Reason, he offers his fullest account to date of the terminal crisis of a system where every activity and aspiration has been subjected to the rule of the market. By carefully delineating the existential and cultural limits of economic rationality, he emphasizes the urgent need to create a society which rejects the work ethic in favour of an emancipatory ethic of free time.

The environmental costs of work-based industrial civilization are now well documented, if still underestimated. But for Gorz these cannot be separated from the social devastation which new technology has only intensified: a society sharply divided between securely employed worker-producers and a growing mass of in secure and powerless service workers He details the dehumanizing consequences of a belief that more is always better, and of the commodification of our needs and creativity

At the heart of his alternative is an advocacy not of full employment but of an equal distri bution of the diminishing amount of necessary paid work. He presents a practical strategy for reducing the working week, and develops radi cal version of guaranteed wage for all Above all, he argues that a utopian vision is now the only realistic proposal, and that economic reason must be returned to its true that is subordinate-place'