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Book Launch: The Emotional Logic of Capitalism

by Martijn Konings on June 19, 2015

Book Launch: The Emotional Logic of Capitalism

Martijn Konings | June 19, 2015

Tags: Karl Polanyi
Karl Polanyi
| 0 508

It is now sometimes hard to remember, but there was a period after the start of the financial crisis when progressive commentary was pervaded by intense excitement about the end of neoliberalism and a return of the Keynesian state. Such thinking is often associated with Karl Polanyi’s idea of the “double movement”, which sees capitalist history as moving in cycles: periodic “disembedding” movements, when the individualising logic of the market becomes unmoored from its social foundations, will be followed by “re-embedding” movements, when society resubordinates markets to the public good. As we now know, however, capitalism instead took a dramatic turn to austerity, repudiating hopes for progressive changes in the most emphatic way possible. Curiously, however, this has done nothing to diminish the prominence of Polanyi’s ideas in the social sciences.

pid_25513 (1)In this context I became increasingly interested not only in the deeper, psychological and emotional roots of neoliberal capitalism’s resilience, but also in what the curious attraction of the “double movement” model is as a way to think about economic life. These explorations resulted in my book that was published at the end of May by Stanford University Press: The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed. It offers a new semiotics of money and  a genealogy of the economy that challenges established critiques of the market and sheds light on the ethical and emotional appeal of capitalist life. The second part of the book traces how, over the course of the twentieth century, progressive thought gradually lost sight of the emotional and theological content of the economy and it suggests that this inability of progressive thinkers to come to terms with the deeper roots of capitalism’s legitimacy has played an important role in facilitating the rise and persistence of neoliberalism.

This extraordinarily incisive and provocative book goes a long way toward explaining the tenacious grip of money on the American moral imagination

— Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University

A unique and original rethinking of the conceptual and affective armature of economy, both in its emergence as a distinct domain of social life and object of analysis over the past century and in its new salience under the sign of neoliberalism

— Randy Martin, New York University

There will be a book launch on Tuesday, June 23 at 6:00pm at Gleebooks (49 Glebe Point Road), with Dick Bryan and Fiona Allon as discussants. It will be facilitated by the University of Sydney’s Social Studies of Finance network and conclude its annual two-day workshop.

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Author: Martijn Konings

Martijn Konings works in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Development of American Finance (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (Stanford University Press, 2015), Neoliberalism (with Damien Cahill, Polity, 2017) and Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018). With Melinda Cooper, he edits the new Stanford University Press series Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times.

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  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
 

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