Taken literally, the message the French philosopher and economist Serge Latouche eschatological flavor takes on an unusual, a harbinger of the end of time that sometimes touches the tone of millenarian preaching. Why in the book The Invention of the economy, just in bookstores for Bollati Boringhieri in excellent translation by Fabrizio Grillenzoni abound apocalyptic phrases such as: "This economy is totalitarianism that leads, in time of death ' economy, and perhaps humanity itself. The absurdity a life where the economy is both the means and the end is unmasked, and this exposes the emptiness is important in life. You might as well commit suicide and end it now. " Really left. Or we read: "The sun of modernity and the economy has reached its west, the place of its setting." Announcement almost Spengler. But again: "The monetization of everything and everything to which we are witnessing the collapse of the causes of meanings." Enigmatic.
Moreover, Latouche is known for his contrarian view, expressed for example in the development How to Survive (2005), in the mega (1995) or in Short treatise on the decline serene (2008), but in the economy The invention, apart from the provocations mentioned above, it will unnecessarily catastrophic money now so easily expendable in the era of global economic crisis. In the preface to the French edition appeared in 2005, Latouche recalled that the genesis of this book sinks into the distant past and do not suspect, when the dominant myth was that unlimited expansion. At the time of economic interpretations flourished
promising dizzying, relentless progressive increments. Great figures of science, as the biophysicist Stuart Kauffman, reason about the "adjacent possible", that economy would translate into increasing levels of complexity, and wealth. The massmediology Derrick de Kerckhove, a student of Marshall McLuhan and prosecutor, illustrated charts that connected the growing rate accelerated economic and financial information and presenting amazing future contingencies. And ultimately the unfortunate theorem Francis Fukuyama, the "end of history" was holding the view of the expansion unlimited global market.
Today, however, even supporters admit unlimited number of uncertainties in development, publishing industry adapts to you. Thus, For example, the Italian edition of the latest book by Niall Ferguson (avid supporter of the evolutionary model in economics) is titled The Rise and Fall of money, while the same in the original text was presented without uncertainty with a triumphalist The Ascent of Money .
But why consider economics an "invention"? Free trade, money, lending at interest and the concept of goods would then be comparable to the discoveries and applications of the steam or electricity? You can rethink the story in the absence of production and financial systems? It is conceivable without the word homo economicus? If the economy really is cursed invention, generating utilitarian obsessions bottomless and pointless, it is fair to hope for a society free of economic laws now known and accepted? Do not you touch perhaps the dream of anarchists? Above all, it is unrealistic to imagine a world without money, yet overflowing with goods and services?
poets, writers, we have tried. Ezra Pound, in his economic writings, denounced the hallucination, mania fixed idea of \u200b\u200bthe market, as we know. The science fiction writer Herbert George Wells, in men as Gods, for his part described the civilization without money or goods of the Utopians, the people of a fictional parallel universe. From these roots thousands of imitators.
Latouche apparently does not go that far, or rather you do not declare. Certainly, in The Invention of the economy there is a strict historical-critical analysis that moves from a distance dall'Aristotele Nicomachean Ethics to the Augustinian and Jansenist surprising roots of capitalism, through the invention of the lexical term "economy" , for the founding ideology work, for the construction of a "social physics" to the inevitable destruction of the concept of communitas to the relentless pressure of the capital accounting year. The metaphysical ancestry - studied with insight into more than two-thirds of this difficult text - certainly frightened, but because you can talk to a real "religion of the economy", and its special "dogmatic."
The touchstone could only be the work of Adam Smith, perhaps the most challenging chapter of the book. With the mediation of thought and criticism of Depuy, Latouche review the fundamental motive, the primary impulse - if you will - behind every capitalist accumulation. Smith was the author of the rage of the Wealth of Nations , and is even today for any economist. And here arise, quite unexpectedly, the comparison with René Girard, The great anthropologist and philosopher, theorist of the scapegoat mechanism and persecution of mimetic rivalry. At the bottom of the economic process may in fact hide the desire for approval from others, borrowed from the possession and ostentation: and in cross-cultural form of collective narcissism, which results in the establishment of a genuine myth. The economic myth, to be precise.
If not that, as we know, the break in Girard indifferentiation original results in the performance generally of mimetic violence, and finally the description of the sacrificial victim, the scapegoat. Apparently the economic myth would turn the state of violence latent in every social organization in peace you need to trade. But on closer inspection the scapegoat is always there: in nature and dominated raped, dispossessed and exploited masses, the frequent economic and financial crises, wars, or the pretext of legal equality and marketable.
course, mimetic desire can go opposite ways. On one hand it can turn the interior, and practice the care of the soul and wisdom. Secondly, it may well be realized in the acquisition of wealth.
In the end, both paths are forms of "speculation," the ego of relationship with the Others. Only this perennially Alice in front of the mirror may tend is external, then the property, the pomp and all that money can buy, including anime, and the acquisition of knowledge and virtue, through the acquisition of the tools of knowledge. Both, however, in hindsight, experience deeply Faustian, and unhappy, because both standardized progressive accumulation, both united by the need to transform a vital process in the abstract capital. All in all, a book that leaves little slits.
Moreover, Latouche is known for his contrarian view, expressed for example in the development How to Survive (2005), in the mega (1995) or in Short treatise on the decline serene (2008), but in the economy The invention, apart from the provocations mentioned above, it will unnecessarily catastrophic money now so easily expendable in the era of global economic crisis. In the preface to the French edition appeared in 2005, Latouche recalled that the genesis of this book sinks into the distant past and do not suspect, when the dominant myth was that unlimited expansion. At the time of economic interpretations flourished
promising dizzying, relentless progressive increments. Great figures of science, as the biophysicist Stuart Kauffman, reason about the "adjacent possible", that economy would translate into increasing levels of complexity, and wealth. The massmediology Derrick de Kerckhove, a student of Marshall McLuhan and prosecutor, illustrated charts that connected the growing rate accelerated economic and financial information and presenting amazing future contingencies. And ultimately the unfortunate theorem Francis Fukuyama, the "end of history" was holding the view of the expansion unlimited global market.
Today, however, even supporters admit unlimited number of uncertainties in development, publishing industry adapts to you. Thus, For example, the Italian edition of the latest book by Niall Ferguson (avid supporter of the evolutionary model in economics) is titled The Rise and Fall of money, while the same in the original text was presented without uncertainty with a triumphalist The Ascent of Money .
But why consider economics an "invention"? Free trade, money, lending at interest and the concept of goods would then be comparable to the discoveries and applications of the steam or electricity? You can rethink the story in the absence of production and financial systems? It is conceivable without the word homo economicus? If the economy really is cursed invention, generating utilitarian obsessions bottomless and pointless, it is fair to hope for a society free of economic laws now known and accepted? Do not you touch perhaps the dream of anarchists? Above all, it is unrealistic to imagine a world without money, yet overflowing with goods and services?
poets, writers, we have tried. Ezra Pound, in his economic writings, denounced the hallucination, mania fixed idea of \u200b\u200bthe market, as we know. The science fiction writer Herbert George Wells, in men as Gods, for his part described the civilization without money or goods of the Utopians, the people of a fictional parallel universe. From these roots thousands of imitators.
Latouche apparently does not go that far, or rather you do not declare. Certainly, in The Invention of the economy there is a strict historical-critical analysis that moves from a distance dall'Aristotele Nicomachean Ethics to the Augustinian and Jansenist surprising roots of capitalism, through the invention of the lexical term "economy" , for the founding ideology work, for the construction of a "social physics" to the inevitable destruction of the concept of communitas to the relentless pressure of the capital accounting year. The metaphysical ancestry - studied with insight into more than two-thirds of this difficult text - certainly frightened, but because you can talk to a real "religion of the economy", and its special "dogmatic."
The touchstone could only be the work of Adam Smith, perhaps the most challenging chapter of the book. With the mediation of thought and criticism of Depuy, Latouche review the fundamental motive, the primary impulse - if you will - behind every capitalist accumulation. Smith was the author of the rage of the Wealth of Nations , and is even today for any economist. And here arise, quite unexpectedly, the comparison with René Girard, The great anthropologist and philosopher, theorist of the scapegoat mechanism and persecution of mimetic rivalry. At the bottom of the economic process may in fact hide the desire for approval from others, borrowed from the possession and ostentation: and in cross-cultural form of collective narcissism, which results in the establishment of a genuine myth. The economic myth, to be precise.
If not that, as we know, the break in Girard indifferentiation original results in the performance generally of mimetic violence, and finally the description of the sacrificial victim, the scapegoat. Apparently the economic myth would turn the state of violence latent in every social organization in peace you need to trade. But on closer inspection the scapegoat is always there: in nature and dominated raped, dispossessed and exploited masses, the frequent economic and financial crises, wars, or the pretext of legal equality and marketable.
course, mimetic desire can go opposite ways. On one hand it can turn the interior, and practice the care of the soul and wisdom. Secondly, it may well be realized in the acquisition of wealth.
In the end, both paths are forms of "speculation," the ego of relationship with the Others. Only this perennially Alice in front of the mirror may tend is external, then the property, the pomp and all that money can buy, including anime, and the acquisition of knowledge and virtue, through the acquisition of the tools of knowledge. Both, however, in hindsight, experience deeply Faustian, and unhappy, because both standardized progressive accumulation, both united by the need to transform a vital process in the abstract capital. All in all, a book that leaves little slits.
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