Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books have been published in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Polish and Korean. Among his recent books in English are Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2021); and Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation, Third Edition (Cambridge University Press 2020).
The COVID-19 pandemic came as a wake-up call for humanity. The modern myths of a full mastering of nature by humans and of permanent growth on a limited planet have fallen apart. As humanity, we need a paradigm shift, new ways of thinking, inhabiting and living in our world with nature of which we are a part, rather than against it. In this incisive and comprehensive book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a leading global thinker of our time, provides us with tools to fulfil this collective mission that will define the 21st century. Geoffrey Pleyers, University of Louvain, Vice-President of the International Sociological Association Only Boaventura de Sousa Santos could deliver epochal thinking of this scale. As a dialectic of fear and hope, he ties the necessity of utopianism to the possibilities of a world devastated but also made transparent by the pandemic. Michael Burawoy, University of California-Berkeley