El retorno de la materialidad¿realismo o distopía?

Abstract

Between 1945 and 2015, Western politics was driven by an idealistic view, whose rise took place in the 1990s and whose decline began in 2008. Since 2015, an approach attached to protectionism, security and territoriality has returned: a «materialistic turn» that is sometimes interpreted in dystopian terms. This paper examines the evolution of economic, cultural and political idealism in three sequences (1945-1989, 1989-2008 and 2008-2020), and presents an analysis of the present-day and the immediate future. The irruption of the pandemic has promoted the materialistic view of the world (under a physical-biological key), and has accelerated trends such as deglobalization, identitarianism and authoritarianism. From a theoretical-political approach, the paper also analyzes the hypothesis of a «hobbesian world» understood as the dark side of utopianism