The Social Ontology of Capitalism

Editors: Daniel Krier, Mark P. Worrell



Offers a fundamental rethinking of the ontological foundations of the contemporary economic and political situation

Contains both abstract, metatheoretical chapters and empirical investigations of the contemporary debt crisis, Greece and the European Union, artistic representation, and risk-pooled subjectivity

Carries out a rich interdisciplinary inquiry drawing from philosophy, social sociology, political science, and cultural studies

This book addresses core questions about the nature and structure of contemporary capitalism and the social dynamics and countervailing forces that shape modern life. From a robust and self-consciously sociological framework, it analyzes and interrogates such issues as the nature of the social, the power of the sacred, the nature of authority, the problem of representation, reification, alienation, utopia, and collective resistance. Historical materialism reveals that the scope of productive functions is broader than the crude realism of economism. Marx’s critical theory of the commodity and his analysis of the capitalist regime of accumulation remain as vital as ever and serve as a guiding light for the continued exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of critical inquiry and praxis.  

Table of contents

Front Matter
Pages i-xvii

The Social Ontology of Capitalism: An Introduction
Pages 1-11

Abstract
Front Matter
Pages 13-13
Social Ontology and Social Critique: Toward a New Paradigm for Critical Theory
Pages 15-45
Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century: The Logic of Capital Between Classical Social Theory, the Early Frankfurt School Critique of Political Economy and the Prospect of Artifice
Pages 47-74
The Sacred and the Profane in the General Formula for Capital: The Octagonal Structure of the Commodity and Saving Marx’s Sociological Realism from Professional Marxology
Pages 75-119
Social Form and the ‘Purely Social’: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value
Pages 121-141

Concrete
Front Matter
Pages 143-143
Debt in the Global Economy
Pages 145-172
Representing Capital: Mimesis, Realism, and Contemporary Photography
Pages 173-193
Demand the Impossible: Greece, the Eurozone Crisis, and the Failure of the Utopian Imagination
Pages 195-234
The Constellation of Social Ontology: Walter Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, and the Body of History
Pages 235-262
The Body Ontology of Capitalism
Pages 263-276
The Morality of Misery
Pages 277-290

Back Matter
Pages 291-300