The Age of Consent - Softcover

Monbiot, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007171242 ISBN 13: 9780007171248

Publisher: Flamingo, 2003

Synopsis

A manifesto for a new world order.

Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable, if alarming, diagnosis of the ills of early 21st century consumerist culture and its free-market myths, George Monbiot sets out now with this new book to offer something more constructive, a set of proposals – political, democratic, economic, environmental – that might effect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen.

‘The Age of Consent’ is provocative, brave, even utopian. But, with most of the 20th century’s Big Ideas dead in the gutter, it’s time for a book that can be a touchstone for real debate about the political and economic presumptions and prejudices on which our society has rested since World War II.

About this title

Review:

George Monbiot's reputation as a campaigning journalist and proponent of social justice makes The Age of Consent a fascinating prospect. And so it proves. It is nothing less than what its subtitle calls a manifesto for a new world order, a proposal to change the way everything works. This is aiming very high indeed. Monbiot is interested in the global mechanisms that control war, peace, trade and development, and his manifesto explores the practical means by which the control of these mechanisms can be removed from the hands of the unelected rich and put into those of truly representative democratic bodies. (Many campaigners within what he calls "our movement" will be disconcerted by the briskness with which he dismisses the parallel options of anarchism and doctrinaire Marxism as useless to his purposes, concluding that a democratically elected World Parliament is the only possible solution.)

Corporations figure largely in his arguments, as you might expect, but Monbiot's analysis of their current and possible future role in a reformed world system is more nuanced than some offered by his anti-globalisation cohorts. He recognises that global trade is a necessity and that global corporations are best placed to carry this out, but only if they are properly policed, their ability to "externalise" (i.e., dump on someone else) hidden costs, such as environmental damage, rigorously controlled. As Monbiot vividly remarks, a corporation is merely a tool. When it starts demanding, or usurping, the rights of a person, it must be destroyed.

This is thought-provoking stuff. So too is his account of the creation of the World Bank and the IMF in 1944. Above all, The Age of Consent is a call to action: all its research and analysis will amount to nothing, says Monbiot, if it doesn't contribute to the process of change for which he sees a vast global will developing. He genuinely believes, and communicates strongly his belief, that the monolithic political and economic forms that constrain the poor world to its subordinate position can be changed, and offers suggestive and practical ways in which this might be achieved by direct and indirect action. Most powerful among weapons to bring about the transformation of the world is the belief in the effectiveness of collective action. This is fighting talk, powerfully delivered. --Robin Davidson

Review:

Praise for ‘Captive State’:

‘This book, politically speaking, is essential...Did I say essential? I meant compulsory.’ Nick Lezard, Guardian

‘After reading “Captive State”, I will never be able to take the government seriously again.’ Thom Yorke of Radiohead

‘Monbiot gives the Green movement a glamour it has never previously enjoyed...the originality of his thought makes him uniquely influential.’ The Times

‘Few get to the heart of the matter like Monbiot, and very few write a compelling enough prose to make you want to shout angry slogans about the injustices of corporate greed.’ Management Today

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0007171242
• ISBN 13: 9780007171248
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256