The World We Have Won

The World We Have Won is a major study of transformations in erotic and intimate life since 1945. We are living in a world of transition, in the midst of a long, unfinished but profound revolution that has transformed the possibilities of living out our sexual diversities.

This book provides a balance sheet of the changes that have transformed our ways of being, from welfarism to the pill, women's and gay liberation, from globalization, consumerism and individualization to new forms of intimacy, from friends as family to same sex marriage. Some respond to these challenges with a deep cultural pessimism or moral conservatism. It rejects such views and argues that this is a world we are increasingly making for ourselves, part of the long process of democratization of everyday life. Unless we grasp this we cannot understand, not only the problems and anxieties, but the opportunities and hopes in this world we have won.

Jeffrey Weeks works at London South Bank University where he has been Professor of Sociology, Executive Dean of Arts and Human Sciences, and Director of SPUR: the Social Policy and Urban Regeneration Research Institute. He has an international reputation for his work on the history and social organization of sexuality and intimate life. Recent books include Making Sexual History (2000), Same Sex Intimacies (with Heaphy and Donovan, 2001) and Sexuality (second edition, 2003).