Talk:Prometheanism

Confusion about chronology of term's usage

The article states that "The term was introduced" by John Dryzek in 1997, yet contradicts itself by stating that "Martin Lewis offered one of the first systematic comparisons" of Promethean and Arcadian environmentalism in 1992. Raphael dreyfuss (talk) 16:48, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. In fact, the claim that it was introduced in the 1990s is ridiculous. I'd like to know when it was first introduced, but it was already well established then. Andrew Dobson's 1990 Green Political Thought and 1991 The Green Reader use the term as something already well understood. Ivan Illich's 1970 Deschooling Society takes up Prometheanism. Henri Lefebvre's 1961 Critique of Everyday Life refers to modern "Promethean society." David Joravsky's 1961 Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917-1932 refers to the Soviet Union's "Promethean notion of science." Herbert Marcuse's 1955 Eros and Civilization uses the concept in a neo-Freudian way. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites Bloch using the term in the 1950s, and I doubt that was the first use either. The term itself goes back to the Renaissance at least, which one would think should be acknowledged in the article, but even if one is only speaking of it in the modern anti-Prometheanist sense, the origin precedes the 1990s. --Franklin Dmitryev (talk) 23:32, 23 February 2020 (UTC)