This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

From Bohm-Bawerk on, political economists have seemingly blown great holes in Marxism, disproving its key concepts and falsifying Marx's predictions. In this book, Geoffrey Pilling maintains that even the most devastating of such factual analyses are fruitless because they misconstrue the nature of Marx's critique. In Pilling's presentation, Marx's critique of political economy is not "economic" but philosophic. In criticizing political economy, Marx transcends it and in so doing is (...) essentially immune from any analysis which turns on "facts." According to Pilling, "Marx's work cannot be reduced to a series of results, to be tested against the 'facts' of capitalist development". Pilling, following the lead of Lenin, seeks to overturn the "shallow empiricism" which has led to the degeneration of Marxism. It is Pilling's aim to recover the "philosophical method" of Capital, i.e., to re-work Capital in the light of Hegel's Logic, to rehabilitate dialectic over empiricism. Pilling begins by showing how "... Marx's critique of political economy [is] of a philosophic nature, rather than one concerned with the details of economic theory alone". Marx, as we know, rejects the individualism of political economy which derives from Locke. He condemns the uncritical and "ahistorical" character of political economy, i.e., the tendency to treat the categories of economics as natural. According to Pilling's. (shrink)

This paper contends that Marx develops in Volume III of Capital an incisive conceptual framework in which excessive credit creation, indebtedness and speculation play a critical and growing role in the reproduction of social capital on an extended basis; however, given the decentralised and anarchic nature of capitalist production, the credit system does so in a highly erratic and contradictory manner which only postpones the inevitable day of reckoning. The paper also highlights Marx's relatively neglected but highly (...) important analysis of the separation of ownership from management in the advanced capitalism of his day, England, and its modern-day implications for excessive risk-taking and debt-fuelled speculation up until the eve of the crash. More importantly, the paper argues that in Volumes II and III, Marx implicitly connected the expanding role of credit (which he associated with the development of capitalism) to a significant reduction in the turnover period of capital, thereby boosting the rate of surplus-value, and countering in a highly erratic and contradictory manner, the fall in the rate of profit. The growing role of credit has been relatively ignored in the Marxian literature as an important counteracting factor to the law of the declining rate of profit. It is not mentioned at all by Marx in his famous Chapter XIV, Vol. III of Capital where he discusses other important counteracting forces to the falling rate of profit, nor by Engels (in this particular context) who edited both Volumes II and III. (shrink)

The gap between Marx’s theoretical writings on political economy and his historical writings arises out of certain limitations that Marx placed upon his political-economic enquiries. These limitations are outlined in the Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes between the universality of the metabolic relation to nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange, and the singularities of consumption. What an analysis of the content of Capital shows is (...) that Marx largely confined his efforts to identifying the law-like character of production to the exclusion of all else. While this allowed him to identify certain laws of motion of capital within any form of the capitalist mode of production, it did not and could not constitute a total theory of a capitalist mode of production. A better understanding of what it is that Marx can do for us through his identification of the general laws of motion leads to a far better appreciation of what it is that we have to do for ourselves in order to make Marx’s theoretical findings applicable to particular conjunctural conditions, such as those that have arisen throughout the economic crisis that began in 2007. (shrink)

Safronov’s Nietzsche’s Political Economy is a pioneering appraisal of Nietzsche’s critique of industrial culture and its unfolding crisis. The author contends that Nietzsche remains unique in conceptualizing the upheavals of modern political economy in terms of the crisis of its governing values. Nietzsche scrutinises the norms which, not only preside over the unfathomable build-up in debt, the proliferation of meaningless, impersonal slavery and the rise of increasingly repressive social control systems, but inevitably set these precarious (...) tendencies of modern political economy on a collision course liable to culminate in an unprecedented human and environmental catastrophe. Safronov explores the core themes of Nietzsche’s political economy—debt, slavery, and the division of labour—with reference to the influential views of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as against the backdrop of the Long Depression (1873–1896), the first truly international crisis of industrial capitalism, during which most of Nietzsche’s work was completed. -/- In Nietzsche’s assessment, modern political economy is predicated on the valuations that diminish humankind’s prospects and harm the planet’s future by consistently enfeebling the present, as long as there is profit to be made from it. Nietzsche’s critical insight, which challenges the most fundamental tenet of modern economics and finance, is that in order to build a stronger and intrinsically more valuable future in lieu of simply speculating on it, as though the liberal Promised Land could descend upon us like the manna from heaven at the wave of an invisible hand [of the market], it is necessary to walk from the future we dare to envisage resolutely back to the present we inhabit to determine what demands achieving such a vision would impose upon us, instead of embellishing the ‘here and now’ by cynically discounting the future to the [net] value of the present while disparaging, disowning and rewriting the past to unburden ourselves of its troubling legacy, as we continue to frivolously squander its capital to the alluring tunes of the ‘sirens who in the marketplace sing to us of the future’. The enabling mechanism for changing our valuing perspectives, Nietzsche tells us, lies dormant in us and it must be unlocked before it is too late. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to current debates on the ‘new imperialism’ by presenting the main results of a reading of Marx’sCapitalin light of his writings on colonialism, which were unknown in the early Marxist debate on imperialism. It aims to prove that, in his main work, Marx does not analyse a national economy or – correspondingly – an abstract model of capitalist society, but a world-polarising and ever-expanding system. This abstraction allows the identification of the (...) laws of development of capitalism and its antagonisms, and reflects the tendency of the capital of the dominant states, by making permanent recourse also to methods of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, to expand and increase the exploitation of workers worldwide, and, at the same time, the cooperation between them. What, for Marx, was later defined as imperialism is the concrete form of the process of ‘globalisation’ of the capital of the dominant states. With the development of his analysis, Marx became increasingly aware of the economic and political consequences of imperialism. In his activity within the First International, with regard to the question of Irish independence, he affirmed the fundamental importance of building a real solidarity between class struggles in imperialist countries and anti-colonial resistance in colonised and dependent countries. His examination of imperialism and internationalist perspective were downplayed, denied, if not completely reversed in the interpretation and systematisation of his thought by reformist leaders within the Second International. In their attempt to react against this tendency and develop an analysis and a political strategy adequate to the new phase of generalised imperialist expansion, increased inter-imperialist rivalries and rising anti-colonial resistance, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin reaffirmed the centrality of the critique of imperialism at the economic and at the political levels. Even if they were partially unaware of this, they thus developed and expanded on some aspects already present in Marx’s work. (shrink)

Karl Marx has often been described as anti‐ecological, concerned about the exploitation of humanity, not of nature. But, conducting a careful review of Marx's writings and a survey of the intellectual context in which Marx lived and worked, John Bellamy Foster argues that, in fact, Marx had a deeply and systematically ecological view of the world.To make this argument, Foster traces the development of Marx's ideas. He finds in the materialist, antiteleological philosophy of Epicurus the (...) partial origins of an ecological perspective. Other elements of Marx's ecology emerged from his critique of Thomas Malthus's view that population would inevitably outstrip agricultural production—a conclusion that could justify social inequality. From this subject, Marx turned to a study of the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, drawing from him to formulate the notion of a “metabolic rift” in the human relation with nature. Armed with such ideas, Marx contributed to debates over soil “exhaustion,” the problems of agriculture, and the division between town and country. Ultimately, under Liebig's influence, Marx arrived at an ecological critique of capitalist agriculture and what he saw as its inevitable depletion of the natural fertility of the soil. Both he and Friedrich Engels would argue that ecological problems could be addressed only if human beings regarded nature rationally, through an understanding of nature's laws, and then organized production accordingly.Thus, engaged in nineteenth‐century discussions about science and nature, including those relating to Darwinism, Marx linked social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature: the alienation of human labor paralleled the alienation of human beings from nature. In other words, the domination of nature resulting from unequal ownership of land paralleled the domination of humans through economic power. Foster traces these ideas across each stage in the development of Marx's thought: in relation to agriculture, Darwinism, and, in his last years, ethnology, geology, and paleontology. Foster follows the course of Marx's ecological views even after Marx's death. For a time, Marx and Engel's ecological critiques influenced Marxist thought in the Soviet Union. Nikolai Bukharin, August Bebel, and other Marxist scholars built on the original foundation, and by the 1920s Soviet ecology was highly advanced—only to be crushed, in the 1930s, by Stalin.Seeking to place Marx within his context, Foster ranges widely, from Epicurus to the influence of Epicureanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Baron d'Holbach, Denis Diderot, and Darwin, and on to Hegel, political economy, and French socialism. He covers thinkers who influenced Marx as well as those whom Marx reacted against, including William Paley and, especially, Malthus, who represented for Marx the intrusion of natural theology into political economy. In attempting to reconstruct Marx's world, Foster largely follows the methods of traditional intellectual history, often interpreting ideas apart from their contexts. In his analysis of Darwin's ideas, for example, he considers Marx's debts to other scholars but not Marx's own research and observations of nature. Foster, however, does review in some detail society and politics in Marx's day, remarking on the social discontent and the perception of materialism as a threat to the established order, associated with both atheism and revolutionary France.Foster's ambition goes beyond illuminating Marx's thought to situating ecology within materialism and science. Foster thus takes issue, persuasively, with the idea, often encountered in Green thought, that modern science justifies exploitative attitudes toward nature. This view, according to Foster, is a misinterpretation of modern science and reflects a reduction of ecological questions to questions of values, obscuring the material interrelations between humans and nature. In fact, he finds no necessary contradiction between sustainability and the mastery of nature, noting that in the seventeenth century John Evelyn, among others, remained an advocate of modern science even as he defended trees and criticized London's air pollution. And he notes that in the nineteenth century ecological thought, in the work of Darwin and others, was grounded in materialist conceptions of nature.Foster's analysis is valuable both as a critique of the conventional wisdom about Marx's views of nature and as a thorough effort to place Marx within the context of his time. Scholars and readers interested in nineteenth‐century intellectual history will find Foster's acccount of an ecological revolutionary worth the study. (shrink)

Volume I is one of the most influential documents of modern times, looking at the relationship between labor and value, the role of money, and the conflict between the classes. The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx's theories. The third volume was unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in (...) 1894, strove to combine the theories and concepts of the two previous volumes in order to prove conclusively that capitalism is inherently unworkable as a permanent system for society. Here, Marx asserts controversially that - regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists - any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a series of worsening, explosive crises leading finally to complete collapse. But he also offers an inspirational and compelling prediction: that the end of capitalism will culminate, ultimately, in the birth of a far greater form of society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Animadversions:Tekhne After Capital/Life After WorkJennifer Bajorek (bio)The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary moment of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats.—Karl Marx, Capital1For a long time we have been used to thinking the relation, on the one hand, between language and tekhne and, on the other, between capital and the technical or technological. And yet, (...) for all the parallels that might be drawn between these two projects, it seems to me quite clear that they remain to be articulated in a way that does justice to either one. It is, moreover, entirely symptomatic of the failure of this articulation that almost all the parallels that have been drawn, in decades past, between capital and language—in the name of "political economies of the sign," for example, or of "symbolic economies"2—have been drawn without regard, precisely, to technical implications, and thus to the implication of capital and of language in and by the technical.What we might call, for purposes of exposition, the missing link—the term that would make this articulation possible—is, I will argue, labor and therefore, by extension, life. That this extension can be made with reference to Marx is by now axiomatic. Wasn't the point of all the charges of "economic determinism" and "class reductionism" that there is, in the end, "more to life" than work? That this extension must be made with reference to Marx is, however, a very different proposition and one that deserves a closer look. How does the notion that, for Marx, labor and life are coextensive stand up to close reading of his text?I shall begin with a fairly programmatic exposition of what I call Marx's two codefinitions of labor in Capital, the first being his definition of labor as a function of the human, the second being his definition of labor as a function of the living body. Each definition is a codefinition insofar as its converse is also true—insofar as, for Marx, the humanity of man and the life of his body are each, in turn, a function of work. [End Page 42] We will be surprised to find that these codefinitions are not equivalent, nor even necessarily consistent, and that the trajectory described by Marx's text is actually that of a radical divergence of humanity and life, whose consequences are serious, I will suggest, not only for any alleged "humanism" of Marx, but for the assumption that can be found almost everywhere—still, today—of an essential humanism of politics. At the same time, a more precise understanding of the labor-life relation we find in Marx, and of the concept of productivity that underwrites it, will give us some first indications as to why politics must of necessity pass through technics, as well as, therefore, through an essentially capitalist—or, at the very least, capitalizing—moment.1Codefinition (the Original Human Instrument)For the Marx of Capital, what distinguishes "man" from animal and, at the same time, defines labor is at least in part what we might call ideation. The essence of man is not simply that he effects a change of form in the materials of nature with the aim of fulfilling his needs—for animals do this, and some apparently more effectively than man—but rather that he is able to form an idea of those needs, and so to project or imagine their fulfillment. Thus Marx writes:A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of every labor process emerges a result which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, and so already existed in ideal form.[Capital 1: 284]3Conversely, the essence of labor is that it is something human: the mediation, by way of an exertion of force, of the "material... (shrink)

A referência central do presente artigo é a fenomenologia material da vida de Michel Henry (1922-2002), fenomenologia essa mediante a qual se evidencia o quanto Karl Marx (1818-1893) merece ser reconhecido como o pensador de uma subjectividade radical em processo de realização mediante uma praxis imanente dos indivíduos, anterior a toda a abstracção política, económica ou institucional Assim, para o autor do artigo, a aplicação desta fenomenologia à economia mostra até que ponto esta última, com as suas equivalências de (...) mercado e capital, não constitui nem uma realidade nem uma teoria autónomas. Por outro lado, o artigo salienta também a enorme importância que para as nossas vidas reais e concretas pode e deve ter uma verdadeira meta-genealogia do processo real da produção e do consumo, especialmente no contexto de uma mundialização cada vez mais objectivista, baseada na aliança entre a ciência e a técnica. Com efeito, o perigo da alienação não é permanente apenas no contexto de uma tal evolução, pois, segundo Michel Henry, o cienti-fismo moderno, ao evacuar a vida subjectiva dos indivíduos, constitui também meio propício para o desenvolvimento de um fascismo latente baseado na negação "metafísica" da individualidade, assim como na "morte" associada às abstracções vazias de uma economia que facilmente se dispensa do "factor humano" ao nível de uma racionalização metodológica sem limite. The central matter of this paper is the material phenomenology of life of Michel Henry (1922-2002), a phenomenology through which it becomes evident how much Karl Marx (1818-1893) deserves to be recognised as the thinker of a radical subjectivity in the process of realization through an immanent praxis of the individuals, prior to all political, economic or institutional abstraction. Therefore, to the paper's author, the application of this phenomenology to economics shows the measure in which the later, with its equivalences of market and capital, neither constitutes an autonomous reality nor an autonomous theory. On the other hand, the paper also underlines the enormous importance which, to our real and concrete lives, a true meta-genealogy of the real process of production and consumption can and should have, especially in the context of a more and more objectivistic globalization, based on the alliance between science and technology. Indeed, the danger of alienation is not only permanent in the context of such an evolution, then, according to Michel Henry, modern scientism, as much as it tends to empty the subjective life of the individuals, is also a propitious means to the development of a latent fascism based on the negation of the "metaphysics" of individuality and, also, on the "death" associated to the empty abstractions of an economics which easily discards the "human factor" at the level of a methodological rationalization without limit. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The political works of Adam Blackwood offer a powerful defence of absolute monarchy, and one which explicitly sets political power within a religious framework. Critiquing the resistance theories of his contemporaries, Blackwood was sceptical about the political value of natural law and of any appeal to popular sovereignty, at least in contemporary Europe. Blackwood was deeply troubled by the way Christianity was being used to justify resistance, often in Protestant texts that aligned Christianity and (...) class='Hi'>natural law, and he insisted that true Christianity taught obedience. Though he has often been likened to his contemporary Jean Bodin, a closer examination of Blackwood’s writing reveals significant differences, especially on the linked issues of natural law, the value of historical argument, and religion. For Blackwood, sovereign power in general had to be underpinned by religion, the one constant in a world of diverse and mutable social practices, and its particular, local manifestation had to be understood historically, as the product of conquest and force. Aware of the potential tensions between Catholic Christianity and monarchical authority, Blackwood also developed a distinctive piety in an attempt to bolster the alliance he advocated between religious and political authority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Political Economy and Classical AntiquityNeville MorleyThe literature of the ancients, their legislation, their public treaties, and their administration of the conquered provinces, all proclaim their utter ignorance of the nature and origin of wealth, of the manner in which it is distributed, and of the effects of its consumption.... The steadily increasing progress of different branches of industry, the advancement of the sciences, whose influence upon wealth (...) we shall have occasion hereafter to notice, and the direction of public opinion, at length estimating national prosperity as being of some importance, caused the science of political economy to enter into the contemplation of a great number of writers.J.-B. Say 1I. The science of political economy offered an entirely new way of understanding human society. 2 Say’s account of its emergence is teleological and self-serving, figuring his own work as the logical culmination of earlier enquiries, but it accurately reflects the way in which political economy was perceived and presented as a modern innovation. The more that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economists turned their attention towards the economic rather than the political state of the nation, the more they became aware of their own originality in doing so. The writings of the ancients might still dominate discussions of political theory, but the moderns noted with satisfaction the failings and fumblings of classical authors in the study of the economy; they alone had discerned its significance and developed the tools with which to [End Page 95] analyze it. Moreover, there was no obvious reason why this new science should confine its attentions to the contemporary world; the economies of the past could be studied in the same manner, and thus political economy offered the possibility of understanding ancient society better than the ancients did themselves.Students of ancient society were slow to respond to this challenge. Neither Edward Gibbon nor George Grote had much to say about the ancient economy, despite their close relationships with economists of the Scottish Enlightenment and the Philosophic Radicals respectively. Gibbon was well aware of contemporary debates on luxury (see below), and he also disputed Montesquieu’s theory that taxes decrease according to the level of despotism in a state, but that was all. 3 A letter written by Grote’s wife suggests that his chapter on Greek colonization was intended to infuse useful doctrines on political economy and the principle of population, but in the published version this intent is limited to vague statements about the importance of agriculture in sustaining a colony. 4 Grote’s advocacy of comparative history—“not omitting the points of resemblance as well as of contrast with the better-known forms of modern society”—was in practice limited to politics and the history of ideas, above all in the debate on the merits of democracy. 5 The sole exception was a comparison of Solon’s legislation restricting Athenian exports with the British Corn Laws, to the advantage of the former. 6With the lone exception of Boeckh’s 1817 treatise on The Public Economy of Athens, the subject of the ancient economy was almost entirely ignored by historians until the middle of the nineteenth century. 7 Their own interests and those of the ancient sources on which they relied led them to conceive of history in terms of events, above all of events in the fields of politics and war. Economic matters were touched upon in their accounts of certain episodes—the reforms of Solon, for example, or the Roman agrarian laws—but never in detail or with much analytical sophistication, let alone drawing upon the theoretical insights of political economy. William Ramsay’s Manual of Roman Antiquities in 1851 devoted much more space to economic topics than had been customary, but was otherwise indistinguishable from its predecessors; the chapter on Roman agriculture was little more than a paraphrase of the writings [End Page 96] of Vergil and Varro, and his account of state revenues merely compiled information from the ancient sources as an end in itself. 8The drought was not ended until 1854, when Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome not only devoted considerable attention to such subjects as agriculture, commerce, and... (shrink)

The article examines the role of Hegel's theory of finite cognition in Marx's critique of classical political economy. I argue that Hegel's distinction of finite cognition between analytic and synthetic in the Science of Logic constitutes the methodological framework through which Marx delineates the different stages of the development of political economy. Focusing on the Grundrisse, I reveal the Hegelian influence behind Marx's statements on previous political economists’ methods. Thus, Marx's (...) immanent critique of the classical political economy is construed as undertaken from the level of the systematic dialectical method of Capital, and is modelled on Hegel's immanent critique of analytic and synthetic cognition from the perspective of absolute cognition. In this context, and focusing on Marx's critique of Ricardo's method, I argue that the latter's limitations are associated with the deficiencies of synthetic cognition as presented by Hegel. Therefore, the article sheds light on an important yet underexplored topic of the Hegel-Marx relationship. By indicating the centrality of Hegel's theory of finite cognition in Marx's methodological underpinnings, the article provides a new perspective on Hegel-Marx scholarship. (shrink)

Writings on Deleuze and Guattari's twin volumes, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, have often focused on questions about desire, body without organs, the schizophrenic etc. There have been a few notable exceptions that have attempted to articulate and expound upon the numerous political problems that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to resolve through analyses of concepts such as de-/re-territorialization, coding and re-coding etc, however a specter is haunting Deleuze and Guattari that has yet to be explained, articulated and debated; the specter of (...) Karl Marx. This volume attempts to analyze the relationship between Deleuze and Marx and their respective works. This volume is an intervention into the fields of Deleuze Studies, Marxist and Marxian philosophy and political economy, and critiques of capitalism through an examination of the relationship between Deleuze and Marx. Themes that will be covered in this volume include hegemony and theories of imperialism, the role of philosophy in changing the world, surplus, tensions between the virtual and the potential, ideology and noology, modes of production, and the very nature of anti-capitalist politics in Deleuze's work. This volume will be of interest to people interested in Deleuze Studies who are interested in questions of politics and critiques of capitalism, Marxist theory and philosophy and people interested in political economy. Key Features:*offers new perspectives on Deleuze's early work*illuminates new connections between Deleuze's and Marx's work*includes a critical re-reading of Deleuze's work*foregrounds a critique of Capitalism in Deleuze's workContributors include: Bruno Bosteels, Alberto Toscano, Jason Read, Jeremy Gilbert Simon Choat and Aidan Tynan. (shrink)

Ethicmentality is an innovative book. It blends ethics with mentality to capture the interdependence of ethical life and social life creatively. The book is also innovative because of the way this interdependence is explored. By focusing on practical ethical behavior in today’s economy, business, and society, Michela Betta has advanced an understanding of ethics freed from the burden of moral theory. By introducing a new type of analysis this book also contributes to methodological innovation. Familiar issues are revisited through (...) the notion of ethicmentality. Capitalist economy is presented in terms of a mentality embedded in society, culture, and politics. Government is revealed as mentality about how to govern economically through market freedom rather than human rights. The rise of the financial economy is described as challenging the traditional capitalist mentality of equal opportunities. A money mentality around debts and owing is perceived as having replaced credit and owning, and the rise of corporation managers as having destroyed the old mentality of ownership. Ethicmentality shows the potential of constructive critique from economic, business, and society perspectives. It also breaches traditional limits by developing the idea of ethical capital and entrepreneurial ethics. Ethical thinking is infused with the Aristotelian notion of virtues and moderation to reflect about modern work. Ethicmentality helps us see the complexity of social and personal life. Given the pervasive nature of mentality and ethics’ focus on individual deliberation, ethicmentality represents their productive combination, a new blend for ethical and social analysis. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis was prepared in 1975-77 at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, under the supervision of Prof. Raymond ARON. It was submitted in 1977 in fulfilment of the requirements for a Ph.D. degree in Social Sciences (Doctorat de 3e cycle en sciences sociales). The oral examination (soutenance de thèse) was held in January 1978, with the examination committee consisting of Prof. Aron, Bartoli, Boudon and Brochier. This 250 page unpublished dissertation was the first study ever written (...) in French on Karl Marx's Grundrisse - a 1857-58 manuscript preparatory to Marx's main economic work, Capital. The dissertation reviews Marx's successive projects for his economic work since the 1844 Manuscripts and then proceeds to a presentation and critical discussion of Grundrisse. The proposed interpretation explains the linkage that Marx operated in 1857-58 between Ricardo's economics and Hegel's dialectics, and it emphasizes that Marx was at that time primarily trying to reconstruct the dynamics of capitalism, without going to the stage of developing a formal theory of value and exploitation, as he will eventually do in Capital. (shrink)

Foucault’s analysis of the relation of power and the economy in the lectures given at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1979 opens up modern societies for a radically different interrogation of the relations of force inscribed in historically heterogeneous forms of wealth creation and distribution, but more specifically within the period of liberal capitalism. Its vast scope clears the ground for genealogies of power, political economy and race that demonstrate their intertwinement, yet he underplays several (...) elements which have been central for the institution of the political economy of liberal capitalism, particularly regarding colonial expansion and subjugation, the prior existence of trade and other networks operating on a world scale, and politico-economic and technical developments, such as banking and finance, that acted as conditions of possibility. By redressing the balance, this article outlines a different genealogy of the emergence of biopolitics and the mechanisms supporting global capitalism, making visible the constitutive role of colonialism. It suggests elements for a more fundamental critique of inequality, one that relays the Foucaldian themes of economy, territory, security, population and race according to a longer periodization that reveals most economies to have been zero-sum games of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Transcending this situation requires a radically different, transcolonial and transindividual understanding of the essentially collaborative and co-implicate character of the production of all life. The implications mean the rejection of ontologies that support not only neoliberalism but other forms of dispossession and pauperization, often allied to the hierarchization of difference, opening the way for a different history of the present and for imagining new economies and socialities. (shrink)

The introduction of the concept of capital inCapital– with the words ‘we find’ – has provoked a great deal of discussion about the precise relation between the categories of simple circulation and the concept of capital. In this article, I argue that Marx derives the concept of capital by way of an analysis of the immanent contradictions of money, and that this dialectical derivation can be understood as a conceptual movement in which the concepts of money and capital progressively (...) change their modal status. Furthermore, I examine the development of this transition to capital throughout Marx’s writings from the period 1857 to 1872, arguing that the same arguments can be found in all the relevant writings. Finally, the article provides a critical review of the literature on the transition to capital. (shrink)

Karl Marx's Capital is critique of the capitalistically organised social relations of reproduction. It recognises economic categories as perverted social categories and asks about the manner in which human social practice manifests itself in the form of independent economic categories and laws that unfold as if governed by invisible principles. He says, the capitalist relations are beyond human control and he argues that the indi-viduals act under economic compulsion and are controlled by the products of their (...) own labour. His critique says, in the capitalist social relations the individuals act as personification of economic categories. The immense wealth of capitalist society is abstract, it appears in the form of money as more money. In these wealth-relations, time is money, the satisfaction of human needs a mere sideshow. Yet, the economic categories are purely social forms. Critique of political economy is social critique of economic inversion, it is about the sheer unrest of live as the hidden misery of economic things. (shrink)

This volume presents those writings of Marx that best reveal his contribution to sociology, particularly to the theory of society and social change. The editor, Neil J. Smelser, has divided these selections into three topical sections and has also included works by Friedrich Engels. The first section, "The Structure of Society," contains Marx's writings on the material basis of classes, the basis of the state, and the basis of the family. Among the writings included in this section are (...) Marx's well-known summary from the Preface of _A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy_ and his equally famous observations on the functional significance of religion in relation to politics. The second section is titled "The Sweep of Historical Change." The first selection here contains Marx's first statement of the main precapitalist forms of production. The second selection focuses on capitalism, its contradictions, and its impending destruction. Two brief final selections treat the nature of communism, particularly its freedom from the kinds of contradictions that have plagued all earlier forms of societies. The last section, "The Mechanisms of Change," reproduces several parts of Marx's analysis of the mechanisms by which contradictions develop in capitalism and generate group conflicts. Included is an analysis of competition and its effects on the various classes, a discussion of economic crises and their effects on workers, and Marx's presentation of the historical specifics of the class struggle. In his comprehensive Introduction to the selections, Professor Smelser provides a biography of Marx, indentifies the various intellectual traditions which formed the background for Marx's writings, and discusses the selections which follow. The editor describes Marx's conception of society as a social system, the differences between functionalism and Marx's theories, and the dynamics of economic and political change as analyzed by Marx. (shrink)

Resumen: Desde el principio ha sido muy obvio que el capitalismo es un tipo de empresa engañosa. Por otro lado, el capitalismo ha estado vinculado a la acumulación masiva de riqueza. Como se indica, el capitalismo ha estado vinculado a la explotación, a una creciente desigualdad de la riqueza, a colapsos económicos y a conflictos internacionales. La economía política ha estudiado durante mucho tiempo cómo interactúan las dos caras del capitalismo. ¿Es posible arreglar los problemas del capitalismo preservando sus beneficios, (...) como afirman sus partidarios? Algunos anticapitalistas sostienen que limitar o eliminar el capitalismo es la única manera de acabar con él. La teoría tendrá el mayor impacto en el resultado de esta situación. Los economistas ven los mercados como un lugar en el que todos reciben un trato justo a la hora de valorar y recompensar las contribuciones económicas a la sociedad. El reino del mercado, en vez de culpar los defectos sociales e individuales de manera global, culpa la carencia del individuo manera particular. La clave para formular una predicción sólida de la caída del orden actual es la tesis marxiana de que las relaciones de producción constituyen la base de toda civilización. En otras palabras, las estructuras de clase sustentan las instituciones políticas, culturales e ideológicas. De ello se desprende que una sociedad postcapitalista sólo puede desarrollarse en la medida en que surjan nuevas relaciones de producción, o de clase (o más exactamente, relaciones “sin clases”). De forma similar a cómo surgieron nuevas relaciones económicas a lo largo del tiempo cuando Europa pasó de una sociedad feudal al capitalismo industrial, y cómo se construyeron nuevas sociedades sobre estos sistemas, en las próximas generaciones surgirán nuevas manifestaciones de crecimiento masivo de la producción para que la especie humana experimente menos épocas de crisis económica. A finales de 2007, la economía mundial se desplomó rápidamente, obligando a los bancos a declararse en quiebra y a necesitar rescates gubernamentales. La principal idea errónea de las economías de mercado, que se autorregulan de forma natural, quedó rebatida. La catástrofe brindó la oportunidad a los individuos de reevaluar cuestiones de larga data que habían quedado sin resolver porque desafió las nociones preconcebidas. La obra fundamental de Marx, “El Capital”, según las librerías de todo el mundo, tuvo un espectacular aumento de ventas tras la crisis. En algunos aspectos, el marxismo parece estar regresando. Debido a la tradición crítica que creó, que abarca las humanidades y las ciencias sociales, el marxismo no puede entenderse adecuadamente dentro del marco del siglo XIX. Marx fue capaz de influir en el agua que bebemos y en el aire que respiramos incluso en lugares donde fue rechazado. El marxismo es omnipresente, como han demostrado las dos primeras décadas del siglo XXI. Mientras sirvan de catalizadores para el bienestar y el desarrollo de la sociedad, las tendencias económicas contemporáneas como el espíritu empresarial y la libre empresa no son desalentadas por el marxismo moderno. (shrink)

This work contains, perhaps, a larger amount of vigorous orthodoxy than can elsewhere be found in so small a compass. It is a plea for a laissez-faire policy, and is full of wisdom of a kind that is needed, in view of the drift of opinions toward “stateism.” Its effect on public policy will be like that of an anchor planted on a shoal on one side of a channel in order to warp a vessel off from an opposite shoal. (...) Yet in one way it brings economics and politics into close connection; it discusses government as an economic function, a process of creating and selling the product security. Though opposing governmental interference in industry, it emphasizes the action of economic law upon government. (shrink)

Marx: Later Political Writings brings together new translations of Marx's most important texts in political philosophy written after 1848. Marx challenged poitical theory to its very fundamentals, as his works do not follow traditional models for exploring politics theoretically. In his introduction, Terrell Carver situates Marx in a politics of democratic constitutionalism and revolutionary communism. The works are presented here complete, according to the first editions or the earliest manuscript state, and include the Manifesto (...) of the Communist Party, the Preface of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Civil War in France, and the little-known Notes on Adolph Wagner. More than most political theorists, Marx made contemporary politics the focus for his theoretical work. He created a distinctive kind of political theory, and this volume makes it accessible today. (shrink)

This volume opens with the marginal contents corresponding to Bentham's first sustained discussions, now lost, of political economy and public finance, written in French, probably in 1786, for Projet Matière; three related appendices follow. Defence of Usury was published in 1787, and was well received and quickly translated. In preparing a second edition in 1790, Bentham drafted considerable additional material which is reproduced in five appendices. Also in 1790 Bentham began an introductory handbook Manual of Political (...) class='Hi'>Economy, the surviving text of which is supplemented by seven appendices containing preparatory materials. A Protest against Law Taxes, Bentham's trenchant denunciation of the denial of justice to the poor, written in 1793, published in 1795, and extended in 1816, closes the volume. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École (...) normale supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

The 2010s were a golden age of information privacy research, but its policy accomplishments tell a mixed story. Despite significant progress on the development of privacy theory and compelling demonstrations of the need for privacy in practice, real achievements in privacy law and policy have been, at best, uneven. In this chapter, I outline three broad shifts in the way scholars (and, to some degree, advocates and policy makers) are approaching privacy and social media. First, a change in emphasis from (...) individual to structural approaches. Second, increasing attention to the political economy of privacy—especially the business models of information companies, such as social media platforms. And third, a deeper understanding of privacy’s role in a healthy digital public sphere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and removal of the social self, through the devaluation of values and de-culturation, to the objectivizatlonof the ego, the state of oneness and unity with all. The remaining sections of the book give an analysis of Rumi, the universal man of the Eas~, and an analysis of Goethe, the universal man of the West. The Rumi chapter contains impressive translations of RumPs poems and the (...) Goethe study offers a very pertinent critique of K. R. Eissler's psychoanalytic interpretation of the great man. Added is a case history of a young man who lived in two cultures, and after many errors and meanderings obtained full integration. The final section offers an application of the transcultural state to health, social change and leadership. A most rewarding and challenging work, marred only by an incredible number of typographical errors and a sometimes uneven English due to misunderstandings of the Dutch printers. Hg~RY WALTESBRANN Washington, D. C. Natural Law and Modern Society. Essays by John Cogley, Robert M. Hutchins, John Courtney Murray, SJ., Scott Buchanan, Philip Selznick, Harvey Wheeler, and Robert Gordis. (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1966. Pp. 285. Meridian Books. $1.75.) This group of essays has been discussed from time to time at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. The essays provide an excellent survey of the various contexts in which the idea of natural law is functioning today: in jurisprudence, political theory, sciences, religions, and philosophies of culture. Though the emphasis is on "modem society," there is a large amount of history in this collection, going back to the ancients, and one of the most valuable features of the analysis is the evidence here offered that "natural law" has meant and still means many different things, and that this flexibility of meaning gives the idea an enduring vitality and relevance. This is the particular theme of Scott Buchanan's "Natural Law and Teleology", which chapter reviews almost the whole history of philosophy to show how the content of natural law has varied for teleological reasons. Since it is impossible to review this whole story, it seems simplest and least distorting to quote a series of passages from the essays so that the reader can estimate the range of subject-matter and the kind of observations in the volume : The natural lawyer who lacks a sense of history, a factual sense, is as seriously deficient as the one who has been victimmed by the historical setting of his own time. Social scientists are concerned with digging up and evaluating exactly the kind of factual material the conscientious natural lawyer needs (Cogley, pp. 24, 26). We are free, with the deference that is due previous laborers in the vineyard, to work out the ~pplication of the principles of natural law to the conditions of our own time. The ends of uman life are heldto be unchanging; the search for the best way of achieving them is continuous and adapted to changing conditions and new knowledge. The search for a revival of natural law--not necessarily, or even principally pitched in Thomistic terms but projected more generally on a ~us gent~um, pluralistic basis--may well be the dominant theme of American legal philosophy over the second half of the century (Hutchins, pp. 34, 37, 46). Plato saw an epitome of the legal and political crisis of the city-state in the trial and death of Socrates.... The sophists are operators in opinion and power.... Plato sets out to find the truth in science and the good of the state.... There is no doctrinal answer to the quest.... The Dialogues practice what they preach, a relentless dialectical exposure of ideas masquerading in dogmas and opinions.... The endless mutual persuasions in any community could result in good laws if the formal processes of government provided insights for the citizens and magistrates alike.... Neither Plato nor Aristotle commonly uses the phrase 'natural law'.... For the Stoics what Plato had described as the "community of ideas," which was only the notion of the interpenetration of BOOK REVIEWS 103 mutual implication of ideas, became the Logos, the perhaps infinite total of... (shrink)

Is capitalist production unjust? It is easy to think, upon first reading Marx, that he answers this question in the affirmative. And I shall argue that this naive reading is correct. This needs to be argued, however, for a more careful scrutiny of Marx's writings reveals passages in which he seems to call capitalist production just or fair. Relying upon these passages, Robert Tucker and Allen W. Wood have urged that, in Wood's words,it is simply not (...) the case that Marx's condemnation of capitalism rests on some conception of justice, and those who attempt to reconstruct a “Marxian idea of justice” from Marx's manifold charges against capitalism are at best only translating Marx's critique of capitalism, or some aspect of it, into what Marx himself would have consistently regarded as a false, ideological, or “mystified” form.What Marx regarded as false and mystified, however, is not the practice of assessing social institutions as just or unjust, but rather the picture of those institutions, and especially of capitalist production, to be found in bourgeois ideology. (shrink)

In Capitalism, Alienation and Critique Asger Sørensen offers a wide-ranging argument for the classical Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, thus endorsing the dialectical approach of the original founders (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) and criticizing suggested revisions of later generations (Habermas, Honneth). Being situated within the horizon of the late 20th century Cultural Marxism, the main issue is the critique of capitalism, emphasizing experiences of injustice, ideology and alienation, and in particular exploring two fundamental subject matters within this horizon, (...) namely economy and dialectics. Apart from in-depth discussions of classical political economy and Hegelian dialectics, the explorative and inclusive argument also takes issues with Émile Durkheim’s theory of value, the general economy of Georges Bataille and the dialectics of Mao Zedong. -/- - See below External Links to the book's homepage at the publisher Brill and to the Introduction. - See also External Links to a Youtubevideo from a seminar on the book in Belgrade, November 2019 and two Author Meet Critics sections from 2020 and 2021. (shrink)

This volume is one of the most remarkable works in the history of economic thought. First published in 1893, its principal significance rests in its argument that economic theory, however technical or pragmatic, is necessarily formed by and derives its meaning from larger moral and philosophical systems and assumptions. Bonar traces the inexorable presence of this moral and philosophical element in a vast, though highly nuanced, survey of the economic aspect of major thinkers from Plato to Darwin and demonstrates how (...) modern economic thought, in turn, grew out of one or another branch of philosophy. Bonar begins with a consideration of Plato and Aristotle, examining their conceptions of wealth, production and distribution, and civil society. Discussions of the Stoics, Epicurians, and early Christianity explore complications introduced by these bodies of thought. His analysis of the classical and medieval world is followed by an extensive treatment of the concept of natural law, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, describing its influence and its relation to ideas of natural rights. The book's later sections concentrate on the dominant modes of ninteenth-cen-tury thought: utilitarianism, idealism, and materialism. Bonar identifies and explores the philosophical topics on which the conduct of technical economic analysis makes assumptions: human nature and human wants, the nature and role of the state, the relation of the individual to society, the nature and origin of property, and the role of ideals in socioeconomic life. He concludes by examining the implications for economics of the theory of evolution arising from the work of Darwin and others. The continuing interest of this volume for economists, philosophers, and sociologists lies in Bonar's contention that at the heart of the relationship of philosophy to economics is the problem of order: the ongoing need to reconcile conflicts between freedom and control, continuity and change, hierarchy and equality. In his reading, the fundamental question to which philosophy and economics are both brought to bear is that of changing the structure of power and opportunity in the social economy. This is, in short, a classic in the history of economics as well as the economic element in intellectual history. (shrink)

Browning and Kilmister review the nature and possibility of critical political economy in the light of recent post-modern and cultural theory. They provide an historical understanding of critical political economy, focusing on the development of the critical perspectives on capitalism of Hegel and Marx. They then review post-Marxist, post-structuralist, ecological and feminist standpoints that challenge notions of critical political economy sustained in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition. This study of critical and post-critical political (...) class='Hi'>economy concludes by arguing for the integration or these standpoints within a revitalized critical perspective. (shrink)

In Between Facts and Norms Habermas both accepts the place of distinctively ethical considerations about ‘the good’ in political deliberation, and advances a particular view of the nature and justification of ethical judgments. Whilst welcoming the former, this paper criticises the latter, with its focus on issues of identity and self-understanding, and suggests instead a broadly Aristotelian alternative. The argument proceeds, first, through a detailed engagement with Habermas’s theoretical claims about ethical reasoning in politics, in which it is argued (...) that he fails to show how different ethical possibilities can be critically evaluated, and second, through the analysis of a practical example, that of a political choice being made between different kinds of capitalism. Here the paper draws on recent work in comparative political economy on the institutional differences between varieties of capitalism, and uses this to contrast the implications of Habermas’s conception of ethics, according to which what would matter is the congruence between economic institutions and a political community’s historically shaped identity, with those of its preferred alternative, which requires a comparison between the different conceptions of the good that each kind of capitalism institutionally favours, and collective judgments about their respective contributions to human well-being. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the philosophical side of Karl Marx's thought as well as some of the major debates about it in the secondary literature. It first examines Marx's early writings, focusing, in particular, on his views on religion, the limitations of political emancipation and the dehumanizing conditions of work under capitalism. Marx and Engels considered the theory of history to be one of Marx's most important theoretical achievements. In an autobiographical note Marx described it (...) as the “guiding thread of his studies,” and in a speech delivered at Marx's graveside Engels compared Marx's discovery of “the law of development of human history” with Darwin's discovery of the law of nature. The chapter examines Marx's materialist theory of history, the view that history is characterized by the development of productive power to free people from material scarcity. It also examines the problematic area of Marx's ethics. (shrink)

Against the background of the contemporary debate about financialisation, the paper conceptualises the capitalist labour economy as fundamentally a monetary system. It argues that money is not a capitalist means of organising its labour economy but that it is rather a capitalist end. The argument examines and finds wanting conceptions of money in political economy, including Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and argues that the debate about financialisation is fundamentally based on the propositions of (...) class='Hi'>political economy. It holds that Marx’s critique of political economy conceives of money as the form of value and expounds money-making as the purpose of the capital labour economy. Thus, the labour theory of value is fundamentally a monetary theory of value, labour is the means of valorisation, and that is, of money in process, and as such capital. Making money out of money is capital as its most rational. In the form of credit, money posits wealth as a claim on future surplus value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aquinas and Black Natural LawThomas S. HibbsIn 1857, after the United States Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott, Frederick Douglass chastised the court for arrogating to itself the role of God, that of being absolute judge. While the Supreme Court has its own authority, he argued, "the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater. Taney can do many things but he cannot change the essential nature of things—making (...) evil good and good, evil."1 The passage is one of many in Vincent Lloyd's Black Natural Law that underscore the appeals of African American leaders, as part of their critique of slavery and segregation, to a higher or more fundamental law than that of human law. Lloyd describes the function of natural law reasoning, which he traces through the writings of Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., in this way: From the careful examination of a "particular view of human nature" and its implications, they "apply those implications to the specifics of an ethical or political debate."2 That sounds similar to the way some contemporary Catholic proponents of natural law depict their own deployment of it. Early in the book, Lloyd suggests that "European and Catholic natural law traditions can learn much from the black natural tradition."3Concerning what might be learned, he focuses on an expansive conception of reason in the African American tradition, a conception of reason that is integrated with the role of emotion or passion and that is not [End Page 943] individualistic, but communal. He also underscores the epistemic privilege of the oppressed, the way suffering injustice attunes us to justice. Beyond the themes mentioned explicitly by Lloyd, I would add the paradoxical claim that natural law teaching is not just about the accessibility of fundamental precepts of justice, but also about the human capacity for moral blindness and the way in which the violation of the natural law is in important ways its own punishment. Because of the regularity of such blindness, attention to the obstacles to the perception of the natural law must become "part of the very activity of natural law." The ways in which these matters are articulated by African American authors can be, as Lloyd suggests, highly instructive. I would add that Lloyd's treatment of natural law in the African American tradition can also be fruitful for recovering neglected features of Aquinas's account. In what follows, I want to take up each of these themes and set them in conversation with the texts of Aquinas. As Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, has urged, seeing one's own tradition from the perspective of another, can, at a minimum, help us see it more clearly.4 As MacIntyre also notes, any such attempt faces the difficulties of translating from one tradition or community of inquiry to another. I must, accordingly, stress the limitations to the current essay, which can be nothing more than a preliminary investigation. I will largely be taking Lloyd's interpretation of the authors he studies as my assumed starting point, although in some cases I will offer my own reading of texts and authors he considers.5 What I will provide will be no more than an initial conversation, a first reading of Lloyd's theses in relation to germane themes and arguments in Aquinas. A much longer exchange, based on an immersive study of selected African American texts and the chief commentaries on them would be needed to advance the [End Page 944] conversation further. Before doing so, however, I want to provide a further reason that Catholic natural law thinkers should be eager to engage the Black natural law tradition, a reason derived from Joseph Ratzinger's reflection on the strange situation of natural law in the modern world.Ratzinger on the Vanishing Evidence for Natural Law and the Engagement of Wisdom TraditionsAs the contemporary Catholic natural law theorist Russell Hittinger has shown,6 Ratzinger, as a ressourcement theologian, is a critic of "rationalism," with "little confidence" in the older, "moral-juridical manualist and casuistical approach to natural law, which was prominent in casuistical approaches."7 In fact, he thinks that... (shrink)

This paper sets forth Marx’s critique of equality as an essential dimension of modern citizenship. For this purpose, the paper traces a link between the early Marxian critique to the citizen “celestial sphere” with the ways in which production and circulation processes are articulated to set up modern societies, according to the commercial logic and the logic of capital. According to our thesis, Marx’s political economy provides someelements to better understand, and in a more (...) comprehensive way, his early criticism, particularly about the relationship between the public and the private, and about the place of the citizen equality in the capitalist society. (shrink)

This volume opens with the marginal contents corresponding to Bentham's first sustained discussions, now lost, of political economy and public finance, written in French, probably in 1786, for Projet Matière; three related appendices follow. Defence of Usury was published in 1787, and was well received and quickly translated. In preparing a second edition in 1790, Bentham drafted considerable additional material which is reproduced in five appendices. Also in 1790 Bentham began an introductory handbook Manual of Political (...) class='Hi'>Economy, the surviving text of which is supplemented by seven appendices containing preparatory materials. A Protest against Law Taxes, Bentham's trenchant denunciation of the denial of justice to the poor, written in 1793, published in 1795, and extended in 1816, closes the volume. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct the development and the complex character of Zilsel’s conception of scientific laws. This concept functions as a fil rouge for understanding Zilsel’s philosophy throughout different times (here, the focus is on his Viennese writings and how they pave the way to the more renown American ones) and across his many fields of work (from physics to politics). A good decade before Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was going to mark the outbreak of indeterminism in quantum physics, (...) Edgar Zilsel started to develop a complex logical-philosophical theory in which statistical and causal laws were given an indeterministic foundation (Zilsel 1916). However, in developing his thoughts on the emergence of regularities from disorder, Zilsel arrives at a profound ambiguity with respect to the ontological or the epistemic nature of laws and order in the world: Whether this order is to be conceived of as an empirical finding or as the product of reason – this would have to remain unclear. This tension between rationalism and empiricism, as well as a tension between a realist and an anti-realist conception of lawfulness, can be identified in both Zilsel’s Viennese and American writings: a tension which touches the core of the “application problem” that would keep haunting Zilsel until his premature death. (shrink)

The "natural law" worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective moral truths which we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection. Most accounts of the natural law are based on (...) a God-centered understanding of the world. After the Natural Law traces this tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and then describes how and why modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Hobbes began to chip away at this foundation. The book argues that natural law is a necessary foundation for our most important moral and political values – freedom, human rights, equality, responsibility and human dignity, among others. Without a theory of natural law, these values lose their coherence: we literally cannot make sense of them given the assumptions of modern philosophy. Part I of the book traces the development of natural law theory from Plato and Aristotle through the crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas. Part II explores how modern philosophers have systematically chipped away at the only coherent foundation for these values. As a result, our most important moral and political ideals today are incoherent. Modern political and moral thinkers have been led either to dilute the meaning of such terms as freedom or the moral good – or abandon these ideas altogether. Thus, modern philosophy and political thought are leading us either toward anarchy or totalitarianism. The conclusion, entitled "Why God Matters", shows how even the philosophical assumptions of the natural law depend on a personal God. (shrink)

The present essay contends that progressive readings of Smith ignore the influence of theological concepts and religious ideas on his work, notably three distinct strands: first, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural theology; second, Jansenist Augustinianism; third, Stoic arguments of theodicy. Taken together, these theological elements help explain why Smith’s moral philosophy and political economy intensifies the secular early modern and Enlightenment idea that the Fall brought about ‘radical evil’ and a ‘fatherless world’ in need of permanent divine intervention. (...) As such, Smith views the market as divine regulation of human sinfulness and an instrument to serve God’s providential plan. Indeed, the ‘invisible hand of the market’ represents a nominalist realm where human cooperation intersects with divine providence, blending private self-interest with the public commonweal. I will also argue that Smith’s conception of a morally neutral market is ultimately incompatible with creedal Christianity, in particular orthodox catholic Christian ideas of the common good in which all can share and the practice of charity for those most in need who have been abandoned by state bureaucracy and the marketplace. The main reason is that Smith, not unlike Calvin, tends to divorce human contract from divine gift by dividing the theo-logic of gratuitous reciprocal giving from the economic logic of contract – a dualism that bears an uncanny resemblance with Suárez’s Baroque scholasticism of which Smith’s friend David Hume was rightly critical. In particular, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology of Calvin, Luther and Suárez sunders ‘pure nature’ from the supernatural and develops a ‘two ends’ account of human nature, according to which human beings have a natural end separate from their supernatural finality. So instead of participating in the divine oikonomia of asymmetrical gift-exchange, human society and the economy operate autonomously and are ordered towards a purely natural end. Smith conceptualises the market mechanism as both a fundamental precondition for interpersonal relationality and at the same time separate from the sociality it engenders. Smith’s anthropology hovers half-way between Machiavelli and Mandeville’s homo œconomicus in search for maximal profit, on the one hand, and the diametrically opposed conception of man as a gift-exchanging animal striving for mutual social recognition, on the other hand. By viewing market exchange as separate from the private virtues of benevolence, justice and prudence, he introduces a split between the exercise of moral virtues and the operation of commercial society. Such a divide is wholly foreign to the project of an overarching civil compact in the writings of Smith’s contemporary Antonio Genovesi and other members of the Italian schools of civic humanism and civil economy. In consequence, Smith’s œuvre marks a decisive shift from civil to political economy. (shrink)

In this paper it is shown that in his conception of value, published in the first volume of Capital, Marx relies on Hegel’s concept of pure recognition to organise the relations between use- and exchange-value on the one hand and the relation between the social relations between things (goods) and actors (sellers) on the other hand. Establishing this thesis is important in three respects: Firstly it demonstrates that there is a strong continuity in the philosophical thought of Karl (...) class='Hi'>Marx, making visible an essential relation between his Economic-philosophical Manuscripts and his later writings. Secondly it helps to better understand Marx’s conception of value; and thirdly it shows that “recognition” is an important conception in his critique of political economy. (shrink)

This book engages with a radical critique of the modern state and the contemporary economic order: Alasdair MacIntyre's 'revolutionary Aristotelianism' project. Central to this critique is the idea that the moral norms that markets and states tend to reproduce or reinforce are an obstacle to the development of practical judgment The book outlines MacIntyre's theory of practical reason and discusses some of the institutional arrangements that can be derived from it. It also explores the growing body of literature (...) which has started to examine the extent to which alternative forms of social organisation might be more compatible with MacIntyre's account of the virtues. This literature includes various proposals for alternative political and economic arrangements, ranging from certain forms of market socialism to the promotion of different forms of mutual and cooperative enterprises. Finally, the book offers an account of the type of institutional analysis required for the advancement of the revolutionary Aristotelianism project. This is achieved by showing how some key features of the Bloomington school of political economy are not only compatible with MacIntyre's political philosophy, but also that a synthesis between neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy and the work of the Bloomington school offers a robust alternative for revolutionary Aristotelians. Thus, the book defends the idea that MacIntyre's account of human flourishing is more likely to be realised, although imperfectly, in a polycentric social order. This book will be of interest to social scientists working in questions of political economy as well as political and moral philosophers. (shrink)

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or (...) political reality, but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings... (shrink)

Mark Pennington’s Robust Political Economy is a systematic exposition of a framework for analyzing institutional performance. The Robust Political Economy framework evaluates institutions according to their ability to solve knowledge and incentive problems. On grounds of robustness, Pennington combines insights from Austrian market-process theory and public-choice theory to defend classical liberalism from several compelling critiques. These include theories of market failure in economics; communitarian, deliberative-democratic, and liberal-egalitarian theories of justice; and concerns with social capital, domestic and (...) international poverty, and ecology. (shrink)

In this inquiry into Marx’s method of theorising, originally published in 1979, the author analyses theory in the same way that Marx analyses the production of capital, and provides a set of rules for reproducing Marx’s method. The rules are developed through an examination of the _Grundrisse_, the recently translated text by Marx that combines his technical critique of political economy with his humanistic, philosophical concerns and his historical perspective. Dr Bologh concludes that (...) Marx’s method, as dialectical phenomenology, offers a way of analysing language, knowledge and the social relations and practices of everyday life, as well as the more obvious phenomena of capitalism. (shrink)

Given Leibniz’ admiration for Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, which he called “le plus beau des dictionnaires” in the Nouveaux essais, and given that Bayle’s skeptical worries provided the occasion for the writing of the Theodicée, it is appropriate to consider in the The Leibniz Review the first English-language version of those articles from Bayle’s Dictionnaire which are most important for political and moral philosophy. For it is a superb version, edited by the most knowledgeable Bayle-scholar in (...) the Anglophone world; it will justly shape early-Englightenment studies in coming decades. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper will follow a path that intends to go beyond the bifurcating interpretations between ahistorical essentialism and historicist relativism with regard to the theoretical elaboration of “human nature” by the young Marx, analyzing it from the conception of the body as a dialectical unit between nature and history as it appears in his Manuscripts of 1844. Why does Marx focus on a theoretical elaboration of the production of human corporality while criticizing work under capital in these (...) Manuscripts that represent, in his trajectory, the beginning of his studies on political economy and the inauguration of his dialectical materialism? From an analysis of the notebooks that make up these Manuscripts, we will demonstrate that there is a theorization of the body that involves transhistorical aspects - the vital connection with the “inorganic body” that is the earth - and historical in the form of mediation of this relationship and that such theorizing has the methodological value of providing historical-materialist premises as a counterpoint to the ahistorical premises of political economy as well as the inversion of the Hegelian dialectic under the starting point of the “corporeal human”, enabling a point of view from which we can overcome a way of “pathological” mediation. (shrink)

I am writing on moral knowledge in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There are two basic parts. In the first part, I articulate and attack a predominant interpretation of the Essay . This interpretation attributes to Locke the view that he did not write in the Essay anything that would be inconsistent with his early views in the Questions Concerning the Laws of Nature that there exists a single, ultimate, moral standard, i.e., the Law of Nature. For example, (...) John Colman, in his book John Locke's Moral Philosophy , argues that even though Locke explains in the Essay that we arbitrarily create our moral notions, they are still objective since they are bound together with the Law of Nature. Colman explains that the features of human nature relevant to the derivation of the Law of Nature are universally shared needs and concerns . I argue that this presupposes a view of Locke which assumes that there are essences of species independent of our beliefs about them. However, I attempt to show from the text of the Essay that this view cannot be supported. ;In the second part, I argue that the text of the Essay supports two alternative theses. The first is that given the kind of metaphysical world-view presupposed by the corpuscular method of science employed within the Essay, coupled with Locke's commitment to the possibility of moral knowledge, he was left with only one option with reference to ethics, viz., to make moral goodness or evil a mind-dependent relation between a rule and an action, instead of a property of an action or person which exists independently of our moral beliefs. This view is logically inconsistent with the existence of the Law of Nature. The second is that Locke has a semantical view of moral claims which is consistent with his relational view of moral goodness, viz., the primary function of moral judgments is to recommend behavior for ourselves and others. I described. However, Locke explains in the Essay that the opposite takes place with respect to our moral notions: events and persons must conform to the moral notion. ;On the account that I offer, Locke's views on moral epistemology are much closer to David Hume's than many have supposed, and correspondingly, anticipate the more skeptical views of moral epistemology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

In these writings by one of our most creative legal philosophers, Meir Dan-Cohen explores the nature of the self and its response to legal commands and mounts a challenge to some prevailing tenets of legal theory and the neighboring moral, political, and economic thought. The result is an insider's critique of liberalism that extends contemporary liberalism's Kantian strand, combining it with postmodernist ideas about the contingent and socially constructed self to build a thoroughly original perspective on some of (...) the most vital concerns of legal and moral theory.Dan-Cohen looks first at the ubiquity of legal coercion and considers its decisive impact on the nature of legal discourse and communication, on law's normative aspirations and claim to obedience, and on the ideal of the rule of law. He moves on to discuss basic values, stressing the preeminence of individual identity and human dignity over the more traditional liberal preoccupations with preference-based choice and experiential harm. Dan-Cohen then focuses more directly on the normative ramifications of the socially constructed self. Fundamental concepts such as responsibility and ownership are reinterpreted to take account of the constitutive role that social practices--particularly law and morality--play in the formation of the self.Throughout, Dan-Cohen draws on a uniquely productive mix of philosophical traditions and subjects, blending the methods of analytic philosophy with the concerns of Continental philosophers to reconceive the self and its relation to ethics and the law. (shrink)