[Richard Saage] The collapse of the Soviet-style regimes in Europe led some to claim the "end of the utopian age", a topic that dominated public opinion at the beginning of the 1990s. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the public has been confronted by a new challenge, one that is associated with the rise of the nano-, bio-, computer, and neurosciences and of brain research and the technologies that these have brought about. At issue is no longer the competition between two systems, namely between the allegedly "utopian" communist planned economies and the constitutional type of society embodied by Western democracies with their neoliberal claim to global applicability. At issue is the vision of a new man that is supposed to result from the interaction of these new primary sciences. The aim of this article is not just to reveal the roots of the term "new man" in the utopian tradition. It also discusses the differences in the most recent variant of meaning as well as the anthropological and ethical problems which follow from the vision of a technically enhanced new man.
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