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Disappointed and disillusioned by 20th century ideologies, overwhelmed by an unstoppable scientific and technological progress, today’s humanity seems to have been left without a “beacon” that can light up its path towards the future. This sort of eternal present – overwhelmed by inequalities, violence and ideological regression – is the condition that Augé defines the “prehistory of humanity as a planetary society.”

How can we get out of this and enter a new era? With a utopia that can mark a radical change of perspective. “The only utopia valid for the future centuries and the foundations of which should be urgently laid or reinforced is the utopia of education for all: the only possible way to curb an unequal and ignorant world society, condemned to consumption or exclusion and, at the very end, to the risk of planetary suicide.”

Marc Augé is a French ethnologist and writer of worldwide fame; he was Director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 1985 to 1995. Augé owes his popularity to the definition of an “anthropology of contemporary worlds” and the analysis of modern spaces based on the absence of history and identity: the famous theory of non-places, expressed in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity